Google released it’s Google Podcasts app on the Google Play Store a couple of months back in June 19, 2018. It’s a very handy tool to listen to your podcasts on your phone and discover new ones. Google also released developer guidelines for developers to make their podcasts compatible with Google Podcasts app. So I am gonna just guide you on how to add your podcast based on the guideline.
First things first, you will need a platform to publish your podcasts. You could use any platform which can host audio files to start your podcast. But the easiest option I would suggest is to use WordPress. It’s easy to use and you can easily setup your podcasts using free plugins. You can either choose to start your podcast blog on wordpress.com or host your own from wordpress.org. WordPress.com provides 3GB of free storage and comes with podcasting feature. No extra plugins required. Only downside is that you won’t be able to customize the look or any other features as your need and for the free version your site name would be on wordpress.com domain (for e.g. yourname.wordpress.com). You can choose to link your own domain to wordpress.com as well.
But if you choose to host your own site with WordPress, you will have full control of your site. You will have to get a domain for yourself and some decent hosting space. Then you can customize the look and feel of the site as per your will. You will get to choose from millions of themes available online or create your own if you please.
You can check the comparison here. https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/self-hosted-wordpress-org-vs-free-wordpress-com-infograph/
Podcasting on WordPress
Now we come to the podcasting part. There are several free plugins available for podcasting. Some popular ones are Seriously Simple Podcasting, PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry, Podlove Podcast Publisher. All these and other plugins do their work but my personal favorite is Seriously Simple Podcasting for it’s serious simplicity. It’s very simple and does what it needs to do best. It creates a new post type called “Podcasts” which you can access from the side menu and start publishing podcasts normally the way you post blogs. It then creates a nice player with description of the podcast for you.
You can browse through its settings which is very easy to use with descriptive messages for each setting displayed along with the options. You don’t need to change anything in the settings. Our concern would be the “Feed Details” tab on the settings page. You will find fields to fill in about your podcast. It’s better to fill out all the fields for better discovery. The “View Feed” link is your podcast feed URL. This is the URL used by every podcast players. The URL looks something like this https://castmandu.com/feed/podcast so for your domain it would probably look like https://yourdomain.com/feed/podcast
That’s all there is to do for Google to recognize your podcast. All you need to do is wait for Google to index your site. Google has provided Podcast Publisher Tools to generate link to Google Podcast. You need to paste the URL of your podcast feed into the box here to generate the link. If Google has crawled through your website you will be able to get the link which looks like https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9jYXN0bWFuZHUuY29tL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdA%3D%3D
This link opens the Google Podcasts app on your phone. You can share this link on social networking sites or add it as a banner in your site. You might have to wait a day or two for Google to crawl through your site. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to verify that your podcast website is indexed by Googlebot. Also for the updates to be reflected on google, you could try publishing your feed to google from Google’s WebSub publish tool at https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/publish
If all goes well your podcast is now ready to be played on Google Podcasts.
If you have any queries please feel free to leave your queries on the comment section. I will definitely try my best to answer your queries.
And please listen to Castmandu on Google Podcasts.
