40+ Free Podcast Tools:
Reviewed and updated September 2026. Chartable, Hootsuite and TweetDeck are gone: all three shut down or moved behind a paywall since the last edition. Every tool name in the PDF is now a clickable link, and there is a one-page worksheet at the back.
Thanks for grabbing the 40 Free Tools Every Podcast Guest Needs guide. Inside, you’ll find my favorite free and freemium tools to help you research podcasts, pitch hosts, record high-quality interviews, and promote your appearances.
Use this list as your roadmap. Explore each category, pick a few tools to start with, and build a repeatable system for landing and leveraging guest spots.
I have broken the prompts down by topics. The topics below are:
- Podcast Discovery & Research
- Outreach & Pitching
- Prep & Organization
- Recording & Audio
- Design & Branding Assets
- Promotion & Repurposing
- Analytics & SEO
Podcast Discovery & Research
Find shows worth pitching and check the audience is really there.
- Listen Notes, Search engine for over three million podcasts. Filter by topic, language and how recently a show published, so you only pitch active ones.
- Podchaser, Host profiles, guest history and listener reviews. The fastest way to see whether a show books people like you.
- PodMatch, Matchmaking between hosts and expert guests. The free plan lets you build a profile and start getting matched.
- MatchMaker.fm, The same idea with a different roster. Worth being on both, since hosts tend to use one or the other.
- Rephonic, Maps which shows share an audience, so you find the ones a directory search never surfaces.
- Apple Podcasts Charts, Public category charts. A reality check on how big a show actually is before you spend a week chasing it.
Outreach & Pitching
Reach the host, write a pitch that gets a reply, and track who you contacted.
- Hunter.io, Finds the verified email address behind a show’s website so your pitch reaches a person, not a contact form.
- VoilaNorbert, A second email finder. Between the two you will get an address for almost any show worth pitching.
- Mailtrack, Tells you whether the host opened your pitch. Silence after an open means the pitch failed, not the delivery.
- GMass, Turns Gmail into a sequenced outreach tool with follow-ups. This is usually where a stalled campaign turns around.
- HubSpot CRM, Free forever CRM. Track every show, pitch date and reply in one place instead of in your sent folder.
- Mixmax, Templates, reminders and scheduling inside Gmail, so following up stops depending on memory.
Prep & Organization
Walk into the recording with your talking points, links and bio ready.
- Google Sheets, A simple pipeline: show, host, pitch date, reply, air date. Unglamorous and better than every tool that replaces it.
- Notion, One page per show holding your research, angles and questions you want to be asked.
- Trello, The visual version. Cards move from pitched to booked to recorded to promoted.
- Obsidian, Local notes with no account and no sync fee. Good for building a reusable library of your own stories and stats.
- Grammarly, Catches the typo in a pitch or a bio that makes a host quietly move on.
- Hemingway Editor, Cuts a pitch to something a busy host reads in one pass. Length is the most common reason a pitch is ignored.
Recording & Audio
Sound professional from a spare room, with no studio and no producer.
- Riverside.fm, Records studio-quality audio and video locally in the browser, so a bad connection does not ruin the file.
- Zencastr, Separate track per speaker, even on slow internet. Hosts appreciate a guest who suggests it.
- Zoom, Still what most hosts use. Know its settings, especially original sound, before you are live.
- Krisp, Removes background noise in real time. Sixty minutes a day free, which covers an interview.
- Audacity, Free and open source. Enough to clean a recording or cut a demo reel of your best answers.
- Descript, Edit audio by editing the transcript. The fastest way to turn an interview into clips afterward.
Design & Branding Assets
Headshots, one sheets and audiograms that make a host say yes.
- Canva, Your one sheet, quote cards and episode graphics. Templates get you to something usable in minutes.
- Adobe Express, The alternative, with stronger typography and quick background removal for headshots.
- Headliner, Turns a clip of your interview into an animated audiogram with captions, which is what actually gets shared.
- Wave.video, Repurposes audio into short branded video for the platforms that only reward video.
- Unsplash, Free photography with no attribution required. Useful for episode art and slides.
- Pexels, Free photos and stock video. A second library so your graphics do not all look like everyone else’s.
Promotion & Repurposing
Turn one interview into clips, posts and a blog article.
