21: How to Set-Up Your RSS Feed in Libsyn
In order to submit your podcast to any of the platforms where podcasts can be heard, you'll need an RSS feed. Creating an RSS feed is often one of the most intimidating aspects of launching a podcast, but it's actually not all that difficult if you know what you're doing. Luckily, I do and I'm passing that information along to you.
In this week's episode, I explain why I recommend using a 3rd party hosting service for your RSS feed and audio file storage instead of your own website, provide some tips for helping your podcast show up in more search results on the various podcast platforms, and break down the exact steps for setting up your RSS feed in Libsyn; which my recommended hosting platform.
Side Note: The image below is referenced in the episode and is what an actual RSS feed looks like. (Don't worry, you won't have to write a single line of code.)
UPDATE: You'll hear me mention in this episode that you should add keywords to your main show title and author fields when creating your RSS feed. At the time that this episode was recorded and released, this was a very effective practice. However, shortly after releasing this episode, Apple decided to no longer allow anything in the main show title and author fields other than the official name of the podcast and the host's name. Keywords and subtitles are no longer allowed in these fields. Apple is removing existing shows without warning and rejecting new shows if they do not comply.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Devices | Spotify | iHeartRADIO | RSS
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 06: The Equipment You'll Need to Start a Podcast
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 15: Tips and Requirements for Creating Your Podcast's Artwork
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 16: Selecting Which Categories Your Podcast Will Be Listed Under
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 20: Why You Need an Episode 00
Podcasting for Coaches on Instagram
Podcasting for Coaches on Facebook
My Launch Consultation Packages
Online Course | How to Start a Podcast (For Your Coaching Business)
Transcript
Hi, I'm Britany Felix and this is podcasting for coaches. We'll get into this episode in just a second. But first, I have a quick disclaimer. In this episode, you'll hear me talk about adding keywords to your main title and author fields when creating your RSS feed. At the time This episode was recorded and released, this was a perfectly good strategy for helping your podcast get ranked a little bit higher inside of iTunes and Apple podcasts. However, since this recording was released, Apple has now cracked down on their policy regarding keyword stuffing. This means that they do not want any keywords. Actually, they don't want anything beyond the official title of your podcast and your official name as the host. They are very serious about this. Several several shows have been removed from iTunes without any warning, some of them have been able to get them reinstated only after removing any extra keywords or subtitles, or literally anything beyond the official title of the podcast and the name. One of my clients is actually a licensed psychotherapist, and that is relevant to her show. And we even had to remove that from her author byline because it was considered irrelevant content. So please, please please do not include anything besides your official podcast title in that field in your RSS feed, and your name as the host in the author byline field in your RSS feed, or else your podcast will likely not be approved by Apple. Or if it's already on Apple, it's likely to be removed at some point. Thank you so much, and let's get into the official episode. Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 21 of podcasting for coaches. First off, I want to say thank you so much for coming back after taking a two week hiatus, I had kind of a crazy situation going on, where I was on vacation for two weeks. So I recorded some episodes ahead of time, and had just planned on recording a new batch of episodes as soon as I got back. However, about two days after getting back from my vacation, I ended up getting sick. Thanks to the fact that my husband was sick when I got home, I actually have spent the past two weeks being sick, I am still kind of recovering from and I have a little bit of a sinus thing. So I'm not sure if you can tell him my voice or not. But I really needed to rest up because every breath was pretty much agony because my throat was so sore. So now I am officially back and releasing new episodes. And I just want to say thank you for sticking with me. In this week's episode, we're going to talk about setting up your RSS feed in Lipson. In Episode Six. I mentioned signing up for an account with Lipson which is a hosting service. And for those that don't quite remember, since it was a while ago, or have not yet listened to that episode, if you have just recently discovered this show a hosting services where you're actually going to store your audio files for your episodes, and where you're going to have your RSS feed hosted. an RSS feed is literally just a bunch of code that when you submit it to different platforms, it automatically updates with any changes. So every time you add an audio file to your RSS feed the changes and picked up by the various podcasting platforms, and they will display those episodes. That is of course a very simple explanation of what a RSS feed is. Just as kind of a little side note, if you're curious to see what it actually looks like. I'll have a screenshot of the RSS feed for this podcast in the show notes, which you can find my going to podcasting for coaches.com forward slash podcast, and it will be the most recent episode at the top of the page. Lipson is one of the best hosting platforms out there, there are a variety of them. Lipson is the one that I recommend for a bunch of different reasons. But in order to submit your podcast to any of the platforms like iTunes, or Apple Music, or Google podcasts, or Stitcher or Spotify or tune in, which is the default app for Alexa devices, any of those places, you absolutely must have an