Here are 8 things you should check in Apple Podcasts Connect. Hey, that rhymes.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Apple provides a portal for you to submit and manage your own podcast in Apple Podcasts.
It's called Podcasts Connect. And the DSers will hate it because there is that extra S
in there, PodcastsConnect, and set PodcastsConnect.Apple.com. Plus, countless other podcast apps and podcasting
tools rely on Apple's data through their free API, and that data is powered by podcasts
that are in Podcast Connect. So whether your podcast has been an Apple Podcast for years
or you're just starting out, I suggest that you check these 8 things right away. If you'd
like to follow along in the notes for this episode or review this so you can check those
things while you are looking at the notes. Get the notes a simple tap or swipe away inside
your podcast app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/checkapple. Or you could just look at the chapters if
you're using an app that supports chapters.
Number one. Check that you have agreed to Apple's terms of service. Apple usually
has to update their terms of service whenever they launch major new features. For example,
Apple started generating transcripts for all podcasts in February 2024 and that requires
your agreement to their Terms of Service so they can make those transcripts, which they
won't do until you agree.
Apple makes it easy to know whether you've agreed to their latest terms.
Simply log in to podcastconnect.apple.com.
If you're let straight into your account, then you've already agreed to the latest terms.
If not, you will be prompted to read and agree to the terms before you're allowed to manage
your podcast. So if you don't see them, you don't need them. And if you're offering a
paid subscription to your audience through Apple Podcasts, check the business tab to
see if there are any additional actions you need to take. Like there might be additional
new terms you must agree to, or you might need to provide legal or financial information.
And especially now since this is tax season when I'm recording this episode, this page
is also where you would go to get your invoices and tax information if you have any sales
of your premium podcast through Apple Podcasts. That's number one. Number two, check that
your podcast is in your Podcast Connect account. Many podcasters don't actually control their
own catalog listing for their own podcast. This is because they either submitted their
podcast before Podcast Connect existed or they allowed someone else to submit their
podcast for them. This might have been a podcast hosting provider or someone helping them with
their podcast like a podcast consultant like me.
That's what I did several years ago.
I still have a couple of my clients' podcasts in my own account.
I've tried to get them transferred out.
Nothing's happened with that yet.
But that might be the case for you.
So that's why you need to see if you even have your podcasts in your own account.
But at least the process to reclaim ownership is fairly easy.
Step one, make sure you've checked all your possible Apple ID accounts.
You might have made an account specifically for your podcast.
You might have a different Apple ID account, just check all of them.
Maybe even ask your co-host or anyone else who works on your podcast with you if they
submitted your podcast and it might be in their account.
So check all of those places and if it's not there, then step two, log into the account
you want to hold your podcast or multiple podcasts and contact Apple through their contact form.
You want the specific option that is missing podcasts.
That's the option to select.
And if you click on the link through the notes for this episode at tap or swipe away or at
theaudacitytopodcast.com/checkapple, that link will take you directly to that form if you're
logged into Podcast Connect.
And it should pre-fill in the missing podcast option.
But then move on to step three, fill in all the other form fields completely.
You need your RSS feed URL, you need your name, which you probably know that part.
You need the ID number of the podcast that you're looking for.
That's simply get the URL of your podcast from Apple Podcasts and the number at the
very end where it says ID and then there's a number.
That is your ID number.
Profound, right?
And then step four, await and then follow Apple's instructions, which will have you
enter a special code somewhere in your podcast RSS feed to verify your ownership or control
of that feed so they know you have permission and authority to make this change to the feed.
This is crucial for you to do with all your podcasts, especially any duplicate podcast
listings you might have, which is probably more likely if you've ever switched podcast
hosting providers.
And I've done a previous episode about how to handle duplicate listings in Apple Podcasts.
Do not delete them and do not resubmit your podcast.
Go back to that episode to listen.
If you're in that situation where you've discovered there are multiple listings of
your podcast in Apple Podcasts, go listen to that episode for some ways that you can
fix that until Apple makes it better.
The rest of these items that I'm going to share with you require that you have access
to your podcast in your own Apple account or an account that you have access to.
Then moving on to number three, check that your podcast information is correctly loaded
in Apple Podcasts Connect.
Click into your podcast, or each of your podcasts if you have more than one in your account,
and look over the show details information, which will be the first screen that you will
see when you click on your podcast.
This includes your title, cover art, artist, description, and more.
You cannot change these details in Podcast Connect.
