This is a guided tour to show do-it-yourself customers would use our platform for publishing their episodes on different distribution channels. Learn how to essentially syndicate your podcasts on any platform that distributes podcasts like iTunes, Google Play, the new Google Podcasts app, Stitcher, or anywhere else that they want to syndicate their show.

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Welcome to this tutorial on how to use the Podetize.com dashboard. This is going to show how do-it-yourself customers. We refer to them as DIY customers, would use our platform for publishing their episodes to the different distribution channels to essentially syndicate your podcasts everywhere that distributes podcasts like iTunes, Google Play, Google Podcasts app, Stitcher. Anywhere that you might syndicate your show. When you become a customer and purchase a hosting subscription on the website, you will receive a welcome email with the link for where to log in to our platform. Initially, you will have logged into the setup page where you configure your RSS feed. If you have not read that tutorial, please stop and go read that first one for the first-time log in customers who are going first to provide all your information, cover arts, description. All that good stuff that gets configured on the website to be syndicated and registered on all those podcast distribution platforms.

This assumes you’ve already done that and you would be logging in to upload a new episode to the system. This is to give you a guided tour of our customer dashboard and all of its features. You see what our login page is. You will be given the login link to our dashboard and you have to enter in your login credentials and log in. This is a test account that I created just for this purpose. Once you log in you will come to your dashboard. This is a podcast that has a lot of episodes published so that you can understand all the different features. This tutorial is for standard podcast hosting. If you are a customer that’s purchased the premium hosting with ad insertion and swapping features. You can learn from this on how to use the dashboard, but there are additional features for that type of podcast and there is a different tutorial on how to deploy ads throughout your podcast. There are a couple of additional buttons that show up on the dashboard.

The Dashboard

Let’s begin. On the left side of your screen is a sidebar that contains all of your podcast information. You choose your cover art. It shows the name of your show, the hostname, the description, any tags, if it’s explicit or not, copyright line, your feed URL. This is important if you are going to need your RSS feed for your podcast to give to anyone or any service. At Podetize.com, when you host with us, we offer and provide free syndication of your show to any platform you want it registered on. That means we will register it for you to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, all the different distribution channels you want. There are six that we do inherently for you and others upon request. Once you’re registered, we list the links to your show on these different platforms like iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play.

The dashboard Help resource is a section you can go to find a lot of different resource videos, tutorials, and any information about how to use the system. Click To Tweet

We’re adding TuneIn to this list and a couple of others, but for the meantime, this just shows you what it is and it also lists your social media link. If you want to, you can click this resize sidebar button and it will shrink it. I’m sure you know your podcast information. On the left indicates, “This is my show and I’m in the right place.” You can shrink that and widen your information on the right. This podcast has been published for a long time and you can see total plays, unique plays, all episodes, total plays last 90 days. You see this more analytics button right up top. You have your analytics for your show and if you click more analytics, it drops down and shows you your top ten episodes in the last 90 days and how many total plays they have each had.

Total Plays Versus Unique Plays

Down a little further, you have a graph. This is a combined graph of total and unique plays. On June 5th, this podcast had 79 total plays and 78 unique. On June 9th, it had 48 total plays and 39 unique. What does that mean, the difference between total and unique plays? The reason we show them is many people has more than one device. They’ll have their smartphone, they might have a tablet, they might have a desktop computer. They’re all being used from the same location a lot of the time. Mostly your home or your office. Our stats tracking system knows the difference when you have multiple devices downloading from the same IP address. Think of it as at your home network and maybe you have an Android phone, you have a Google Home, a smart speaker and you have your laptop.

You may start listening on your smartphone, but then later you pause it and then you continue listening on your smart device, your Google Home smart speaker or even on your laptop. The system knows that those three plays that if you listen to a podcast a little bit on each of those three devices. It got even just downloaded to each of those three devices, even if it wasn’t listened to on all three. The system knows that same IP address downloaded episode two or three times. That’s how you get the difference between total plays and unique plays. Total plays is a bit of a fictitious number. It is an actual number of how many times the podcast was downloaded from the server, but it knows that realistically there were only 39 unique people that downloaded that and played that episode. Sometimes there’s a big discrepancy. Here you have a difference between 98 total plays and 54. It can be more at times than others, but the total unique plays are the most realistic number to how many listens your podcast got.

