Podcasting: question

I am putting together some ideas for half hour to hour long talk shows, also featuring music, as podcasts.

I'm a musician and run a studio so i can do the recording and mp3 encoding, i also have a website and plenty of bandwidth and storage space. I have an active blog, hosted at my website so i think that will be helpful.

My question is, once i create an mp3 of my show, what next? I don't understand the RSS part of this. How do i publish this as a podcast, and what officially makes it a "podcast" and not just an mp3 people are downloading?

Would it make the most sense to use my blog: create a blog post for each podcast, and use that for RSS feeds? Is that just an announcement with a link, and the link is the podcast that opens in people's iTunes?

Thanks as always for any replies.

The blog is the simplest way to manage the feed. You're right simply create blog post for each episode. I recommend add podpress (if you're using wordpress) and the run the feed through feedburner to get the tagging just right.

Submit to itunes to get it into the directory once you have an itunes url that serves as the "one click" subcribe link. (you can also do this by replacing http:// with itpc:// in front of the feed)

Officially what makes it a podcast is a media file in a RSS feed.

Thank you. I'll use podpress as you suggest with my wordpress, plus ping o matic. After i submit to iTunes and get the URL as you describe, and post that in my blog post, do i now have the RSS file? Or is that another file i need to generate somehow?


Sorry for the newbie questions. Thanks for any help.

You don't need to post the itune url in the post, just link to it in the side bar.

Your Workflow

1. create mp3 file
2. up load that file to a folder on your site
3. Write up a blog post with show notes
4. add file through the podpress plug in (at the bottom of the new post) The address will be something like http://www.mysite.com/podcast/firstshow.mp3.
5. Publish post.

Now submit the feed to itunes it takes a couple of days for it to show.