Video Transcript
Note: We’ve made a few changes to the video and added more information so you may see some differences with the transcript below. We’ll be updating it very soon but we wanted to get the new video out to you as soon as we could.View Video Transcript
Hi, everyone. Welcome. I am Lae. I am a WordPress.com happiness engineer. And in this lesson, I will take you through the steps needed to create or to turn a website into a podcasting website. So if you haven’t yet created your site, if you don’t have a site that you want to, well, set as your podcast site, please go back to the section called Before You Start.
And there you’ll see tips and tricks and links to videos and all the steps you need to take to create a site. And from there, you can go back to this one and we can start. OK. Let me just share my screen, so you can see what I’m doing. OK. Here we go.
So I set up a very simple website with mostly some dummy content. And it’s called Sustainable Life Podcast Home. It’s the title, but we’ll change it. And now I’m going to take you through the steps to turn this site into, well, a podcasting site as well. So if you hear on the left sidebar, this is your Press.com dashboard.
And on the left side on the menu section, if you click Settings and then here the writing tab, you scroll down. And you’ll find a place here, a section called Podcasting with a button. And if you click that button, you’ll be taken to the view where you can set up all things related to your podcast.
First thing before you can set up anything else because everything is read-only, not editable at the moment, you’ll need to set up a category for your podcast. So this is very important. It’s internal to your site. But it’s very important, because this category – it’s the one that will be used to create your podcast feed. And your podcast feed is the one that you will use to share your podcasts to directories like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, et cetera.
It’s very important that you only use this category for your podcast episodes. So choose one that is specific to that and do not use it in other posts or anything else. OK. So I’m going to create a new one – podcast for instance. And you’ll notice that as soon as the podcast, that the category is created, or as soon as you pick one if you already had one before, all the other fields will be editable.
By default, you don’t have an image. And OK. So let’s go through the fields one at a time. RSS feed here – and this is the link that you will use to share your podcast to the directories as I was saying before. So you can click Copy – the Copy button. And you can either save this somewhere, so you can have it as a reference. Or you can come back to the screen whenever you need it. And we’re going to need it some lessons after this one.
So this is where we start making up all the settings for our podcast. So first thing cover image. We don’t have at the moment. And I created one already. If I hadn’t created one, well, at least it should be 1,600 by 1,600 pixels. So if you have an image that it’s for instance larger than that, you can resize it. You can use it larger.
It does have to be a square though. If it’s not a square, here in this step, you’ll be able to make it smaller, larger. And you’ll be able to make an image into a square. So you can use it as your podcast cover image. This image is the image that will be used in the directories. So when people are searching for podcasts and all, this is the image that they will see.
So yeah. It’s important. Right next to the image, we’re going to use the title and the subtitle. And these are also visible in the directories. So well, it highly depends on the podcast you’re creating, of course. By default, it will use your site title. But you can obviously change it. And we’re going to do that.
So we’re just going to call it a Sustainable Life, because we already know this is the podcast setting. And we’re going to create a subtitle – Creating a sustainable life one day at a time. And after we have this title and subtitle, we can define the podcast topics. So these are important, because they will define in which topics or categories your podcast will appear listed in the directories.
So it’s important to think what your podcast is about, what you’re going to talk about, which kind of categories you’re going to cover, and which type of audience you’re looking for, because if you choose comics here and someone searches for comics, your podcast will appear there. So obviously, it should be something that relates to your content and your audience you’re looking for.
So we’re going to choose a couple. So for instance, Health and Fitness assuming that we want to talk about that. And let me see if we have – you can just scroll. Think of it – which ones you like better? So let’s say Home and Garden. And you can even choose the parent categories. You don’t have to go into the detailed ones, if you don’t feel there’s one that fits, of course. So let’s choose just in general the big one – Leisure.
So again this highly depends on your podcast topic and what you’re going to talk about. So yeah. Here you can choose – on the Explicit Content field, you can choose whether you’re going to use any sort of mature content, mature language. So if you are, do choose yes here. But well, we’re not planning on doing it here, so we’re going to keep it as no.
So who is artist, producer? By default, it will be you. But if you have a name you’d rather see displayed on a podcast, then you can set it up here. Here you can choose a small summary. So a list of topics, a bit of a description of what you’re going to talk about. You can change it afterwards as well. So no problems.
And then we go to the email address fields. This information will be public. So if you do not want your – for instance, your personal email address to appear publicly on your feed, you should probably create one specific for this one. So thesustainablelifepodcast. This email does not exist. But if I were to create a podcast, I would probably create something like this.
And then the copyright – by default you would choose the current year. But well, you can add more information or well, whatever you want. We’re going to write the podcast name for instance. And that’s it. You also have a keywords field. But this field has been deprecated. So it’s not used anymore. You can write it if you want. But it’s not going to be used. So you don’t really need to do it. OK.
So we’ve filled everything. We just need to click Save settings. And we have a podcast. Well, we don’t really have a podcast just yet. But we do have it all set up. Let me just show you. So if I copy the feed now, it should have been created already. OK. So here you can see already – of course, we don’t have episodes just yet. But here’s the information we just filled.
And as we create podcast episodes and as we publish them, this feed will start growing with that information. And the directors will be able to get all that and show your podcast to your future listeners. OK. So this is it. These are the steps you need to take. And right after, we’re going to start creating our podcast episodes.
Resources
- A Sustainable Life – Example site you can see with the podcasting blocks on it
- WordPress.com – Podcasting – The WordPress.com main Podcasting documentation
- Compressing images – How to make your image file sizes smaller so they load faster
- For logos, there are a lot of options. Why not try Canva or a fully-featured (free) image editor is Gimp
- Email forwarding – For the podcast set up email
- Adjust the Number of Posts/Episodes in Your Feed – WordPress.com
Learning Action
If you haven’t yet created a site, return to the Before You Start page and follow the section on how to create one.
Choose a podcast category for your blog and configure your podcasting settings under Settings->Writing. You’ll want to make sure you’re in the Default View for this page to see the settings.
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