22: Publishing Your First Podcast Episode
Last week I walked you through the process of creating your RSS feed in Libysn. You need an RSS feed in order to get your podcast on the various platforms where podcasts can be heard. However, you need to have at least one audio file in your RSS feed in order for it to be approved.
In this week's episode, I'm walking you through the process of adding your first "episode" to your Libsyn RSS feed.
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Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 10: Determining Your Main Call-to-Action
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 18: How to Edit Your Podcast Using Audacity
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 20: Why You Need an Episode 00
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 21: How to Set-Up Your RSS Feed in Libsyn
Podcasting for Coaches on Instagram
Podcasting for Coaches on Facebook
My Launch Consultation Packages
Online Course | How to Start a Podcast (For Your Coaching Business)
Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 22 of podcasting for coaches. In last week's episode, I talked about creating your RSS feed, which is what you need in order to submit your podcast to the various platforms. In order to submit your podcast to those platforms, you have to have at least one file in your RSS feed, it cannot be blank, it can't be empty or they won't accept it. So you have to have a file. Now in Episode 20, I explained why that file should be an episode zero. And what an episode zero is, if you haven't listened to that yet, in Episode 18, I very quickly went over how to edit and mix your episodes using a free program called Audacity. So today, I'm actually walking you through the process of taking your completed episode that you have edited and mixed together. And we're going to put this into your RSS feed. Specifically, I'm talking about how to do this in Lipson, which is a third party hosting service where you can store all of your audio files, and you use it to actually create your RSS feed. There are a variety of different platforms out there. So feel free to research in working with editing clients. For the past few years, I have had experience with blueberry, which is another very popular one podcast websites, pod bean. There are all kinds of different ones out there. Lipson is my preferred, it's what I've used to host all three of my own podcasts. And it's what I recommend to all of my clients. So just like last week, when I walked you through how to create an RSS feed in Lipson. Now we're going to talk about adding your first official episode in air quotes, because it's is more like a teaser trailer equivalent of an about page on your website type of an episode than a full real episode. And again, tune in to Episode 20 To find out more about that topic if you have not already listened to it. So to start in order to put the file in your feed, it has to be an mp3. If you're using audacity to mix everything together, meaning that you've combined all the elements together for your show. So your intro, your music, the interview, whatever it is that you want to have in your show, you've combined it all together, so it's complete. And now you're ready for the next step, you are going to export it from audacity as an mp3, you're going to check the option for it to be constant bitrate. And there are a couple of different options for the kbps setting. in Audacity when you export as an mp3, I personally choose to go with 128 kbps kbps stands for kilobits per second. And that basically just determines the amount of data that's stored in that file over a period of time. So this basically is the quality of the recording. And that translates to how large the file sizes. So 128 is a pretty good balance between quality audio, and not taking up too much space on your listeners devices when they download your episodes. So you don't want to go too crazy here. You don't need to go with a super high setting on this because your podcast isn't music. It's not like a full length CD, where you really need a lot of data stored in each one of these tracks at spoken word, a little bit of music for your intro and outro most likely, and 128 is perfectly fine for that. And your listeners will not have to delete a whole bunch of stuff of their phone in order to download your episode onto their device so that they can listen to it offline. And while you're exporting, you can go ahead and name the file, which will be the title of the episode. I do always recommend even though there is a debate on whether or not you should include episode numbers in your titles, I always always recommend putting it in at least the file name, even if it's not displayed across the platforms. So when you export this file, go ahead and name the actual audio file the actual mp3 file, starting with an episode number. And this will help you keep your files organized. Now I personally put everything for one particular episode in a you know a sub folder labeled with the episode number. But that's because I work on a whole bunch of different shows for all of my clients. For you and just your show. You don't necessarily need to do that probably. So I recommend again, having that episode number at the beginning of the file so that it keeps them organized in a numerical sequence wherever you have these stored and you can easily find the file at any point in the future if you ever need to. And yes, sometimes you probably won't need too. Okay, so now that we have named your file, and we've exported it as an mp3 with a constant bit rate, and 128 kbps, we are going to tag this audio file. When I say tagging it, that basically means we're adding