RSS feed. Now some people will say if you do some research in some groups to host the feed on your own website, I actually don't recommend this. I know why they say that they say you want to own your feed, you want to have control over it, which is all great in theory. But if you are not an IT person who knows how to code or if you don't have the money to pay an IT person who knows how to code, then that's just not really a viable option. And in addition to it being extremely complicated or extremely expensive You also then have to host all of those audio files on your own website, which takes up so much storage, it's crazy. So you either have to upgrade your hosting account for your website in order to include enough storage for all those audio files. Or you have to deal with the audio files taking up so much of the storage, and it really just bogging your site down and making all the pages load very slowly, which is of course, not good. So I recommend going with a hosting service, Lipson is my preferred one. And I'm going to take you through the process today of setting up your RSS feed inside your Lipson account. Now there's going to be some information that you want to have ready and on hand when you actually go to sign up for this account and get this RSS feed set up. So I'm going to run through that first and explain what that information is. And then I'll tell you what to do with it inside Lipson. So the list that I'm going to run through here is actually from a form that I have all of my lunch clients fill out so that I have all of the information that they want us for their RSS feed in their show whenever I create their RSS feed for them. So first off, we have the official name of the podcast. Now I know that seems like a pretty obvious thing to have on hand. And you should already know the name of your podcast before you ever sign up for a hosting service. But I have to mention this because there's actually two ways this is handled. So you have the official name of your podcast, which is just the name of your podcast. So for this one is podcasting for coaches. That's it. That's the name of the podcast. So when you sign up for a Lipson account, one of the very first things it's going to have you do on the signup page is to enter a show slug. Now if you don't know what a slug is, that's everything after the forward slash in a URL. So for instance, when I just gave the URL for where to find this episode podcasting for coaches.com forward slash podcast, that podcast is actually the URL slug. So in Lipson, when it asks you for your show slug, you should put the name of your podcast because that's what's going to be used in your RSS feed. The RSS feed actually just looks like a URL. And so you want to have that podcast title in that URL for a variety of different reasons. But mostly, we just want your show to be accessible. And for SEO purposes, we want to make sure that your podcast title is in that show slug. So when it asks you for that just enter the name of your podcast, if it's multiple words, just put it all together all lowercase, it'll automatically default to that. But just enter it in that way. And it'll be easier. Now another thing to think about and have ready on hand, is how you actually want your podcast name displayed inside the various platforms. So the reason I bring this up is because across the various podcasting platforms, and each one of them is different, but the vast majority of them will pull from the title of the show the title of the episodes, the author byline in the description, some of them also pull from episode descriptions, but that's a little bit dicey. So if you put important keywords into those places, then ideally, if it works the way that it's supposed to, and depending on which platform you're on, whenever somebody searches for those terms, it'll pull from those places for your show. And then you'll show up in the search results for those terms. So for instance, for my podcast, while my official title is podcasting for coaches, and that's it, I actually have it displaying as podcasting for coaches, Colin, build brand awareness and generate leads for your coaching or consulting business. And the reason that I do that is because now if somebody were to search for brand awareness, generate leads, coaching, business consulting, any of those things, my podcast is now going to show up, because somebody is most likely not going to go on to iTunes, and search podcasting for coaches to try and find a podcast for coaches. But they might search those other terms for how to gain brand awareness how to generate leads for a coaching business, those types of things. And now I'll show up in those results. And this also works with your author, byline and the description which I'm going to talk about in a second. The author byline, you can put just your name, and that's perfectly fine. And some people choose to do that. Or you can load these down with keywords. And you don't have to use a colon with something that's like a tagline or a sentence. Some people just choose to use actual keywords separated by brackets or separated by commas. Really, however you decide you want it to look, it can look a little bit cluttered. So you just kind of have to weigh your options and see how you want it to look compared to how much you want to show up in the search results for certain keywords. And the great thing about this is you can always change these at any time in Lipson by updating a simple field. So don't ever feel like whatever you decide right now is something you have to stick with forever. So if you want to just start right now and just to make it simple with just your name and just the title of the podcast, by all means go ahead. But I do recommend adding keywords at some point even if it's just a couple of you don't want it to look too cluttered. And the reason that I say this is because even though most people probably aren't going to find their podcasts by a general search term, most people find podcasts by them being recommended by somebody they know by them being talked about on other podcasts by them being shared in articles online. Any of those types of typical ways that people discover new