What Does The New Podcast iTunes Submission Process Mean For Podcasters? – The Podcast Report With Paul Colligan Episode #80

Hey, everybody, it's Paul Colligan, and this is episode 80 of the podcast report. The question is, what does the new podcast itunes submission process mean for podcasters actually recording this one live on YouTube live, believe it or not. And I'm using a cool app, which I will answer some questions at the end. So, Rachel, I will answer your question at the end, but we're going to go over the changes at itunes and what they mean. I've got some notes here. I'm going to try not to wrinkle the paper as much because I know the microphone will fill that up. But with that said and done, let's get to work. So the big thought, the big idea is simply this. Itunes is changing the game. Are you changing with it? There are some new things at itunes, massive new things at itunes. We don't even know entirely what they mean yet. But the fact of the matter is I want to tell you what's there. Tell you what I think you need to do to get prepped for it, give you a chance to get in the update for how all of this stuff comes together. My name is Paul Colligan. I've been podcasting since podcasting was cool. I've got several books about it. I'm a podcast consultant, I'm a podcast speaker, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not what this is about. This is the podcast report where I help you, the podcaster, try to reach more with your message and profit more from your content. That's the goal of the show. That's what it is that we're trying to do. So today we're doing live on YouTube and I've got people commenting and that's so much fun. And thank you so much. The podcastreport.com 80 you'll be able to get the video of the test that we did. You'll be able to get the live YouTube presentation that we did, what we did there. You'll also be able to. When the video is complete, I'm going to do a special report and I'm actually going to get another video of walking through the entire process if you want to sign up for the special report. And if you want to sign up for the video, head out to the podcastreport.com 80 that'll let you sign up for both of those, depending on if you're listening to this after the fact, the report will either be there or. Or for people like Rachel and Kent and everybody else who's watching this live, you won't be there yet. But if you sign up, everything is ready for you to go. I don't like to date things here on the podcast report. I like to do the type of things that are evergreen, that have a long lasting impact. But the fact of the matter is this is big, this is huge, this is important and I want you to know about it. So there it is. I put this together quickly. These are just my general notes in mind map form. This is not a complete thought out process, but it's a thing that is so key and so vital right now that we're kind of go through this process together. So the outline for today is simply the what, the so what and the now what. This is a great outline. If you're putting together a podcast and you want to just know an outline for what you need to tell your audience, you got to tell them those three things. What's going on? So what does it mean? And then now what do you do about it? So that is the report for today. So what? There's a new thing in itunes. For the last 10 years, iTunes really hasn't. Or since itunes has been taking podcasts, it hasn't really changed. You click on the submit a podcast button and this thing popped up where you gave it the address of the RSS feed for your show and then bam, it accepted it and it brought it in. That was it. Even the screenshot hasn't changed until now. Now, if you type submit a podcast, if you click on the submit a podcast instead of itunes, it takes you out to a place called podcast connect. Now, for those of you familiar with itunes connect, it's actually just a subsidiary of iTunes Direct. If you don't know what itunes is direct, let me tell you, okay, not everything is set up in this new update. This is really, really important. There are still things inside of there that aren't complete. Apple lately, honestly has been doing really what I call beta releases. They're kind of releasing things that just aren't quite ready for primetime yet. So. And this isn't ready for primetime yet either. But we got to get ahead of it. Paul, what's not ready for primetime? The Apple watch not ready for primetime. The new Apple TV not ready for primetime. And this website, at least at the moment of this recording, not ready for primetime. This is ownership of your podcast pass submission. If you log in there right now with the email address that you've submitted pass podcast with and the password, if that email address is an Apple account, and if it isn't, you'll have to go ahead and make it one, and we'll chat about that in a second. You'll see all the podcasts that you've submitted. So I see Fred, old friend here on the show. The funny thing is, Fred, all those old podcasts, podcast tools and marketing online live, and all those shows are actually in there because they were all submitted with the same email address. So as a result, you're able to do things with your podcast past just submitting them and what you're able to do now and what you're able to do a little bit later. All really, really important stuff. But really it's ownership, past submission of the podcast. Now this hints to something big at itunes. And I've been hearing, not grumblings, that isn't the right word, but I've been hearing through the grapevine that big things are changing over itunes and this is definitely an example of what's happening now. I'm about to sneeze here and yeah, there it is. I said sneeze. And then of course it goes away, but there it is for the audio. So what's happened is itunes has changed. It's no longer a blank form inside of itunes. It's a full website with login and password and management and history and that kind of stuff that we don't know the entirety of it yet. But that's what's gone on. So. So what? Well, now you can make some changes you couldn't make before. You guys know, for a while, I was working with a company called Instant Customer. They had a podcasting platform that I had to build, help them build. The one problem with platform, and it's a problem with a lot of platforms, was that you couldn't pick up your podcast and move it from one place to another. I've shared in the podcast book, both versions of it, that that's really, really important. Well, now you can actually go in and you can change the source of the podcast, even if it's a place that won't let you move it. This is huge. I've got a podcast still over at instant customer that