metadata, which if you've ever put a CD, kind of retro these days, but I am technically a millennial, so I remember CDs, if you ever put a CD in your car, or your stereo or anything like that, and it's displaying that track information, it's displaying the album artwork, it's displaying the title of the song, the artist, the album name, maybe even the year that it was published, or copyrighted any of those things, that's all metadata that's added to that individual file. So we want to go ahead and add these things for two reasons. One, so that if it ever is downloaded and played on another device, outside of the podcast app that they are choosing to download it from, or if it's downloaded from like your website or something like that, that information is going to be transferred to whatever device they're playing that on. Now, I will be completely open here and say that that's a fairly rare occurrence that that's going to happen, but in the off chance that it does, it's nice to have that information. The other main reason that we include this metadata is for SEO purposes. So if at any point anybody is searching for any term, any phrase, whatever your name, your show, your guest who's on there any of these things, that metadata is going to be searchable in the podcast apps for the most part. And you know, in general web searches if you have them in your show notes. So the program that I prefer to use to add metadata is called ID three editor and I will have a link in the show notes for this episode. So just go to podcasting for coaches comm and click the main podcast tab in the main menu on the home page, super easy. This is available for both Mac and PC users. So that's awesome. And I actually purchased this a few years ago, if I remember correctly, it was like $30, one time, and I've had about five or six different computers since I purchased it. And every time I've just had to email them. And they've given me a new like purchasing code to put it on my new device, and I have not had to pay for it again. So it's been pretty amazing. And they do that very quickly. I mean, I've had some as soon as 30 minutes, I don't think I've ever waited more than a day for it. If you're on a super, super tight budget, you can use iTunes. Actually, in order to add this metadata, it is a fairly complicated process is way more complicated than using it through editor. It's time consuming, it's frustrating. It doesn't give you all the different fields that you want to utilize. But it is there to use if you want, you just have to add the file into your library and then right click on it and do get album info. And then you can update that all there. So there actually is a way to create the kind of like a template in 93 editor. So you don't have to enter in all the information every single time for every single file. But this episode is going to be fairly long. So I'm going to refrain from explaining that for right now. Because this isn't something you necessarily need to know right this second. And it's a process that we can add later on to help make your workflow a little bit more efficient. Okay, so now that we have our tagged file, it is time to actually add it to your RSS feed. So at this point, you're going to log into your Lipson account, which you should already have by this point. And you're going to hover over the Content tab in the main menu bar. From there, you're going to click on add new episode. And there you're going to see five different tabs where you can do various things on. So on the first page here, what you need to do is click add media file right at the very top of this particular section. And then you're going to select the mp3 that you just exported and tagged, it will automatically start uploading and then you can actually proceed to fill in the rest of the information for this while that file is uploading. So next, we want to go to the second tab, which says details. And here's where you're going to enter in all the information that's going to be displayed in the various podcast apps. So this first section here you'll notice is a little bit different from the section down below where it says iTunes. Apple has specific requirements. Since they released the apple podcast app, around December of 2017. They've kind of changed things up a little bit and they have some specific requirements that they want you to follow in order to be on their platform. However, basically every other platform that does not pull from iTunes for their directories lets you have a little bit more freedom in what you do. So here where it says title, you're Of course going to enter the episode title. Here is where you have to decide whether or not you want your episode numbers displayed in the titles. Again, this is a widely debated topic. So many people say that you know your characters are limited in what's displayed and you need to get right to the heart of the matter. And you're wasting valuable real estate by including episode numbers. And there is some validity in that I'm not going to say that there isn't. However, I personally am on the side that you should include episode numbers in your titles for a couple of different reasons. One Anytime a new potential listener finds your feed, it's always a great idea for them to know exactly where you're at, I am much more likely to subscribe or check out a show or become invested in a show that's already on episode 200, as opposed to one that's on episode 15. Because the one with 200 episodes has a proven track record, I know that they've stuck at this for a while. And I have a lot of content to consume. So it's going to keep me busy for a little while not to say I will never check out a new podcast, I don't