content It's still actually really relevant and a good idea to have those keywords in there. Because those keywords help you become ranked for those terms. And iTunes rankings mostly. And I always refer to iTunes because it is the top dog Spotify is gaining but iTunes is where it's at. And when I say iTunes, I also mean Apple podcasts. So iTunes is the desktop version, Apple podcast is the mobile version. But rankings inside of these are really more of a vanity metric. They don't necessarily mean that if you are ranked super high, you're gonna all of a sudden get a ton of new subscribers or downloads. That's not really what it means. But it is still important, because some people do search and try to find podcasts that way. But it's important for a few different reasons. One, if you are a brand new coach, or you're considering starting a coaching or consulting business, and you think a podcast is a great way to build your audience before you actually have a business in place, which is true, by the way, but so you don't have any products or services of your own to sell to your audience or to pitch to your audience, you might consider getting a sponsor to help cover the cost of the podcast as you create and build your business and create products of your own. If you do that, then sponsors love to see these types of things. They love to hear that you are ranked number five in all of iTunes for a certain term that is completely relevant to the product they offer. In addition to that, if you're trying to get high profile guests on your show, this is something else that will work for them as well in your email pitches to their PR person or their media team or them directly. You can put that you are the number two ranked podcast and all of iTunes for this particular term, which relates to their audience and their niche and their market as well. And lastly, I will give you a real life example of how being ranked for a certain term made a huge difference in my life specifically, actually. So I believe I mentioned on this podcast before that I originally started with a different podcast called Living unconventionally. That is how I began my podcast journey in Korea. I officially launched it in February of 2016. And I had it going for about two years until I retired at the very end of January of 2018. Just a few short weeks after I released my farewell episode, I had a listener reach out to me and say he absolutely loved the show. He was really behind the mission of it. And it really meant a lot to him. It represented a lot of things in his own life. And that he found the show by searching for the term expat inside of iTunes, and discovered that my podcast was ranked number four in all of the podcasts on iTunes for the term ex Pat. He has a business where he helps expats actually find jobs, and he's wanting to start a coaching business of his own around this particular topic. And so my podcast being ranked very highly for that search term was really appealing to him. And he wanted to know if I would be willing to sell the show to him after a couple of months of back and forth and getting to know him because the show was my baby. And I wanted to make sure it would be in good hands. And it absolutely is. I sold my podcast to him. I sold my very first podcast I personally don't know of anyone else that has sold a podcast. But because he found my show by it being ranked number four and all the podcasts on iTunes for the term ex Pat. I sold my podcast a few months ago for I can't specifically say the exact amount. Legally I'm bound from doing that because of our contract. But I can say it was a few $1,000. So that's not bad considering all it took was me adding the term ecpat into my I think it was in my author byline. And that was it. So all that to say think about keywords, they can be beneficial, even if it does kind of seem like it's a vanity thing. So when you're getting these items ready, think of the official title of your podcast and what you want it to look like inside of other platforms. So if you want it to have keywords, and think about your author byline, so if you want it to be just your name, or if you also want it to have keywords. And then next we have your shows description. This should be a very short paragraph. And it should also be organically filled with keywords as well. It should explain who you are what makes you qualified to talk about what you're talking about why you're so passionate about it, what the purpose of the podcast is who it's for, what it's going to talk about those kinds of general things, it should be fairly short, because people aren't necessarily coming to a podcast to read a blog post. They want enough information to know that the show is most likely going to benefit them and then they're going to listen. Now if you want your show to be on Spotify, and you absolutely do, they require that the podcast descriptions be less than 384 characters. You can enter separate descriptions for Spotify and then a description for everywhere else it can be a little bit longer. But I would say just make it easy on yourself and keep it under 384 characters for both if you can. And Spotify has not specified whether those characters include punctuation and spaces, but I would assume that it does, just so you're on the safe side and you get approved. So the next thing in the form that I have my lunch clients fill out is for them to tell me what categories they want to be listed in inside the various platforms. We base everything off of Apple because a lot of the lesser known platforms, but where people still do listen pulls from the apple directory. And so we just kind of base everything off of that because a lot of the other platforms don't necessarily even give you options. Now there is a little hack to really fully utilizing these categories elections that I actually devoted an entire episode two, in how to choose these categories and utilize that hack. And that was Episode 16. And I will have a link to it in episode six in the show notes for this episode, so that you can make sure you take a listen to that already if you have not, so that you can be as smart as possible when choosing your iTunes categories. Okay, so