Welcome to podcast answers, the show where we help you start and grow your podcast answering
any podcasting questions along the way.
That's right.
We are here today to help you start, grow your podcast and understand just a little bit
more about why your episode is not showing up once you publish it.
So you get your episode going, it's all polished up and you're ready to publish.
You do publish, you go back and check your favorite app and it's not there.
I've heard many people ask the question, "Help me, my episode is not getting published
to a specific directory.
Why didn't it get uploaded to a specific directory like Apple Podcast or Spotify or
etc. How long does it take to publish episodes to other programs, other platforms? So I want
to cover just a little bit of the basics today on how podcasting works. You may not know how it
works, but essentially once you publish your episode and upload it to your media host,
they create a file. It's called an RSS feed. And what it is, is it's basically a listing
a text listing of what your podcast is.
So the information like for this show, it's the title podcast answers
the description of what the podcast is.
And then it has all of the episodes.
So it lists one episode.
It may say, you know, this is the episode and it has the title of it.
It has the information for the description and it has the link for your media file,
etc., etc., etc.
You take that file, you take that RSS feed and you send a link to it.
So when you when you first start your show,
you log into podcasts, connect for Apple and you say, I'm submitting this new show.
Here's the RSS feed, etc, etc.
And you do that with all of the different directories and a lot of the podcasting
apps pull off of the Apple podcast app, Apple podcast directory or the podcast
Index, Index Directory.
But podcasting is a pull technology, not a pull push technology.
So when you publish your episode, it doesn't say, Hey, Apple podcast,
here's, here's the new episode.
It also doesn't say, you know, it doesn't upload the file to Apple podcast.
Apple podcast actually just links to your episode.
So it doesn't get uploaded to Apple podcasts.
just it's just a link.
So sometimes because it is a pull technology, it takes time for your
episodes to go out into your once you're in the episodes in the RSS feed.
It may take a time for your directories to pull the latest episode.
The directories have a time that they go back and check.
So they check, let's say Apple podcast, we're just going to use Apple podcast
here, Apple podcast may check every hour for a new episode.
So the Apple Podcasts directory is going to come out to your website, to your media
host and say, Hey, is there a new episode for podcast answers?
Yes.
No.
Okay.
It's going to come back an hour later.
Or the time is, is not necessarily an hour, but in this example.
So in an hour later, it's going to come back and say, Hey, is there a new episode?
You may have published that new episode, but you may have also published that
episode right after they just check.
And so it's going to take Apple podcasts an hour to know that your podcast is having a new episode.
So because it is a pull technology, it takes time for them to come out and pull the new episode.
Now, some podcasts apps, so if you're using other podcast apps, they may not get the
listing off the directory, they may check directly on your RSS feed.
And so again, then in that case, the person can just go out and refresh the feed, you
over refresh their app and see because the app will go out and check.
So what can you do?
Are there things that you can do to make this go a little bit faster?
Yes, there are.
There are things that help out with this.
So the main thing is be consistent.
Publish your episode on a specific day and a specific time and do it the same time every
week.
So for this podcast, I release on Thursdays.
And so Apple podcasts know that I release these on Thursdays and usually it's sometime
in the afternoon.
For my other podcast, every time I record it, I, in a new episode, I release it on Tuesdays,
on every other Tuesday, and I release it at 1am every time.
I can schedule that because I record ahead of time and then I just wait until in my podcast
media host, I sell them Tuesday, 1am, put the new episode out.
And so Apple podcasts and the other directories start to learn your publishing habits.
So they're going to know every other Tuesday, Andy's going to publish an episode of the
Dudes and Dads podcast, and it's going to be at 1am.
Go check it.
So that's one way that you can make your episodes show up faster in the directories.
If you're consistent with that and you do the same thing every week.
So some of the other things that you can do is use something called WebSub.
And essentially that's a way for you as you publish, so podcast apps and directories can
subscribe to a WebSub.
They can say, "Let me know every time this podcast updates."
your podcast media host may or may not support this.
And there are some problems with this because the apps have to go back and resubscribe every
so often.
They can't just say indefinitely, show me when this podcast updates.
It has to resubscribe and say, "Hey, I know it's a week later, but resubscribe me."
And so that takes a lot of time to do and a lot of bandwidth.
