The Two Minute Guide to Creating a Podcast Series

I get asked a bit about how do you create podcast series from scratch. Here is the two minute guide

1. Download and install iTunes and research your competition of what you do and don’t like about them.
2. Define your niche, the purpose of your podcast and the keywords you need to include in your title, description etc.
3. Plan and Document the Outline of your series in detail
4. Plan and Document your first episode in detail eg. dot points
5. Have a go at recording your first episode and add intro music, outro music etc.
6. Listen to your content through headphones to ensure it sounds good.
7. Save it as an MP3 file and set your ID3 tags.
8. Setup your wordpress blog and use the podpress and feeburner feedsmith plugins (or equivalent plugins of your choosing)
9. Burn your feed through feedburner
10. Ensure feedburner can recognise the media (mp3) files
11. Submit your podcast to itunes (or make multiple show entries then submit it to iTunes)
12. Promote your podcast according the the steps outlined in Jason Van Orden’s ‘Promote your Podcast’ book.

Feedburner Not Recognising MP3 files in Wordpress Podcasting Blog

A frustrating week. I have just spent the best part of a it working on a problem since upgrading podcasting blogs from 2.5 to 2.6 or installing podcasting blogs on wordpress 2.6. I just wanted to share the experience so that no one else feels my pain.

If you are a wordpress hosted podcasting blog user either installs wordpress 2.6 or upgrades from 2.5 to 2.6 and you find your podcast breaks in any of the following ways
- feedburner no longer recognising mp3 attachements in your feed
- podpress plugin player no longer working
- can’t submit podcast to iTunes
- feedburner error message “Content Type reported: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Media enclosure not created because: The content type returned from your host server was a text type, not a binary media type. Podcast content should always return a binary media type, such as audio/mpeg for audio, or video/mpeg for video.\”

Then try applying the ‘No Revisions’ plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-revisions/ and your problems should go away.

What is wierd about this problem is that I experienced it on one web host and not another, so not sure what is going on there.

Here is the text from the No Revisions site which explains what it does “While the WordPress 2.6 upgrade has not gone smoothly for a lot of people, one new feature that has yet to bite too many people is post revisions. Whenever you save a change in a post in WordPress 2.6, it saves a copy of the old version as well as your changed version. If you a lot while writing, that can add up to a lot of extra crud in your database.

Now, these can be turned off by editing your wp-config.php file, but that’s a bit gross for a system like WordPress where everything else can be done through a nice web interface. This plugin gives you that web-based solution.

Just install and activate this plugin and no more revision debris in your database. Of course, that also means no safety net if you accidentally screw up a post and then save it, but that was the case until 2.6 anyway.”

I hope this helps.
Regards, Greg

Podcasting Money in the Funnel

I have been reading plenty of blog posts and media write up recently about how the money for podcasting is in the inserting of advertising and sponsorship in podcast episodes.  I think this is being said largely due to the fact that podcasting is a new media and many folks think of it as like the baby cousin of traditional radio (as that is how it is monitised).

One big difference though is that radio is broadcasting and it has to appeal to a wide audience, where as podcasting is narrowcasting and has to appeal to a narrow group of people who are passionate and responsive about the subject matter of the podcast, or else they wouldn’t be listening.

So we know they are a targeted audience and if we give good value content and they see us the podcaster as a trusted adviser then they are also more likely to take action when prompted with our web 2.0 friendly call to action (such as a call to opt in on our web site).  For the  online niche marketer with a successful profitable multi step direct response marketing funnel there is more money in the prompting of the podcast listener to opt in to the site to receive high value content (and ultimately sales of related products down the line) than there is in the monitisation of podcasting via ads and sponsorship.   I have 7 podcasts coming on line for direct response internet marketers with proven marketing systems in the next month or two, so time will tell.

That being said I am still a big believer in the community and the value of what building a community around your podcast can do as far as monitization.  The best example I have seen on the web is the boys over at Internet Business Mastery who make the lions share of their income with this exact technique.