 

 

Down below, we have geographic distribution. You can go through this pie chart and see the percentages from 100%. That’s the way this is designed to do it. For convenience on geographic distribution, we’ve given you how many countries in total that your show has been listened in or downloaded too. That’s a nice, useful piece of information. If you’re interested in percentages, you can go through all this. Podcast player, fourteen players are used here. Windows Chrome, Firefox, other browsers, Google Podcasts app. You’ll have iPhone, iTunes, maybe using a different app on the iPhone. There are lots of different players so you can see where the majority of your plays are. There’s also a large unknown category and that’s because they’re just a lot of different players that don’t self-identify. It may be within a track player on someone’s website that it was listened to and that does not have an identity that is discernible by any stats recording system.

In the platforms, what type of computers are people listening on. We are always expanding and adding to our statistics. We are expanding in many different additional statistics including your website statistics that are coming but just be aware, you may see a lot more statistics because we’re constantly adding them. One of the things you can do in the analytics is you can enter in a date range. Let’s say you want to know what plays you’ve gotten in July of 2018 and you can click go and then it will refresh all this information in this graph. Instead of being 90-days long, it will end up being one month long. It still provides you all the same information. That’s also very useful.

You can click less analytics if you want that to go away. Down in the bottom, this is the list of all episodes that you have either published, scheduled to publish or put into draft. There are actually three different modes when you enter an episode that you can go into. Here you’ll see that says scheduled for August 25th, 2018. This customer is very far ahead in their recording and editing schedule, which is great. You’ll see every episode has the episode number displayed and title. If there’s a guest, it’ll display the guest information so that you can sort through it and know what all your episodes are.

Once you change something in the Account Settings, it will change it on iTunes, Google Podcasts, and everywhere that your podcast is syndicated. Click To Tweet

Searching For An Episode

You can search within all these episodes. Here we have 91 episodes. If you wanted to go look at a particular episode, you’re searching here by episode title. Enter in something and it will find all the episodes that have those search titles in it so you can quickly find your episodes and not have to scroll through a very long list. You have options where you can publish an episode immediately and then it will say published in this list. If you started to enter in an episode and you didn’t have all the information, you can save it as a draft and come back in and edit that later. You schedule it for a future publication date as there are a bunch.

All these will show up in chronological order based on scheduled or actual publication date. We have a few other buttons. I want to draw your attention to the green, yellow buttons. If you click the file link, it will bring a pop-up. This in blue is the link that you would want to copy if you’re putting this episode into any track player on your websites like the Smart Podcast Player or Simple Podcast Press. There are a number of other track players out there. This entire URL you would copy and then paste. I want to draw your attention to this because the URL looks a little funny. It says https://www.Podetize.com/StatsAPI/www.Podetize.com. That is not an error and it is not an accident.

You need to copy this entire link to paste it in any track players or anywhere you would want to use it. This code is very specific and is necessary for our stats tracking system to work. There is a nice feature here where you can click this link and it ends up bringing up your MP3 file in a new tab and it will start playing the episode. You can listen to your actual episode just by clicking that link in our dashboard. Maybe you need to review it. Make sure you uploaded the right file. Maybe you were worried there was a glitch in it and you want to listen to a certain part of it. It makes it very easy to listen to it without having to copy the link, paste it into a track player and then load it.

 

 

 

Linking Your Podcast

One important thing I want to point out is when you go and play this, if you look at the URL string. It actually shows a different URL in the URL field, which does not have this entire code in it. You can see this warning here is saying, “When linking your podcast, make sure you include this entire link below.” You need to copy it from this pop-up window. Do not copy it from the resulting URL line that would be above this browser window because of that link while it will work and get to your MP3 file. If you copy the link here, it will not record your statistics properly when someone plays from that link here. You’ve got to copy the link right from this pop-up in the dashboard.

