WordPress Tip: WordPress and Podcasting — Wordcamp Utah
Thom Allen presented on WordPress and Podcasting at Wordcamp Utah. Below are my notes, which I mostly took from his slides. See Thom's full presentation here.
Preparing Your Podcast
- Capture extensive metadata in the ID3 tags of your audio file. This helps increase the visibility.
- Give your podcast files a human readable name (not something like nar0081008.mp3).
- Host your own podcast files. This allows you to reap the benefits of the search engine karma that comes to your site. Bandwidth usually isn't an issue.
- Listen to your own podcast before publishing it.
Blogging Your Podcast
- Use WordPress to publish your podcasts -- it makes it incredibly easy.
- Write attention grabbing titles.
- Add a link in the text area of your audio or video file (so users can download it).
- Add a description of the podcast to let users know what it's about.
- Announce your new podcasts on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.
Essential Blog Theme Elements
- Choose an uncluttered, simple theme.
- Make it easy to subscribe. Put the RSS buttons in a prominent location above the fold.
- Choose a theme that allows you to organize your podcasts into their own area.
RSS and SEO
- Create an RSS feed just for your podcasts.
- Give readers the ability to play the audio or video.
- Make sure you publish your podcast on iTunes (and link to your iTunes page from your blog).
- Document highlights and time indicators in your podcast.
- Use a transcription service to produce the texts of your audio and video.
- Make sure your title is highly descriptive and SEO-rich.
- Gather stats from Google Analytics, Woopra, web server stats, Podtrac.
Recommended Plugins
- One Pixel Out Audio Player
- PodPress
- All In One SEO Pack
- WordPress.com Stats
- Woopra
- Google Analytics
- FeedBurner for WordPress
- WP Super Cache
My Notes
Nice presentation, Thom. I'd add one thing, though. Because the iPod has total market domination for MP3 devices, getting into iTunes is essential. iTunes requires certain specification tags to be included in your podcast feed. I use Feedburner's podcasting options to automatically insert these iTunes tags.
The PodPress plugin also inserts the iTunes specifications, but since PodPress sometimes breaks with new releases of WordPress, I don't recommend PodPress. I wasn't always an iPod user, but since switching from the iRiver to the iPod Nano last month, I'm a total convert. iPods are the way to go.
