Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 4 of the Ultimate Podcast Guide for Beginners. Today we're talking about how to get your podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Over the past few years, I've gone from being obsessed with listening to podcasts, to starting one as a hobby, to eventually starting my own creative agency where I produce and launch podcasts for other creators. In addition to hosting my own show, Creator Club, I've helped tons of other creators of all sizes to start their own podcasts. And I'm so excited to be helping you to start your podcast today. Today I'm going to be showing you how to host your podcast and get it submitted to Apple Podcasts and Spotify using Squarespace. This is not objectively the best way to do it by any means. It is just my personal preference and the way that I've done it for myself and the way that I've set it up for clients. There's lots of other ways to do it, which I'll explain in a minute, but I just wanted to tell you why I use Squarespace personally. First of all, I already had a Squarespace website, so it's one thing that I'm already paying for. I don't need to pay for another service to host my podcast, so I might as well use Squarespace. It's already there. It's already on the credit card bill. Also, I want to have a more in-depth website associated with my podcast, so rather than hosting my podcast somewhere else and then creating a website for it, I can just do it all in one place, and then it allows me to have a website with testimonials, reviews, blog posts, further resources, all that kind of stuff. And it's just in one place that I can log into and manage all of it. And so really what it comes down to is I can just do this all in one service, paying for one thing rather than paying for multiple different subscriptions, one for website, one for podcast hosting, when you can do it all in one. So that is why I personally use Squarespace. If you are a WordPress user, like if you have a website through WordPress.org, not WordPress.com, that's an important distinction, then you can do the same thing that I do with Squarespace in terms of using your website to create an RSS feed. However, if you don't already have a website and you don't really need to or want to have a website associated with your podcast, then you can use something like Simplecast or Anchor to host your podcast. So for Simplecast, it is a pretty modest monthly fee, and it makes it really easy to upload your audio, add your podcast art, title, description, all that kind of stuff, and it walks you through submitting it to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Anchor is similarly user-friendly, especially if you want to do everything on mobile and not have to use your laptop at all. All of that being said, I use Squarespace, and that's how I'm going to show you how to do it today. But just know, there's other options. You don't have to do this. It's just my preference. All right, so with those options being laid out, there's one important thing that you need to know about how podcast publishing and distribution works, because I think this is normally the thing that most people get confused about. A lot of people who are starting out creating a podcast think that they're going to need to upload it to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or all these other platforms, but actually, that's not really how the process works. So it's important to understand that in this case with podcasting, the method of hosting and the method of distribution are different things. Now, this is quite different than what a lot of us are used to with other content platforms online. For instance, with YouTube, where you're watching this video, YouTube is both the host of the content and the distributor. I upload my videos to YouTube, they live on YouTube servers, and people can watch them by going to youtube.com. However, with podcasting, it's different. You host your podcast with some third-party software, like Simplecast or on your own website, and then Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the countless other podcast apps, they distribute it to listeners. Once you understand that important distinction, the rest of this becomes a lot more straightforward. It's just two different places, one for hosting, one for distribution, and what we're going to work on is getting the host part set up, and then basically all you got to do, send your information over to the distributor, and then it goes on all these different apps. It might sound complicated, but it's actually a very useful system. Once you get everything set up, you have one place to upload your podcast episodes to, and when you upload it to that one place, it automatically will end up on all these other platforms, like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, et cetera, because of the way you have them linked together, so it kind of saves you the time of having to go to all these separate sites to upload your podcast every time. You just have to do it once for each episode. So that in brief is a very short explanation of how the RSS feed system works, so what I'm going to show you how to do now is to create that RSS feed using Squarespace. Once you have your Squarespace site set up, you're going to go ahead and create a blog. This blog is going to be exclusively for uploading your podcast episodes. Once you create this blog, you're going to click on settings and then go to feeds. You'll see that there is an option at the top for podcasting, so click on that and then you can start entering all your information. Like we talked about before, you want to enter your title that is hopefully quick and catchy, but also optimized for SEO. You can write a description of your show, and then of course you're going to upload that podcast artwork that we made in Canva. Once that's done, you're going to exit out of settings. In order to launch your podcast to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, you're going to need at least one episode that you can submit when you submit your RSS feed to those distributors. To upload your first episode, go to your blog and then click the plus button to create your first blog post. The blog post section that you're seeing right now, this stuff is only going to display on your website, so people who come to your website and look through all your different podcast episodes, they'll be able to see that there, but none of what you put in this generic blog post section is actually going to show up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. That is actually going to be in a different section of settings. So here you might want to put your transcript, write a summary of what the episode is about. This blog post is a really great opportunity to put your podcast into words so that hopefully people who are Googling for the kind of information that you're sharing in your podcast might be able to find your website through Google search results and then therefore might be able to find your podcast. So that's the primary use of this blog post section. Now what you're going to need to do is add the audio module to your blog post. So if you're on the older version of Squarespace like me, you can press the plus button and then select the audio block. If you were on Squarespace 7.1, I believe, then you're going to need to mouse around until you see the little gray bubble pop up and then you can click on that to add a new block to your blog post. So select the audio block. The menu that pops up is where you're going to put all the information that is actually going to show up in the podcast distributors apps, okay? So what you want to do is add your name or the name of your show, whatever you want to show up under author. Put that there and add your title as well. Actually, this first page of settings is still just about the actual audio block that shows up on your blog. But when you tab over to the podcasting section of this settings area, this is the info that is actually going to show