Guides
Top 3 platforms to distribute your podcasts
So, your masterpiece is ready. You have edited it carefully, you've added its intro and outro, and now you're eager to share it with the entire world. Here are the most popular podcast distribution sites, which will help grow your audience.
Apple's podcast directory is the largest one in the world, allowing people to create, update and submit their podcasts easily. To get started, you will need to have an active Apple ID; the good news is that if you own an iPhone or iPad, you already have an Apple ID account.
The piece of artwork that's associated with your podcast must have a square size and a resolution that ranges from 1,400x1,400 pixels to 3,000x3,000 pixels, using the JPEG or PNG formats. Test your artwork at lower resolutions as well; you want to ensure that it looks great even when people see it on mobile devices that utilize low-resolution screens.
Content must be original, relevant and non-spammy, of course. To increase your chances of attracting subscribers, be sure to use a very specific podcast title, which will tell people what your content is about. Pick one or (my recommendation) several relevant categories, because this will increase the chances of having your show featured in many of Apple Podcasts' search results.
Total podcast duration should be included as well, because it helps the Analytics component of the system evaluate the Average Consumption metric, for example. You want to know how many people listen to the entire podcast, right?
Ideally, the podcast feed should utilize an SSL certificate. This will be mandatory in the future, so it's best to use an SSL-based site to host all your productions.
Once that your new episode is submitted to Apple Podcasts, the company will review it, and will hopefully make it active. If everything goes as planned, you will receive a confirmation email from Apple, and that email will include a link to your live podcast. You may need to wait for up to 24 hours before seeing your podcast listed in Apple Podcasts' search results, though.
This music and podcast distribution service has over 100 million users. To get your work approved, you will have to obey some tight rules, though.
Sound quality must be really good; Spotify only accepts MP3 files that have bitrates which range from 96 kbps to 320 kbps.
File sizes shouldn't exceed 200 MB. RSS feeds must include descriptive titles (don't go over 20 characters here) and should only link to square images.
While some podcasts can go live within a few hours, other may need 2 to 5 days to get approved. Unlike Apple's service, you won't be notified when your podcast goes live, so you'll have to check the listing yourself.
This platform is different in comparison with the ones described above. Since Google has enough CPU power to crawl the web regularly, it will discover, and then list your podcast on its own.
To maximize the chances of your show being approved, you will have to create a link to your podcast's RSS feed. If you've submitted your work to Apple Podcasts, you have already created that feed, so you can use its URL exactly as it is. The feed should link back to your site's home page.
That's all! You will have to wait for a few days, until Google's bot reaches your site and indexes your new podcast episode. To speed up the process, you can submit the page manually to Google, or (a much better solution, imho) you can publish a link to your new episode on Facebook and Twitter.