Instead, you would change these in the publishing tool that is creating your RSS feed.
That might be your podcast hosting provider, that might be your website, like if you're
using PowerPress to create your RSS feed.
Whatever is creating that RSS feed, that's where you change this information.
But viewing these details here lets you confirm that everything is properly loading from your
feed into the Apple Podcasts system.
That's why you need to look it over so that you can know that it is displaying it correctly.
And if you're having trouble, the first thing I suggest doing is validating your podcast
RSS feed through any of the following three validators.
I have the links to each of these in the notes for this episode.
Those would be Cast Feed Validator, Podbase, and a new one is TrueFans.
Each of these have podcast validators that you can test and do test all three on your
podcast RSS feed so that you can see if you have any errors or anything that you need
to fix.
This is if you're trying to fix a problem with your feed.
Like Apple might not have pulled in your new title or cover art and it's already been at
least a day and you're not seeing that updated information inside Podcast
Connect, validate your feed to make sure there aren't any problems, but also then
even check where that feed is being generated to make sure that you've set
everything correctly over there. Especially watch out for problems with
your podcast cover art. Like if the dimensions are wrong, the dimensions are
too small, the file is too large, it's the wrong file type. Most of the problems I
see are with the podcast cover art. There are occasionally other really wacko problems that
happen. Like I just helped someone recently with a problem. They were generating their podcast RSS
feed through Drupal. That's a blast from the past. And the way that Drupal was set up was entering
something that actually the validators did not catch as invalid in the RSS feed. And that was
hyperlinked text in the title. I think that's what it was in the title for every episode and
and the title for the overall podcast, hyperlinked text was in there like with the A HREF tag.
And I think that's what was breaking the feed and surprisingly the validators, at least
at that time, didn't catch that.
That's where sometimes you just need to make sure that you're using a good podcast publishing tool.
Moving on to number four, check the optional podcast information fields.
On this same show information page are several optional fields that you should populate or
verify if they already have information in them.
these include update frequency, content rights, and show contact information. And that information
is especially important if you've removed your email address from your RSS feed because Apple
needs a way to be able to contact you about your podcast. So if your address isn't in your feed,
put it in here through this field or verify that's correct if it's already entered.
This information is proprietary to Apple Podcasts and thus currently not pulled from your RSS feed,
like especially the frequency information in there that's not pulled from your RSS feed,
at least not yet. Although we do have an option for that in Podcasting 2.0. But to set that
frequency of how many episodes you publish in a certain amount of time, that kind of thing,
you would set that inside of Podcast Connect for your podcast. Number five, check your Apple
Podcasts distribution availability. And this affects other apps too, not only Apple Podcasts.
Switch to the availability page and there are two important options to ensure your podcast
can be discovered by as many people as possible. The first option is countries or regions. I
recommend setting this to "make this show available in all countries or regions".
You can click into the edit view to ensure all 175 countries are selected. And that 175,
that's the number now. Many years ago it was 155. They added 20 more. Someday in the future they
might add more countries to that so just make sure all of them are selected. And there's
an easy select all, select none option in there.
Now despite this option, even if you select everything in there, some countries still
block explicit content. And it seems like Communist China blocks almost everything anyway.
Like The Audacity to Podcast is not available in the China Apple Podcasts catalog. I guess
Maybe I said freedom one too many times, which maybe one time is too many for communist China.
Second option, moving on quickly, distribution. I recommend enabling this option and make sure
it is enabled. It says, at least at this time, it says "make this show available for distribution"
which why would you not have that option checked? This ensures that countless other podcast apps and
and podcasting tools using the catalog API from Apple Podcasts will be able to see your podcast.
For example, Pocketcast, Podcast Addict, Overcast, many other very popular apps have for many
years used the Apple Podcasts API for search and for the catalog and everything.
So if your podcast is not visible in the Apple Podcasts API, then people could not find it
in those other apps.
So if you uncheck this, it makes your podcast not available through the API so people with
those other apps would have to manually subscribe to your podcast.
They wouldn't be able to search for it and you wouldn't be able to easily link to it
in any of those other apps.
But this is, thankfully, the default option.
So make sure that both of these options are set this way so that you have the maximum reach.
But if for some reason you don't want your podcast available to as many people as possible,
Then you can change these options to limit your reach.
I don't know why you would want to limit your reach and reduce the size of your audience
like that, but if you really wanted to, you can do that now.
