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Learn how to publish podcast episodes using wordpress. See my exact podcasting workflow and learn how you can quickly and easily publish new podcast episodes to your wordpress blog.
Hi and welcome to Start A Podcast Fast, the series where I show you how to get your podcast started really quickly. I’m Ryan McLane from Podcastfast.com and in this lesson you’re going to learn how to publish Podcast episodes using WordPress. I’m going to show you everything, from uploading your audio file to your media host all the way through to getting it live on air using your WordPress website.
The first step is to upload your audio file to your media house, that might be SoundCloud, it might be Libsyn, it might be another media host that I haven’t mentioned. There are two ways that you can upload your file to your media host. You can use auphonic.com which is a post production software that I recommend which helps level out your sounds and makes everything sound great or you can upload it directly to SoundCloud or to your media host which I don’t recommend. I’m going to show you right now how to upload to your media house using auphonic. If you want to see how to upload directly to SoundCloud then check out my free advanced tutorial on podcasting with SoundCloud. Just go to www.podcastfast.com/soundcloud to get direct access to that.
To upload your media file using Auphonic go to auphonic.com. Sign up if you don’t have an account, otherwise simply log in. Once you’re logged in you are going to need to integrate an external service so you are you going to need to integrate your media host, so for me that’s SoundCloud. To do that go up to the top menu bar and click on the Services tab. From the options at the top click on your media host and for me that is SoundCloud. You then need to authorize Auphonic to access your SoundCloud account so simply enter your SoundCloud login details and click Connect. We can now see down here we have the integration with SoundCloud for user name Podcastfast which is exactly what we want.
To upload a file we go up into the top menu bar again and we click on the production’s tab and we then click new production. The first thing we need to do is to select our file so I’ll go ahead and do that. We can then add intros or outros if we want. We then need to go ahead and name our file. I do suggest that you name your file using the same format every time – it needs to be at least three letters or numbers. For me I like to use the letters Ep and then the episode number. So in this case I’m going to do Ep1. This will prove important when it comes time to go to Step #2 finding our direct file link. It’s going to make life so much easier if we name these consistently and you’ll see that laid out in the video.
We then need to choose our cover image so go ahead and do that. We then need to put in our artist details and now album details. With the extended media data you can skip over that because iTunes actually pulls this data from your blog post summary. With the output files we want to make sure we just have mp3 there so if you have anything extra, (like for me I’ve got the video file) you just hit the X to get rid of it. And then down here on the publishing external services we want to click add service and then we want to find the service we just added. For me that’s SoundCloud and username podcastfast. We then want to change this type to podcast. Leave all the audio algorithms the same. Click start production and then click start production again. That will now begin uploading the file and it will then go through the process of making sure that the file is level but isn’t too loud, etc.
We can now see that the file has uploaded successfully and if I click on this link it should take me to SoundCloud and it should show us the file that we just uploaded. [playing: “Hey and welcome to podcast”] Perfect, exactly what we wanted.
The next step is to find the direct file link. Believe it or not but this address up the top where you can play your episode is not actually the direct file link. We need the direct link to the mp3 file and I’m going to show you how to find that now.
In order to find that you need to be in SoundCloud and at the top right hand side click on this cog that looks like a Settings tab and then click on the Settings button from the drop down menu which is just above the Log Out button. You will then find your RSS feed on the profile page so simply copy this RSS feed, open a new tab, paste this RSS feed in and click enter. This will show you this RSS feed – it should look like this. I’m in Google Chrome so it’s showing me all of the code which is what we want. If it doesn’t show you all the code and it shows you images and stuff like that find a blank space, just right click on it and then click view page source and that should show you the code that you need to see.
In order to find your file what you want to do is hit command F or control F and you want to type in your episode number – the same thing that you put into Auphonic. In this case it was Ep1, so we type in Ep1 and then we add to the end dot mp3 and we can see here that there is one result and we can see the link right here and that is our direct file link. This is why we name our episodes Ep1, Ep2, Ep3, it just makes it so easy to find the right episode in the stream, so let’s go ahead and copy that direct file link.
