Author: Neil Matthews

Many blogs are moving away from being text only to include multimedia files.  Audio, images and video are all common in WordPress blogs.  In a three part series I would like to give detailed how to’s on adding these type of media to your posts, how to manage the files and the best available plugins to extend WordPress so it can serve up your shiny new content to your readers / viewers or even listeners.

In the second part of this series I would like to look at how to add video to your blog.

UPDATE June 2012: Video Tutorial

Feel free to read the whole blog post, but I’ve created a free video tutorial to show you how to use video with WordPress.

 

[leadplayer_vid id=”503506D2E5EE7″]

 

A picture Tells a Thousand Words …

To expand on the cliche;  moving pictures give us a thousand of words a second in infinite detail, video is one of the best forms of communication we have developed, there is no loss of body language (a problem with podcasting) and complex ideas can be communicated fairly easily.

Many bloggers are mixing video and written content, who would have thought, even ten years ago, that you could create your own broadcast easily and fairly cheaply from your own DIY site.

Mixed Media Or Vlog?

A decision you may want to make about your blogging future is if you want to solely produce video content or mix it up with other mediums.

You can scan a written document to extract the bit you want but not a video, but to write an article which shows the emotion of a video is very difficult,   What is the future?

There is no definitive answer to this one, personally I prefer to write, I do not feel at ease in front of the camera and as a result my presentations are pretty clunky, the other end of the spectrum is Gary Vaynerchuk, his blog is a true Vlog with a limited amount of text for links to other site.  He is a self confessed poor writer,  but his presentation skills more than make up for that lack, and as a result he has become an Internet video star.

There is room for both video, images, podcasting and text on one blog, why not mix it up and see what your readers/viewers/listeners respond best to.

Type of Video You Can Add to Your Blog

There are a number video types you can add to your blog, here are four potential formats for the blogger:

Other peoples video – you can add other peoples video to your site.  I did this rather well on a mountain boarding site I used to own, I would take video from YouTube and post it as a feature on the top of my blog.  Check out the big video hosting sites, there is probably some content which matches your niche.

To camera work – this is where you are presenting to a camera, this can be seen as a blog post to camera where you talk about your subject rather than writing your piece.  Give it a go, you may be a natural or you may be (like me) a gibbering idiot in front of camera, a once loquacious person reduced to errms and ahhss and pregnant pauses.

Screencasting – My favourite type of video for technical items is a screencast, using this format you record the screen and play it back with a commentary over the top.  This can be used with great effect for showing technical items or for recording and playing back a presentation.

From Your POV – POV or point of view recording means you are behind the camera recording what you can see, whilst adding a commentary, the uses of this are endless.

I am no video production expert, so if anyone out there knows the proper technical terms for these types of production, please let me know in the comments section.

Video Production

As with the podcasting post I wrote, the subject of producing your media files is too big to go into here on a WordPress blog, but a few words of note, you don’t need a hugely expensive setup to produce content, I use a mid range web cam along with Camtasia to capture screencasts and edit the whole thing together,

How to Add Video to A post

Depending upon your method it is a fairly ease task to add video to a post, the three methods of adding your media file are discussed here.

WordPress Serves Video Out of The Box

Later versions of WordPress allow you to serve video out of the box, click on the icon shown below and upload your video and it will be inserted into your post in the same way images can easily be added to posts.

Embedding a Remote File

Most of the video hosting providers will supply an embedded video code which you can paste into your post from the html section, go to the hosting provider of your choice, and look for embed this video, you should get some code looking like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Al74d0x9RKU&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Al74d0x9RKU&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Plugin, Plugin on the Wall, Who’s the fairest One of All?

I’ve tried numerous plugins for video and I have yet to find the one I am 100%  happy with.  Here are the things I want from my video plugin:

• Ability to play from numerous sources i.e. Youtube, self hosted, hosted on other sites
• Counter for the number of plays of a video.
• Re-sizable – I want to pop the video out to full size.
• Re-skinable – I want to be able to change the look’n’feel of the player to match my theme

Here is a link to the WordPress plugin repository which holds hundred of video plugins http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/video

The plugin which matches most of my requirements is Word Tube.  If you use other plugins please let me know in the comments section below.

Most plugins ask you to simply enclose the URL of the video file in a tag, so this can be a locally hosted file you upload from your media section or a remote file on YouTube and Co. Refer to your preferred plugin for full details on how to add a video to a post.

