6 Steps to Professional Podcast Publishing

The process of publishing a podcast is at least as complicated as producing the episodes to begin with. As with most things on the Web, you can take a do-it-yourself approach that affords ultimate control over all the details.

Alternatively, you can choose a solution that glosses over the details so you don’t have to worry about them. Which approach you choose depends on your needs, your own technical expertise, and how much spare time you have. Remember: every hour you spend publishing your podcast is an hour you don’t have to spend producing another great episode of your show!

1. Pick a Host

No matter how you go about it, publishing a podcast comes down to serving up relatively sizeable files for download. And if your show is the success you hope it to be, you’re going to be serving a lot of files, possibly in a very short space of time.

Intensive media serving may not be something your current web hosting plan is up to, and it would be a shame for a popular episode to generate a massive hosting bill or, worse yet, take down your site just when your hard work is paying off! It’s worth giving some thought to whether you need to make separate arrangements to host the downloadable files that make up your podcast.

2. Publish Your First Episode

Once you’ve settled on hosting for your media files, you should get your first episode up. At a minimum, you need to upload the MP3 audio file, and then publish a web page that offers it for download. You should do this in such a way that each episode you publish will have its own web page associated with it, so that third party sites can link to particular episodes. You may also want to provide a way for new listeners who stumble on the page to play the episode right inside the browser, without having to download it.

The easiest way to do all this is with a blogging system that includes special support for podcasts. Libsyn provides an easy-to-use blogging system that comes pre-configured for your account, though it is notoriously difficult to customize its look and feel.

3. Set Up a Feed

What makes a podcast a podcast, and not just a set of media files available for download, is the feed. Software like iTunes can subscribe to your feed and automatically download new episodes of your show. If you’re using a blogging system to publish your podcast, chances are it already provides an iTunes-friendly feed.

If you aren’t using a blogging system, but are simply coding up a static page for each episode that you publish, then you’ll need a good tool to write the feed. Feeder is an excellent choice for the Mac, providing plenty of podcast-specific convenience features. Yes, you could code the feed by hand by referencing the relevant documentation from iTunes, but keeping a hand-coded feed perfectly valid can be a chore, and unlike web browsers, feed-reading programs like iTunes do not tolerate coding mistakes.

4. Promote your Show

With your first episode up and a feed in place, you’re ready to start getting the word out.

Your first step should be to submit your feed to iTunes. iTunes is by far the most popular directory of podcasts, and it is the first place most regular podcast listeners will look for your show if they hear about it. Make sure you have configured your feed with the iTunes description, artwork, and category information before submitting. Of course, submitting your podcast to directories will only go so far. Like any other content published online, you’ll have to do some work to promote it.

5. Watch your Stats

With each episode you publish, keep an eye on your stats to see how you’re doing. Are most of your users downloading the show manually, listening in their browser or auto-downloading them with software like iTunes?

6. Keep it Rollin’

Perhaps the most important factor in building a regular following is to maintain a regular production schedule. It doesn’t have to be every week or even every month, but set yourself a schedule and stick to it. If you become unpredictable, so will your listeners’ dedication to your show.

Of course, the beauty of podcasting is that you can do your own thing on the Web. If your intent is to publish occasionally and at irregular intervals, that’s okay too—just be clear with your listeners that that’s what you’re doing, so they don’t consider unsubscribing just because they haven’t heard from you for a month.

And that’s it! Your road to podcast production success.

By Kevin Yank