want you to get discouraged about that, since you are just starting. Because eventually you are going to have those higher numbers. And I will definitely still check out newer podcasts if the content is especially interesting, or I'm a follower of the person who's putting it out. Another reason that I advocate for including episode numbers in your titles is to make it super super, super easy for you to reference previous episodes, and get your listeners more engaged with your content. If you're on episode 89, you probably have people who are just coming in recently and haven't listened to Episode 15. And maybe Episode 15 relates right with the topic you're talking about now and will provide more information that they might want to check out and consume. So it's always a good idea to reference previous episodes in your recordings, if they're relevant. And it's really difficult for listeners to find those episodes. If they don't have any numbers to go back on. If you just say the episode title, that means they literally have to go through every single episode in your feed to find that right title and they have to remember what the title is, which is a lot more difficult than just remembering a number. So decide whether or not you want numbers or not. If you do have it take up as few characters as possible. Don't include any leading zeros don't include the word episode, don't include add number sign or a hashtag. For people these days, you don't really even necessarily need a colon. I personally prefer that just because I think it looks a little bit more polished. And because if you ever start an episode with a number, it looks a little bit weird if you don't have some kind of a break in there. But again, you can choose to not include one and a half an extra character for what's displayed for your title. Some people choose to put the number at the end of the title. And to me this completely defeats the purpose because that's most likely not going to be displayed when someone's just scrolling through your feet. So whatever you enter in this title field is going to be what's displayed on all of the platforms except for apples, and any of the podcast apps that pull from Apple's directory. So some title you can choose to put that or not that's going to display on some platforms and not on others. Description. This is what shows up in the episode description. So whenever they click on this file to learn more about it, this is what's going to show and you can format these. So you can include links and different font choices and you know, bold things and highlight things and whatever you want to do here, some platforms will display it correctly, some will not. But I do recommend adding a pretty decent summary of your episode here, get the potential listener intrigued, you know, let them know enough of what the episode is about that they know that the content is going to be relevant for them and not a waste of their time. But don't of course, give everything away to the point where they feel like they don't need to listen to the episode. This does not need to be a full blog post. This is just a quick description to let them know whether or not they want to listen. And I do recommend including a link to your show notes here. So you can just say something like to view the resources mentioned in this episode, visit the show notes. And then you can just hyperlink that with the URL for the show notes, or something a little more clever. Well, however you want to say that that's fine. And then you can also include your social media links, if they want to connect with you further, if you're going to offer some type of a download, or you want people to join your Facebook group, whatever your kind of initial call to action is, which we have discussed in Episode 10. You can include that here in the show notes as well. We don't want to overwhelm the listeners with all of the different options, we want it to be pretty clear what the next step should be. So whether that's go to the show notes, connect with you join your group, download this thing, whatever that is, put that there front and center and don't really bog them down with too many options. For category just leave that as general tags and keywords, you can choose to include these or not. Some platforms allow them some platforms don't. So it's just a matter of whether or not you feel like spending the time on this permalink points to we want to go ahead and select custom URL here. And then it's going to pop up with another box that will let you paste a URL in there and you want to put the URL for your show notes there. You can choose to enable comments or not this is going to be on the actual Lipson page, which you will probably never ever look at and most people don't listen on. So I honestly would just uncheck that box and not worry about it. Next is iTunes optimization. So this is the fields that got added in 2017 iTunes title, you can enter it exactly as you did in the title field at the top of this tab without the episode number and this is iTunes realization. But this really applies to Apple in general, the platform. So iTunes is desktop Apple podcast is the mobile app. So for Apple titles, they do not want episode numbers, period flat out, no shape, way or form. They don't want episode numbers because they want their episode beads displayed very neatly and clean. And they think episode titles make it look a little bit cluttered. So they do not want people putting those in there, you'll still see that some people do. And that's a personal choice that they make, because they are very pro episode numbers in the titles. And they don't really care what Apple's policy is, they're going to keep doing