I’ve had an idea for a book in my head for a few years now. Since there is was a challenge afoot, I started, November 2, 2010, to write that book. This blog will contain the very rough draft and I hope I’ll get a chunk of it out this month. No guarantee I’ll write everyday, but I hope this won’t be the last entry.
Submitting to iTunes
There are two pieces that every podcaster should know about iTunes. Even if you don’t use any of it’s other features, you should know how to submit to iTunes and how to get the url to advertise that fact on your website.
In order to submit to iTunes you need to have an iTunes account. It’s free, but they may require you to assign a credit card or PayPal account to the service should you want to buy something from them. Once you’ve done that, go to the iTunes store in iTunes and click on Podcasts.
In iTunes 10, there’s a list of links on the top right called “Podcast Quick Links”. One of those choices is “Submit a podcast”. Click on that and add your feed url. Follow the on-screen prompts and in a minute you’ll be done.
If you have a podcast that doesn’t have an iTunes link or you don’t want it to (because it’s for a small group of people like a team), don’t do this. Instead, go to Advanced>Subscribe to Podcast and put the feed there. It won’t be visible to others which you want if it’s either not yours or a private podcast.
Once the podcast has been posted to iTunes, you’ll want the link so that you can put it on your website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. To find this out, search for your podcast in the iTunes store. Click on the icon for your podcast like you’re going to subscribe to it. You should get a picture of your album art with a button underneath it that says “Subscribe to Podcast”. To the right of that is an arrow button. Click on that and you’ll see a drop down that has the “copy link” option. Once you click that, it will be ready to be pasted somewhere. Make a new text document and go to edit and paste. It should look something like: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/technobabels-podcast/id76274055. You can shorten it with a url shortner like bit.ly, but that should do it.