Video Players

There are a number of video engines out there, but he one which seems to be used by the most plugins is from Long Tail Video and is called the JW FLV Video Player.  It is an open source player which can be skinned as you like it,  there is also an ad Solution to self monetise your video.  See below on more ideas to make money from your video content.

Where to Host Your Files

There are two options to hosting your video, you can self host it on your server or use one of the video hosting services, here are the pros and cons.

Self hosting

Pros

You have complete control of your content, you can decide who sees it i.e. you could limit it to approved registered users, or in the case of membership sites, only approved paying customers.

Remember, once you pass your video to companies such as YouTube you loose control of your content, if that is an issues opt for a self hosting.

Cons

Bandwidth hungry video will quickly exceed your limits or impact on the performance of your site.

Third Party Hosted

Pros

There are two  huge benefit of hosting your video with a third party such as Youtube and they are bandwidth protection, Google and Co take the hit to serve up your files, the second huge benefit are the audiences already in place on these services, if you produce something really good, there is more of a chance of (sorry for what I am about to say) “going viral” than this happening from your home site and it’s smaller reader base.

Cons

Loss of control or who views your video or what happens to your video.

Some of the third party hosting solutions I have used are:

• YouTube
• Viddler
• Vimeo

Monetising Your Video

Monetising your video content is still in it’s infancy,  there are various options including:

Pay per click – Viddler runs pay per click ads beneath your videos, and you are paid if someone clicks away from your video to the target site.

Pay Per Impression – You are paid on the number of impressions or views your video gets with some sort of ad banner attached to to it, Vimeo are offering CPM

Sell your own content – setup a members only section of your site and sell you videos yourself.

Good Blog Video Examples

Here are some examples of video used expertly on blogs

Gary Vaynerchuck check out the monetisation

ProBlogger Darren seems at ease before the camera

Yaro Starak to camera & screencast post

Wrap Up

I hope that has given you a taste for video blogging, go on build some content and check out your ability as a presenter, you may be the next news anchor or MTV video jock in waiting.

Of course I couldn’t create a video post without a video post, here is a good video on resetting a lost password, this is shown using wordTube:

[media id=3]

The rest of the posts in this series

How To Add A Podcast to A WordPress Blog

How To Add Video to A WordPress Blog

How to Add Images to a WordPress Blog

UPDATE: WordPress Video Training Available

I’m running a live video training session on using video with WordPress for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.

I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do

1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up

2) Sign up for the live event from Go to  http://wpownersclub.com/live-events

I hope to see you on the call.

I was recently sent a comment from a reader saying that they were about to subscribe to my blog, and would I install a comment subscription plugin asap.

At first I was a bit taken aback, I’ve never had anyone ask me to extend my blog for them with new plugins or feature. This started me thinking, have I ever dropped a blog because of the way it is configured, and the answer is yes, here are my turn offs, what are yours?

Register to comment

You want feedback through your comments section, but you expect me to register, confirm and then login before I can join your conversation.

No way Jose, you have to remove all barriers to entry to make people comment, this just makes me sad and away I go.

Partial RSS

I don’t care that you are trying to up your impression count for your advertisers, when I ask for an RSS subscription I want the full monty to read at my leisure inside of my feed reader, I don’t expect to be propelled back to your site after the first 500 words.

I have clicked on unsubscribe a couple of times when this tactic eventually wears me down.

Pop-Up email boxes

A new fad has being doing the rounds to have popup, pop-over, pop-under and pop goes the weasel email newsletter signup boxes appear after a couple of seconds on blogs.

If I want to subscribe to your newsletter, give me an incentive, an ebook, a course not an dodgy flying box in front of your content. it makes you look spammy.

No RSS subscribe button above the fold

I’ve found a new blog, the content is excellent and I want to read more, don’t make me hunt around your site for an RSS icon, make it big and bold above the fold.

We are lazy, we know what we expect, join the herd and do as everyone else does please.

Lets Have A Rant!

What are your bette-noirs about blogs?  What makes you unsubscribe or stop reading a blog, let’s make a list in the comments (which I am happy to say you can now subscribe to).

Is there anything else I am not doing which which really annoys you, seriously let me know, I have a hoop ready to jump through all you need to do is ask.  Readers are a precious resource for a blogger, they are your customers so to speak give them what they want.

WPDude not only impressed me with his considerable technical prowess, but also with his integrity and commitment. He really is a pleasure to work with.

I was packing for my holidays at the start of this month, and I decided to pick a few books to read around the pool.  My eyes landed on ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (aff link). and I thought I would like to re-read Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett’s book on blogging for money to see if it stands the test of time.