Number six, switch the transcript default to your provided transcripts.
On the same availability page is a third option that I feel defaults inappropriately.
It's the transcripts option.
For some reason, Apple's, at least current, default is to use only their auto-generated
transcripts for your podcast.
So regardless of whether you're already using Podcasting 2.0 transcripts, which I talked
about in a previous episode about how to use podcast transcripts, I suggest switching this
option to the other option that, at least right now, is not the default.
And that option currently reads as this, "Display transcripts I provide or auto-generated
transcripts by Apple if one isn't provided." I think that's the way apps should behave
anyway. They should use what you supply first and by default and generate their own transcripts
only if you don't provide your own, through the Podcasting 2.0 transcript feature that
is. But you should also note that there is no way now to disable all transcripts for
your podcast. That's part of the terms of service you must accept for your podcast to
a main and Apple Podcasts is for it to have a transcript. If you really wanted to disable
transcripts, and I don't know why you would, you would have to either edit every episode
in Podcast Connect to use a custom episode specific setting to not use any transcripts.
And the only way you can get to that don't use anything option is by editing every single
episode through Podcast Connect. Or you could provide through the Podcasting 2.0 transcript
feature a nearly empty transcript file for all the episodes that you don't want to have transcripts
and you'd put that inside of your episode in your RSS feed. And you could share that same file in
the same URL for all of your episodes so it's not like you have to create a new one every time.
But why would you do this? Why would you limit the accessibility of your podcast like that?
I can understand if you don't want Apple to use their transcripts. I totally understand that and
I think that you should provide your own transcripts if you think yours can be better than Apple's.
Although Apple has made some really good progress at making their transcripts really good. So you
might want to check out their transcripts. Try downloading theirs and compare it to your own
transcripts to see if maybe like there's better. You could download it then re-upload it through
your podcasting 2.0 tag so that other apps could use that transcript instead of whatever you had
before. But because transcripts are important for accessibility and usability even for people who
don't have any kind of hearing impairments, I highly recommend keeping your transcripts
enabled for all of your episodes. But just switch the settings so Apple will default to your
transcripts if you provide them and if you don't provide them then it falls back to their
own transcripts and that happens only if you don't provide any.
The idea here is that the episode will have a transcript.
Either you provide it or Apple makes it, but no matter what it will get one.
But switch that option and you have to switch this option for every podcast in your account.
Not for every episode, but just for every podcast and then it applies that to all of
the episodes.
that so that it uses your transcript if you provide one and then it falls back
to Apple's if you don't provide one. Number seven, check your Apple podcast
ratings and reviews. There is also a ratings and reviews page that lets you
see your Apple podcasts and only Apple podcast ratings and reviews. There was a
time where I panicked when I saw that because I thought, "Oh no! This is going
to kill my business!" No, not really. Because yes, you can see your ratings and
reviews in there, at least your Apple Podcasts ratings and reviews, it requires you to switch
between all 175 countries before knowing if you even have any ratings and reviews in those
175 countries. It doesn't show your difference of ratings versus written reviews and you
can't search, sort, or filter your ratings and reviews. You also don't get notified
when you get a new rating or review so you would have to come back to check all of those
175 countries, each one by one, as frequently as you want to check it. You can download
your reviews but you would have to do that one country at a time. And there are 175 different
countries you'd have to switch between. That's cumbersome, right? That's why you
should use Podgagement, formerly known as My Podcast Reviews, to engage your audience
and grow your podcast. Podgagement not only tracks all those 175 places automatically
for you. It also tracks the non-Apple places which you are not going to see in Apple Podcast
Connect. Plus, with Podgagement's Constellation plan, you can easily collect written or voicemail
feedback from your audience, discover podcast networking opportunities, receive direct reviews
from your audience, and more. I personally created Podgagement for you because I believe
engagement with your audience is the most powerful and most rewarding thing you can
have with your podcast. So please check it out at Podgagement.com. I've got the link
to that in the notes for this episode. You can try it free over there. Podgagement.com,
I'd love to have you using it to engage your audience over there, especially with the new
cool features like getting your voicemails from your audience through there, or they
could send a written message if they want to. Instead, they could include a written
message with their voicemail message. You can check all your ratings and reviews in
nearly 200 places, so more than only Apple Podcasts and so much more over there. I enjoy
using the tool myself and I did personally create Podgagement, version 2.0 of my podcast
reviews. It's Podgagement now. Check it out at podgagement.com or you can continue
to do things the manual way, especially clicking thousands of times inside of Apple Podcasts
Connect to see your ratings and reviews from only Apple Podcasts.
