This post is part of series on Podcasting, beginning with Podcasting 101: Turning an audio file into a podcast ready audio file.

Warning: Technical post

This article will cover creating your very own podcast feed; which is to say, creating an XML file which will be your RSS feed. What I will not being covering, however, is recording the actual audio.

With that being said, let's make sure we're on the same page and define exactly what a podcast is. A podcast, is simply an audio file with an RSS feed attached to it. So, in other words, a subscribe-able audio file.

Now, let's dive into how to create your XML file.

Ideally you''ll use a web authoring program, but you can also use a simple text editing program such as Notepad for Windows or Text Edit for the Mac.

Here's an example of the code you'll use within the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Enter the title of your podcast</title>
<description>Enter general description of your podcast</description>
<link>Enter the URL for the website of your podcast</link>
<language>en-us</language>
<atom:link href="Enter the full URL for your XML file" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<copyright>Enter current copyright</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<webMaster>email for podcast owner</webMaster>

<item>
<title>Enter title of your individual podcast</title>
<link>Enter URL of your podcast</link>
<guid>Enter the URL to your mp3 file</guid>
<description>Enter the description of your individual podcast</description>
<enclosure url="Enter the URL to your mp3 file" length="15389705" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<category>Podcasts</category>
<pubDate>11 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Red text is information that you need to enter for yourself, black can be copied. Now for some explanation behind some of the tags.

<description>
When this is used closer to the <channel> tag, then you want to enter a general description of your podcast as a whole. When it is used later on under the <item> tag, then this is where you would describe the individual podcast you are uploading.

<atom:link href="Enter the full URL for your XML file" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
Enter the URL of your xml file. Example: http://www.zzz.com/rss.xml, inside the quotations.

<copyright>Enter current copyright</copyright>
Such as "Copyright 2010"

<lastBuildDate><pubDate>
What works on both of these is entering the date and time of the last time you updated your XML file.

This must be entered in the exact format you saw listed above.

day = "Mon"  / "Tue" /  "Wed"  / "Thu" /  "Fri"  / "Sat" /  "Sun"
month  =  "Jan"  /  "Feb" /  "Mar"  /  "Apr" /  "May"  /  "Jun" /  "Jul"  /  "Aug" /  "Sep"  /  "Oct" /  "Nov"  /  "Dec"

<webMaster>
Email address for the person responsible for the technical piece of the podcast.

*With that you have completed all the information needed for the <channel> section, after this, begins the first <item> section. Outside the dates and times, this information shouldn't change much. The <item> section will be about the individual podcast you are adding. Each time you add your new podcast, you will add another <item> section.

<title>
Title of your individual podcast.

<link>
Here you enter the URL to your podcast. Some people keep links and show notes for each individual podcast, if you do that, enter that URL here. If not, you can just enter the podcast's website that you entered earlier.

<guid>
Enter the URL to the mp3 file for the individual podcast.

<description>
Enter description of the individual podcast.

<enclosure url="Enter the URL to your mp3 file" length="15389705" type="audio/mpeg"/>
The <enclosure> tag is unique in that there is no closing tag to match it. Enter the URL again for the mp3 file inside the quotation marks. Next, enter the "length" (actually size of file) in bytes. You can find this by looking at the properties of your mp3 file by either right-clicking (PC) or ctrl-clicking (Mac).

<pubDate>
The last <pubDate> tag is for the publication date/time of that particular individual podcast. Each time you add a new <item> with a new podcast, this should be updated as well.

Now, save that file as .xml, and that's it. You have your XML file. Note that iTunes has many specific tags that you will want to add into this XML file for publication in their system. I'll post more on those later.

Each time you want to post a new podcast all you do is add a new <item> section.

Unfortunately, you'll still not done with your XML file though. The last thing you need to do is validate your feed. There a few different feed validators out there but here is probably the most common, Feed Validator. Validating your feed simply means that you are going to run your feed through a program that scans it for any errors. If you have some errors, it'll let you know. Once you've got a validated feed, you are now through with Podcasting 102.

Look for more posts coming soon taking you the rest of the way through publicizing your podcast.

This post will be part of series of podcasting, beginning with Podcasting 101: Getting your audio file podcast-ready, I will do taking you through the process of converting your audio file, to creating an RSS feed and publicizing.

In this post, I will cover how to get an image associated with your audio file. This image will then be used in iTunes or whatever you use as a podcast player.

This is isn't a difficult process at all. In this video tutorial I use Garage Band (part of iLife) and iTunes for the mac.

I just attended the Mayo-Ragan Communications conference at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ. A great conference with great information. Over 100 folks were in attendance and all in similar situations with their respective healthcare systems. Mostly all Marketing, Public Relations or web healthcare people there.

Some key notes I took vary in range from specific social media tools, ideas for those tools or notes in general:

1. YouTube: With keeping regular updates to your YouTube channel usually being a challenge, how about start getting physicians to talk about whatever the theme of the month is for healthcare. Example...this month is Breast Cancer Awareness month, get a doctor to explain some things about breast cancer and mention the services you have available.
2. YouTube: Ensure all your videos you place on YouTube have branding information placed on the video itself. Since someone can use YouTube to embed your video anywhere, it may not always be in context, this at least ensures your brand is staying with the video.
3. YouTube: Check out Henry Ford's YouTube channel, a great one to model yours after.
4. Monitoring: Check out Glassdoor. See what employees are saying about your company.
5. Monitoring: Sites like Vitals do exist, where patients can rate your doctors on their experience with them. These types of sites will only gain in popularity.
6. Podcasts: Check and use iTunes University. MD Anderson has done alot with this.
7. Podcasts: They are not dead as some have claimed, in fact, there are more than 3x the number of podcasts hosted by iTunes then the number of radio stations out there (over 100K).
8. Podcasts: Having podcasts without the blog or way of establishing community is not social media.
   
9. Blogs: There are other lifeforms for this other then the WordPress blogging platform, even though it dominates the market. MD Anderson uses Moveable Type for their internal blogs.
10. For physicians: Promote social media internally to your doctors. One way for them to see the benefit if they are unfamiliar with the tools out there is Sermo, an online community espcially built for physicians.
11. Flickr: For any site that you use to share images, be sure and use the Creative Commons licensing, images you are trying to share should not have "All Rights Reserved".

See also the second post in this series.

                   

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