Looking for another way to draw web surfers to your RSS feed? Consider making audio and/or video content available through your feed. Right now, without doing anything special at all, you can put a regular link to the content in one of your feed items, and a visitor can click on it to download the file (an MP3 audio file or a Torrent file for instance). In RSS 2.0, however, there’s a new feature called an enclosure for digital media items. Enclosure-sensitive client software, such as iPodder, iPodderX, Doppler or Nimiq can utilize the link, content length and content type stored in an enclosure to automatically download the content in the background. The media content could be automatically transferred to an attached Apple iPod (thus the term podcasting), to some other attached media device, or stored for later enjoyment.

Why Podcasting Will Help You

Podcast content is a very fast-growing segment of internet media. Simply having podcast content in your feed and advertising that fact by listing your feed in one of the free up-and-coming podcast directories will draw more traffic to your site.

Feedburner recently reported that their SmartCast service manages approximately 1750 podcast feeds as of February 2005, up from just 750 in December 2004. Several of them are in Feedburner’s top 50 feeds and a couple have more than 3000 subscribers each. Overall, Feedburner tracked 24000 listeners to their podcast feeds in February 2005, up from just 13500 a month earlier. It’s just going to become more popular going forward, especially with Apple selling millions and millions of their iPods.

Since podcast directories are even younger than blog and RSS feed directories, your feed’s listing in them will stand out and be noticed. In contrast to blogs and RSS feeds though, you won’t often get listed automatically: actual humans will review your podcast content for quality and appropriateness before they’ll list it in their directory. Personally I think this is a good thing, so we’re not all inundated with technical monologues and audio spam.

When your podcast is ready, you can find out where to publicize it using my regularly-updated list of podcast directories, search engines and related sites on my Free RSS Resources website, ordered by their Alexa rankings (just like my lists of RSS feed directories and blog directories).

Stay tuned, tomorrow we’ll discuss the easiest way to set up a podcast, which feed readers support them, and they’re future (hint: it’s very bright!).

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