I would like to lay out this information in a step by step process so you will have a complete understanding of what the RSS feed actually does to help you grow your acim . Once you understand the “how” this helps you, then you will also understand the “why” the feed is so important to the process.
First, a podcast is simply a distribution of your audio or visual files, called episodes, to people searching for, or are interested in, a podcast of your topic and niche.
The people who use the RSS feed, through a podcast host, to access your podcast are called subscribers. The podcast hosting platform is what allows them to subscribe to your feed. It is simply a machine readable piece of coding that sends an episode to a subscriber (and to the various “pod-chaser” companies) that have people looking for the information you are providing.
RSS feeds were originally used for blogging and distributing blog posts to subscribers. As time went on, however, the idea of enclosing information about media files within the feed became popular. Software coding was then developed that would provide the information requested and download the files described.
It is the podcast RSS feed is that allows the entire system to function properly. If this process was not available, you would need to manually distribute notification of each and every episode to thousands of podcasting providers, clients and to each of your subscribers.
As the popularity of podcasting increased, so did the need to quickly and cheaply distribute the episodes that were created with subscribers. Rather than requiring subscribers to visit the podcast host site to find out if a new episode has been released, users could rely on this little link to do the work for them.
It is even possible to subscribe to, and keep track of, numerous podcasts feeds on various podcasts of interest. This allows people to download the files they desire on demand and listen to them whenever it is convenient for them to do so.
In this way, podcast RSS feeds allow normal, everyday people, to publish their podcasts over the internet at a fraction of the cost of other forms of media distribution. This permits people to publish their programming with much smaller budgets as compared to normal publishing and distribution methods on conventional media platforms.
However, this system is also being used by more established companies and organizations such as radio conglomerates and news organizations. They use podcast RSS feeds as another way to distribute their information to the general public as well.
Podcast RSS feeds are now used to distribute any number and variety of different types of podcasts. Some podcasters use their RSS feed to distribute a comedy program or a news program which they conduct. Others will use the link to share music files they have produced. Still others use it to share church programming or sermons. The range of programming is almost limitless when using the RSS feed to share the episodes with the world.