When you publish a podcast to a hosting service, a lot of technical stuff happens. The hosting service stores your audio files securely on their servers. These files are organised into episodes and accompanied by metadata like titles and descriptions. The service generates a unique RSS feed that contains all the episode information. The places where you download your podcast from like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, will then read this feed and make your podcast available on their service. When you release a new episode, the hosting service updates the feed, notifying directories about the addition. This triggers the directories to fetch the latest episode, making it available to listeners worldwide.
So when you choose a podcasting host they will make sure that the podcast can be listened to by all users in the world who find it on their preferred podcasting service.
Spreaker Free account
The SustainCast project will be using Spreaker as the hosting service, since they have a free option called “Free Speech”. This option however will only allow you to host one podcast so we will make an account for each language. We will make sure that the artwork and titles and theme music are the same, so people can find the different language versions if they like, but most likely a typical user of the podcast will only be listening to one of the national versions and then the English one for an insight into the other countries. https://www.spreaker.com/
Dissemination
The publication of the podcast is only to make it available to the listeners, but it will not help them find it. You will have to use all your normal channels of advertising and dissemination in order to spread the word of our podcast. We will be using the regular channels on social media for this, but this being a podcast we might have to think outside the box a bit. Ask all who have been part of making it to spread the word on the personal social media feeds, and research if there are any national podcast lists we can sign up to be on. Podcasting is still a young medium, and even though the big producers are investing a lot of money to promote their popular podcasts, small independent producers are still able to shine through if the quality is good. Be creative in your efforts and make sure to spread the word about the project as well as the podcast.
