Introduction to Podcasting

[00:00:00] So you've been wanting to start a podcast, but didn't know where to start. Well, you're in luck. In this series, we're going to walk kind of a through z through every step you need to take to start a successful podcast for you and your brand.

[00:00:13] Hi, I'm Craig Hewitt from Castos. And in this introductory video, we're going to cover just kind of like, what is a podcast and why you should start one for you and your brand. So what is a podcast? Well, a podcast is a series of episodes. Think of them like chapters in a book where you're telling a story. Over time, podcast episodes can be released kind of all at once, like in a series, like a tv series, or every week, or every other week, kind of forever. It's really up to you. And that's the beauty of podcasting, is there's no rules around you have to do it like this, or you have to do it like that. It really is up to you as the creator to define the type of show you want and how you want to run it. So, from a technical perspective, podcasts are powered by what's called an RSS feed. It's really just a technical term for a link or a URL that has all of the information about your podcast at a meta level. So the title and the COVID image and the category in the description about your podcast. And then every time you publish an episode, it's included in that RSS feed. And it has things like the title of the episode, the show notes, and most importantly, the link to the media file. This can be audio or video that defines, really what a podcast is all about. So in a nutshell, in 30 seconds, that's what a podcast is. I think the bigger question is, why should you, as a creator, start a podcast here in 2024? There's a few reasons, but most importantly, I think podcasting comes down to storytelling, right? You have a story to tell, and we want to match up the medium with the type of content that you're creating. So it probably is that you're considering starting a podcast, because something like a YouTube video might not be exactly right. A long form blog post or a newsletter might not be the right medium for you because you want to tell a story in long form over time. Podcasting is really great for that. It's really great at creating a brand around you or your company, or your organization, or your initiative.

[00:02:08] And most importantly, I think it brings this kind of connection and community together, especially these days when everyone is online. Um, being able to kind of deeply know somebody and get to know them over time in a async on demand mobile first kind of way is is really amazing. So in this introductory video, at a high level, just gonna cover what is a podcast? What the heck is an RSS feed and why should you care? A little bit. We'll dive much more into this in depth in a few minutes, and then a few reasons why you might should consider starting a podcast, probably most of which you already know because you're here.

[00:02:43] In the next video, we're gonna cover exactly what an RSS feed is, how you can create one, and why it is the engine that powers everything around podcasting. To learn more about what we do at Castos, head to castos.com.

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