How to use Substack for podcasts

You can easily host and distribute a podcast to your paid and free subscribers through Substack. Podcast episodes will be available not only through email and on your Substack site, but also in all the major podcast apps.

Get set up

To set up a podcast through Substack, go to the Podcast tab on your publication dashboard.

There, you can select between two options.

If you start a new podcast, you will be prompted to fill in your podcast details such as the title, description, byline, categories, language, and logo. This is the information that will be provided to podcast distribution apps. We pre-fill these based on your existing publication settings, but you can change them to whatever you like.

If you import an existing podcast, follow the instructions to find and paste your current podcast URL.

Note: Even if you don’t plan to distribute to any podcast apps, you must go through the podcast creation flow to publish audio posts of any kind.

Distribute your podcast

To distribute your podcast to the major listening apps (e.g. Spotify, Apple Podcasts), you’ll need to submit it with your podcast RSS link. 

First, navigate to your Podcast tab and click Settings. Copy your RSS feed URL, then click on and follow the instructions for submitting it to each of the major apps.

Create a new episode

You can create a new episode via the button on your Posts dashboard.

You can then either upload your episode audio file or record directly from the browser. When the audio finishes uploading, a player will display above your post text.

You can then write and publish your post as usual.

If you change the post’s social preview text, that text will become the show notes in listeners’ podcast apps. If you leave the social preview as the default, the show notes will be the post body text, sans any images/rich media.

View your podcast stats

You can view your podcast stats (title, publish date, downloads) via the table in your Podcast dashboard. Stats for each episode post (e.g. link clickthrough) can still be viewed in the Posts dashboard.

Visit our support center to learn more:

• How do I create and publish a podcast?

• How do I move my podcast to Substack?

• FAQ: Podcasting on Substack

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Last updated: May 2022