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

Survey Says

A while back I sent out a survey to the community to find out what podcast producers wanted to learn about most. I was intrigued by how things had changed since 2005 when I first started podcast consulting. The results also offer some very important insights for your own podcast.

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Earlier this week I came across some information in Apple’s podcast specs that caught me off guard. I find out my podcast album art looks horrible on Apple TVs! Is yours ready for prime time? This affects both audio and video podcasters. If you want to look top notch…

Make Your Album Art 600×600 Pixels

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NOTE: This article is cross-posted at the Association for Downloadable Media blog.

Building a loyal audience is the goal of any online media creator. To do this requires a steady stream of new listeners to your content. Search engine traffic is powerful since the visitors are targeted and you incur no cost to bring each one to your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices for raising the rank of your site and web pages in the search engines for relevant keywords.

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While at the Podcast and New Media expo I was interviewed by Sunny Gault of the Guru show about podcast promotion and building social media buzz. I give my top five promotional tips. You can watch the episode here.

In addition they posted a video on their blog with additional footage where I summarize a number of things I spoke about in my expo presentation. You can watch this seven-minute program here.

Positive reviews in iTunes are important for getting increased exposure and attracting more subscribers from their directory. How would you like to get some more?
From my experience, positive reviews appear to contribute to increasing:

• The rank of your podcast
• How high up you appear in search results and featured podcast listings
• Your popularity rating in search listings
• The chance that you will be noticed by the iTunes podcast editorial team to get featured

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Below you can download PDF files containing the slides for all six of the presentations I did last weekend in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasting Podcasting Summit. They aren’t the most dynamic slides, so they will have more meaning to those who attended. But you can probably glean some other interesting tidbits of information from them.

Podcasting Metrics

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Yesterday I had an interesting call on which I was berated by the owner of a podcast directory that I mention in my book. It was surreal. But before I tell you that story, let me give you an important update on my top recommended podcast directories to submit to…

In chapter one of Promoting Your Podcast, I talk about how to get maximum exposure in the podcast directories. At the end of the chapter, I share a list of my top recommendations of directories to submit your podcast to. Since the aforementioned podcast directory owner didn’t like being in my book, now is a good time to update the list.

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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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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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Today Digg launched (in beta of course) their new podcast listings. Now you can submit and digg your favorite podcasts. They provide for digging and submitting both the feed and individual episodes. This includes the usual digg-style voting and discussion threads.

This could prove to be a valuable resource for finding quality content online. As more and more podcasts hit the Internet (over 100,000 now), portals and search tools such as this will be increasingly important for helping consumers find relevant content.

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