The next step is to create a new post. In order to create a new post we need to log into the back end of our WordPress website and to do that you go to your domain.com/wp-admin. For me that’s podcastfast.com/wp-admin. You then go ahead and log in and that will bring us into our dashboard.
Word Press is a bit confusing and it does have a bit of a learning curve so I have created a WordPress basics tutorial for you if you don’t know how to use Word Press. Simply go to www.podcastfast.com/wordpress (all one word) to get free access to that. Once we’re in our dash board on the left hand side we want to find this post section and then we want to click add new. This is where we will be adding our podcast episode so I can go ahead and insert a title.
We now want to move on to Step 4 which is adding our podcasting file to the post. Remember how we found the file in the RSS feed here? We want to copy that file and in our Word Press dashboard where we’re adding the new post we want to scroll down and we want to find the section that says podcast episode and where it says media URL we want to go ahead and paste in that link and then click Verify URL. You may get this error message. This is because it does take some time for SoundCloud to actually process this file and make it available to you. Therefore if this happens wait five or ten minutes and then try it again. In this case it actually took about 12 hours for my media to verify successfully, so worst case scenario can take some time but now I can see the file size and the duration which means that this file will play correctly. This direct link is what gets syndicated out to iTunes and Stitcher and any other directory so it’s extremely important that you do this step. If you don’t do this step then it won’t go out to iTunes and you will miss out on a lot of listeners.
The next step is to add your show notes. Now remember, iTunes will index these show notes as the summary text so you want to make sure that you are clear and concise about what your podcast is about in these show notes. To add show notes we scroll back up to the top and in this tech section here we can add our show notes. I’ll go ahead and do that now. Here on my show notes – this is just a basic summary of what my podcast episode is about.
The next step is to add our SoundCloud player. Even though we put our direct file link in here that won’t actually create a player. If I go ahead and click this preview button then you will see that there is actually no player on this page. So what we need to do is we need to add the SoundCloud player to this post. In order to do that we go back into SoundCloud and we find our episode. In this case it’s episode 1 and we then click on the share button. This will bring up a bunch of sharing options. Choose the embed option and then there’re three different players that you can choose from. I like to choose this player in the middle that has my art work and then has the player itself. We grab this code by simply highlighting it all and copying it and then we decide where in our post we want this player to go. I actually want it to go between this first sentence and where it said we discuss. Therefore what I’m going to do is I’m going to add a line and what we need to do is now go up from the visual editor and change it to the text editor up here now and I then paste in the code that I copied from SoundCloud and we can then hit preview. We can then see my episode here with the first sentence in the SoundCloud player which we can click play on [playing: “Hey and welcome to podcast] and other show notes below that.
The next step is to actually publish our podcast episode and make it go live. So we go back into Word Press in order to publish this and make it go live. All we need to do is hit the publish button. If you want to delay this and have it published at a later date, where it says published immediately you can click edit and you can change the dates so you can have it published in the future. However, I want this to go live right now so I’m just going to hit the publish button. My post is now published and I can view my post which I can see right here and it has gone live.
That’s how to publish podcast episodes using WordPress. If you want to see my exact workflow and get a checklist that you can follow go to www.podcastfast.com/flow to get access to that.
In the next lesson I’m going to show you how to set up the Blubrry PowerPress Plugin correctly so when you syndicate your podcast out to iTunes or Stitcher it has all the correct settings and looks great. After that I’m going to show you how you can submit your podcast to iTunes and Stitcher Radio so thousands of people can listen to it.
Until then, don’t just podcast, podcast fast. If you like this lesson then you are going to love our advanced tutorials. We also have tools and resources available to help you get started podcasting – go to www.podcastfast.com and check them out today.
So until next lesson don’t just podcast, podcast fast.