SPP Quick Start Guide
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Automatically publish your podcasts to your WordPress plus. Also includes a podcast player designed to grow your audience and build your email list on auto pilot. Quick Start Guide Rev 7 - May 14, 2019 HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !1 Section 1 - Installation 1. Download the plugin in .zip format to your computer. You can find the download link in the purchase receipt email you received after purchasing 2. Log into your WordPress Dashboard 3. Choose the Plugins->Add New option from the left sidebar 4. Select Upload and choose the .zip file you downloaded above 5. Click Activate Plugin 6. Choose Simple Podcast Press from the WP Dashboard left sidebar 7. Click on Licenses and enter your License Key from the email you received 8. Click Save and then Activate HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !2 Section 2 - Read This First Podcast Publishing Workflows This section describes 2 publishing workflows and how SPP integrates with them. Workflow A - 3rd Party Feed You host your feed and audio with 3rd party podcast hosting companies like Libsyn, BlogTalkRadio (see page 28 for specific details for Blog Talk Radio) , SoundCloud, Spreaker, etc If you are using a 3rd-party service like Libsyn, BlogTalkRadio, Spreaker, SoundCloud, etc to generate your podcast feed, then your workflow is as follows. Step 1 - Log into podcast hosting service and create a new episode. Include the title, description, episode-specific image (see screenshot below for where to add the episode image in Libsyn), and your mp3 file. All this information will be added to your episode page on your site when SPP imports the episode. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !3 Step 2 - Log into your WordPress site and enter your iTunes URL in the Simple Podcast Press Settings page. If you don’t know where to find it, simply do a Google search for Your Podcast Name iTunes. Paste your iTunes URL and click Continue. We recommend you use your iTunes URL in order for SPP to pull in all your world-wide iTunes reviews. If you haven’t released your podcast on iTunes yet, you can use your Podcast Feed instead and click Continue. Note: This step is reading all your podcast episodes and world-wide iTunes reviews and will take up to 5 mins depending on how many podcast episodes and reviews you have. Note: If the spinner continues to spin for more than 5 minutes, then it is possible something went wrong during the import or your server timed out. You can simply refresh the page and it should continue into the settings page. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !4 Step 3 - Configure your SPP publish settings. There are a lot of settings on this page, but don’t worry about them all right now. Let’s focus on the publish settings only. At this point, all you need to decide on are the publish settings including: • if you want the automatically created episode post to be set as "published" or "draft" • which episodes to import (default is all, but you can set it to only import episodes published after a specific date) • if you want to import the episode image in your podcast feed and set it as the featured image on the post • the WordPress category you would like to assign the posts to (this is handy if you want to add a menu item on your site to only display your podcast posts) • author of the post if you have multiple authors on your site. That is all for now. Scroll to the bottom and click "Save Settings". You can go back and customize the other settings later and they will take effect immediately on all players on your site. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !5 Now you are ready to import your episodes to your site. You can tell SPP to import all your episodes now (this is done using the "Import New Podcasts Now" button on the bottom of the page). After that, it will automatically check your feed every hour and when it detects a new episode it will automatically create a new post (even when you are not logged into your site) Tip: At any point in time, you can click the "Import New Podcasts Now" button to check for new episodes and have them automatically imported on your site. Step 4 - Configure your SPP player and additional settings (see section 3 below) Workflow B - Self Hosted Feeds If you are using the the Blubrry PowerPress plugin to generate your feed Step 1 - Log into your WordPress site and enter your iTunes URL in the Simple Podcast Press Settings page. If you don’t know where to find it, simply do a Google search for Your Podcast Name iTunes. Paste your iTunes URL and click Continue. If you haven’t released your podcast on iTunes yet, you can use your Podcast Feed instead and click Continue. If you are just getting started and don’t have a feed yet, you can simply leave all fields blank and click Continue. This step will take a minute or two depending on how many podcast episodes and reviews you have. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !6 Note: Some features like the Episode Listing Page and Latest Episode Sidebar Player will not work if you don’t enter your podcast feed or iTunes URL. Don’t worry though, you can always go back to the Simple Podcast Press settings page and click the "Reconnect My Podcast Feed Button" and they will start working. Step 2 - Because you are using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin to generate the podcast feed on your site, SPP will simply become your podcast player and will automatically replace your existing PowerPress player. Note: You will not see the any publish settings or buttons for importing your episodes since they are already on your WordPress site. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !7 Your workflow will not change. You still need to continue add the media URL of your audio file in the PowerPress “Podcast Episode” section while editing your post like you’ve been normally doing. Note: Your podcast feed will remain untouched and will continue to be powered by PowerPress. Step 3 - Configure your SPP player and additional settings (see section 3 below) HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !8 Section 3 - Plugin Settings After you’ve entered your iTunes URL or Podcast Feed, you will be taken to the main settings page to configure how you want the plugin to work. This section is just a general overview. We’ve added a small icon beside most of the settings that will give you more details on what each setting does. Please refer to that for specific details on each setting. Don’t forget to click “Save Settings” on the bottom of the page when you are done changing your settings. The settings page is divided into a few sections: 1. Publish Settings - Here is where you configure if you want the posts to be automatically created and if they should be published right away or saved as a draft for further editing. You can also specify which WordPress category you want these posts to belong to, the author of the post, if you want your to import episode specific art to be imported and set as featured image, and if you want to automatically insert the featured image on top of the post. Note: Most podcast feeds contain your iTunes channel art as the image for each episode (unless you specifically upload an image for each episode when creating your episode). If you don't want that set as the featured image, we recommend to set the “Enable Podcast Episode Art Import” to Off (default value). 2. Podcast Player Settings - Here is where you can fully customize the look and feel of the podcast player itself. buttons. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !9 3. Button Settings - This is where you can customize the look and where these buttons link to. There are 11 buttons including Apple Podcats, Spotify, Google Podcasts etc where all you need to do is enter the URL for your show on those platforms so the buttons link to them. There are also 6 custom buttons that can be configure to link anywhere you like. We also an option to make a button that pops up a LeadPages LeadBox. All you need to do is copy the HTML code provided inside in the publish area of LeadPages account for that specific LeadBox. HAVING TROUBLE? EMAIL OUR SUPPORT TEAM: [email protected] !10 4. Opt-in Box Settings - Here is where you can enable the opt-in box, customize the look of it, and choose where you want a standard opt-in or a two-step opt-in (A two-step opt-in is when you only show a button with the call to action, and when clicked, a popup will appear for the visitor to enter their name and email to opt-in). You can also enable the privacy page option which adds a GDPR compliant checkbox with a link to your privacy page. A user would need to tick the checkbox before they can opt-in. You need to be using a email marketing providers like MailChimp, GetResponse, Aweber, Infusionsoft, etc for this option to work (SPP is compatible with all email marketing providers that provide HTML opt-in form code ).