If you have ever thought about starting a podcast, then do we have the tool for you. Try out our simple to set-up and use Podcasting powerhouse plugin to showcase your new podcast!
Activating Simple Podcasting #
To activate Simple Podcasting, head to Add Plugins from your admin dashboard. Find Simple Podcasting from your plugin options and select Activate.
After you activate Simple Podcasting, you will be redirected to the 5 step start-up process. Here you will add the name of your Podcast (don’t worry, this can be changed later), upload your podcast album cover art (this can also be added later), and complete a few more steps before you are ready to upload your first podcast episode.
One of those steps is to sign-up with Castos, an external podcasting platform. If you plan on releasing lots and lots of episodes, or very very long episodes, or your podcast goes viral and has tens of thousands of listeners, then we do recommend that you use a service like Castos that is specifically created for podcast hosting. Castos is one of the best-priced options at only $19/month for unlimited podcasts and up to 20,000 downloads per month.
Settings #
General #
There are only a few options on the General page, and only one to pay attention to. By default your podcast posts do NOT show up in the regular Blog of your website. They will appear in their own archive page ending in /podcast (eg. https://mywebsite.com/podcast).
If you do want your podcast episodes to appear with your blog posts, you can toggle on the option for Include podcast in main blog.
Player #
Under the Player settings, you can choose your media player style, location, and position, along with a few more controls.
Feed Details #
This data will be used in the feed for your podcast so listeners will know more about it before they subscribe.
All of these fields are optional, but it is recommended that you fill in as many of them as possible. Blank fields will use the assigned defaults in the feed.
This info is stuff like the title of your show, the host names, the categories, the cover art, and so on.
Security #
You have the option to password protect your podcast feed in this tab.
Publishing #
Use these URLs to share and publish your podcast feed. These URLs will work with any podcasting service (including iTunes).
Hosting #
Not a lot to say about this, as it only applies if you’re using the Castos hosting. You will put in your API key and credentials to link the site to Castos under the Hosting tab.
All Podcasts #
Under the Podcasting menu item in your admin dashboard, you can find the option for All Podcasts.
It is possible to use this in two ways: to create miniseries of episodes for your show. You may have a podcast on running, let’s say, but do a special interview series with ultramarathoners. If you want to keep those episodes separate, you can make them a series, and they will be included in both your main podcast feed and be accessible by a unique secondary feed that contains only them.
You can also do this to create and run multiple shows from the dashboard as well. Just make each show its own parent series, and you can choose which show the episode gets pushed to before you publish.
You will want to create the series you want, however, before you start publishing episodes so you can pick.
Speakers #
Does your podcast have a number of different speakers? Or maybe a different guest each week? Perhaps you have unique hosts for each episode? If any of those options describe your podcast then you can take advantage of this feature.
Speakers allows you to add one or more speakers to each of your episodes – the speakers are setup as a new taxonomy (not users), making them easily searchable as well as giving them their own archive pages out of the box.
To add or edit your speakers, look for the Speakers option under Podcasting in your admin dashboard.
Creating an Episode #
Posting an episode is as easy as creating a blog post. Just go to Podcasting > Add New, and you should see the same editor you always do. In the main text area, you post just like normal. Show notes can go there, images, whatever else you want. The title gives your post its individual slug, and so on and so forth.
Below that, there is some information that you absolutely need to add, especially your podcast file!
Episode Type and File (and Transcript) #
You will need to add your media. You also choose whether you want audio or video. Audio is fine to upload through the media library (generally .mp3 is small enough not to warrant any problems with upload sizes, plus you don’t need a high bitrate for podcasts), or you can paste in the file’s URL from your host, such as Castos. If you do a video podcast, however, you should really go with an external host, such as Castos or even YouTube.
Date Recorded #
You really want to let folks know when the episode was recorded. Listeners sometimes come in much later than when the show first goes live, and it’s good for them to see how far back this episode came.
Duration and File Size #
If you feel like entering these in manually, you can, but it is better to leave blank and let the system calculate these automatically.
And that’s all she wrote! Now you have all of the skills needed to publish your first podcast!
