Best Online Courses for Podcasters

We cut through information overload and show you how to pick a podcast course that fits your learning style, budget, and goals. We cover everything from free online courses to deeper production training, leaving you with lots of options to choose from. 

• Buzzsprout's How to Start a Podcast Course 
• Buzzsprout's How to Start a Podcast 
• Tom Buck: YouTube Channel
• Adobe Audition CC Audio Production Course Basics to Expert
• School of Podcasting

Keep podcasting!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Podcasting Q&A
• 2:52 Free Podcasting Courses
• 7:37 Paid Podcasting Courses

Transcript

Cara Pacetti: 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. No matter where you are in your podcasting journey, it's never too late to seek advice and to continue learning. In fact, it's beneficial to hone in on a skill or perfect something that you've already been putting into practice for a long time. In the podcasting space, there is a ton of information out there. It can almost be overwhelming. Even here at BuzzSprout, we have a full YouTube channel, help articles, and a full blog that's jam-packed with helpful information. And sometimes all of that information can cause a bit of analysis paralysis, and that can stop new podcasters right in their tracks. Before they even give podcasting a try, they're so overwhelmed with the steps involved in creating and launching and scripting that they just throw their hands up and say, maybe next year. So in today's episode, I want to highlight a super helpful resource that you may or may not know about. And that is a podcasting course. A podcasting course can be super helpful because basically it's where somebody already did that hard work of learning the steps in launching your podcast, creating your content. And what they've done is broken it down into easy to follow instructions. After learning it in this way, then you get to choose where you're going to invest your time. And it's just not so overwhelming. And it's a little bit less like drinking from a fire hose. Before I get into some of the courses that I want to recommend to you, I want to start off with what do we need to look for or consider when we are searching for the perfect podcasting course. And so I've broken it down into three things I just want you to think about. And the first is your learning style. How do you learn best? Some people, it's better if they can read an entire post or an entire article and then they commit that to memory and they are able to follow that and follow those steps. I am actually not like that. I'm a visual learner and I know that about myself. And so a video or a live stream where somebody is sharing their screen and I can see what it looks like, what they're doing is very beneficial for my learning style. And then others can listen. They don't need to see it. They can do it simultaneously as they're listening to the instructions. So they're more of an audio learner. And so just kind of recognizing that about yourself and how do you learn best will help you to narrow down which podcasting course is worth the investment of your time and maybe money. So that leads me to my next point. There are free options out there and there are paid options out there. So at this stage in the game, you have to just reason with yourself where are you when it comes to launching this podcast? Is it time that it's worth the investment of money to go ahead and sign up for this course? Or maybe at this time a free option will work just fine. You're just getting your feet wet and you just don't quite know where it's going. So you want to start with all of the free resources first, and then maybe later down the road, it will be worth more of an investment. The last point I want to make is what is your end goal? So how big of a hurry are you in? Where do you want to be at the end of this podcasting course? Are you looking for something that's specific to a skill, like maybe editing or production skills? Or do you want to have a fully launched podcast with a couple of episodes recorded? Or maybe you're just searching for a course that will help you sharpen some of your podcasting skills that you're using already, maybe like becoming a better interviewer. These are all things to consider again when you're searching for the courses, because just like the podcast information that's out there, there's also a lot of options for courses. And once you've taken the time to walk through that on your own, then you'll be ready to commit to a podcasting course. Now that we've gone through what to look for when deciding on a podcasting course, let's go through some of the options that are currently available. First, I want to start with some of the free options out there. So I bet you guessed it, but here at Buzzsprout, our team has created two amazing podcast courses called How to Start a Podcast. The first is formatted in both video and written material. You will walk through modules. It's very organized. The modules will answer questions like how to record with multiple people or how to submit your podcast to the directories. This is a great place for someone just starting out. It's outlined in a way that helps you learn and master those important skills in launching your podcast. The next resource is a podcast. Our team who created this how to start a podcast course also created a podcast with similar information. Now, you won't have the written or the visual aspect on this because it is an audio podcast, but this is essentially a learning course in audio. One of the ways that I see this being really helpful is if maybe a podcast for you is just something that you're thinking about. You want to launch a podcast, but you don't quite know what all is involved in it. Listening to this How to Start a Podcast podcast is super easy to ingest. You can listen to it while you're doing dishes, while you are taking your kids to school, and you can kind of have that passive learning and it'll teach you the ins and outs of podcasting. I'm going to share links to all of these resources in the show notes below. So if this sounds like something that would work for you, go ahead and click that link in the show notes. One resource that's actually brand new to Buzz sprout this year is our Buzzsprout cohort. If you receive our newsletters, then you would have seen that we are going to start running a free start podcasting cohort to help new podcasters move from planning to publishing. So this is a brand new free resource that we are creating this year. It's a guided small group experience. We are asking for applications and then we will review those applications. And then essentially, we will walk this small group of committed podcasters as they launch their first podcast. We will be with them every step of the way. It's very interactive. So this is something fun and exciting that we are offering in 2026. Currently, the applications are closed, but if this comes around again, I will be sure to mention it on a Podcasting Q&A episode so that you can have access to that if that's something that you would be interested in. The last free resource that I want to mention here is actually a YouTube channel created by Tom Buck. Tom has created a lot of helpful courses on his YouTube channel, and one of those courses is the Podcaster Playbook. The podcaster playbook is a comprehensive do-it-yourself guide for helping you launch your very own podcast. Of course, this is in video format, but he also has some screen shares in there so it's interactive, so you can pause as you need to and follow along. This course is free on YouTube, and so it's welcome for anybody to enjoy and learn from. These are just a few free resources available, but there are many out there. If there's a podcast course that you've tried and you loved it, please send us a text using the text the show link in the show notes. I'd really love to hear more about it and share this with our listeners. While you absolutely do not have to pay for an online podcasting course, I didn't want to walk away without giving you just a couple of options to explore. Now, I have not personally walked through these courses, but members of our bus sproute team know the creators. And so I felt comfortable recommending them here. The first resource is from udemy.com. So Udemy is an online learning platform that you can register for and become a member of, and then some of the courses are discounted, but you can always purchase courses independently. The course that I want to highlight is the Adobe Audition CC Audio Production course, Basics to Expert. So Adobe Audition is actually the editing software that I use to edit our podcasting QA episodes. It is an easy to use but very professional editing software. So highly recommend it. This course is great to again take you from basics to expert. So it touches on a lot of very informative information that you can take with you as you learn to edit. And so if you're just starting or you're just wanting to get that much better at editing, I recommend checking that course out. The other course I want to recommend is Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting. So Dave Jackson runs the School of Podcasting and has created a very inclusive online course. He actually lists out all of the educational resources available, which he estimates to be a grand total of over $6,000 if you were to pay for all of them individually. Of course, his course is much less than that, but the information taught is invaluable, including setting up your podcasts with hosting services, templates, and cheat sheets for structuring your content, and even creating a podcasting website, monetization, and more. I said this in the beginning, but I'm going to go ahead and link all of these courses in the episode description. So if you want to give any of them a try, you can find links to those resources there. If you have any questions for our podcaster success team about any of these resources, you can reach us by emailing support at buzzsprout.com. If there's a question you'd like to see answered on a future Podcasting Q&A episode, just click the send us a text link in the show notes and send in any questions you have. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.