Moving on to number 8.
Check your Apple Podcasts analytics.
Lastly, but probably most exciting, are the podcast stats you get from Apple Podcasts.
Remember though, these stats measure consumption only in Apple Podcasts.
So any numbers you see will be a smaller subset of your audience.
Nonetheless, since Apple Podcasts is the number one podcast app, I suspect the percentages
and engagement levels that you see would be close to an accurate, albeit smaller, reflection
of your whole audience.
Here are some of the handy and potentially addictive data points you can see.
Total followers, engaged listeners, average consumption or completion rates, where your
audience skipped or stopped within your episodes, performance comparisons across your episodes,
more. Some really cool stats in there and they keep building on to this as well.
Just keep in mind it is only a small subset of your audience and due to the
way that some of Apple's privacy stuff works, it's even a smaller subset than
you might see compared to your analytics from your podcast hosting provider. So
you might see that you get a thousand downloads from Apple Podcasts but then
when you go into Apple Podcasts Connect you see that maybe you're getting only
700. Well, it's a smaller subset for multiple reasons. Don't worry about the raw number
itself. Look at the directions of things and the percentages and that might be then a fairly
accurate reflection of the rest of your audience. Like if most of your audience is listening
to only the first half of your episode through Apple Podcasts, probably they're doing that
in other podcast apps as well. Although there could be a case to be made that if someone
intentionally chooses an app other than Apple Podcasts and they're on an Apple device, they
are probably a little bit more of a podcast super consumer and they might be more likely to listen
to all of the episodes because they're not using the default podcast app. That is an assumption,
but I think it could be a reasonable assumption. Nonetheless, the stats that you see in Apple
Podcasts Connect could be generally reflective of your whole audience. So once again, these
These eight things are number one, check that you have agreed to Apple's terms of service.
Number two, check that your podcast is in your account.
Number three, check that your podcast information is correctly loaded.
Number four, check the optional information fields.
Number five, check your distribution availability, which does affect other apps too.
Number six, switch the transcript default to use your provided transcript.
Number seven, check your Apple podcast ratings and reviews.
Number 8. Check your Apple Podcast Analytics As I hope you can see, even if you don't
use Apple products or dislike their ecosystem, there are still many advantages to keeping
your Apple Podcasts account current and especially learning from its really cool data.
Check out the resources and links that I mentioned for this episode a tap or swipe away in the
notes or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/checkapple. Let's visit the community corner. Leslie
Martin pointed out, and you probably knew this already, that 7777 or the 7777 boost
is a striper boost, not a rush boost, which would have been 2112. As I've said previously,
hard rock is not actually my preferred music style, so I know nothing about these bands.
I couldn't tell you a single song that these bands have produced. I could tell you all
kinds of things about movie soundtrack music, not hard rock bands like that. So my bad,
that was a striper boost that I received previously. Some of these numbers I might not recognize.
But here's one I do. 1701 sats, a number that I do recognize as the Star Trek Enterprise
from Brian Insmeaner from my previous episode. He said, "Ugh, myth information." Wow,
that's just so fun to say and a challenge to say without slurring and lisping the whole
"Myth Information" and also streaming satoshis from Brian Insmeiner, Dave Jackson, and Dwev
Dwev, not sure how to pronounce that. But thank you very much for those streaming sats.
I really appreciate those. If you would like to send a boostergram or stream some satoshis
to the Audacity podcast, I'd be very grateful for that. Or if you just want to send a donation,
your app might have a boost button or a donation button. Tap both of them. Send whatever you
feel the podcast is worth to you. Also, special thanks for the five-star review from Josh Liston
in Australia. He said, and these are just excerpts from his review, he said, "A perfect mix of fun
and expertise in podcasting." He also said that the Audacity podcast is making often dry technical
subjects a lot of fun without wasting people's time. You can read that full review in the notes
for this episode. Thank you very much Josh for that feedback and the kind review in Apple Podcasts.
I really appreciate this engagement and I would love to see you in the community corner.
Please make sure that if I don't already know and have said what your podcast is, please
make sure that you mention it in your booster gram, in your review, in your message, anything
like that so that I can give it a shout out as well here in the community corner.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for
for you to go check your Apple Podcasts Connect account
or start your own podcast and grow it for passion
and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.
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