Starting Your Podcast

Blubrry Podcasting is dedicated to helping as you start your podcast journey, including a free podcast hosting trial. Launching a podcast is exciting, we know! Blubrry podcasters have the longest-lived shows in the podcasting space. Launching a new show is easy, but it requires planning, content, distribution, measurement and promotion.

Planning

When planning your podcast, consider what your content will be about, what the goals are for your podcast, how your podcast’s content, logos, and branding will reinforce your objectives. Over time you can align your show’s branding to your free website provided by Blubrry we provide a great theme and the ability to modify the design and colors easily.

Goals:

  1. Decide on your content, format, and goals
  2. Come up with logos, branding, and website theme

Content Production

The heart of every podcast is the media content. Whether you’re creating audio, video, electronic books (PDF/ePub), content production will be your most time-consuming and important task.

Goals:

  1. Decide on a media format (audio, video, electronic book). Most podcasters focus on audio and may expand into video or eBooks later
  2. Pick the tools and software necessary to create the media format selected. In the beginning, we want you to keep it simple using inexpensive gear and recording applications
  3. Create a first episode or introductory episode

Distribution

Podcast distribution is the heart of what has made podcasting the exciting medium it is. It allows your media to be syndicated to your audience. The recommended things you need include a website (Blubrry provides a free WordPress site as part of our podcast media hosting), podcast media hosting (separated from your website), and syndication via Podcast RSS feed.

WordPress is recommended for podcasting for a number of reasons. First, podcasting is nothing more than an extension of blogging. A blog post with media associated with it is a podcast episode. With WordPress being the most dominant and free blogging platform today, it makes perfect sense to use WordPress for your podcast website to gain the benefits of search engines, having a site to send your audience for additional offers, content and services.

With Google being the #1 discovery method for podcast as of 2020. Having your own site on your own domain name is a given requirement to be indexed and available to be found via search.

Goals:

  1. Setup a website for your podcast (Free and easy with Blubrry Podcast Hosting)
  2. Setup a hosting service for your podcast media (Included with Blubrry Podcast Hosting)
  3. Setup syndication for your podcast made simple with the PowerPress plugin for WordPress
  4. Publish your first episode

If you are using WordPress with PowerPress, simply create a new blog post. Upload your media through the WordPress dashboard to Blubrry Podcast Hosting, which will auto-populate the PowerPress episode entry box in the edit post screen. If you’re using Blubrry media hosting services, this is as simple as clicking the Upload Media button, uploading the file, and clicking Publish.

Measurement

Measuring the success of your podcast is critical. There are three ways you can measure this success: via media download statistics, web statistics, and audience surveys.

Goals:

  1. Set up media download statistics (Blubrry Free Statistics are free and easy to add to WordPress website using the PowerPress podcasting plugin) Blubrry Podcast Stats are IAB V2.0 Certifed Compliant which is the gold standard in Podcast measurement
  2. Set up web statistics (Google Analytics is free and easy to add to a WordPress website)
  3. Set up an audience survey (Blubrry.com offers a free audience survey)

Promotion

Promoting your podcast is the only way to get your podcast into the hands of the masses.

Goals:

  1. Submit your podcast to as many podcast directories as possible (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandor, Amazon Music, Blubrry Podcast Directory, etc.) We’ve provided links in the Destinations settings area of PowerPress for all the sites to make this easier.
  2. Come up with a social media strategy (for example, use Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram)
  3. Attend conferences and trade shows that complement your content and genre
  4. Set up a mailing list/newsletter and regularly send news and information to your subscribers
  5. Consider using traditional marketing techniques such as Google AdWords