it anyways. And that's fine. I haven't really heard of anyone getting punished for this. But it is Apple, and they could decide that they want to start cracking down on that. And they could just flat out, remove your show because you're not following their guidelines and their standards. So Better safe than sorry, just don't include an episode number here. iTunes summary. So this is the episode description for, again, Apple platforms, you'll notice there's a character count here, Apple does not want your descriptions to be any longer than 510 characters, which is like the most random thing ever. But it is what it is. If you include anything longer than this, it's going to get cut off when it's displayed. So just stick with under 510. And you should be good episode type. So this very first one is going to be a trailer episode. So you're going to mark trailer here instead of full normal episode. And that's because this is your episode zero. This is essentially your trailer for your show. For all your other episodes after episode zero, so episode one and on unless you do bonus episodes should be full normal episode, which is the default. So that's good, you can usually just leave that alone. But again, for episode zero make sure you mark trailer season number of course only applies if you're going to do seasons of your show, which I will devote an episode to in the future. Episode Number, of course is the number. So here is where they want you to put that number so that they can display it in whatever way they decide which has changed a little bit. And it looks differently depending on where you're viewing it. And whether you're subscribing on and a whole bunch of different things. But that's apples deal. We're just having to play along. So into your episode number here, rating not set explicit or clean. And of course, this is referring to the language. So do you have explicit language in this podcast, and that is a million dollar question of what constitutes as explicit language, you're going to kind of have to make that call for yourself there is no set role of these words are allowed in these words aren't. My general rule of how I explained this to my clients is would your listener be upset if they were playing this episode through their car stereo their car speakers so out loud, while taking their kids to school in the morning. If they would, then you should probably market explicit just to be safe. If they wouldn't, then go ahead and market clean. iTunes author will always be you always, always, always put your name in here. And then if you have a podcast where you are interviewing people, but your guests name here separated by a comma, and then a space, so your name comma space guest name. What this does is it lists both of you as the author, which means that both of your names are now searchable inside of Apple platforms. So if someone is looking for your guest, and they do a search for them, because maybe they really love them and they want to consume more of their content, your show should come up in the results. So next, we want to go to the third tab which you can click go to artwork right at the bottom underneath the iTunes author field, or you can scroll back up to the top and then just click the third tab. So here for artwork, we have thumbnail and widescreen image are our options. If you have set up your podcast, which we will go over this another time to automatically share your episodes when they're published to various social media platforms that you can connect here in Lipson, you might want to use a widescreen image for those so specifically YouTube and Facebook widescreen images look better because they create a video with a static image. So you're going to upload the widescreen image of for those particular platforms. If you are not connecting to the social media accounts, which again, is a topic we will go much deeper into because there's a lot to consider there. Then you can choose upload your thumbnail or not for the thumbnail, you can choose an individual episode image, you can create a new image each time or you can show your guests image. I don't really personally recommend this because it makes your feed look a little bit cluttered when you have a whole bunch of different images. And they're so tiny, you really can't see them anyways, you can't read them. You can't necessarily tell what the picture is of. So I recommend just using your main cover art for your show. And again, you can choose to upload it here for each episode or not, I do just to be safe. However, in last week's episode, I talked about how to set the default where if your episode artwork is ever broken for any reason, for some reason, it's not displaying properly it defaults to your main artwork anyways. So technically you should not have to upload your artwork in this thumbnail section each time but again, I'm Have the opinion Better safe than sorry. So I always do. So by this point, you should be able to go back over to the Media tab and see that your audio file has uploaded, it will say success, and then you can just click the little box to close it. And it'll be fine, you're good to go. And you can proceed to publishing or scheduling this episode. Go to tab number four for that, where it's scheduling. And then you'll see another set of tabs come up, and you'll see that the second one says basic release slash expiration, and go and click on that one. And here you're going to see three different sections release date, expiration date, and download availability, expiration date, we should set that to never expire. Unless you're doing some fancy things with your feed, which you're probably not, you can actually set expiration dates on your