- Buffer, Schedule the episode across your channels. The free plan covers three channels, which is enough for most guests.
- Meta Business Suite, Free native scheduling for Facebook and Instagram, after Hootsuite retired its free plan in 2023.
- LinkedIn, Native scheduling is free and LinkedIn is where a B2B interview earns the most attention.
- Repurpose.io, Automates pushing one recording out to several platforms in the right format for each.
- Otter.ai, Transcripts you can mine for pull quotes, a blog post and a newsletter without rewatching anything.
- ChatGPT, Drafts show notes, posts and a recap article from your transcript. Give it the transcript, never a blank brief.
Analytics & SEO
Track the traffic, links and rankings each appearance earns you.
- Google Search Console, Shows whether your brand name gets searched more after an episode airs, which is the real signal.
- Google Analytics 4, Measures the traffic each show sends and what those visitors do next.
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, Free backlink tracking for your own site. Show notes links are the part of a guest spot that compounds.
- Ubersuggest, Watch your brand terms and interview titles move in the weeks after an episode.
- Bitly, Give every show its own trackable link so you know which audience actually clicked.
- TubeBuddy, If the host publishes the interview on YouTube, this optimizes the title, tags and thumbnail you suggest.
How to Use This Toolkit
- Research 5–10 target shows with Listen Notes or Podchaser.
- Organize your pipeline using Google Sheets, Notion, or Trello.
- Send effective pitches using Hunter.io, GMass, and Mailtrack.
- Prep and record with Notion, Riverside.fm, and Krisp.ai.
- Promote appearances using Canva, Headliner, and Buffer.
- Track results using Bitly links and Search Console data.
You Have the Tools. Here Is the System.
You have the tools. The harder part is the order to work in: choosing shows, writing the pitch, and turning the recording into something that keeps working.
That is what the Complete Podcast Guesting System is. Four modules that take you from a blank list to booked, and from booked to traffic.
- The AI Pitch Kit. Prompts that draft the pitch, so you start from a draft instead of a blank page.
- Podcast Outreach SOPs. The follow-up sequence and the tracking that turn a list of shows into actual bookings.
- Conversion Assets. What to say on air and where to send listeners, so an episode produces visitors rather than compliments.
- SEO and Repurposing Frameworks. One interview turned into seven pieces of content and a high-authority backlink.
$97 one time. Instant access, with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Get the Podcast Guesting System
“Within only a few months, my Google stats went up and up. They were even able to write guest blogs for me, since my business is all about local history.”
★★★★★ Matti Geyer, verified Google review
Want It Signed On Your Shelf?
The tools are yours either way. If guest podcasting is the part you want to get right, I will sign a copy of The Power of Guest Podcasting and mail it to you. You do not pay for the book, just $8.95 shipping.
Who Put This Together
I am Brandon Leibowitz. I have been doing SEO since 2007 and podcasting since 2020. I have been booked on more than 300 podcasts as a guest, and I wrote The Power of Guest Podcasting about how to do it as a repeatable system rather than a lucky break.
Most people treat a podcast appearance as a nice hour of conversation. The ones who get results treat it as three jobs: getting booked, making the episode findable afterward, and turning the link and the recording into something that keeps working. The tools above cover the first job. The other two are where we spend most of our time with clients.
★★★★★ 4.9 out of 5 across 251+ client reviews on Google and Yelp
What Changed After They Hired Us (70 Seconds)
Guest appearances earn links and mentions, and that is what moves rankings. These are clients describing what it built over time.
With Brandon Leibowitz & The SEO Optimizers Team
We will analyze your podcast plan and tell you:
Which Shows Your Buyers Actually Listen To
How To Pitch Them So Hosts Reply
How To Turn One Interview Into Months Of Traffic
"We saw a dramatic increase in our leads, our phones began ringing constantly, bookings increased by 200% in a couple months."
★★★★★ Marketing Hangover Team, verified Google review
Read Our Reviews
Ready To Get Booked?
The toolkit gets you started. The system is the order to do it in, with the research prompts, the pitches, the follow-ups and the repurposing already written for you.
$97 one time, with a 7-day money-back guarantee, so the only thing you can lose is the time you were going to spend guessing.
Would rather talk it through first? Book a free podcast visibility review.