Learn how to podcast and blog to establish thought leadership, extend your brand and engage your target market

Wordpress 2.1 (aka Ella) is now available. It includes several worthwhile features including a better post editor, more efficient database usage and the latest version of Akismet for comment spam control. Wordpress is what I run this blog on as well as all of my podcasts. It’s an amazing blog platform. Best of all it’s free.

However, I’ve still not upgraded any of my Wordpress sites to the new version. Apparently there are some compatibility issues between the new version of Wordpress and the Podpress plugin that many podcasters (myself included) use to publish their shows. Dan, the creator of Podpress, is currently looking into this issue. You can keep an eye on the situation in the Podpress forums.

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With the global launch of Windows Vista today, RSS is going to get a lot more mainstream. Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 and MS Office 2007 all have RSS features incorporated into them. Outlook 2007 users will be able to subscribe to and consume RSS content as easily as they do with their email.

I’ve not personally tried Windows Vista, but from everything I read it’s going to be a lot easier now to for Vista users to detect, subscribe to and consume RSS content–all without needing to even know what RSS is. This is a good thing for RSS content creators and publishers. The more RSS consumption becomes as easy as listening to the radio or using email, the higher up the consumer adoption curve we’ll go.

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The itunes:keywords tag is a very important piece of meta data contained in your podcast feed. From my experience this tag greatly impacts the exposure your podcast gets in iTunes Music Store searches. But I recently discovered an interesting limitation (more on that in a second).

The itunes:keywords field contains a list of keywords (single words not phrases) that describe your content. This is used by the iTunes Music Store to return search results for phrases using those words.

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After a week of jury duty, I’m back in the blogging seat. It was an interesting experience, but it brought several hectic days of playing catch up. Now where was I?

In my last post, I talked about the importance of carefully choosing which format was best for your podcast–audio or video–rather than submitting to any hype or false assumptions. Now I’d like to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each format.

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A little while back I was chatting with an audio podcaster. He was excited because he would soon be “upgrading” to video podcasting. I asked about the reason for the change. The answer was: “Because it’s the future.” I didn’t find that to be the best reason for a change.

There’s no doubt that web video has rapidly gained popularity over the past year, especially with the advent of the iPod with video and the hype behind You Tube. The consumption of online and portable video will only continue to grow. But will video replace audio?

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In the last post on podcast metrics, I talked about measuring the number of listeners who are subscribed to your feed. In this installment of the Podcasting Metrics Series, I’d like to address an issue that you might have wondered about when looking at your subscriber stats.

If you look at a graph of feed subscribers mapped out by each day, you’ll notice that it usually resembles a rollercoaster–dipping lowest over the weekend. Don’t worry. This doesn’t mean that your joke at the end of your last episode bombed and listeners promptly unsubscribed. This up and down movement is a natural phenomenon. Why is this?

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I just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show. This show is huge with enough gadgets to keep any geek busy for days. Despite this, my favorite part was not in the show at all. It was the BlogHaus.

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I leave this afternoon for the huge consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas (CES). I will be speaking on a panel with Tim Bourquin, Eric Schwartzmann and Michael Geoghegan. The title of the panel is Audio and Video Podcasting: The Right Way To Use This Medium for Marketing. 

The panel takes place Tue at 1:30 PM at The Venetian Titan 2302 room if you are at the show and want to drop by. If you will be there, please feel free to shoot me an email or track me down to chat. I’ll be hanging out a lot in the Podtech Bloghaus as well.

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My book, Promoting Your Podcast, has been out long enough that I’ve decided to post updates online. Podcasting is moving at the speed of light. Things are constantly changing. There are already things I want to update in the book for the benefit of my readers. I’ll be posting occasional updates here on my blog and linking to this category from the book site.

And with that, here’s the first update.

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So far we’ve discussed how to measure the size of your audience by tracking downloads and bandwidth.

Another important podcasting metric to track is the number of subscribers that you have. Even though subscribers only represent a portion of your total listenership, it’s worthwhile knowing how many of your listeners have taken the step to automatically receive new content from you. It can be argued that this is typically a more engaged listener.

So how do we identify a subscriber and distinguish him/her from other listeners? A subscriber is someone who has entered your feed address into a podcatcher. A subscriber can be identified as a unique user (probably identified by unique IP address) who is checking your feed on a regular basis.

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