Learning about syndication and podcasts
I’ve been spending some time today looking at different ways to get our content out to listeners. We’ve been asking about how you listen podcasts on our Facebook page and we’re still really interested in that so please do get in touch via social media by clicking on an icon below. As a new podcast, it’s so important that we get our show out there to as many people as we can, otherwise we may as well talk to ourselves!
This has meant some head scratching on my part and I can’t tell you how many windows I’ve had open on my Mac this afternoon!
There are several steps I needed to take and these are…
Setting up RSS feeds from this website. As a podcaster we need a podcast RSS feed to share with followers and submit to directories like Apple. RSS is simply a collection of XML (“extensible markup language”) standard formatting and without it, we don’t have a podcast! This is why the listen page has changed to this page here as it required a different set up. You can find the future episode details right here.
Get the podcast onto Apple’s podcast. This was a bit of a learning curve because I though you had to have three recordings. It transpires that we need three posts which can also be articles so that was fairly quickly solved and I hope we’ll have approval from Apple very soon.
Spotify. This is coming soon as I need to get my head around their requirements. It’s never ever the same on each platform!
Content mark up. By this I mean a description, title, album cover, logo format and author details for everywhere that the podcast appears and making sure that the categories all match up in each podcast syndication we use (the websites and places that will share our work). Are we about health or news for example? I decided on health, self help and families as I think it’s important we break into those markets. It’s also important that the content all contains keywords so our SEO (search engine optimisation) is working and we’re located on Google. Using weird words and made up phrases means Google hates us and we’ll never be found!
There is much more work to do but I’m hoping that all the above only happens once! Luckily the website has been a doddle to do and I’m so pleased that side was simple.. in fact it was all fairly easy once I understood this new lingo! I’m still holding by breath and hoping it works…!
Ta! Da!
This means that I am thrilled to bits (again… how many more times in one week?!) to let you know that you can listen to us on Podbean by clicking this link here to get to our channel. Podbean has an app which you can download and listen. For Apple devices click here to get to the iTunes store, and here for android devices.
I’ve also learnt about Google Feedburner, oh yes, it’s full on geekathon over here! This means you can listen to us by pressing the button below. I’m still not totally convinced by Google’s Feedburner, I get the feeling Google bought it to rival Apple’s Podcast and forgot to update the design somewhere along the line but it is generally considered to be a universal RSS feed.
If you are thinking about a podcast and you’d like some advice, then I’ll do my best to help you. Just drop me a line or leave a comment below!
Best wishes