My wife gave me that “You have got to be fucking joking look” and icily informed me I was on holiday and not working, so I pushed in two other fiction books which appeared to pass approval as suitable poolside reading.  To cut to the chase I re-read the book when I got home, and thought a review was in order for the good readers of WP Dude.

Books on Blogging, an Oxymoron Or What?

Here is my issue, I have read a number of books on blogging and, because of the fairly fast nature of blogging and the slow speed to publish a dead-wood book, there tends to be a time lag which leaves the information out of date.   The Problogger book was first published in spring 2008 which is a long time in tech circles.   Read on to see if this is the case with the Problogger book.

What’s the Book About?

I would describe this book as a beginners guide to blogging for money.  How people make money blogging, how to develop a sucessful professional blog via quality content and marketing/networking techniques.

Who Wrote it?

The book was written by two of the leading lights of blogging; Darren Rowse, the force behind problogger.net, twitip.com and http://digital-photography-school.com and Chris Garrett, the author of chrisg.com and ubiquitous speaker on all things tinternet.

Wherever you go in the blogging community their names are whispered with reverence and awe, they could take a dog turd, carve the word blog in it with a stick and the very next day that turd would have 5000 rsss subscribers, they are that good and followed so closely by poeple in the blogging community.

With this in mind when I first found they were writing a book I dashed over to Amazon and pre-ordered my copy.  I have read it a number of times and still use it for reference often.

What Do I get for my money

You get a manual on starting and developing a blog which generated an income.

THIS IS NOT A GET RICH QUICK PROGRAM!

This is an insighful practicle guide on how to develop a quality web presence, how to monetise your work, build a network with blog marketing techniques.  This is aimed at bloggers who are  in it for the long haul. drop the $$$$$ now thoughts, this will not help you.

The chapter by chapter break down goes like this:

Blogging for money – some background on the writers and what this whole blogging for money malarkey is all about.

Niche blogging – developing your blogging niche, market research and c0mpetition analysis.

Setting up your blog – a techie chapter on setting up a blog using free hosted solutions such as WordPress.org or blogger and a section on self hosted installs such as WordPress.

Blog writing – one of my favourite chapters on copywritting from a blogging perspective, headline writing, the types of posts you can write, the importance of writing from a website and rss reader perspective.  Great stuff.  Going off track if you are interested in developing your writing check out copyblogger.com an excellent resource for web writers.

Blog income and earning strategies – this is where we get into the nitty gritty of earning some money.  This chapter talks about direct versus indirect strategies, affiliate marketing, ads and developing your attractiveness to potential advertisers with your media kit and much more.   This is timeless stuff and this is how people are making money bloggin right now.

Personally I use a mix of indirect methods via my WordPress services and affiliate marketing such as this review.

Buy and Selling blogs – Blogs can be flipped just like real estate, I have developed a number of blogs and then sold them on when I became bored or disillusioned with the niche.  That was done using techniques described in this chapter.

Blog Networks – The demise of the blog network has been discussed widely recently, but this chapter tells you about the benefits of joining a blog network, the increased traffic and marketing exposure and the downside of shared revenue.

Blog promotion & marketing – I remember feeling deflated when I first read this chapter, my re-read confirmed that feeling.  This chapter is 20 or so pages long and it attempts to cover a vast topic, and as a result is only highlights the numerous techniques available to market your blog.  My advice, take each in turn and do further research online.  Find what works for you and expand your efforts there.  I do about three of the marketing processes described in this chapter.

Secrets of Successful blogs – an analysis of some long running and successful blogs, how they did it and where they excel from other similar blogs.

Creating somthing worthwhile – The wrap up chapter and probably the key, make a blog that is worthwhile to your readers is the real secret to a successful and profitable blog.

My favourite quote from the book in the marketing section:

Content might be king,  but without posh clothes and an army to back him up, what is a king but an arrogant bloke in a funny shiny hat.

My Feel for the book

When I first read this book I loved  it.  It was a distilled version of problogger.net which I could refer to easily without the need to search the site.  There is so much content on problogger.net I find it really hard to search for a particular post I read x months back.

My suspicions were bourne out, blogging is such as fast developing media that I saw gaps in the book, some of the most popular marketing techniques such as developing your Twitter presence were mere by-lines, but that in no way depreciates the content, the majority of which was still relevant today.

I would still 100% recommend this book to beginning and developing bloggers, thats why I wrote a review packed full of affiliate links.  I only put my name and reputation against products I believe in.