up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. So enter whatever title you want to show up there. You'll see that there's a subtitle and summary and episode notes section. You can fill all of that out however you would like, but what you need to know is at the end of the day, Spotify will only show your title and your episode notes. Inside Apple Podcasts, however, you will be able to see the subtitle and summary if you enter one. So it's up to you, but my personal preference is to only enter the title and the episode notes because then I know that I am putting the same information consistently on Spotify and Apple. Those are really the only two sections you need to fill out, but if you have episode numbers or season numbers that you want to enter, you can do that too. When you've entered all the information that you'd like, just click Apply. Finally, once your audio block is complete and you've added everything to your blog post that you'd like, you can click over to the Options tab and you can upload a blog post thumbnail. So this image will be the thumbnail for your actual blog post inside your Squarespace site. So if people are looking through the feed of all your different podcast blog posts, this will be the image that's associated with it. But the cool thing is actually inside Spotify, they will show whatever image you upload here as the episode art for that particular episode. So in Spotify, you can have cover art for the entire show, but you can also have an image that's associated with each individual episode. So you can see how that shows up here with my Creator Club podcast. Once you're happy with your post, you can either publish it right away or schedule it, of course, or leave it as a draft. I would recommend just publishing it right away because in order to submit your RSS feed to Spotify and Apple, you need to have an active podcast on there or else it won't be able to detect the information that you're trying to send them. Also, you need to make sure that your Squarespace website is public before you submit your RSS feed or else it won't work. All right, now that that groundwork is laid, let's actually go ahead and submit our podcast to Apple and Spotify. To do this, you're gonna need your RSS feed. If you're using Squarespace like me, this will be the format of the URL of your RSS feed. First, it's going to be whatever your website domain is. In my case, it's katiesteckley.com. Then it's gonna be slash whatever the URL slug is of the blog you created. You can find out what this is by going to your blog and clicking on the Settings button. Rather than going into the Feeds area like we did before, just stay in the General Settings section and you'll see under URL slug what it is. It probably by default is slash blog or slash blog-1 if this is the second blog that you created, but you can change that to whatever you'd like it to be. I would recommend making it podcast or maybe the title of your podcast if that's not already in the domain name that you're using. For me, it's katiesteckley.com slash creator club because that's the title of my podcast. Then after you have the yourwebsite.com slash podcast section, then you're gonna add question mark format equals RSS. All of that together is the RSS feed URL for your podcast. Once you have that, you're gonna go and open up a new tab and Google Apple Podcast Connect. This first result will bring you to the page where you can submit your podcast to Apple. Log into your Apple account, honestly probably like two or three times because Apple can be like that, and then you're gonna select Podcast Connect. The page that shows up will be a pretty minimal page with a spot for you to paste in your RSS feed. So go ahead and click Paste, enter the RSS feed that we just created, and then click Submit. You'll see that it will auto-populate the information that you added in Squarespace. So your podcast artwork should be there, the title, description, all that stuff. And then you can submit it for approval. Once you've got that done, you can go and Google Spotify for podcasters. Again, the first result will take you to the page where you need to go to submit your podcast to Spotify. Once you log into your Spotify account, you can go to the menu on the left-hand side and click Claim a Podcast. There you can enter the URL that we came up with for your RSS feed, paste it in there, and press Submit. And again, this should auto-populate with your podcast art, title, and description, all the information you entered in Squarespace, and then you can submit it for approval. Each of these platforms can take up to 48 hours to approve your podcast, but in my experience, Apple normally takes longer than Spotify. Sometimes Spotify will even have your podcast live within the hour that you submit it. But because of this differential between the platforms, it's pretty much impossible to choose a definite launch date. So what I would recommend when it comes to marketing your podcast when you're launching it is to choose a launch date and then submit it to Spotify and Apple maybe three or four days in advance so you know for sure that it will be live on those podcast apps before you start talking about it on social media. This isn't a perfect system. In my experience, I've worked with influencers who have their followers end up finding their podcast on Spotify before they actually announce it, but there's not really much that you can do about that. You just have to submit them around the same time and hope that the approval process doesn't take that long. Once you know that your podcast is approved, you'll get emails from both Spotify and Apple, and of course you can just check in the apps as well. Then it's time to start promoting it on your social media. In this series, I've taught you how to establish a niche and a brand for your podcast and an idea for your show. I've shown you how to record it, what microphones to use, and also how to edit it and get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Of course, the next step is to market it, tell people about it, and grow a group of listeners that are excited about your show. If you're interested in seeing a video about that in the future, definitely let me know in the comments because I would love to make another video all about that. Please let me know if you found these videos helpful. And if you did, I would really appreciate it if you subscribed. It really does help me out and help me grow this channel so I can keep making more content like this. If you felt overwhelmed by any of the stuff that I showed in this series and you're feeling like, you know what, I would just rather have somebody else do it, you can have me do it for you. So you can go to my website, katiesteckley.com slash apply is my client application form. And you can select that you're interested in podcast services and I'll get back to you as soon as I can and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together because I'd be happy to edit the intro and outro or launch a podcast for you. And of course, if you ever have any quick questions, just send me a DM and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you again for watching these videos. If you watched all four, seriously, thank you so much for the support. I really appreciate it. I'd love to hear from you. Just send me an Instagram DM letting me know that you watched the whole podcast series because I really put a lot of energy and love into this and I hope that you appreciated it. So reach out to me if you've seen all four and if not, you can go ahead and click on this playlist to check out any of the videos from this series that you might have missed. The best ways you can support my channel are by subscribing and just keep watching. I've got tons of videos on content creation and social media marketing for you to check out next and I would really appreciate it if you went ahead, clicked on some of these videos and watched them. As always, thank you so much for watching. I wish you all the best with your podcast launch and I will see you in these videos. Bye.