How To Self Host A Podcast On Your Website For Free With Castos In 15 Min
hi guys in this Tutorials I’m going to show you how you can host your own podcast on your website for free I’m also going to show you how you can make the most of the free trial from seriously simple podcasts from castos podcasting is a great way to increase traffic on your website and build your fan base and I’m also going to show you how you can sign up for Google Podcast manager so as always sit back relax hit that like And subscribe button and let’s get into the Tutorial.
Sign Up to Castos
Okay guys to start things off we’re going to sign up for castos you don’t have to sign up but you do get a free 14-day trial that we may as well take advantage of so you’re gonna have to enter in your name your email address and create a password or you can create an account by clicking on the Google button at the bottom you can host your podcasts on castos but we’re not going to do that today we’re just going to sign up for a free trial and we’re going to be hosting our podcasts on our own WordPress website.
The benefits of Hosting with castos is that you have advanced analytics private subscribers and you have editing services but the most important reason is that it doesn’t slow down your website or take up valuable space the sign up link for castos is in the description below once you’ve entered in your name email address and your password you can choose your plan you can either pay monthly or you can pay annually if you do choose to sign up for the year as a one-off payment you will also receive a discount.
Once you’ve chosen your plan click on select and enter in your your card details just remember to cancel the subscription before you actually get billed at the end of the 14 days once you’ve signed up for cast us then head over to your WordPress dashboard from here you’re going to have to click on plugins in the left hand side and click on add new now in the search bar type in seriously simple or you can type in castos once the plugins have loaded we need to install the first one which is seriously simple podcasting by castos.
Once it has installed click on the activate Button as you can see on the left hand side of our dashboard podcasting has been added we’re going to give that a click if you want to add a new podcast all you need to do is click on add new episode you can either do that by clicking on the add new episode button on the top of the page or the one in the menu well you’ll notice once the page loads is it looks like any other WordPress page.
self-hosted podcast manager
But what you will know is is at the bottom it’s got podcast episode details now I know this may look a little bit confusing but I will show you how I lay out my podcasts and I’ll show show you where everything goes now to get things started the first thing we’re going to do is enter our episode title for this episode I’m going to be using the audio from last week’s YouTube video so I’ve already copied that title and I’m going to be pasting it into the title box I’m also going to add a H2 heading.
To be lazy I’m just going to use the same heading that I use for the H1 what I’m going to do next is add an image to our page now what I’m going to do next is add an image to our page you don’t have to add an image here they’re not displayed in most podcast players what you’ll normally see within Google and Spotify is just text but sometimes there is a link back to this page within your podcast and you want something for people to look at what I’d normally add here is the thumbnail to the episode of the podcast.
You can style this page pretty much however you want for the purpose of the Tutorial I am going to keep it fairly straightforward and simple with my image added I’m going to just adjust the size of the image and I’m going to move on to add in some text you do want to be quite this descriptive here as this is displayed within the podcast and it’s this text that’s displayed within the description of Google and Spotify.
You can also add and use links in this text they are displayed within Google podcasts and Spotify podcasts and that’s it basically for the page that’s as simple as I keep my normal podcasts albeit with a little more text for the description now we’re going to go down to the bottom of the page and add our podcast episode details this is where we upload our video or audio episode it’s also where we add our episode thumbnail.
So what we’re going to do first is upload our file for our audio there’s nothing difficult about this part all you do is click on upload files select a file and locate the audio file for your episode once you’ve found it click on open once the audio file has been uploaded always like to add a title the artist which is me and a description for the file once you’ve completed filling everything in then click on select in the bottom right hand side of your media library.
Now we’re going to add add the thumbnail for the episode and all I’m simply going to do is click on the upload new image button and I’m going to use the same image that I used in the top half of the page now all that’s left to add is the length of the episode and the file size and we can find all this information out within WordPress if we click on the upload file button again and select our audio file in the right hand side of our media library it will give us the length of our podcast and the size of it.
Now with that information we’re going to go back into our episode and we’re going to fill in the duration box and the file size until that’s completed you can scroll down the page and fill in the rest of the information I don’t personally use iTunes and I don’t have an account but you can fill in this information if you do now all I’m going to do is add our featured image on the right hand side of the screen for this I’m going to be selecting the same image.
We’ve been using all along you can then add tags to your podcast on the right hand side and you can set the episode as part of the series which I’m going to show you how to do later in the video but before I show you how to do that I’m going to add an excerpt to the podcast it is optional but I’d like to fill it in anyway once I’ve completed this normally what I’ll do is I’ll go into rank math in the top right hand side and check on my SEO score by using RankMath.
You can increase the chances of your podcast being discovered if you haven’t got rank math there is a link in the description below and to find out how to use rank math for free then check out the video in the top right hand side of the screen once all of this has been done you’ve ready to post your first podcast all you need to do is click on the publish button with our first podcast episode published.
We’re going to go back into our WordPress dashboard and as you’ll see within the podcast tab we’ve got our title of our podcast we’ve got the awful which is me and we’ve got our thumbnail image now the next time we want to add a new podcast episode all we need to do is click on add new episode in the left hand side or at the top of the screen then it’s just a case of filling out the same information as before if we want to add tags to our podcast.
All we need to do is click on tabs in the left hand side and fill out the information on the left in tags it can help us organize our podcasts later on to create a tag you need to First enter in a name because that one episode was for OneSignal.
I’m going to type into the name box then we need to add a slug which is the URL and we’re going to type in one signal again finally we’re going to add a description it is worth being as descriptive as possible as it lets people know what this Topic’s about it can also help to show your content to the right people once you’ve finished filling all this out click on the add new tag button and as you’ll notice on the right hand side our OneSignal tag has been added.
