64: How to Avoid Issues When Submitting Your Podcast to Apple
"The number one thing that prevents people from getting approved by Apple, is your main podcast artwork."
It's the first week of December and this means we're about a month away from the new podcast boom that comes every January.
This also means there are a lot of new podcasters getting ready to submit their shows to the various listening platforms.
Unfortunately, this can be a frustrating experience for those new podcasters who get rejected by Apple because they don't understand the guidelines their show is supposed to meet.
That's why, in this episode, I'm breaking down the common issues podcasters experience when submitting their show to Apple and how to avoid them.
SPECIAL NOTE: For some inexplicable reason, I neglected to mention an important artwork guideline in the episode. In addition to the guidelines mentioned in the episode, your main podcast image must be 72 DPI. If you work with a graphic designer, this is information they'll need to know.
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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 number 64. podcasting for coaches. At the time of this episode is being released, it's the first week of December. And this is the time that a lot of people are thinking about starting a podcast for January, the start of the new year is a boom time for new podcast launching, which means this is going to be around the time that anyone who's launching a show in January should be submitting their show to the various platforms for approval, so that it's there and ready on launch day. As a reminder, I do recommend submitting at least a month out minimum of two weeks before your official launch day. Now this is not a how to when it comes to submitting your show. So I'm not going to be explaining how to submit your show to the various platforms. I actually did that all the way back in Episode Number 23. So make sure that you check that out if that's the information that you're looking for. What this episode is about is avoiding a lot of the common mistakes that people make that keep them from getting approved by Apple, specifically, Apple has the most strict requirements and terms that need to be met in order for them to approve your feed, therefore approve your show and be listed on their platform. So we're going to talk about avoiding those mistakes so that you can make sure that your show gets approved without any delays. The number one thing that prevents people from getting approved by Apple is your main podcast artwork. I know that seems crazy. I know it seems silly. But there are specific requirements that this artwork must meet. And if it does not meet all of them, your show will not be approved. So those requirements are that it needs to be a minimum of 1400 by 1400 pixels, and a maximum of 3000 by 3000 pixels. So this is what I'm going to refer to as the image size. So this is literally the size of the image itself. Now the thing that really trips people up, the one that most people don't realize, and that most people get wrong, is the file size. So this is the actual size of the file when it's stored in a feed or on a device. This has nothing to do with how big the image is, when you look at it, it's all about the data behind that image that you don't see an image the size of 3000 by 3000 pixels is a pretty big file, which means it's going to take up a lot of storage space. However, Apple doesn't really give you that storage space, they don't want these large files, your file size has to be 510 kilobytes or less kilobytes is kb. Usually a 3000 by 3000 pixel image is between one and two megabytes. Now I'm not going to explain the difference between megabytes and kilobytes. But it's a big freaking difference. And Apple absolutely will not approve your show. If you are over 510 kilobytes, I actually recommend going with under 500. Because different programs can read the size of a file differently. I've had clients who have sent me a file and they say, Oh, well, this is 503 kilobytes, so it should be fine. But then my program, my computer reads it as 513 kilobytes. So I like to say say under 500. If you are working with a graphic designer, and you tell them this, it shouldn't be a problem, they should know exactly what you're talking about. And they should be able to make that large image be actually a small file. If you're doing this on your own and you're not particularly skilled with creating artwork and working within these parameters, I would suggest creating artwork on the smaller side so closer to 1400 by 1400. And then maybe using something like tiny PNG calm to compress the image. When you compress it. What that does is it literally compresses that file size. So it like shrinks it down, it squeezes it gets rid of some of that data. Which also means if you compress it too much, your image can start looking a little blurry and not as crisp and clear. So you have to find that balance. You can't start with a really huge file and just compress it 20 times to get it down to what you need because it's going to look like crap. So again, if you're doing this yourself start with a smaller image size so closer to 1400 by 1400 and then compress it if you need to a couple of times to get under the 500. If you're not able to do this on your own, it might be Worth reaching out to a graphic designer to just do this for you, then that way you know it's taken care of, and you won't have issues with your show. So if you didn't notice, by me going with those dimensions of 1400 by 14 103,000 by 3000, that means the image absolutely must be a square. That's another apple requirement. The image also must be in the RGB color space. If you're working with a graphic designer, this is good information to provide with them. But if you're creating it yourself in something like Canva, this is going to be the default, so you really don't need to worry about that. And then the last thing is that the file needs to be either a JPEG or a PNG. So that's the actual file type. Pretty much every single picture that you ever take and put online as a JPEG. I actually recommend going with a PNG instead, it's a little bit better quality and then you can use something like tiny PNG calm to compress it if you need to. Links to all of the stuff that I have mentioned will be in the show notes podcasting for coaches.com. Click on the podcast tab in the main menu and go to episode number 64. Okay, so to recap, what you need for your image is a square minimum of 1400 by 1400 pixels or maximum of 3000 by 3000 pixels in the RGB color space, under 510 kilobytes in size, and