I'd like to change and I'm going to be able to do that. And this is, this is tremendous. So it can make some changes you wouldn't be able to make before longer term ownership, you know, now instead of just submitting it once and then being kind of terrified of the great itunes gods, we now have the ability to go in and change things later and update things later, which is really, really huge. It's also part of iTunes Connect. So if you're an iTunes Connect user, and what iTunes Connect is, is iTunes Connect is a place where, if you have an app. So we've got my how to podcast app. We've got the podcast report app. It's where you can log in and you can see where you've been downloaded, how many times you've been downloaded, how much money was made. Paul, can we see that for our podcasts? No, not right now. But the interesting thing is maybe that's coming later. I mean, it would make a lot of sense. Apple is really pushing hard in this space, and we don't know. So it's part of iTunes Connect. We don't have a lot of information. We don't know what's coming, but we know it's a platform. And the thing they spent a lot of time and effort on, money on. So I want to. I want to push that out. So that's the. So what, so now what now what do we do about this? Well, a couple things. Apple doesn't make a move unless they have a reason, good or bad. Apple's gotten to the point to where a large part of what they do is response in the industry. And what are they responding to? Do they know something that we don't know? Are they responding to. And all this is conjecture, all this is guessing, but are they responding to a bigger push for podcast on the Apple tv? If so, very interesting. Are they pushing to the new competition being represented by the coming Google search platform? I don't know if it does interesting. If they're just making things easier for the podcaster to manage their life because they've realized the podcasters deserve to make it a little bit easier to manage their life. I don't know. Easy. So what I'm doing here is I'm just. Now I'm not going to do that. You guys have came and I think it'd be interesting. This whole platform for streaming is fascinating. I'd love to do the whole push to the world thing, but I'm not going to worry about that. So Apple doesn't do this unless they have a reason. Google competition, Apple tv. Don't know what the reason is. You need to figure out what podcasts you have access to. Perhaps you submitted your podcast under an old email address that you let go, a podcast maybe domain that you let go, a company you no longer work for. If your podcast is now associated with that email address, I would, I would work diligently to get that email address back and see what you can do there. So you Gotta figure out what podcast you have access to. So. So login, see what's there. If you can figure out how you submitted the. The past shows previously, if you don't have that email address anymore, I would definitely take a look at that up, look that up and see what's going on there. I would ponder the implications to be able to make changes. I have spoken in the past of how one of my biggest regrets in podcasting is letting old shows go, podcast tools, marketing, online live, and even Internet marketing. This week I let those go and I lost the audience that came with that. And the fact of the matter is I don't have to let those go anymore and I can kind of get those back. And what happens if you can get these podcasts back? What do you do there? What are the other changes? Not just shows you've abandoned, but what are the changes you can make? I'll tell you this right now. I got a show, I mentioned this earlier with an old host. Yep. Rachel sees how this is huge with an old host. And the fact of the matter is, now I can move it, now I can take it back. And I was looking at the numbers and the numbers for this podcast are still really good. So the implications for this are really great. Get ready for greater management. This is big right now. We can change the title. We can set essentially a ping again, but that's about it at this point. And we'll go from there. I'm going to do Q and A at the end and I only see the last three or four Q&A. So we'll definitely try to chat these and see what we can do with that. But I think the implications of this could be interesting. So the what is itunes connect is now podcasts, podcasts. Connect.apple.com gives us more manageability than we ever had before. We can change a couple things, but we don't know what it is that we can change. We know that it's definitely not all there, but it's worth looking at. If you have old email addresses associated with your shows, dig those up, make those Apple accounts and go from there. And then just ponder what happens now that we've got longer term management and even, gosh darn it, ponder what happens if we're able to get stats or that type of thing. You have been listening to the podcast report. Some of you watching this live, some of you are watching the video of this, some of you are listening to the audio podcast of this. And so what's interesting is, regardless of how you're consuming this content. What I want you to do is I want you to subscribe to the show. I want you to Inside of iTunes thepodcastreport.com iTunes subscribe to the show. Make sure you get the next week's episode. If you're inside of Stitcher, go to the podcastreport.comstitcher if you tune in thepodcastreport.com tunein all of these will let you get the show on a regular basis. If you want to interact socially, I would love that thepodcastreport.com Twitter thepodcastreport.com Facebook or even thepodcastreport.com 80 for episode 80 to speak to what you think about this episode and what this means there inside the website, I will have under today's episode, as I said, a link to pick up the what so what now what report that I'm going to put together for you and when I do a new submission in the new area, I will get you out that video as well. So you can get that@the podcastreport.com 80 other links out there will be the podcast book and of course the apps that we have, which is absolutely fascinating. Social subscribe There it is. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you're listening to the audio version of this, we're going to cut off at this point. If you're watching the video version of this, I'm going to take Q and A from the audience for as long as it comes and we will go from there. So if you're listening to audio, thanks for listening. If you want to catch the Q and A, basically head out to the podcastreport.com 80 and forward through in YouTube about 15 minutes and we will go from there. So thank you for listening. Chat with you soon. Bye.