Podcasting 101 : Part 3 – Promoting your Podcast

Once you’ve recorded a show, you need to upload it somewhere on the Internet. You could upload it to your own site, but if your show is at all popular you’ll soon find yourself paying additional bandwidth charges — most personal and small business hosting packages charge after a gigabyte or two of traffic, and audio and (especially) video files are quite large.

There are plenty of services that will host your files, though; Libsyn is a good choice that offers a lot of features, starting at $5 US a month. Another good choice is WordPress.com, whose free accounts allow you to store up to 3GB of files; you could have your podcast and notes on each episode at yourname.wordpress.com and just post the RSS link at your main site.

Now that it’s available, you want to start telling people about it. Mention it on your site, of course, but also make sure your podcast gets listed in the big podcast directories. The most important is iTunes; there’s a “Submit a Podcast” link in the podcast section of iTunes. Zune software also has a “Submit a Podcast” link in the podcast section. Just cut and paste your podcast’s feed address where instructed. For both iTunes and Zune, you need to have downloaded and installed the software here: iTunes and Zune. Note that you don’t need to own an iPod or Zune to use their software — iTunes works especially wll as a player and directory on your computer.

You should also submit your podcast feed to the big online directories, such as PodcastPickle and Podcast Directory. These are online sites that have built large communities of podcasters and podcast fans; they don’t require extra software. Again, find the link to “submit your podcast” (or something similar — each site is different) and cut and paste your site’s podcast feed address where directed.