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Post details: Talkcast on Blogging and Podcasting

01/11/2007

Talkcast on Blogging and Podcasting

In today's talkcast I talked about blogging and podcasting in more detail. Here you will find the links that I have mentioned in the talk.

You can get the MP3-File for this talkcast here:

http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TS-6382.mp3

or visit the Talkshoe-Site for more episodes:
http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=12267

[More:]

Build your first blog

To start your first blog, you can can get free accounts on:
blogger.com
wordpress.com

Start your first podcast

To start you first podcast, you can get accounts on:
odeo.com

hint: odeo.com has discontinued audio uploads for new users but you can still record a podcast directly on the odeo site (perfect for beginners, because there is no additional software needed).

blip.tv
podomatic.com
podstrike.com

A good paid podcasting host is:
libsyn.com

I talked about posting your blog/podcast to several directories. You will find a lot of recommendations in my del.icio.us list, that I have set up for the talkshoe talkcasts.

How to become famous (and promote your blog/podcast)

For promoting your podcast, I can recommend Jason van Orden "Promoting Your Podcast". It's an inexpensive paperback for around $12 and well worth the price.

Some tips from the book:

Post your podcast to different podcast directories (same is true for blogs)
Give your podcast a good, interesting and eye-catching title that is searched by many people.
also choose interesting titles for each episode

All these tips are also true for blogging. There are some blog directories and search engines around. The most popular is technorati.com. Get at free account there and claim your blog. To do that you have to put some special HTML-Code onto your blog page. Normally you put it in a sidebar. The code also provides a link "Blogs that link here" that link back to technorati. So you (and your readers) can check, who else is recommending your blog.

Blogging is mostly about link popularity. The more links you get from other blogging sites, the more popular is your blog regarding to technorati.

In most cases, you combine your podcast with a blog. The blog is a great place to put your show-notes on. A show-note is just additional textual information about a podcast episode. So if you mention a website in your podcast, put the link in the show-notes. This is useful for your listeners because they don't need to take notes or remember the URL while listening.

If you use a blogger account or and out-of-the box blog software, you will automatically get an RSS Feed for your blog. The same is true for your podcast. Odeo and blip.tv provides an RSS Feed for your podcast that is hosted on their site.

How to set up an RSS-Feed

An RSS Feed contains just some text information with all useful information about your blog or podcast. You will find here the latest blog entry or podcast episode and some additional information.

The RSS Feed is just a normal URL. If you put this in your browser, you normally just get an error message or a page with strange information. If you are a geek like me, you can read this information and find out some information that you are looking for. But the RSS-Feed is meant to be put into your podcatcher or news reader.

The news reader or podcatcher understands this information and checks out, if there is any new article/episode since last time. If so, it will show up these new items and you can show or download them.

I also mentioned feedburner.com to build your own RSS feed with more sophisticated statistics.