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Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast, answering
¶ Intro
any podcasting questions along the way. That's right, guys. I'm here. I'm still here. It's wow. Wow, wow, wow. Life is just crazy now. I've got four kids and they are all over the place. Not that you want to hear excuses though, but they are super, super busy. And so for me, it takes me a little bit sometimes to do a podcast answers episode. But this episode
¶ What Is RSS
is one that I thought was going to be is super, super, super important for us because essentially what is RSS? You may have heard it. All of the old school guys know what RSS is. Everybody knows what RSS is if you're an old school guy, but what about those who are new school? Yes. Randy black. Let's go. Let's go. Randy black is live with us in the comments and
says let's go. So we're talking today about, about RSS, what it is, because it's super important because a lot of times the new school people, new school podcasters, those who have come along since 2020 may not actually know what RSS is because they just think, Hey, I'm going to upload a podcast to YouTube and that's it. No podcasting is so much more than just a pod video on, on YouTube. Now I do podcast on YouTube, but that's not the only
thing that I do. So RSS stands for really simple syndication. And essentially what that is as it's like, I'm going to compare it to a radio tower. So if we're going back traditional radio broadcasting, we are going to, you're going to think of the person behind the mic and then there's the radio tower and the radio transmitter. RSS is essentially like your
radio transmitter. And because essentially on a traditional radio, you speak into the radio, the mic, and then it goes up to the tower and gets transmitted out into the universe. And then those with the radio, the radio sets can tune into your broadcast. So the RSS is really just the radio tower and podcast apps are like the radio receiver. They get the
signal and allow you to tune in to your show. So at its base, what is RSS? RSS is a text file that, that has all of the information about your, about your, your podcast episode. So when a podcaster publishes a new episode, they upload it to their hosting platform, which generates this RSS feed. It's just a text file, but it has information about details about the episode, like the title, the description, the duration, where the audio file is hosted
and such as well as the overall show itself. So title and description of the show. And then what happens is that that automatically updates at any subscribers. So if the, if you have a Apple podcast app or any other podcast app in general, it's gonna, it's gonna look, it looks every so often. So it checks either 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. It just checks that file and says, Hey, is there any new content here? Is there any new
episodes for let's say podcast answers? And if there is, then it knows what the episode is, what the title is, and then tells you to, to download, tells it to download that file. And so essentially again, RSS is like just being able to go out and it's, it's like the transmitter for your podcast. Now, what it allows you to do and why it's so, so important, because a lot of new year companies are saying, Hey, upload your file here, upload your file
here, upload your file here. So for instance, podcasting on YouTube, and I'm putting that in quotes, they want you to upload your, your podcasts video to them. Spotify, if you're doing video with them, once you do upload to their host, what this allows you to do RSS as you upload it once. And then it goes everywhere because you don't have to because all of your applications and directories check that file and say, Oh, there's a new episode
available. So it's really it allows subscription based delivery. So it allows you to say, subscribe to your favorite podcasts. And then it ensures that anytime that a new episode is delivered, or published, it gets directly delivered to your podcast app, users don't have to go manually check back for new content. This is automatic delivery makes following podcasts convenient. It's so easy, because you don't have to go to the website and say, Hey, is there is there
a new episode? Now I do publish my episodes on my website. I do have a listing of all of my episodes and you can play them right from my website. But the beauty of podcasting is you don't have to do that. You can do that right in the app. Because the app just checks it and it delivers it when there's a new one there. The RSS again, is your radio tower
to your broadcast. The great thing about this too, is it is, is it's so cross platform compatible to all of the apps and all of the all of the the directories know how to ingest take in that file. And they can, they can be can be hosted on one platform. But as long as your podcast has an RSS feed, it can be picked up by any of the apps anywhere. So again, you want it doesn't matter if we're going back to the we're gonna go back to the the
the radio days here. You're not saying only people who have a Pioneer receiver are going to be able to receive my podcast. You don't want that you want anybody who can speak radio, right? Anybody who can is producing a radio feed a radio, a radio transmission to be able to be to be able to be have their transmission heard by anyone who has a radio. And so our RSS is critical to that because it allows you to tell and have any user anywhere listen
to anything. And the nice thing about that is because it does get a lot of apps don't necessarily use their own directories. They either use pod podcast index or they use Apple podcast. And so as long as you are submitting your show to one of those two directories, you can submit them other places too. But one of those two, a lot of people are going to be able to hear it because they will be able to find your podcast. The nice thing
about this too is you have control. With an RSS feed, you have control over your content that you publish. Because you can manage all of your metadata, all of your your feed, all of your episodes, ensuring that your updates are distributed exactly like you want. Now, again, podcast apps may display it differently. And some may display links in your description, some may not. But you have control over that and you have it in one place. You can go back