To get your copy from Amazon or to read more readers review, click on the link below:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (aff link)

Thank you for making this such an easy experience to move to WordPress from TypePad.

I found it much easier for you to get me going for a small fee than spend hours trying to go through the WordPress codex.

I am going to give you a glimpse into my soul and tell you about the OCD I have about my WordPress database and why I audit my database on a regular basis.  Feel free to join me on my downward spiral.  I hear the cuffs on straight jackets no longer chaff

It’s Alive, it’s Alive!!

Your WordPress database is alive and growing all of the time.  As you add posts and get new comments, they are added into your database, this is great, but there are also other reasons your database can grown, and these often go unnoticed

As you add plugins, they often create new tables on your database, you may have a forum or affiliate software, this will create new tables on your database, are you aware of them?

Why Audit Your Database?

There are a number of reasons to audit and clean up your database and they are:

performance – a large database needs more resources and can degrade in performance

Backup and recovery needs – are you aware of all the tables on your system, are you backing up all of the data you need?  An audit shows new tables which need to be added to your backup schedule.

Hosting issues – your hosting provider may have an upper limit on database size or you may pay a premium for space, reducing the size may solve these problems.

Security – Have you been hacked, are there hundreds of credit card numbers in your database from a Paypal phising attack?  An audit of your database can show discrepancies like this.

Backup

Before we start messing around with WordPress database tables, we should always do a backup, what should be do children? (I’m cupping my hand to my ear waiting for your reply).

Default Tables

The default tables for a WordPress install are shown below, don’t touch these or it will end in tears.  Please note your prefix may be different.

wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_terms
wp_usermeta
wp_users

Doing Your Audit

I cannot give you the exact specifics of an audit for your site,every blog is unique with different plugins and addons, but here is what I do.  I do all of my DB admin using phpmyadmin, check with your host to see what tools are available.

1. Check the default tables make sure nothing is untoward there.

2. Look for unidentified tables or unusual tables.  I know it’s a bit woolly, but I have just done a quick check and I can see tables for an invoicing plugin I tested but rejected, they are on the list.  I also saw some weird tables with a qu prefix I did not recognise, a look at the data shows it is my affiliate system, I need that but the audit has helped me to know what is valid and what is not.  I  put these tables names on my list.

3. I check last updated times on tables, if they have not been updated recently, they can go on the list as potentials to get rid of.

During you audit it may be a good time to run an optimize table routine,  this tidys your database and indexes to improve performance.

What to Remove

So I have built a list of tables to get rid of and suspect ones, the suspect ones I leave alone till my next audit if they have not been updated they are dropped, the ones I definitely know I don’t need are killed on the spot.

In database parlance you drop a table, look for that button on your database admin tool.

For The Seriously Messed Up

If you are getting into my mania, why not document your database.  A list of tables and relationships just like the corprate database administrators do.

I am only stage two barking so I don’t bother, but you may have the urge, there are even tools to do it LINK REMOVED DUE TO MALWARE ON SITE (no affilaite link, I am not that desperate).

As I Fret Myself into an Early Grave

Go on have a look at your database and see how untify it has become, a quick audit of your tables can improve your database performance.

It’s friday we always have waffles on Fridays, where are my waffles, WHERE ARE MY WAFFLES!

Oh yeah and I audit my plugins too.

As you may have seen, I was running an experiment on Twitter to see if I could provide technical consultancy via 140 character interchanges here is the original post https://dev.neilmatthews.com/twitter-wordpress-consultancy-experiment.

I also  said I would write up my findings, so here you go.

How Many Takers Were There

I was completely underwhelmed with the results, I only got two takers .

Financial Results

I made a big fat lonely zero in pounds, shillings and pence.  Nada, zip, bugger all, sweet FA, nothing.

The HUGE problem

You cannot give consultancy in 140 characters.  It is too small to express the problem people have, and again too small an amount of characters to give out information. In both cases I dropped from twitter to email exchange very quickly.  I was expecting to give out small how to’s, pointers to other documents or plugins that type of request, but what I got were very big and complex problems or blog design requests.

I got one really meaty problem and that took up a large part of my afternoon, so trying to give support via twitter was pointless, in the end I got my hands dirty and fixed the issue.

What I learned

Although financially it bombed,  I have learned quite a lot and I believe there are some great client acquisition techniques to be learned from what I did.  Here are some of the things I learned

You cannot sit back and wait for people to come to you.  I asked a few twitter chums to RT what I was doing and I tweeted a number of times to introduce the concept.  I sat back during the morning and waited for the stream of tweets asking for help, but none came.  I changed my technique and went searching for people.  This is where my hits came from.  I pushed the URL to my experiment in front of people tweeting about their WordPress problems.  This brought action.

