Troubleshooting Your Podcast

While I help a lot of people start their podcasts with people goingthrough our step by step tutorials, I do most of my consulting with people who have not, and I need to troubleshoot what has gone wrong iwth their podcast. As a corporate trainer I’ve developed and lead classes on troubleshooting (originally for technicians, but this can apply to podcasters). Here are some tips:

Try to isoloate each part of the process. If that’s your audio, test the cables, the channels, the microphone, etc. When you can swap out pieces for alternative options. When you’re done with a test ask, “What did I learn from this?” It may be that its not your mic cable, or its not the mixer. In the case of your website, I ALWAYS start by turning off all the plugins within WordPress to see if the problem persists (it’s a plugin many, many times). Here again, by isolating the plugins you can determine which one is causing the problem and either quit using it, or contact the developer.

The Podcast Information Flow

The recommend tools I recommend are Feedburner to add iTunes tags, and WordPress for your website. The chain of command is iTunes looks at Feedburner which looks at your website. This also then works backwords. When you update your website, feedburner is updated, which in turns updates iTunes. This is sometimes confusing as I use Libsyn.com as a media host. In a nutshell a podcast is simply an audio or video file that is “attached” to a blog post. I don’t use any of Libsyn (or blubrry.com for that matter) blogging features. I use them for hosting my media and providing great stats. Thats it.