One great way of maximising the profile of your podcast is to feature it not only on your website and iTunes, but also on YouTube. However, there is a problem: the world's 3rd biggest website will not let you upload audio without an accompanying video.

So, how do you get around this? Well, the obvious route (short of reformatting your podcast into a video only affair, perhaps over Google Hangouts if there are co-podcasters, and also stripping the audio to upload to iTunes) is to add video – or, more precisely, an image – to your audio track, which can then be uploaded to YouTube without any problem.

Windows Movie Maker Or iMovie

You may have tried uploading an audio-only clip to YouTube in the past (possibly as an alternative free podcast host) and found yourself looking around for the best way to add images, only to find yourself using Windows Movie Maker (or, if you're a Mac user, iMovie).

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This is a good solution, although it can be quite slow, and the temptation to turn your podcast into a slideshow can prove too great. If you're a podcaster you probably don't want to get bogged down with overdoing the post-producing. You should address this while you're recording using good quality hardware.  So choose just a few images, perhaps one every 15 minutes.

These two articles on Movie Maker and iMovie will show you how to add audio and images to your movie projects. Once you're done, save the movie in a suitable format and upload to YouTube.

TunesToTube

A very useful online tool is TunesToTube, which can pair your audio with a single image and upload it to YouTube on your behalf. Head to www.tunestotube.com to get started, where you'll be invited to connect your YouTube account. You can remove this connection once you've finished uploading audio.

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The next step is to click Upload Files and browse to the podcast MP3 file to be uploaded. Once this has completed, click the button again to find the image you want to accompany the audio.

While these are uploading, take the time to add a Title, Description, and Tags for YouTube. Once the files are uploaded, enter the Captcha code and click Create Video. The files will be combined and uploaded to YouTube, and a few moments later will be available to view!

Although TunesToTube will put a promotional watermark on your uploaded audio video experience, it is non-intrusive and you can donate to remove it. The only real drawback with TunesToTube is with the file size, which is limited to 25 MB. If your MP3 podcast is larger than this, perhaps the next solution will suit you better…

Forget Limits: Use FFmpeg

That 25 MB limit can be a bit of a killer, especially given how many podcasts these days run to 30-60 minutes. A 25 MB limit can also prove particularly frustrating on a 30 minute podcast as you might find yourself only just over the limit. Do you want to mess around editing your podcast (perhaps with Audacity on Windows or Garageband on Mac OS X), or find a TunesToTube-esque solution without the filesize restriction? FFmpeg is the answer, and best of all it is cross-platform so you can use it on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux!

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Get started by downloading FFmpeg from www.ffmpeg.org/download.html, choosing the version for your OS. Windows users will need 7zip to unpack it after download.

Navigate to the directory and run the ff-prompt.bat file to open the tool in the command prompt, and use the following script, which you can copy from here and paste into the command line:

$ ffmpeg -loop 1 -r 2 -i image.jpg -i input.mp3 -vf scale=-1:380 -c:v libx264 -preset slow -tune stillimage -crf 18 -c:a copy -shortest -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 output.mkv

Whereever you see image.jpg and input.mp3, input the filenames of the MP3 and image files you intend to combine. You'll need to drop these files into the bin directory within FFmpeg.

You can also change the filename of the created video file from output.mkv to something more descriptive. When you're happy, enter the command and wait for the file to be created. You change further settings by checking Edd Mann's website eddmann.com/posts/uploading-podcast-audio-to-youtube.

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All that is left to do now is open your YouTube account and upload the file, adding the usual information and tags.

Three Methods: Do You Have A Fourth?

Using any of these three methods will get you the results you want. They're all relatively simple, and the Windows Movie Maker option can give you a far more impressive finished product, albeit one that takes longer to produce (and requires careful placement of your images to create the "slow slideshow").

FFmpeg is probably the most efficient, simply taking the audio and a single image and creating a file that you can upload to YouTube without limits.

But is there another way that we've overlooked? Let us know.