now that you have that information on hand and ready to go, I'm going to run you through where to input this information inside Lipson. So when you first sign up for your account, it will actually probably give you a little bit of a checklist or like here's some things to do, go ahead and check these off. And you can follow through with that. And that's fine, they'll guide you through it. But if you want to follow along while you're listening to this episode, that'll work as well. So when you sign into Lipson, you're going to be taken to a main dashboard. And that's going to be just kind of a general page that has a menu bar at the top and it shows your stats which will be zero, of course, because you haven't released any episodes. In the main menu bar, you're going to see a tab all the way second from the right that says settings, hover over that tab, and then select Edit show settings. And this will take you to your show settings as a whole. So here, the first field you're going to fill out is show title. And this is where you input the full title with the keywords if you're going to enter those, whatever you have entered here, however, this type is how it's going to be displayed on the various platforms. Now some of them have character limits. So if you go through and you put 15 keywords in here, chances are it's going to get cut off. I wish I could tell you there's an exact character amount where it cuts off at, I have a client of mine who we really played with this for a while, because she wanted to load down her title and her byline with as many keywords as possible. So I know she's ranked very, very highly in multiple keyword listings now as a result, but we kept getting her keywords cut off, and I would count the characters and we would say okay, well, we just need to be under this character. And so we'd shorten it up and be under that and then it would cut the next one off. So we just had to play around a little bit until it displayed properly. So just be aware that that may have to happen, which is a great reason why we do everything for all of us setting up your feeds submitting the show well before you're ready to launch and you start promoting them. That way you can play around with these things without other people really noticing. So again, show title is the full title that you want displayed, including the keywords. Show description is self explanatory, go ahead and input your description there. This is the show description for all of the other platforms, including Spotify, if you don't enter in a separate one. So this one can be longer than 384 characters website address that will default to Lipson. If you don't have a website yet, you can just leave that as it is. If you have your own website, absolutely enter that here, then you have an option of selecting the show type whether it's episodic, which means listening order is not important, or cereal, and it should be consumed beginning with the very first episode. So if you select cereal, then it will display your episodes essentially backwards, it will display your oldest Episode First, and new episodes should be displayed below it if it works properly. If it's episodic, it will display your most recent episode first. So if your listeners do not need to consume your content in a specific order, then go ahead and put it as episodic cereal is really more for those shows, well, like cereal, or any of those other you know type of storytelling shows where you do have to listen to it in a specific order tags and keywords. Those don't necessarily work for iTunes anymore, I recommend filling out this field just to be safe in case they decide to have that work in the future or it works with other platforms. Public contact email address that's pretty self explanatory. That's the one that's going to be displayed publicly across all the platforms. So this should be just kind of a general email, like info at podcasting for coaches, or contact at podcasting or coaches. If you want it to be yours or your assistance that's perfectly fine. Default show feed should say lips and classic feed and just leave that as is. And then you have some options here to enter in Facebook URLs and Twitter handles. So those should be for the accounts related to the podcast or your account if you don't have any specifically for the podcast. And then you'll see it says iTunes Store web address tune in web address stitcher web address and Google Play web address and Spotify address. Those will actually be the URLs for your listings on those platforms of your show. Now you won't have those until you get approved for those platforms. So for now those can stay blank. copyright notices pretty self explanatory just put whatever you would like your official copyright notice to be. Next you have your artwork. I did go over creating your podcast artwork in Episode 15 which I will also have a link to in the show notes in case you haven't listened to it yet. But in that episode, I actually recommend having a 2000 by 2000 image. I have reasonably learned that Apple is now stating that if you ever want to be one of their featured podcasts, your podcast artwork should be 3000 by 3000, which is their max that they allow. Either one of those is perfectly fine. The likelihood of your podcast becoming a feature podcast is actually fairly rare because those are curated by people who work in Apple. So you generally have to have a connection. If you have a connection there at Apple and you think one day you could be featured then definitely use a 3000. By 3000 image of your artwork, widescreen image, you don't have to worry about that. That's for if you want to upload it to a hosting service like youtube facebook recently until they just kind of are cracking down on allowing third party platforms to post. But even if you do want to post your episodes on YouTube, I actually still recommend not necessarily going this route and I'll explain that in a future episode. next section is sync slash import feed enable sync with an external feed you can leave that unchecked and custom domains you don't need to buy one because we want you to have a website of your own. At the bottom you are going to click Save. And