Timing seems to be quite crucial on Twitter.   You need to get your offer in front of people at the right time, my initial push was early morning UK time, this obviously missed the US and Canada, and on the other side the Aussies and Kiwis were off to bed.  If I was doing this again, I would use a service like Tweetlater.com and setup and number of timed announcements to push to people in other timezones.  I am going to take this further and time my blog posts to publish at a specific time and push tweets about them during core hours.  I am not sure when that is yet, need to get out a world clock.  Any suggestions when the most people are awake please drop a comment to me.

I was able to push work to other members of my twitter network which was cool.  I am not a web designer and one of the requests was for prettyfication.  I was able to refer that to someone in my network.

I generated a bit of of buzz.  Quite a few people have noticed the tweets and are following me because of it.     This is another area I will investigate further.  The ideas which come to mind are free webinars push out like this, then gaining paying clients on the back of that.

Twitter is an excellent client acquisition tool.  If you know how to tap into search you can place your offering before people just at the point they are having the problem your service or product solves.

You need to develop your twitter network.  A lot of the contact came from people re-tweeting my messages.

Will I Do It Again?

No I won’t.  I lost a day of billable hours to the experiment, but I learned a boat load of new techniques which I will be using to push people to my blog to gain readers or even clients.

Got any more questions about the experiement please leave a comment.

What’s The Big Idea

I am doing an experiment on Twitter throughout Wednesday 20 May 2009 09:00 – 20:00 GMT to see if there is a way for subject matter experts to provide their professional services via 140 characters and earn a fee for it.

Here is the offer, I will give anyone who tweets me  a 140 character consultation/technical support answer on any WordPress technical issue they may have.

In exchange I will ask them for a tip.  This is completely at your own discretion.  If my answer was no good or you feel it is not worth a tip simply walk away.

This may cause uproar, a lot of people think the interchange of information and ideas should be free on twitter , but why not carry the real world personal services tipping culture online.  I remember a time a gave a hotel usher $1 to open a taxi door, surely some expert advice is worth the same gesture?  Let’s run the experiment and see what happens.

How to give a Tip

First you need to register with TipJoy.  Tip Joy is a cool little startup which allows people to send money via a tweet.  You need to create an account and then charge your account up via your credit card.

To make the payment you need to make a tweet in the following fashion

p $X @wpdude for wordpress services

Replace X with the amount you want to tip, the recommended amout is $3, but if you think my tweet is worth more (or less) please feel free to change the amount.

The Write Up

I will also write up a detailed description of the day to let you know the response and how well or poorly the experiment worked including full disclosure of money earned, the amount of work required to do earn this cash and my observations on the day.

Micro Payments Are The Future

I think micro payments are the future of the knowledge industry.  Instead of the large hourly consulting fees or deleveoping content for a miniscule adsense click awaywhy not give a micropayment tip. Sometimes you just want quick pointer or nugget of information not a full on consultation.  Check out Nick Cernis’ excellent blog post on the subject http://putthingsoff.com/the-end-of-free-content/.

I need Your Help

Please tweet and RT this page by clicking on the button above, I need to generate some buzz for Wednesday.

Many blogs are moving away from being text only to include multimedia files.  Audio, images and video are all common in WordPress blogs.  In a three part series I would like to give detailed how to’s on adding these type of media to your posts, how to manage the files and the best available plugins to extend WordPress so it can serve up your shiny new content to your readers / viewers or even listeners.

In the first part of this series I would like to look at how to add a podcast to your blog.

What Is A Podcast

In the truest sense of the form, a podcast is an audio file available to download and be played in an audio player such as an iPod.  The podcast will be a series of audio files which can be subscribed to using an aggregator.  The aggregator will then download each new episode as it is released and make it available to listen to at a time convenient to the user.  For me this means I can subscribe to a pocast in iTunes and upload it to my iPod.

Bloggers may not be creating pure podcasts, perhaps we are doing a one-off audio posts with no series, but the techniques are the same.

I have created a podcast using the techniques I describe to highlight this posts, it is available at the bottom of this post.

Why Podcast Over and Above Writing?

Podcasting is not a replacement for the written blog posts, I think it is a useful addition to your articles.  Here are some benefits and pitfalls of podcasting versus writing.

