Podcasting Automatically
Forget manually generating your podcasts XML
In my podcast generator, I made a quick note about FeedBurner. Well... right around the same time they also announced support for podcasts and some of you may already know how to do this but for those you don't here's how you can (semi) automate your podcast. No, it won't record, upload and generate your podcast for you, but you'll hear from me when there is one.
First, if you have a blog account, any blog account, create a new blog. This will be what I call a silent blog, one that you don't normally publicize but is only set up for the feed. If you prefer, you can also use your existing blog it really doesn't matter.
Second, in your blog post, enter a link to your MP3 file, for example <a href="http://url-to-mp3">Here's this week's Podcast</a> then publish your blog. Now go find your RSS feed, head on over to FeedBurner. Get an account if you don't have one. Burn this new feed and check the SmartCast option. Don't forget also to check the option to ping audio.weblogs.com. Scroll down to where it says Content-Type Burner, check that option, choose the predefined type as RSS 2.0 and burn it.
You're done! Now just get your listeners to subscribe to this feed. FeedBurner will automatically pickup the MP3 in your blog post and make a podcast out of it. This works with any blog pretty much and saves you from manually creating the XML file and uploading it.
In the next email (should be about 2 days from now), I'm going to teach you how to take that automation one step further where you only record once and you'll have a podcast no uploading whatsoever. No need to even upload your MP3's
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