Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts is the largest and most popular podcast directory in the world. It accounts for over 43% of all podcast downloads. And if your podcast is listed in Apple Podcasts, it'll also show up in other apps like Castbox and Overcast. This makes it the first place you wanna get your show listed. So in this guide, I'm gonna walk you step-by-step and show you exactly what you need to do to get your podcast listed in Apple Podcasts. Step one is to fill out your podcast info. Apple Podcasts requires a unique title for your podcast, a short description, and for you to put down who the author of the podcast is. This is probably your name or maybe the name of the company that's creating the podcast. Now, title and the author information are really important because they're what Apple Podcasts uses for search. So let's make sure that any keywords we expect for our listeners to be searching for to find a new show, that those are showing up in our title. So for example, this podcast, it's a podcast about drones. So I naturally want the word drone in the title. But make sure you don't keyword stuff here and put a bunch of things in that don't really relate to your podcast. If you do, Apple Podcasts could reject or remove your podcast from the Apple Podcast directory. Your podcast hosting provider will have a place for you to fill all this information out. If you're on Buzzsprout, this is all listed under the podcast info page. Step two is to upload your podcast artwork. This is really important to pay attention to because it's one of the most common reasons that people get rejected from Apple Podcasts. First are some technical requirements. Your artwork should be exactly 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. If it's off by even a couple, 3,000 by 2,998, that's going to get rejected. Needs to be that perfect square. Next, it needs to be 72 dots per inch, RGB color space, and a PNG or JPEG file type. You can give these to a designer. If they're designing the artwork for you, make sure they have these requirements. But if this seems a little bit too much for you, you can check out the Buzzsprout Canva integration where we'll set all these automatically so we know the artwork will work for your podcast. Something that's not a technical requirement but you want to consider is what does this artwork have on it and what does it look like? We've done a bunch of videos and blog posts about this where we go in much more detail. I'll link those in the description. But just keep in mind, this is the thing that will hopefully stop people when they're scrolling through Apple Podcasts. It is your first impression. Let's try to grab people's attention so they click on your podcast and listen to it. And if there's any words on the artwork, which maybe you should have the title of the podcast on there, make sure there's not too many because this will show up at really small resolutions and so we want people to be able to actually see the artwork. Step three, pick a podcast category. Apple splits its directory up into different categories like history, fitness, earth sciences, all sorts of things. While other directories will use three categories, Apple Podcasts really focuses on the first one. Let's make sure that this is the best description of your podcast. And you can scroll through and look, but one tip I would give you is to pick a subcategory. So you notice there's some categories like news and then a subcategory tech news. Tech news will be less competitive. There's less podcasts in there, so you're more likely to move up in the charts and get new listeners. All right, four, upload your first episode. Apple Podcasts requires you to have at least one episode before you can get listed in Apple Podcasts. Your episode will need a title, description, but it also needs obviously the episode itself. Now this can be a full episode, a bonus episode, or a trailer. Trailers just have to be a couple minutes long and describe what your podcast is about. They're really good if you want to get listed in Apple Podcasts, but you have a specific launch date where you're going to be putting out the full content. Once your episode is up, click publish now. Five, copy your RSS feed. Your RSS feed is just a webpage generated by your podcast host. It includes all the metadata about your podcast, including things like title, description, category, author, everything we've already put in, but also all the episodes that you'll ever upload. And this just makes it super easy for directories and for podcast apps to pull in new episodes when you upload them. So all you have to do is copy this URL and we're headed over to step six. Step six, we're going to create an Apple ID if you don't already have one. Apple ID is just a login and you need one to get into Apple Podcasts Connect to submit your show. And you can use an existing Apple ID. Maybe you set one up when you got your iPhone or you can just create a brand new account. One thing that we've noticed is if you don't have a credit card associated with your Apple ID, you can run into some errors when logging in. Now, Apple Podcasts doesn't cost anything, but this is just a troubleshooting tip that we've noticed. And make sure you hold on to this login information because this is how you're going to get your Apple Podcasts statistics, at least the ones that are specific to Apple Podcasts later on. Now let's add our podcast to Apple Podcasts Connect. Step seven, login to Apple Podcasts Connect and click the plus up here at the top left, click new show and select add a show with an RSS feed. Click next and paste in your RSS feed URL that we copied a couple steps ago. Apple Podcasts will now validate and process your feed. This should only take 30 minutes, though I have seen it take up to a few hours at times. If it ever takes 24 hours, reach out to Apple Podcasts support directly and they'll be able to help you out. If you are at this stage and you're prompted to pay for anything, make sure that you go back a couple steps and add a podcast with an RSS feed. If you're prompted to pay, you're setting up an Apple Podcast subscription was just something totally different. Step eight, while we're waiting for Apple to process our feed, let's go and fill out our content rights and our show contact information. Content rights are just letting Apple know either this is all original content that you own the copyright for, or there's some copyrighted material here, somebody else owns the copyright, but you have the rights to use it. If there's somebody else's copyrighted material and you're using it, but you don't have those rights, don't submit your show yet, go and secure those rights first. Next, complete the show contact form. This isn't public, but it allows Apple to reach out to you if there's ever an issue with your show, or if somebody ever tried to copy your show. Once you're done with this, scroll up to the top and click save. And now the final step, publish your podcast. Now that Apple Podcasts has processed your show, you'll be able to click that publish button up at the top right, and you'll get an email letting you know that your podcast is now in the directory. And as soon as you get that email, you can look it up on your phone or on the Apple Podcasts website. Make sure you send it to a few friends and family, celebrate that your podcast is now official, it's out in the world and it's in Apple Podcasts. If you have any questions, drop them down in the comments below or reach out to support at buzzprout.com. Thanks again for watching and as always, keep podcasting.