Reach Your Users with the Power of Podcasting

Reach Your Users with the Power of Podcasting by Tony Bowles

A podcast is a media file that is distributed over the internet for playback on portable players. The device used to receive the podcast can be an MP3 player, iPod or Windows Media player on a PC. RSS (Remote Simple Syndication), can allow people to subscribe to podcasts and download 'audio blogs', original audio programs and public radio programs. There are many uses for podcasts, it may be used to advertise a product or service, provide information to a target audience for a particular topic or communicate a message to a wider audience.

How To Create a Podcast

Firstly you could download a sound editor from audacity.sourceforge.net, this is an open source (free) utility and comes with a tutorial. Next, you need to create an RSS feed. You could create your feed using html, but to make things easy you can use the free utility at tdscripts.com. Click on 'webmaster utilities' when you are at the site, and you will see the podcast RSS generator. There are a few fields to fill in, then you just hit the create button and you are done.

The next step is to upload your RSS and MP3 file to your webserver. When you have done this, you need to validate your RSS feed to make sure there are no errors. You can carry out the validation by going to publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php, you will also find that there is lots of helpful advice on this site with preparing your feed. Your website URL will look something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/podcast.rss.

Next, to be able to listen to your podcast, the subscriber needs to have some software installed on their PC, this is typically Windows Media player. To download audio to an MP3 device, or any device that supports exchanging files with Windows Media player, a free utility called iPodder will allow you to do this. To listen to internet audio programs, but can't when their scheduled, a free utility called Juice is a must. Both iPodder and Juice are available from Sourceforge.net. If you wish to place buttons on your website, so that people can subscribe to your feeds, then these are available from Yahoo, MSN and Newsgator. Another site worth checking out is dopplerradio.net. This is free and great for subscribing to and downloading RSS feeds. Have fun creating your podcasts!

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Tony Bowles is the owner of several successful websites and a regular to article directories.

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