And so not a lot of things to support because it is problematic and it doesn't scale very
well.
If you're a directory and you have a million and a half feeds to go back and try to subscribe
to those million and a half feeds to check to get notified of a web sub is a pain.
And so there's something kind of new.
It's been new within the last couple of years and it's called pod ping.
And the cool thing about podping is it's based on Bitcoin, not Bitcoin, but it's based on
blockchain just like Bitcoin is.
So essentially it's a blockchain and anyone can publish to the actual chain.
So what some really smart people at podcasting index have done, podcast index have done,
is they've created this thing called podping.
And a lot of new, a lot of companies are starting to support this.
And essentially what it is is when you publish, you use it with their tool, it'll send what
it's called a ping, a pod ping.
And what's cool about it is it, unlike a web sub, it doesn't require the listener to
resubscribe.
All they have to do is watch the blockchain for this specific kind of ping.
And then they'll know when an episode is published.
There's no resubscribing.
It scales really well.
the cool thing about it is as a directory, they can even use that as an ingest point.
So they can say, "Hey, I see this podcast being published as Ping with PodPing, and I
don't have this podcast in my directory."
And then it can go out and get the RSS feed and add it into the directory.
So it's really cool, a cool way for people who are building directories to not have to
check as often because if you have to go out and use your servers to check a million feeds,
two million feeds every hour, that's a lot of web traffic.
Even if nothing has changed, they have to go out and say, as a regular poll to say,
"Hey, is this updated?
Is there anything new in this episode?"
That wastes a whole lot of data, internet traffic, having to do that, computer cycles
having to do that.
So with this pod ping, it's really cool because they don't have to go out and check.
They can just listen to the stream of pings and know if something is published and then go out and check.
So it actually saves a lot and it's actually immediate.
It's really quick.
I can publish an episode of this podcast and within seconds of it being published,
it's out in the podcast index.
It's out in a lot of new podcasting apps because they're using pod ping
because they're listening to pod ping to know when to update.
So sometimes it's not just a matter of waiting though.
Sometimes there are technical issues that can happen with your feed that can cause your
cause your episode not to show up in the directories.
Did it actually publish to your feed is the main important thing.
You may have created this awesome episode edited it and it sounds great.
You uploaded it to your media host, but you didn't hit publish.
It didn't actually show up in your feed.
And so your RSS feed.
So the best thing to do is you can open your browser, type in your feed address, and physically
see in there what episodes are in there.
You can see.
So for me, if I'd open it up and go to feeds.podcastmirror.com/podcastindex, you'd see all of the list of episodes
that we have in our feed.
If my latest episode is not in there, then you are not actually going to get published.
Your episode is not actually going to show up to have people listen to your show.
The other thing is your feed may be too large.
So several megabytes is too large because it does take a while because if people are
ingesting this, it is too big.
There's a technical limitation.
It is just a text file, but if you have thousands and thousands of episodes in there, that can
get really large and that can cause the directories not to show your latest episode.
So what can you do about that?
You can write less show notes.
I mean, you still want to be detailed, but you don't need to make a book out of it.
You don't have to put in your whole transcript into the show notes.
That's going to blow out your feed.
You can also check to see if your host allows you to publish only the last number of episodes
in your feed.
So, let's say you do have a thousand, two thousand episodes.
Your host probably is going to allow you to say only show the last 300 episodes in the
feed.
And this will help because that will keep the feed size down because that will, yeah,
it'll just keep the feed size down and not be so large because you're only showing the
last two episodes or last 10 episodes or whatever.
And the last thing that can happen is you forgot to put a title on your episode.
Most hosts aren't going to allow you to save your episode without a title and publish,
but some do.
And if there's not a title, it's not going to show up in the directories because they
have no way to know it's not a title.
There's not titled.
And so you need to make sure that your episode is actually titled and there is a title to
it.
So guys, if that's something that you're dealing with, I would love to help you out.
I'd love to help you create your show.
You can contact me several different ways, but the most easiest way is just to go to
podcastindex, podcastindexpodcastanswers.com/contact and get a hold of me there.
The other way to do the thing you can do is we have a Discord channel and I would love
to have you there.
It's just podcastanswers.com/discord that you can there go and see and talk to me about
all sorts of different issues.
Guys, with that, thanks.
and have a good week.
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