Podcasting for Solopreneurs | Online Marketing Tips for Business Growth

125. What is an RSS Feed? | Podcasting Industry Jargon Explained

Julia Levine | Podcasting Coach for Online Business (The Podcast Teacher™)

Welcome to Podcasting for solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a podcasting question in five minutes or less. Today's question is, what is an RSS feed? This question comes from aspiring podcaster Veronica. Hey, Veronica, thank you so much for listening. Veronica went on to say that she's feeling a little hesitant to start her podcast because the term RSS feed sounds super techy and complicated, and she's not really tech savvy. I totally understand. And the good news is that it's not actually complicated at all. So your RSS feed is this magical delivery system. It's the technology behind the scenes that takes your podcast from point A to point B.

So point A is your podcast hosting platform. This is where your podcast, quote, unquote, lives on the Internet. I personally use and love buzzsprout as my podcast hosting platform, but there are a lot of great other options. And then point B is the listening app. So somewhere like Apple Podcasts or Spotify Overcast, there are a bunch of places where people can go to listen to your show. So your RSS feed is what connects those two. So every time you upload a new episode to your hosting platform, your RSS feed updates automatically, and that episode is pushed out to every listening app that your show is connected to. And the best part is that you don't really need to do anything with the RSS feed yourself.

So your podcast hosting platform creates the RSS feed for you. You have to copy and paste it just once. When you are first connecting Apple and Spotify, you're first creating that initial connection between the two platforms, and it's just a simple copy and paste, but after that, it just works automatically in the background. You can basically forget that it's even a thing. So while it does sound really technical, it is actually just simply the thing that makes your show appear on all of the listening apps. And your hosting platform handles 99% of it for you. So if the tech has been holding you back, you can let this be one less thing that you have to worry about. And if you have a podcasting question, click the send me your question link in the episode description and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode.

Until next time, happy podcasting.

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