You don't need a very expensive microphone to record a great sounding podcast. What you do want is a quite room to record in and the right distance to your mic. 5 inches is a great starting point. If you are too close your B's and P's will create a pop/bang sound in your mic, and record too far away will record much of the reverb from your room.
In your editing software you have some few options to alter the sound. You can put on an equalizer to cut out some frequencies that you don't want/need. These equalizers may look a bit differently from each other but they do basically the same. You can clean up your sound a bit by cutting the bass from 100Hz and below. You could also cut a little bit (like 1dB) of 300Hz. It can sound a little bit boxy around these frequencies. Also if I want to get some shine on there boost everything above 5000Hz. But be careful so your S's and T's wont be too annoying.
This is what it could look like:
Now you would want to even out the volume of the podcast so your listeners wont die when you laugh loudly, or need to turn it up when you speak softly. This can be done with a compressor. These look differently as well as EQ's.
You will need to lower the "threshold" or increase the "input" (depending on the compressor) till you see some gain reduction on the meter. This picture shows an average of 7dB of gain reduction. You can set it so it lives around 5-10 dB of gain reduction. Set the release to medium/fast.
Now you will want to set up a limiter so your none of your peaks reaches above 0dBFS. This means that your sound dosent get digitally clipped or distorted. Set up your limiter to -1dbFS and push the threshold a bit. Your podcast dosent need to be super loud, but dosent need to be too quite ether. You dont want the limiter to show 7dB of gain reduction like the compressor, but you could see like a 1dB of gain reduction now and then.
Now you can export the track. You can export it to the best option of a mp3-file. A full wav-file or AIFF-file isn't really needed for a podcast - but that's up to you.
Hope you learned something and good luck!