It’s a lot easier to get going if you choose an existing Podcast provider. But I like to handcraft things so this is what I spent four hours figuring out today :+). These days you can get your podcast on all platforms! It’s amazing!
- For Spotify, go here. as an individual (i.e. you don’t need to go through a broker). Submit your feed here.
- For Google, go here as an individual (i.e. you don’t need to go through a broker). Submit your feed here.
- For Apple, go here as an individual (i.e. you don’t need to go through a broker). Be sure that you are logged into the App Store from somewhere. Submit your feed here.
Note that each of the services requires you to have an RSS feed available to submit. If you’re on WordPress, I recommend you do the following to get one going:
- Use the 10up Simple Podcasting plugin with your WordPress site. It’s super well done.
You’ll need to make a first episode, to start. Good luck there!
For the Mac device universe, the Overcast app is a cool podcast player. And I noted how they were kind enough to have made Forecast — which is a utility that encodes an MP3 with chapters (which I haven’t had 100% luck with yet — but apparently it isn’t worth doing as only a few players support this amenity).
When cooking your first podcast, integrating music is a good idea to create a sense of energy. I have no musical ability so I went and purchased a few samples off of Jamendo and that was fairly easy.
Compress your file using Forecast into an mp3 file (96kpbs is good for talk shows and 128kbps is for more high fidelity radio shows according to this person over here). You’ve got a file! Now go ahead and upload your mp3 file to your WP site via Simple Podcasting’s Gutenberg block. All three of my feeds are now baking on all three services and my fingers are definitely crossed! —JM
Good news! Google Play now carries my podcast. It took one business day for it to get approved. iTunes carried my podcast after I fixed the name of the podcast (they had some stringent rules) — that took 14 days. Spotify took me a while but that’s due to my finding a tiny unhandled case in the 10up plugin, and I was able to fix it because of open source.