to your your RSS, whoever's creating your RSS feed. Most of the time that's going to be your podcast host. It's going to be a person that's going to be listed, you know, the place that you're uploading your videos to. But you can go back and change that stuff. Or pull the episode. I've had an episode that I've had to pull before, if we're for content reasons that yeah, I was a guest, besides the point, but I've had to pull it. And so
it was really easy for me to pull. And actually, that goes back to this where you if you distribute multiple locations with multiple hosts, you have to remember where did I put that at? Where did I? Where did I put that episode at? Because for me, when I had to take that episode down, I definitely easily quickly pulled it right from my RSS feed. And then that made it go away from a good majority of the podcast applications. However, I forgot
that I had it on YouTube still. So I went out and I had to remove it from YouTube, because they came back to me and said, Hey, you the episode is still available here. And and and so that was one of the things that I really enjoyed having an RSS feed because it was really easy for me to pull it from the places that ingest an RSS just by removing the audio file and removing the episode. So that's why it made it super simple and super easy to
to go out and remove that episode. So again, guys, RSS is critical. A lot of the newer podcast apps and our podcast apps, podcast players, I'm gonna say that in quotes, YouTube, Spotify, whatever, is allowing it to, to, they're trying to force you into having a, a, having your episode uploaded on their site. And, and this is RSS, we need to keep RSS alive, I'm gonna bang on that drum forever, because it is, it is so easy to, and efficient
to deliver it to all of the podcast apps. Now, Randy Black has reminded me in the comments, pod ping has revolutionized RSS distribution for podcasting, we need Apple to implement it and save themselves server load on the back end. So I will briefly touch into that. So we what what pod ping is, is essentially a notification system, a notification bus, because the way traditionally RSS works is my podcast app goes out and says, hey, RSS
feed, is there a new is there a new episode? And it does that every hour. So that way, when I open my app, I know that there's a new episode, or I can get notified of it. And then there are certain things like Apple podcasts and other directories, where listing directories, those go out every how often 30 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, or whatever
it is, and says, Hey, is there a new episode? And so essentially, what that does is that puts a whole lot of strain on on the episodes, because our Yes, as Randy has reminded me, it makes it it's the person push versus pull. So pull is normally what your normal RSS is, where you're saying, Okay, is there a new episode? Is there a new episode? Is there
a new episode? And that's really wasteful, because it has to take server time and server space and server cycles to come back and say, Yes, there's a new episode or no, there's not a new episode. And so and so what pod ping essentially does is it allows directories
and apps and everything to listen to this huge giant message feed, right? Essentially saying, it's on the blockchain, it's on the the hive blockchain, but essentially, it's just a listing of podcasts that are updating podcasts that are updating podcasts that are updating. And you can go to podping dot watch and see this happen live. It's kind of cool. I sometimes have that just a web page up in my podcast or in my, in my browser. So that
way I can see what's happening. But essentially, you as a as a host or a a directory, you can have that set to you can just be watching that. And so every time you see a new, a new episode come up on pod paying, then you go out and pull the RSS feed for it. And what Randy is saying here is essentially, Apple, I mean, Apple is a huge player in the podcast in the podcast, complex comp ecosystem. And so they pull a lot of feeds a lot. And so
their servers are constantly checking, constantly asking for new episodes. And so if if they were to implement this, they would not have to do that nearly as often because there's a lot of podcasts and hosts that are using this pod ping technology. In fact, if you're listening to me live right now in a podcast app, new podcast app, you you that new podcast app got notified that I want live because I sent a pod ping out right before I went
live. And so pod ping is a great is a great technology. And it's super easy to implement as far as the the notification goes. And so yeah, Randy, I totally agree with you. We need to see hopefully Apple, you know, and Apple has been listening to podcasts, podcasting 2.0, they know they've implemented a lot of the new podcasting tags, not a lot, they've implemented a podcast tag, and they're starting to implement another one here, or they have
implemented another one here. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens with Apple over the next the next couple years or months and stuff and see if they implement some more of the new, the new tags that we've got over here in podcasting. So that's a brief rundown of it in why it's super important. Because again, you're not your RSS feed is is your lifeblood to your podcast? Yes, you can have video and I'm streaming to YouTube
right now. And yes, you can do that. But you need to have a broadcast tower. Otherwise, your podcast is not a podcast. I'm just gonna go out and say it. It's not a podcast if you don't have a RSS feed or a broadcast. So if you need help, I would love to help you out.
¶ Ask your questions
If you've got questions, what podcasting questions do you have? Go to podcastanswers.com/ask and that will allow you to ask your questions for me that I can go ahead and put on an upcoming podcast episode for this show. Again, if you want to ask podcasting questions, I love helping people podcast. And so get out there, ask me some questions for future episodes. If you need help one on one, I would love to help you one on one set up your podcast or
do something with podcasting for you. You can go to podcastanswers.com/contact and we can do a one on one consultant. Thanks, guys. Have a great week and keep podcasting! Bye! you