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How to Host a Podcast with WordPress Using PowerPress

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How to Host a Podcast with WordPress Using PowerPress

Are you looking to host a podcast with WordPress? If that’s a resounding yes, you’ll definitely love this post. Today, we show you exactly how to create a successful podcast on your WordPress site using a nifty plugin known as PowerPress. Why PowerPress? Well, the plugin ships with a million and one features that help you host podcasts like a boss.

In addition, PowerPress helps you to distribute your podcasts to Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes Podcasts),  Spotify and Google Podcasts among other places. As such, the plugin allows you to reach millions of listeners without bending backwards. The best part is the plugin is free and incredibly easy to set up and use.

That being said, grab yourself a hot mug of coffee and let’s roll. Oh, please don’t hesitate to ask questions and share your thoughts in the comment section at the end of this post.

Download PowerPress from WordPress.org

How to Use PowerPress to Host a Podcast with WordPress

Without wasting another second, let us set up PowerPress to create and host a podcast with WordPress. Don’t worry one bit; you can configure the plugin even if you’re the perfect beginner without any coding knowledge. Let’s get down to business.

Installing PowerPress

PowerPress is available at WordPress.org plugin repo meaning you can install it right from within your WordPress admin dashboard. How? On your WordPress admin menu, navigate to Plugins > Add New as shown below.

installing a new wordpress plugin

Next, enter PowerPress in the search box and once you find the plugin, hit the Install Now button as we highlight in the image below.

installing powerpress wordpress plugin

After that, hit the Activate button.

activating the powerpress plugin

Activating PowerPress add a new item to your WordPress admin menu. Click this PowerPress menu item as we highlight in the screengrab below.

powerpress podcasting plugin on wordpress admin menu

Configuring PowerPress

On the next screen, configure your podcast basic settings. You can add settings such as your podcast title, set up Apple Podcasts, integrate Blubrry services (media hosting and statistics), and link your blubrry.com account (if you have one) among other things.

powerpress settings to host a podcast with WordPress

Configure your settings (I promise it is easy as A, B, C), scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit the Save Changes button.

save powerpress settings

Creating Your First Podcast

With your basic settings ready, you’re ready to start creating podcasts. Click the Create a blog post with an episode link as shown in the image below.

creating a podcast with powerpress

Clicking this link redirects you to the familiar WordPress post editor. See? Didn’t I tell you PowerPress makes it easy to host a podcast with WordPress?

powerpress wordpress podcast plugin

What next? Enter your podcast title and content the same way you create a blog post. But a podcast is not complete with the audio/video file. How do you add that? It’s simple, scroll towards the bottom of the page until you see the following section.

adding powerpress podcast media file in wordpress post editor

At this point, you should have your podcast file ready. The best part is you can host your files on any media hosting site.

Uploading huge files to the same server where your WordPress site lives could lead to slow page speeds depending, of course, on your host.

For purposes of this tutorial, though, I uploaded a music file to my WordPress media library. Then I pasted the file URL as seen in the screenshot below.

At this point, copy-paste your file URL into the section above, check everything is okay and hit the Publish button. Let us see what we’ve achieved so far.

Not bad at all. What do you think? Was that easy or what?

Submit Your Podcast to Podcast Directories

Now that you have a podcast ready, it is time to get it to more eyeballs. Obviously, you need to put together a marketing plan for the podcast, the same way you promote your other content.

Additionally, you can submit it to podcast directories. Now, PowerPress makes it incredibly easy to submit your podcast to various directories. How do you do that?

Navigate back to the PowerPress admin dashboard and click the Submit your podcast to iTunes and other podcast directories link as we highlight below.

submitting podcast to podcast directories using the powerpress plugin

You will be redirected to the Blubrry website. If you don’t have an account already, you will be prompted to create one. If you already have an account, you will be redirected to the following page.

On the above page, you can submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, TuneIn, and Stitcher Podcast Radio. All the links you need to submit your podcast to these directories can be found on the navigation menu to the right (see image above).

That is not all, you can do so much more in your Blubrry podcaster dashboard, so don’t hesitate to explore.

What’s More?

PowerPress comes with more features that make podcasting not only a reality but also extremely fun. For instance, you can import podcasts from SoundCloud, LibSyn, PodBean, Squarespace, Anchor.fm and RSS feed. Additionally, you can import settings and episodes from podcasting plugins PodPress and Podcasting Plugin by TSG.

Moreover, you can import podcast episodes from other blogging platforms such as Blogger, Joomla, Movable Type, and TypePad among others. And since Blubrry offers media hosting, you can migrate your media files to their service in a few clicks.

Worried about SEO? PowerPress SEO is a new feature that helps you to optimize your podcast episodes for search engines without breaking a sweat. On top of that, you can fully customize the PowerPress audio and video players to suit your theme.

On top of that, you can define MP3 ID3 tags (title, album, artist, year, etc.) that appear alongside your podcast episodes. PowerPress comes with many other tools that make the plugin the podcasting solution of choice for more than 60,000 WordPress users at the time of writing.

Conclusion

Having a website that allows you to host your podcast and publish it to multiple podcast directories is essential. Not only does the site give your listener the chance to listen and subscribe, but it also gives your community a platform to discuss each episode.

You can use each post that links to a podcast episode as an area for detailed show notes or further information. You can use the comment section of each post to get feedback from your listeners about each episode. On top of that, a website offers you an archive for all of your podcast episodes without relying on a third party service.

Having a powerful plugin such as PowerPress to host a podcast with WordPress leads to tangible results. Why? This bad boy does a lot of heavy lifting for a free WordPress plugin. Honestly, I don’t think you can get a better podcasting plugin for WordPress.

Do you host a podcast with WordPress? We’d love to hear how you do it, as well as your thoughts on the whole process in the comments.

Article by Freddy WPExplorer.com guest author
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6 Comments

  1. todd cochrane

    There is some incorrect info in the post, to use the free stats you have to be commercial free. But participating in blubrry advertising is “never” mandatory. Podcasters can participate if they choose but they always have the option to not participate in ad deals we would present to them..

    • AJ Clarke

      Thanks for the heads up.

  2. Ted Boreal

    Do you need to host your podcast on Blubrry? Or can you still use PowerPress and have it be hosted anywhere?

    • Steven

      You don’t have to host your podcast on Blubrry. I found that mine works on my WP site. I put the MP3 into my media folder and link to it from the post. By the way, this is a very informative article which helped me achieve my goal of getting Powerpress up and running with my WP site.

  3. Dr. Rahat Sayyad

    Can we use an embed player on the wordpress website for playing podcasts without slowing speed? Any other way to not buy podcast hositng and keeping podcast files on the website itself?what bandwidth is required?

    • Kyla

      You certainly can add audio files to WordPress either using a plugin like PowerPress (which allows for self-hosted or Blubrry hosted files) or by using a theme that supports audio media for posts. Just keep in mind that a podcast file size is probably going to be large (according to my Google search, 25MB per 1hr on average) which means it’s going to eat up a ton of resources and slow down your page loading. My guess is that you’d be best off with a dedicated server just to ensure you have access to all the resources your site would need.

      However, and alternative is to use one of the supported WordPress oEmbed music types (like Mixcloud or SoundCloud) to host your podcast. I believe these are free, and then you can simply embed your podcast episodes by simply pasting the link on your site.

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