If you are awake 16 hours a day and there are 30 days in the month, that means you are awake 480 hours a month.  That means you have access to my information for .08 an hour. OK, I know you work 8 hours a day. You need to eat, so lets say you have 6 hours a day (6 PM to midnight – and we know you have more on the weekends) that would be 180 hours a month. This means you are gaining my instructions for .22 an hour. You can sign up for a month and cancel after you launch your podcast.

Join Today.

They say the music is “Free” but you end up paying $8.41 for the shipping. With that said, it’s still a great deal on royalty free music for your podcast. Check it out at footagefirm.com

Unless you have money to burn you don’t need all the other .net, .org.  Also, only buy the domain name from Godaddy. NOT anything else.

To get deep-links and icons to your shows in the Zune Marketplace software and to Zunepodcasts.com visit here – http://social.zune.net/links/ZuneLinks.aspx?keyword=school+of+podcasting&type=podcast&x=7&y=8

Microsoft also has the Zune Video Podcast catalog available in Windows 7 Media Center. Video podcasters have this as a distribution opportunity – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-media-center/zune.aspx

Tags can be thought of as an “index” to your website. You can even use a widget to display them on your website (if you wish, I don’t). If people were to click on them, they would be shown all the posts that had that word.  Useful? Well, maybe.

However, GOOGLE seems to love tags (based on the image to the left). Google brings eyeballs, which bring ears, which means they can be subscribers to this podcast.

Listener Feedback

We got some feedback from Daniel of Edgy Podcast Reviews on how he enjoy the last few shows, and my openness to share my numbers. If you are looking to get your podcast reviewed head on over to edgypodcastreviews.com

For the record 4 days into circulation show 211 has had 421 downloads. Whoop-dee-doo. I am more interested in influence and how connected I am with the audience instead of how big the audience is (quality vs quantity).

Another Podcast Experiment

I am turning the Weekly Web Tools Podcast (audio) into a Weekly Web Tools podcast that distributes pdf documents instead of mp3 files. Why? Because I can type faster than I talk. Also this makes it easy for readers to click on links to view the different tools. I will be monitoring the downloads to see if this works, along with clicks to see if it grows or reduces the amount of activity from the audience.

I found this out when all the sudden my downloads got cut in half.

THE SOLUTION

If you go into your wordpress and go to settings, then click on Reading. You can limit the number of posts that show up in your feed. Mine was set to 200. I set that to 100, and went into Feedburner and went to troubleshootize, and then did a resync.  It’s fine.

The effects of this is when a new person subscribes to the podcast (Building a Better Dave in this instance) they only see 100 (keep in mind many podcasters never make it past 7 episodes).

Today I talk about a podcast that should have been one of my favorites. It’s called “Money Matters” and it takes a Christian perspective on handling your money (two things I’m really interested in at the moment). However in a 24 minute podcast they had one minute commercials at the

3 minute mark

9 minute mark

17 minute mark

a big plug at the end.

In the end a 24 minute podcast was 17% commercials.

I tolerated this for a few episodes, but I then found out something that made the commercials even more annoying. They ran the same commercials in every show. I realize they have three or four products they are promoting but instead of running the same commercial for product A, why not have a few variations. After all I never get tired of Geico commercials here in the states (an insurance company) as they keep coming up with new commercials for the same product.

Part of the reason I think they use this format is this show is originally aired on radio (so they have to break for spots). However, this is also done on shows such as Dave Ramsey, and the now defunct Jillian Michaels podcast and both shows cut out the advertisements, and breaks for weather. They just give you the “meat and potatoes” of the show (both podcasts promoted people to sign up for their sites).

Now I realize you can argue that “Hey you’re getting it for free,” and that is true. For me, I will now use this as a benchmark. A post should not have more than 17% commercials. For me I typically try to keep it around 5% (a one minute commercial in a 20 minute podcast).

Some would argue the best place to put a commercial is at the beginning. This is true as even people who listen to a msall portion of the podcast will hear the commercial. However, if someone makes it to the end of this podcast I believe that means they are truly interested in podcasting and those are the people that I want to hear me talk about the school of podcasting. This is why I do most of my promotion at the end of my podcasts.

1. Start iTunes
2. Click on Music on the left hand side
3. You can either scroll down to find your episode, or use the search box in the upper right hand corner.

If you podcast is not listed, click the File menu and choose Add File to Library. Navigate to your episode and click Open

1. Click ONCE on your episode (and only this episode do not have more than one item selected).
2. If you are on a Windows machine right click on the episode (which should be highlighted) and choose “Get Info.” If you are on a Mac use the Ctrl Click and choose Get info
3. The Summary tab will be displayed. Click on the Info Tab. The NAME field is the name of this episode. The Artist is your name. Make sure to spell your name identically in each episode. The Year is obvious (optional). The Track should be the episode number (optional). The Album is your Podcast Name (the name of the show – not the name of the episode). The Genre should be Podcast. If it’s not podcast, click there and type it in. The composer you can ignore. Comments is where you can enter a blurb about the show, your website etc. Once you enter your comments, highlight them and copy them.
4. Skip the Video, Sorting, and Options tabs.
5. Click the Lyrics tab. Paste the comments from step 6 into this area (lyrics are easily viewed on an iphone).
6. Click the Artwork tab.
7. Click the ADD button in the bottom right hand corner.
8. Navigate to your 300X300 jpg image. Click on it once, and click the open button. It may look like nothing happened.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Click the Play button (as your episode should still be selected) and you should see your album art show up.