Retaining Ownership

Ownership is another thing to bear in mind when you're making the decision about where to host your podcast and what software you're going to use. Another way to think about this is using the concept of brand. If you're spending lots of time and effort to create a successful podcast, your podcast, Web site, URL, and everything to do with your production are part of your brand. Building a successful podcast goes hand in hand with building a successful brand.

Successful companies have what's known as brand equity. That's why soft drink companies are extremely protective of their brands. They know their brands have intrinsic value, and they don't want anyone else to be profiting from them. You should be thinking the same way as you build your podcasting empire. If your podcast becomes wildly successful, you want the rewards from that success to come back to you — not your podcast hosting partner or your Web hosting partner. These people may play an important part in your success, but without your success, they're just hosting companies. You're the one bringing the programming to the table.

For this reason, it's important that you seriously consider retaining ownership of everything related to your podcast. Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned that you should register a URL for your podcast, and this is a prime reason why. If you're hosting your site on someone else's service, you're surrendering some of your brand equity. As your brand builds, you're also building someone else's brand, because everyone coming to your site sees your hosting partner's branding. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; you may, in fact, be building your brand on the strength of an existing podcast directory's brand. In the long term, however, you want to be able to focus on building your own brand, not someone else's.

Similar to registering your own URL, you should also retain ownership of your RSS feed. It's great that many podcast hosting solutions offer tools that automatically generate valid RSS feeds. However, these feeds live on their servers, so the URL to your feed ends up being:

www.podcastpoodle.com/feeds/mypikepodcast.xml

Part of that URL has your branding, but the other part has your podcasting host's branding. The problem here is deeper than just the URL. After all, the URL may be hidden beneath a large "Subscribe to my podcast!" button that you put on your home page, so folks may not even notice the branding attribution. The problem is what do you do when you decide to part ways with Podcast Poodle? Everyone who has subscribed to your podcast has done so via the hosting service URL. You have to wean your audience off the old URL of your RSS feed to the new URL, which may not be a simple task, particularly if you have thousands of listeners.

A better approach is to keep control of your RSS feed, so that all your subscribers are coming in through your Web site, subscribing via your RSS feed. That way, you can change hosts at will, Web or podcast, and your audience won't notice a thing. If you change Web hosting partners, people will still find your Web site through the magic of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). They just type http://mypikepodcast.com, and presto, your site pops up. Similarly, if you change hosts for your media files, you just have to change the contents of your enclosure tags in your RSS feed, and no one will ever notice.

Granted, managing your own Web site and maintaining your own RSS feeds may not be for everyone. It requires a significant amount of responsibility and technical know-how. There's a reason that podcast hosting companies are popular: The convenience is hard to pass up. If you decide to go the hosted route, just remember that you may be faced with a difficult decision later if your podcast is as successful as you hope it will be.