either PNG or JPG form. Okay, so next, the other thing that will get your feed rejected is if you have any spam in the title, or author, byline and my title, I mean, your main show title, not the episode title, and spam, you may say, Oh, I'm definitely not going to do that. I'm not going to spam my own show that would be ridiculous. However, spam, according to Apple is anything literally anything beyond the official title of the show, and your name in the author byline. So if you add any extra keywords to either one of these fields, this show will not be approved. Now I know what you're thinking. There are a ton of shows who do this. They have a bunch of keywords built in after the podcast title, they have a colon with a tagline, and they're still on there. And the answer is just because they're getting away with it doesn't mean you will. There are hundreds of shows being removed on a daily basis from Apple. And part of the reason this is happening is because they have keywords or taglines, aka spam, according to Apple in either their official show title or the author byline. So just please do this. Build your keywords into the description itself for the show as a whole into your episode titles and into your episode descriptions. I know this goes against advice that I gave all the way back at the beginning of this podcast. And that's because Apple did not have this policy in place at the time, it has been in effect for over a year now. And they are still hitting it hard. So just don't do it. Just don't do it. Next is the explicit language reading. If you do not have your show set as clean or explicit one or the other, because there are some hosting platforms where they give you the option of of not choosing one or the other, you can just have, there's like a third option where it says like no rating, or they label it differently. But if you don't have clean or explicit selected, then Apple might not approve your show. Because they don't want you to do go with a not set or a general basically not answering the question. They want to know clean or explicit, they don't care which one they just want to know. So make sure that you are not forgetting to market a cleaner explicit. I have talked about another episodes about when you need to mark a show explicit. So I'm not going to dive into that here. But basically, if you have a show where you use language, or you speak about topics that you would not be comfortable having your audience members play out loud through their car speakers, as they're taking their child to daycare or preschool in the morning, you need to market explicit. That's just the safe way of looking at it. If you don't mark your show explicit, and it actually is and somebody reports it or Apple becomes aware of it, they will remove your show outright. No warning, no explanation. And it's a pain in the butt to get it back, if ever. The last thing that will get you rejected from Apple is if there's something else wrong with your feed something else somewhere in this feed, which is literally just a bunch of code, your show will be rejected. If you go with a hosting service like Lipson that helps you create your RSS feed, you don't really need to worry about this. This is really only if you're going through your website and creating the feed yourself which I do not recommend doing. Unless you are very, very, very comfortable with doing something like this. If you're in an IT field, if this is what you do day in and day out. Yeah, totally. You can build this RSS feed from your own website. No problem, I would just make sure that you run your feed through something like feed validator.org or any of the other options just to make sure that there's nothing wrong with it before you do submit it to Apple. Okay, the last thing I'm going to talk about is the problem that you will incur sometimes when you actually go to submit your show. There's sometimes what we call a podcast Connect loop. And this means when you go to podcast Connect, which is the interface you use to actually submit your feed to Apple. Sometimes you can get Stuck in this loop where you click a button to submit your show. And it just keeps kind of refreshing the same page over and over and over again, you can't actually get beyond that page to enter in your RSS feed. If this is happening to you, how you get out of this loop is by making sure that your Apple account because you do have to have an apple account is fully set up and running. There are two things here that people don't necessarily realize will keep your account from being fully usable and being able to submit a show with it. One is that your payment information is not up to date, sometimes cards will expire. Even if you never ever, ever plan on purchasing anything through apple or iTunes or any of those things, you still have to have your payment information on file in order to have an account with them. So if that information is not up to date and current, then it will not let you pass that loop, you cannot submit a show. So go into your Apple account your iTunes account, and just make sure that that payment information is up to date. Next, if you're creating a brand new account, you have to verify or validate that account. So when you create a brand new Apple slash iTunes account, it should send you an email, but you have to basically just verify that it's you and you're good to go. And then you can use the account. If you don't verify that via that email, then it will not come through your account setup is complete and you cannot submit a show you'll just stay stuck in that loop. So those are the two things that could be the problem if you get stuck in that loop with podcast Connect. Now if you haven't listened to Episode 23, yet, you have no idea when Apple podcasts Connect is. So you're going to need to know that. So make sure that you do listen to Episode 23. And then if you get stuck in that loop, this is how to get out of it. So that wraps up this episode. Hopefully you won't have any issues or when you submit to Apple. If you do feel free to reach out and I will see if I can help you troubleshoot it, I can't always. So that wraps up this episode. Hopefully that will prevent you from getting your feet denied or running into issues when you submit your show to Apple. Thank you so much for listening and I invite you to come back next week where one of my clients is actually going to be our special guest for the week. Thank you so much. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches comm and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcasts that you create and put out into the world.