You’re ready to upload your podcast. It’s polished, produced, you’ve done a sound check, and you’re happy with how it came out.
That’s awesome, but you’re not out of the woods yet. How are you going to distribute it? Where are you going to put it?
That’s where Anchor comes in. Anchor is a podcast hosting platform that allows you to distribute your podcasts with ease. You already have the product: they make the marketing easy, and give your podcast a home online. This is everything you need to know about Anchor befolre you sign up.
What is Anchor?
Anchor is a podcast hosting platform dedicated to making your podcast more available, accessible, and reach more audiences than ever before.
They act as a distribution channel and host, so you can always know that your audience has the biggest chance of finding you no matter what production level you’re at.
Beyond that? They’re also a sponsorship platform. Anchor helps you make money off your podcast even when you have no more than a single listener. It’s one of the more intuitive platforms, and it’s available to just about everyone.
Pros
- Integrated Sponsorship: Want to start making money right after you post your podcast? Anchor helps you with that. You can sign up for their sponsorship program even if you don’t have any listeners yet. They understand that this is a business venture, and you don’t have time to wait around until some platform decides you have enough listeners. You want the monetary motivation now, so it’s time to earn it.
- Easy Collaborations: Podcasting can run into so many complex issues (more than most people think when they get started). Anchor allows you to record your friends right on the app, so you can collaborate with others if they simply download the app and join you during a call. While Anchor doesn’t have the highest call quality, it’s good enough for you to then mess around with the audio in post and add EQ and compressors as needed. Overall, the quality is better than you get with most in-app recordings, which impressed us.
- They Create a Website for You: That’s a very loose way of putting it, of course. They’re not going to design the site for you, but they will use templates and put your podcast up on its very own website as its home. While your podcast is distributed to other networks, your website will reign supreme and show up high in search results. Your website can even host social media links, so if you distribute through Twitter and Reddit, you’ll have that all set as well.
- Project Management is a Cake Walk: With every podcast, there’s a level of project management that you have to involve yourself with before you can finalize your production. However, if you have five people on a podcast, each with different microphones and recordings in different, remote locations, you have a lot of work to do. Mic B might have background noise that you have to filter out, while Mic E had some static and needs a fair amount of EQ. You can set and track all of your project management in the
Cons
- Spotify Takes a Cut of Your Ad Revenue: There’s never a clean way to get out of these sponsored ad sections, is there? Spotify owns Anchor, so as the media company behind the ad network that Anchor boasts, they also take a cut of the profits. The percentage can vary, but it’s the price you have to pay for getting monetized so early on in your podcast. Nobody’s going to let you walk through it for free.
- Required to Compress: Because this is a free platform, there’s going to be some limitations. For one, you can’t just upload insanely long podcasts. There’s a limit of how long you can upload. You can’t exceed 250 MB or two hours worth of length, which puts limitations on some people if they want to upload in WAV format. These restrictions can harm the quality of your podcast if you’re forced to compress your file into an MP3 just to be able to upload it.
- Anchor Owns Some RIghts to Your Content: The parent company, Spotify, claims the right to use your content as they see fit. This isn’t much to be concerned about if you’re a brand new podcast in the beginning stages, but they can use anything you upload to Anchor in their advertising matierla. That could be dangerous if your brand is misidentified or advertised in a way that you don’t agree with. This is why bigger media companies don’t work with Anchor, especially when you have an established brand on the line.
How Does it Work?
On Anchor, you simply choose which audiences and platforms you want to share your podcast with, and bring your audio into the mixer.
Once you’re in the mixer, you can add audio segments into different sections of your episode. If your entire episode is already pre-recorded, that’s okay too.
Anchor has a fantastic walkthrough that basically hand-holds you through the entire setup process in a very intuitive, linear way. The editor is easy to use even for new podcasters.
How to Make Podcast on Anchor
Making a podcast on Anchor is simple. Download the app or run it on your PC, and boot up Anchor. From there, you add your title, your captions, and build the segments of your podcast in their intuitive editor.
Everyone is practically done on a single page to make the entire process streamlined and simple for anyone to use. It sounds dead simple, but it truly is that easy. Beyond reading and signing-off on the terms and conditions, it’s a cake walk.
How Much Does it Cost?
It’s entirely free. Anchor has a long message regarding the unnecessary and outdated practice of charging hosting fees that most platforms require. They say that on average, it costs under $0.10 to host a single podcast in cloud fees, and mention how it’s a fraction of what other large platforms cover.
However, because nothing in life is truly free, it’s important to note that Anchor takes a cut of the money you make from their integrated advertising platform. Additionally, they reserve the rights to use your material in marketing and advertising products, which means they spend next to nothing on sourcing and finding material to promote their platform.
Pro Tips for Using Anchor
You may be a beginner with Anchor, but we’re not going to let you leave this article with beginner-level knowledge. These are some pro tips from Anchor veterans that know the platform front, back, and center to help you get started with your venture.
- Distributing podcasts to Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms is as simple as checking-off on a checklist. Their directory puts your podcast in all the right places for you. Don’t overthink it.
- The app is surprisingly more intuitive than the web-based app. Because most of you will be uploading a podcast from a web-based application (as most podcasts are edited on desktops or laptops), get familiar with the site before you plan on uploading your first podcast. It can be a little tricky to navigate at first.
- There’s a spot for debates with Anchor. It’s a common tool that’s used by universities, professors, and students because it’s entirely free. Student bodies will host debates on Anchor podcasts because it can be easily distributed to their friends via the directory, and allow for up to two hours of debate on a specific topic. Recording and posting your debate on Anchor is actually the best possible way to save it without taking up space on your PC.
- Use the Record With Friends feature to remotely record a podcast with a friend or colleague, and Anchor will help mesh your tracks and equalize sound leveels (mostly) for you. This makes the entire collaborative process a lot easier.
Anchor has a very straightforward platform and setup process, so you won’t have to mess aorund with it for too long before you feel right at home.
If you come from other platforms such as Adobe Audition, you’ll feel like the editor is too simple, so be prepared to work with the tools you have at your disposal to make the best podcast possible.
Become an Anchor Pro
Anchor is an amazing way to host your podcasts without having to do too much of the legwork yourself. Now that you know everything about Anchor and how it operates, it’s time to find out if it’s right for you.
Look at the pricing, where you are in your podcasting journey, and if their comprehensive platform is right for you based on your current needs. It doesn’t take much to become a pro with Anchor once you get the hang of it.