next we're going to click on the destinations tab in the main menu bar at the top. And you're going to notice here at the very top it says quicklinks lips and classic feed and you will see a URL there. Mine says http colon forward slash forward slash podcasting for coaches dot Lipson comm forward slash RSS. That is what an RSS feed looks like is that's what you use to submit everything If anyone asks you for your RSS feed, that is what you want to use. So down at the bottom, you'll see some options here, locate the one that says lips and classic feed and go ahead and click Edit. Next, we want you to go down to where it says iTunes categories, you see three options here, you should have those three options selected already. And so go ahead and input those here with the most relevant and most important category listed as the first one, because some of the other platforms do not let you have more than one category option. So your most relevant ones should be listed first and then two and three, it doesn't really matter which order those are in. Here you have iTunes summary, and you can use the show description for the iTunes summary. The show description is what you entered in the show settings field just a minute ago. Or you can enter in a completely separate description that will show on iTunes alone, that's different from everywhere else. And there's really no reason to do that. So I recommend just keeping it as you show description for iTunes summary and then you can leave show description blank, iTunes contact info, owner name should be your name as you are the owner of the podcast, and owner email. So this can be separate from your public one. So if you have a general like contact or info email listed publicly, here, you want to actually put your email or an email that is checked regularly. Because this is where iTunes is going to contact you out if there's ever any issue. iTunes Store basics, you can enter in a subtitle for your podcast that doesn't always display on the various platforms, and the iTunes author. This is where you're going to enter in your name and any relevant keywords if you want those displayed in the author field. Again, iTunes show type here you can select episodic or serial next language code, it should be defaulted to E n if you are located in the United States. And that's what you want to keep it at content rating. So this means whether or not your show is going to be listed as explicit, you have not set clean and explicit. So not set generally can be used if you're going to rotate between explicit and clean. There is some debate as to whether or not iTunes lets you mark certain episodes as explicit. And if you do Mark even one episode explicit, some people say it marks your entire show as explicit. But that has not been my experience, as evidenced by my own original podcast in which I had several episodes that were explicit but still displayed a clean rating for the show overall inside of iTunes. And again, here keywords you can add them here just for the heck of it. If you've already got them, just paste it there as well. You'll see a little note here that says iTunes has recently dropped support for keywords, this field will be removed from Lipson in the near future that's been out for a couple of years now. So until they remove that you might as well just have them in there just for the heck of it in case iTunes decides they want to change their mind. Episode item settings you show image for episodes. What this means is if you ever upload an individual thumbnail image, and for some reason it doesn't work, for some reason it breaks or if you just don't upload an episode at all, this means it will default to using your main podcast artwork. So go ahead and check this box because we would rather you have that image the no image at all or at displaying a broken graphic. Next, I want you to click the little arrow next to advanced options. And that's going to drop down a whole other set of fields here. The only one that you need to worry about here is where it says episode slash post limit. I want you to enter the number zero, it's most likely going to default to 100. And what that means is if you release Episode 101 the podcasting platforms are going to stop displaying your episode zero your very first episode in order just buy that new one, it will only ever display 100 episodes at a time so it'll display your most recent 100 episodes. However, if you enter in zero, there will be no limit. Now the various platforms may set limits on it, but we have no control over that. I believe Apple only displays your most recent 300 episodes. But if you get to 300 congratulations. That's amazing. I'm guessing you're not going to have to worry about that for a while though. So again, just enter in zero where it says episode post limit And you don't have to worry about any of the rest of the fields in this section. And you do not need to click on Update episodes related to this feed because for right now we're going to release all of them. And then you click Save, and you're good to go. So that is officially setting up your feed on Lipson. This was a little bit more of a lengthy episode, but I wanted to make sure that you guys really understood how to do this because I know that creating the RSS feed can be one of the most intimidating aspects of the entire process. So hopefully this helps break it down for you. And if you have any questions at all about any step of this process, please do not hesitate to reach out I'm always here to help. You can reach me by going to my Facebook page, which is facebook.com forward slash podcasting for coaches, or just emailing me directly at Britany BRIT, a ny at podcasting for coaches.com. Thank you so much for joining me this week. And I hope that you come back next week where I am going to explain exactly how to publish your very first podcast episode, which as mentioned in Episode 20, should be your episode zero. Have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business, head on over to podcasting for coaches.com where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly, thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you back here for the next episode.