Now on the left hand side we’re going to click on all podcasts if we want to create a new podcast all we need to do is fill in the information so we’re going to start by typing in one signal for the name of our podcast if you think of a podcast as a season this is the best way to understand it you can have the season name of the podcast you can type in a new mug add a description and a new cover image for each podcast.
And if you’ve got multiple Seasons then you can put them all under one umbrella so your parent podcast could be cars and as part of that podcast series you may have one podcast on sports cars and another run and takes cars you’ll be able to give both Seasons or series a different thumbnail image but keep them under the same podcast parent as cars then if you want to create a new series all together and go on to something like fashion.
Then you would create a podcast called fashion then you can create your sub podcasts which could be Formal Wear or sportswear now all that’s left to do here is ADD our thumbnail image to our podcast series I’m being lazy here I’m just going to select the one that I’ve been using all along and this is a cover image for the whole series so you would want to make this different to your episodes.
Once all that information has been filled out click on the add new podcast button at the bottom and as you’ll see on the right hand side our one series podcast has been added if we ever want to make any changes to our podcast all we need to do is hover over it and click on the edit button here you’ll be able to change the name the slug the description and the podcast image and at the bottom it gives you all the details about the podcast if you make any changes click on the update button at the bottom.
Castos Settings
Now what I’m going to do is add the tags and the podcast name to our previous episode to do that I’m going to go to all episodes on the left hand side hover over our episode and click on the edit button wait for the page to load and on the right hand side click on all podcasts and as you can see we can highlight one signal you can also add the one signal tab just above now all you need to do is click on update and if we go back into WordPress we’ll see that our podcast name has been added.
Every time we want to add a new podcast or series click on all podcasts and fill out the same information as before if you are finding this video useful so far please do hit that like And subscribe button and the notification Bell what we’re going to do now is click on settings on the left hand side in the general settings I normally keep this as is if you want to be able to add your podcast to other Pages then you can go to the player Tab and style it yourself.
If you choose to embed your podcast player onto another page you can choose its location it’s buttons and its style I will show you what the player looks like later in the video but for now we’re going to scroll back up to the top of the page and we’re going to click on feed details in here you’ll be able to change your podcast title the subtitle and the categories that it’s displayed in but again I’ll quickly come back to this later in the Tutorial.
The next one we’re going to click on is Security in the top row here you can set who can see your podcasts you can set a username and a password next up we’re going to click on publishing in top row in here you’ll find your RSS feed next up in the top row is hosting and if you’re hosting your podcast on cast our servers then this is where you type in your email address and your castos API key if you have podcasts hosted on other platforms you can click on Import in the bro and enter in your RSS feed.
You can also manage them by making sure they’re in the right podcast feed and category and finally in the top row is extensions in here you’ll be able to find other tools that help you with your podcast such as templates and statistics the next thing we’re going to take a look at is options in the left hand side of our WordPress dashboard in here you’ll be able to choose all the places that your podcast is sent to.
All you need to do is Tick the ones you want and scroll down to the bottom and click on save you will probably need accounts for all the platforms that you look into post to and I’ll show you how to sign up for one of those which is Google later on in the video now that we’ve selected all the podcast platforms that we want to broadcast to we’re going to go back into settings and click on feed this is where you want to make sure that your podcasts are being put in the right categories.
You can put them into three categories and free subcategories I forgot to add my podcast image cover so I’m going to put that on now I’m also going to add my Google your email address this will save time later on verifying our account you can use a different email address here but if you do use a different one then you will be sent a verification code if you’re signing up for Google podcasts by entering it in.
Now we can skip this process as it’ll be able to read its own verification just to quickly go back to the categories there are about 12 you can choose from and most of these will have subcategories as I said there is three main categories you can choose from and you can add three subcategories if we scroll down to the very bottom of the page we can add our subscription buttons for each platform all we have to do is copy the Subscribe link from the platform and paste it into the box.
Remember if you do make any changes don’t forget to click on the save button.
Now if we want to go and see our podcast page we need to go to our website and at the end of our URL in our address bar we need to type in slash podcast now this page isn’t the most attractive depending on your theme you can change the layout if we click on a post we can see what our podcast looks like and it’s got the player at the top of the screen.
As I said earlier on you can also use rank math with castos so if we go back to our WordPress dashboard and on the left hand side this time we’re going to click on rank math if we click on sitemap settings we can see that podcast has been added to our site maps you can add these to your Google search console or you can add them to other search platforms like Bing.
Sign Up To Google Podcast Manager
All that’s left to do now is show you how to sign up to Google Podcast manager so on their website we’re going to click on the start.
Now button we’re then going to be asked for our RSS feed for our podcast if you copy the RSS feed from castos you may get this message at the bottom that says that your URL is invalid to correct this you’ll need to go into the address bar and change it from feed podcast to podcast slash feed now once you’ve done that you’ll click on the next step button in the bottom right hand side you’ll then be asked to confirm your selection if everything looks okay click on next step in the bottom right step.
Three says that they’ll send you a verification code but when you click on next step it will take you to the verify ownership once you click submit your ownership will be verified click on get started and you’ll start being able to see your analytics so you might be wondering why I said at the start of the video to sign up for castos on their 14 day free trial and this is so we can start to use some of the features in our WordPress dashboard the one I use most is seriously simple stats.
Once installed it’ll pull all the information from your podcasting platforms and put them on One display on your WordPress dashboard this saves you time and it shows you where all your traffic is coming from remember if you do want to sign up to castos or rank math there is a link in the description below it is an affiliate link it doesn’t cost you any more to use but it does give me a very small percentage of their profits if you choose to sign up.
Wrapping Up Tutorial
If you have found this video useful please do hit that like and subscribe button the notification Bell for future Tutorials if you want to see how you can use rank math for free to improve your SEO score then check out the video displayed on the screen now.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next Tutorial
