Step Four: Publishing

Now that you’ve got your audio ready to go, it’s time to put it on the internet! Select your hosting service of choice, upload your file, and make a post to your blog of choice. Make certain that the direct link to the file is somewhere in the post; an example is at the top of this post.

Now that your blog has content, grab the URL for the RSS feed. If the blog doesn’t have a link or button to get the RSS information, the blog address itself is usually enough. Take that link and save it somewhere.

FeedBurner is an amazing podcasting service. It will take your blog feed and do all the necessary conversions using its SmartCast service. Register an account (or log in with your Google account if you have one), log in, and enter the RSS or blog address. Make sure to check “I am a podcaster” before you hit the Next button!

Follow the steps to create, and you’re halfway there! Once FeedBurner has your podcast feed ready, it will take a day or so to get stats for you, but you can continue setting it up however you want to do it. Go through the “Optimize” and “Publicize” tabs and enable as many options as you wish. Make sure you check out the SmartCast option!

Now that you have a FeedBurner feed, you can test it out in iTunes. Open it up and select “Subscribe to Podcast” in the Advanced menu. iTunes will open up your feed and automatically download the available episodes based on your podcast settings. The title of the blog post becomes the title of the podcast episode, so make sure you have the blog posts formatted the way you want!

Once you have a few episodes, you can submit the feed to the iTunes store directory. Apple has instructions on how to do that. That usually takes a day or so to be approved, but once it’s there, you will be searchable to anyone looking for your podcast!

FeedBurner and iTunes update the podcast automatically, so once you have this all set up, all you need to do is post the episode to your blog! Within minutes of your posting, everyone subscribed to your podcast will get the notification, and iTunes subscribers will have the episode ready to download!

You’re all set! Go forth and podcast!

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