How to use Substack for podcasts

It’s now possible to host and distribute paid and free podcasts through Substack. Your podcast episodes will be available not only through email and on your Substack site, but also in all the major podcast apps.

Our podcasting feature is in beta, so we’ll continue to improve it in response to user feedback.

Get set up

You can watch our video on how to publish podcast and audio on Substack:

To set up a podcast through Substack, go to your Settings page and scroll to the bottom, where you’ll find a “Podcast Settings” section. Check the box beside “Enable podcasting beta.”

Once you’ve done that, you can upload cover art and enter the details of your podcast, including title, description, and categories. There are simple instructions to follow to ensure your podcast will appear in each of the major podcast apps (including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Pocket Casts). All you need to do is add your Podcast RSS feed URL (provided by Substack) to each of the apps. This takes less than a minute.

If you have an existing podcast, you can import it simply and quickly by following a few easy-to-understand steps. It takes less than five minutes. Your listeners can continue to access the podcast in the app of their choice and won’t know that anything has changed.

Start publishing

Now that you’ve enabled the podcasting features, in your posts tab you’ll see an option to create a “New episode.” Click on that.

Then you have two options: record audio directly into the Substack editor, or upload an MP3 file. Add a headline and whatever text you’d like to accompany the episode. Then click “Publish & Send Email”.

That’s all you need to do. The episode will then go everywhere: by email to your mailing list, on your Substack site, and into the podcast apps.

Private feeds

If you have paid subscriptions enabled, your subscribers can add a private feed of your episodes into their app of choice. Substack will email your subscribers a link that they then click on to select their preferred app. From there, it’s one more click to add the feed to their app. The process takes less than 10 seconds. The private feeds include all episodes you publish, both free and paid.

And that’s it.

You get a podcast that’s tied to a mailing list and published on your own website. It’s all free. As with newsletters, Substack only makes money when you make money, by taking a 10% cut of your subscription revenue.

Check out these podcasts on Substack:

• Sh!tpost, by Jared Hold (@jaredlholt )

• Foreign Exchanges, by Derek Davison (@dwdavison)

• Historicly, by Esha K. (@historic_ly)

• Inside the Newsroom, by Daniel Levitt (@InsideNewsPod)

Got feedback, questions? Please leave them in the comments.

Photo by neil godding on Unsplash