episodes, to entice people to listen to them by a certain date and keep the listener super engaged. But I do not recommend this, you're putting all the time and effort and probably money into this podcast, let's make this evergreen content that constantly brings in a new audience for you. So I would recommend leaving that as never expire. Download availability, media files are always available is the option that is checked by default, then you have another option of media files are available based on release schedule. So when you finish uploading your episodes, you have an option to release them immediately or schedule them in the future. For this one, we need it to be live in your feed in order to submit your RSS feed to various platforms. So we're going to go ahead and release this episode on publish the releasing and immediately for all of the rest of your episodes, you should hopefully be working on them before they're supposed to be out. So we're gonna set those to be released in the future, we're going to schedule a date and time. In the meantime, though, however, you'll have a link where you can actually play this file before it's released. So you could maybe give a Facebook group a sneak peek of the episode before it's actually released on the platforms, you could give maybe members for a paid membership site, early access to this file before it's released, you can do a lot of different things. And if you have the files always available that works out. However, if you ever check the box for media files are available based on release schedule. That means that direct download link will not work and no one can access a file no one can listen to it until it goes live. So just to make it easier on yourself leave that defaulted to media files are always available, because no one's going to be able to access that unless you share the link with them. And you wouldn't be sharing that link unless you wanted them to listen. So again, for this first episode, this episode zero, go ahead and leave it as release immediately on Publish. And then you can just click the Publish button down at the bottom. And you're going to be good to go. In the future, click Set new release date, and then select the date and time that you want it to be released at and then go ahead and click Publish. So when you do this, you will get another box that pops up. And it will have a whole bunch of different options for you. The very top one will be the direct download link that I just mentioned that you can send to people before the episode is live to let them listen to it. I do this a lot with my clients. Most of them like to have a copy of the final file or be able to listen to it to review it. And so this is what I provide them this direct download link. Also on this page, you're going to have the option to get an embed code for a player to put in your show notes on your website, you'll see a bunch of different options for the player. I personally prefer the custom one, which is the one all the way at the very bottom, because it lets you customize the color, it looks a little bit fancier than the other ones. And it gives you some playback options like fast forward and rewind and skip and download and sharing it those kinds of things. You can choose to include the thumbnail that you uploaded in the artwork section that we discussed. So if you upload an image there, it can actually be displayed with the player. And you just have to click the use thumbnail box and the option that comes up for the custom player. You'll also see an option to customize the color of the buttons, you'll just need your hex code for whatever color you prefer, which is like a six digit code that you probably already know about whenever you set up your website. So you can actually customize the player to match the colors and the branding on your site, which is what I love about it personally. So if you go to the show notes for this episode, you'll see how this looks displayed. I use the custom player from Lipson in my own show notes. And I have it customized to have all my buttons be the same color as my podcast artwork and the rest of my website. And it displays my podcast artwork right there with it. So all you do is you just select your options for however you want this to look with the color with the thumbnail or not. And then you click to get the embed code it pops up in other box, you just copy all of the code that it gives you there and then just paste it in the text editor if you're using WordPress, but anywhere that you can enter HTML code on your site, and you just paste it wherever you want in the show notes and it should display properly. And FYI, any plays that come from this player in your shownotes counts in your downloads, according to Lipson, so those downloads and those plays, even though they're not on a podcasting platform or app are still being counted, which is great. So that was a run through of how to publish your very first episode in air quotes because it's an episode zero to your rss feed in lipson so now that we have an audio file in lipson and we have set up your rss feed we are going to talk about finally submitting your podcast to the various platforms next week so make sure that you definitely tune in so that we can finally get your podcast submitted to all the various platforms thank you so much and i hope that you have a fantastic week and that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches if you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business head on over to podcasting for coaches.com where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly thank you so much for joining me today and i will see you back here for the next episode