We have some embed codes. You might use the file link if you’re putting it into a track player, for instance, the Smart Podcast Player. We also offer two different embed codes that actually will embed an HTML player or a JavaScript player right in with the link. The link to your episode is included there. We have a non-JavaScript code that’s an HTML player, a basic one and we have a JavaScript code. We added this because we had some customers who had sites that use JavaScript and they wanted a JavaScript related code and others that needed a non-JavaScript code if their website wasn’t using Java or wasn’t able to. Those are just copied and pasted into whatever it is, your blog post or any page on your website and they will automatically load the episode and you can play it.

Creating And Publishing An Episode

Every episode has detailed statistics that are very similar to what’s here and more analytics, but this is just for the specific episodes. More analytics gives you the analytics for all of your episodes, inclusive of everything. If you want to look at individual episodes, you click on the detailed statistics and it will bring up a page of the statistics for that episode. I want to teach you how you would go and create an episode. When you go and click the create episode button, that’s the button you want to push when you’re ready to upload your new edited MP3 file and publish it to your feed or to schedule it to be published at a future date. When you click it, a form will come up. You would enter in your episode number, the title. If you have a subtitle, you can enter it. If you have a featured image, you can enter it, but these are not required fields. The audio file is very important.

For a podcast that has more than 500 episodes, iTunes will only display the most recent 300 episodes at most. Click To Tweet

When you click the audio file, it’s going to bring up your local browser window. You can choose whatever your MP3 file is and it will upload it. As it’s uploading, you see the bar moving across the screen with the upload progress in red. The length of time it will take to upload completely depends on the size of the MP3 file you’re uploading and also the speed of your local internet connection. It can be very fast or if you have a slow internet connection, it can take a while. Once it is completely done uploading, it will change to green and that’s how you know everything’s good. It was uploaded and accepted to the system and there are no problems.

You can enter your description in the field, whatever that description is. You can see the audio file finished and it’s green, now that’s good to go. If you have any tags, you enter them separated by commas. It does not have to be single words. It can be phrases. These are key tags that are keyword phrases and those will be used to assist in the search on iTunes and Google Podcasts. All the different distribution platforms still do use tags as one of the ways. Down, you have three options for publishing. You can publish now, you can save as draft or you can pick a future date and time, which will again bring up a calendar. Let’s say we wanted to publish this on August 30th. I’m in California, so I usually do it 3:00 AM California time on the date, which is 6:00 AM in the East so that it pushes out hopefully before people start commuting.

Editing For Resubmission

You can pick anytime you want and then once you submit, it will bring up a response page that shows you what you entered. It shows your episode number. Your title tells you the audio file had been uploaded, gives you the description. You can confirm this is what you wanted it to be. You can either click to go back to the dashboard or you can edit for resubmission. Those are your two choices here. If everything’s good to go, just go back to the dashboard. If at any point in the future you realize, “I already published this episode and I typed a typo in the description,” or “I don’t like that title, I want to change it.” Maybe you discovered an editing mistake, you re-edit your podcast and you want to upload a new MP3 file. You click the button, request details, which is the details of your episode and that will then pull up the page for that particular episode and you would go edit for resubmission.

 

 

When you edit for resubmission, it will bring you back to the page. That is what you entered when you submitted the episode in the first place. You can edit whatever you need to. You will remove the MP3 file if you’re replacing it. Once you click remove, it would be gone and it would then have the button for you to choose a new MP3 file and upload it. You can do that and change any other texts, anything you want and then submit. When you submit, it will end up going back to the response page again, showing you what you submitted, then you can go back to the dashboard. That’s the process for publishing an episode. As soon as you publish it, it is going to publish to your feed within seconds or a minute at most. Every different service that your show is registered on will pull your RSS feed or they call it scraping your RSS feed. Essentially reading your feed for any new information, usually every day and sometimes multiple times a day. It depends on the service. As soon as they pull the feed, it will be available in their system.

