Text is a great medium and nothing will ever replace it, but sometimes it’s nice to have options. For many of us, we have an easier time speaking than writing, or we’re on the road often and need to get our information by listening to it.

That’s where audio and video podcasts come in, as a supplement to your diary at RedState. Here’s what you need to get started.

The start off, you need a microphone. Unfortunately microphones aren’t available for download free on the Internet, but that’s where Black Friday sales come in. The Blue Yeti USB microphone is a great choice. I’ve used Blue for years, and picked up a Yeti earlier this year myself. It’s $50 off on Amazon today, so get going!

Next for a podcast, you need an audio recorder and editor. This will let you save your recording for later, trim down your broadcast, and add stock recordings to the beginning and end. You can do that and a lot of other processing with Audacity, which is free, open source, with years of development backing it up.

Finally you need to distribute your podcast! You can start simple with Soundcloud, uploading your files there, and then submitting them to Apple iTunes and posting them in RedState diaries. If later you get big, you can launch your own web site and install something like Seriously Simple Podcasting on it.

Finally if you want some music to start and end your show, a royalty-free track will let you spice up the broadcast without any legal headaches.

After that, it’s all on you and what ideas you can come up with!