Getting your voice over – a podcast allows people to hears and associate with the real you, rather than assuming what you are like via your writing

Interviewing people – there is no real replacement for a person to person interview, it has to be audio or video, the nuance of voice is lost when an interview is transcribed to text.

Distributing large amounts of content – if you are delivering a large amount of content, podcasting may be for you, it allows people to get the content for review whilst they are traveling or have it playing in the background when doing other tasks.

If you audience is not online all the time – podcasting is great for an audience which is not listening all of the time, the asynchronous format means you can record and distribute your podcast and your listeners can hear what you have to say at a time convenient to them.

Podcasting takes practices –  once you are comfortable with the medium you can rattle off a podcast with a great deal of content very quickly.  Writing the same amout of content would take much longer.  As you can tell from my podcast, I am not very comfortable with the medium, but that would come with practice.

Podcasting is linear – your reader may not need all of the information you are spouting out, is it not easy to jump to a particular section of a podcast as it is with a written document.  Use podcasting where podcasting works use blog posts where thye work best.

A very good example of a podcaster cum blogger is Ozzie blogger Yaro Starak, why not skoot over and check out some of his podcasts.  Yaro blogs about blogging and internet marketing, here is one of his podcasts http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/1104/scocco-interview/.

Subscribing to A Podcast

As I have already mentioned, podcasts are available to subscribe to using the RSS format.  This functionality is not available out of the box with WordPress so your old WP install needs to be extended, I sense plugins are needed.

Creating the media file

Creating your audio file is a little beyond the scope of this posts, but I will give you a few pointers:

Microphone – buy the best one you can it will show in your final production. I use a fairly cheap one and you can hear the hisses and pips as I breath out or speak.  Check out podcasting microphones on amazon they are not cheap but if you are serious about podcasting you will need to make that investment at some point.

Recording Software -MAC and PC both come with an audio recording package, as you can expect these are limited. It looks like a lot of people are recommending audacity, an open source recording package available to download for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.  This is what I used for the podcast included with this post and I found it easy to use and full of neat little editing tools and effects.

Uploading the media to your blog

So you have recorded your podcast and converted it to an MP3 format.  Now you are ready to upload it to your blog for play back or subscription via an MP3 player.

Login to your WordPress dashboard and click on the tab marked media.  From there click on add new, and browse to your podcast file.  Upload it. The file will be saved in the wp-content directory.  In the case of this podcast, it is saved at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/howtoaddapodcast.mp3

Bandwidth Concerns

Streaming MP3 over the net will use up your bandwidth quite quickly if you have a popular site with a limited amount of downloading on your hosting plan.

There is a solution to this problem and that is to host it on a third party server.  I have never done this so I cannot recommend any provider over another, but a search for podcast hosting on Google will return quite a few, if any readers of this posts can recommend any podcast hosting providers please leave a comment below with a link – cheers.

The Plugin

Ah god bless em over and over again, the happy little plugin developers.  I have seen podcasts on other peoples blogs so I knew there would be a plugin out there for me.  I made a small list of things I wanted from my plugin and went a-searching.  I wanted:

• Podcasting subscription functionality
• Use a local or remote file – this allows me to host the file wherever I like
• Ability to Play from a blog post – I want immediate or downloadable access to my podcast.
• A neat player with pause / play / volume functions

I went to the WordPress plugin repository and did a search for podcasting, this returned all the plugins available, I checked the functionality against my list and got a hit with my first plugin.  I am using the imaginatively names Podcasting 2.1 plugin produced by Spiral Web Consulting.   It is available to download at the following location:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/podcasting.2.1.zip

To add a podcast to this page, I enclose the URL to my podcast with a tag {podcast}http://podcastURL{/podcast}. If I want to play a remotely hosted MP3 I simply point at the remote file, all of my problems solved.

To subscrive to this podcast or any future podcasts,  the plugin has created the appropriate feed at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/feed/podcast. At the time of writing this does not work, I will update once I have sorted the problems.

You can see my nice little player at the base of the post with volume controls, play and pause controls – a very nice little plugin.

Conclusion

Podcasting is a great way to build a more personable feel to your blog, it lets your readers hear and get a sense of what you are like.  Sometimes our written voice is  not the real us, this helps to grow brand-you.

I the next part of this series I will talk about adding video to your blog.

My Podcast

Here I am with my lovely Geordie accent, an English accent which most people outside of the UK never hear, we don’t all talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins you know.

[podcast]https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/howtoaddapodcast.mp3 [/podcast]