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Once you have produced your first podcast episode, you’ll need to get it online. You can’t upload your show directly to a well-known podcast directory. Instead, you have to create your own website to host your podcast, and then use a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed to get it listed in a podcast directory. A blog website is an easy way to set up podcast hosting and an RSS feed for syndication.
Read on to learn how to make a website for your new podcast, then upload your latest episodes and set up a podcast RSS feed to get your work onto the most popular podcast platforms.
Choosing a blog layout
Creating a polished, professional-looking blog site for your podcast doesn’t require any coding. Many website builders, like Squarespace, offer a variety of templates with different layouts to customize the look and feel of your website design.
With Squarespace, you can add a custom domain name, which will help the search engine ranking for your podcast. Squarespace’s plans include one year of domain registration costs, web hosting, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, analytics to see which episodes are resonating with your audience, and a built-in RSS feed to submit your episodes to a podcast directory.
You likely won’t need an art-heavy template to host your podcast, but you may want to include photos to take your listeners behind the podcast curtain. Whether it is a photo of you in front of the microphone in your recording studio or you with a guest on your show, including photos on your podcast blog posts will let your listeners get to know you and your operation better.
Squarespace has many podcast website examples to use as a starting point for your own podcast brand. Each template includes important pages, like a landing and Contact page, in addition to the actual blog page where you’ll post your new episodes. The first page that will greet visitors is a homepage, where you can include an overview of and description for your podcast. The homepage is the place where you can make your argument for why someone should listen to your podcast.
You can also add an About page with information about your background, then use the Contact page to list your email and social media accounts so that listeners can get in touch with you. Once you’ve established a following, you can use your website to explore monetization options: sell merchandise with a shop page, add paid content in a Member Site, and even add a password-protected media kit page for sponsors and partnerships.
Hosting a podcast on your website
Within Squarespace’s blog template are tools devoted to uploading and sharing podcasts. For starters, you can attach your podcast to a blog post as an audio block, which adds an audio player to the post. You can upload this file—an .mp3 or .m4a—from your computer if you have it saved there or you can link to an external file.
For the best results and wide compatibility across different web browsers and devices, Squarespace recommends your audio meet these specifications:
Format: .mp3 or .m4a
Bit depth: 16bit
Bitrate: 128 kbps or less (96 kbps is recommended)
Channels: Mono or stereo
File size: 160 MB or smaller (for larger audio files, you’ll need to link to an external host)
Uploading your first episodes
After adding your podcast to a blog post as an audio file, you can fill out fields for your podcast title, subtitle, author/artist, summary, show notes, season and episode number, and more. This information not only helps to boost your podcast site’s ranking in search results, but you can also submit this information as metadata via your RSS feed to the major podcast apps and directories. You should only submit an RSS feed when you have content to share.
You can also include episode transcripts in your blog post, in case some users want to refer back or prefer to read through the conversation. To avoid filling the page with too much text, put the transcript behind a Read More link.
When you create your first blog post for your first podcast episode, create a URL slug that you can use for future posts. A URL slug is the word or words after the “.com/” at the end of a link. For example, if your site is mypodcastexample.com, then the slug for your podcast page would be something like mypodcastexample.com/episodes. A URL slug plays a key role in describing what is on a page to search engines and is an important piece of metadata in your RSS feed that you will submit to podcast directories.
For each individual blog post, you can use the episode title for that specific URL. For example, mypodcastexample.com/episodes/the-first-episode.