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4. Your podcast in the big, bad world …
a) Retrieving it for purely personal satisfaction:
Download yourself a program known technically as a ‘podcast aggregator’. Known to the rest of us as ‘podcasting software’. Good examples are iTunes (latest versions) (from www.apple.com) or iPodder. (www.ipodder.org): these seem to work just fine.
Find the ‘Add podcast’ or ‘Add feed’ item and type in the address of your podcast, e.g. ‘http://www.superduperpodcasts.co.uk/mypodcasts.rss’. Get the program to scan for new podcasts and Whey Hey! Your podcast should come winging back to you over the wires, as fresh as though it had never been away. If it doesn’t … check what you did, debug and try again.
If you’re using a program like iPodder, then your podcast will automatically appear in your media player (for those of us with Macs, that normally means iTunes anyway). If you’ve got a portable MP3 player, then that also means that when you connect it to your computer, it will appear in there for you to listen to whenever you fancy.
b) Telling the world about it:
This means submitting the podcast to a podcast directory such as iTunes, Podcast Alley, or wherever. There are plenty of podcast directories, just as there are plenty of search engines. Do a Google search and take your pick.
You will have to tell the directory the address of the podcast (just as you have to tell your podcast software the same thing), what genre you want it included under, and possibly some details about yourself, where you are based, your website address, that sort of thing. Some directories (in particular iTunes) vet podcasts before putting them up for public consumption and will reject them if you don’t own up to all that explicit content …
c) Getting the world to listen to it:
Good luck! Since the vast majority of podcasts are free, then podcasts are differentiated from each other only through their titles, text descriptions, and content.
Just listing your podcast in a directory is not enough. The competition for clicks is immense: think how infrequently you choose a plumber out of the hundreds in the yellow pages purely because they’re in the yellow pages. Most people choose a plumber on recommendation from a friend – and most podcasts are chosen on recommendation from a trusted source, be that a friend, a website, a newspaper, a specialist magazine, traditional radio or elsewhere.
Fundamentally, the rule is: if you make something good that a community of people will want to listen to, it’s up to you to find that community and tell them about it. You yourself are your most valuable resource in that regard - you will know that community, its’ dynamics, and how its members communicate – so use the channels you know already to spread the word.
The most heavily-subscribed podcasts number their downloads in the hundreds of thousands – and it’s not always the obvious candidates who achieve that. If you get in to that league (and we all hope you do!) then you’re probably going to have to buy your own podcast-hosting servers, but until (and after) that time …
Happy podcasting!