Dashboard Help Resources

Some other things I want to draw your attention to on the dashboard. Help resources, this is a section where you can go to find a lot of different resource videos, tutorials and any information about how to use the system. In fact, you probably went there to find this video. Help ticket, if you ever have a problem with anything on the site, you can submit the help ticket and that actually gets the attention of a lot more people at our company quicker. It automatically gets into a system where your issue is reviewed and you will get the fastest response doing that. You may have our email addresses and you’re certainly welcome to email us directly, but if you use the help ticket system, it gets logged and flagged and may get attention a lot faster. Account settings, when you click this button, you will go to this page, my account settings, not the customer’s podcast. With your account settings, you would go here obviously after your podcast is already registered and syndicated. Let’s say you wanted to make a change. Say you’re changing your cover art.

You come to account settings and you can choose a new file and upload it. Once it uploads, it will actually be saved. It will appear in this left sidebar. The same thing with any of this information about your RSS feed. The title of your podcast, who it’s hosted by, your description for your podcast, your tags. Is it explicit or not? Copyright line. You can come and change any of this information and once you save it, it will be changed on your RSS feed. Be careful. Make sure you want to do this because once you change something here, it will change it on iTunes and Google Podcasts and everywhere that your podcast is syndicated. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. It’s perfectly acceptable to all the platforms. You’re allowed to change these things, but if you want to do it yourself, this is where you would do it.

Password Management

Also, your password to the Podetize dashboard. You were assigned a password when your account was created. It was a very long, complicated password with lots of crazy characters. I highly recommend using a password management program like LastPass is one that we use. I do think it’s a great one and it’s free for most users. You can have an enterprise account for a company that you have to pay for, but for individuals it’s free and you can save your password that way. Let’s say you wanted to change your password to be something you could remember better. This is where you would do that. You’d enter in your new password and confirm it. Save your password. Remember what that is because when you log out, the next time you log into this platform, it will be your new password and you’re going to have to know that information.

If you lose your password, email us, we can reset it for you and email it to you as long as we verify your identity. You can manage your own password. I’m going to share one other feature. One of the unique features on Podetize.com even with our standard hosting package is that if you have more than one show or you have, let’s say season one and season two. If you have a podcast that’s been around for a long time and you have more than 300 episodes, you might need an additional feed for your earlier episodes and archived or volume one of your shows or something like that. On the website, for your same standard monthly hosting fee, you get up to five RSS feeds. Five different show listings on iTunes and everywhere else.

No other podcast hosting platform has that. They will all make you pay an additional subscription fee for each different show list that you have. This customer actually does have two, Dr. Nilda Show and Marketing Whisperer. Most of you who have one show will not see this dropdown list or this go button, but if you have more than one feed and all you have to do to get another one is request it from us and give us the information for your show. All the stuff on the left, we will set it up for you and add it to your account so you can access it from your same login. All you’ve got to do is select your other show, click go, it will refresh this page and you will be managing that other show. It’s completely independent. We’re just giving you access to it from your same login. That’s another nice feature we have here.

That’s all for this tutorial. This change feed button is something I’m going to address an additional video and you would use that for one of two reasons. I’ll just explain what that is or why it is. I’m not going to teach how to do it here. I’m going to do that in another tutorial, but let’s say you were in Dr. Nilda Show and you created an episode, but you forgot which podcast you were in. You actually were entering a Marketing Whisperer episode, but you did it in this profile. That’s a mistake. You’d need to move it from one feed to another. If you have an additional feed, you have the ability to move an episode from one feed to another. The change feed button is how you would do that. There will be a different tutorial on how to do that.

The other reason you would do that is if you have a podcast. I have one podcast that has more than 500 episodes and iTunes will only display the most recent 300 episodes at most. Every month I have to take four or five episodes or depending on how many you publish a week. You could be needing to do this weekly moving several episodes every week from your main feed that has the latest episodes to your volume one or your classics feed, whatever you might call it. You need to move them to the other feed in order to make room for new episodes. If that is something that applies to you, go back to help resources and look for that video for changing an episode from one feed to another. Thank you for reading this tutorial. Thank you for being a customer of Podetize.com.

Important Links:

• Podetize.com
• Smart Podcast Player
• Simple Podcast Press
• https://www.Podetize.com/StatsAPI/www.Podetize.com
• LastPass