Exploring Private Podcasts

Creating a private podcast is a popular way to distribute information to employees, members, or specific list of people. While traditional podcasts are available to the general public, a password protected RSS feed only grants access to those with the required credentials. Recording a private podcast isn't much different than a publicly available one. The key change is in the distribution. In order to start podcasting privately, your podcast hosting provider needs to have a special set of features. So today, we're excited to announce that a Private Podcasts are now available for all Castos users. In this article, we'll explain who would benefit from creating a private podcast and how to use Castos or WordPress to set it up. What Is A Private Podcast? As the name suggests, a private podcast is a podcast that isn't readily available to the general public. With conventional podcasts, you want your episodes available online and in directories like Apple Podcast or Spotify. Whereas with a private podcast, you want to limit who has access to your content. This also means your RSS feed isn't listed anywhere online, across podcast directories. Only you know the URL and personally distribute it to a specified group of people. From a technical perspective in Castos, this also means your podcast episodes are not available on your show's podcast page (i.e. the myshow.castos.com site). When To Use A Private Podcast If you want to limit access to content, you should consider creating a private podcast. There are a lot of common uses for password protected podcasts, here are the most popular scenarios: Corporate training courses: used within employee onboarding sessions, company-wide continuing education courses, or complement text or video trainings. Company-wide communications: used to distribute C-suite messages or regular company updates that are more personal than company-wide emails. Connect remote employees: used to communicate key information with distributed teams. E-learning courses: used to let only current members access a course's podcast material. Premium content subscriptions: used to create special podcast content for select subset of listeners. Podcast content for Membership sites: Connect your existing membership site to your Castos account to automatically provide members with exclusive podcast content. Anytime you have episodes that are only meant for a certain subset of your audience, private podcasting will allow you to restrict access and distribute the content as you see fit. How To Launch A Private Internal Podcast For Your Company If your company wants to create an corporate podcast that is only for internal use then restricting access to that content is vitally important. With this restriction in place your podcast team can feel more comfortable with sharing sensitive company information, knowing that only authorized individuals have access. Let's walk through the steps necessary to create your company's internal private podcast: Plan The Content Any type of podcasting requires some good forethought before turning the mic on for the first time. It's always best to outline two areas of your show before getting started: What is the goal of your podcast and who is it for? What will the first 10 episodes be about?