Podcasting for Solopreneurs | Podcasting Tips and Growth Strategies for Online Business

95. Should I Put My Podcast on YouTube via RSS or Manually? | Podcasting Tips and Strategies

Julia Levine | Podcasting Coach for Online Business (The Podcast Teacher™)

FAQ Friday answering the podcasting question of "Should I Put My Podcast on YouTube via RSS or Manually?"

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Welcome to Podcasting for Solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a podcasting question in five minutes or less. Today's question is, should I put my podcast on YouTube via RSS or manually? This question comes from Chad, host of the RevRx podcast, on the heels of our recent podcast optimization plan call. That's episode 92 if you haven't caught it yet. And to give a little bit of background info to set up this technical context, YouTube started widely accepting RSS feeds only about a year ago when Google Podcasts was discontinued. Now this makes it so that with a couple of clicks, you can automatically send your podcast audio to YouTube from your hosting platform somewhere like Buzzsprout. This sounds really great in theory, but there are a few drawbacks. The first is that when YouTube receives an episode from your RSS feed, it makes a copy of it. That might not sound like a problem, but let me explain a little bit further.

If you publish an episode with a mistake in it, you can go into your hosting platform, swap out the audio, and then all of the podcast players, Apple, Spotify, etcetera, they update with the new audio. Same idea if you want to change the episode title or fix a typo in the description, you change it in your hosting platform and then it automatically updates in the players. But since YouTube makes a copy, nothing will get updated. Instead, you'll have multiple versions on YouTube. You'll have the original and any revisions. That's a pretty big drawback in my opinion. The other drawback is that your YouTube stats don't get collected by your hosting platform. So, normally you go into your hosting platform to see your downloads and that number is cumulative.

It's taking numbers from Apple, from Spotify, from Overcast, etcetera, etcetera, and it's adding them all together. But it's not adding in YouTube. You have to go into YouTube directly to see their numbers. And I feel like having that extra step of having to go into YouTube to see your stats kind of counteracts the convenience of having your RSS feed automatically put things on YouTube since you have to go there and log in anyway. So while connecting your RSS feed to YouTube is convenient, it does come with some limitations. And if you have the capacity, I recommend putting your podcast on YouTube manually. And when I say that, I don't mean that you have to do video. I just mean going to YouTube and adding your audio with a static image.

While this process does take a few extra minutes, we're literally talking about a few. I am teaching a super simple way to do this inside of my upcoming community, the Podcast Growth Collective. The doors open in April 2025, and you can be the first to get all of the details by going to the podcastteacher.com/collective. If you have a podcasting question, click the send me your question link in the episode description, and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Until next time, happy podcasting.

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