On this dailicast, Chris talks about publishing your dailicast as a flash briefing skill on the Amazon Alexa environment.
TRANSCRIPT:
With your "Dailicast Moment" for today. I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Now all this week we're talking about publishing your dailicast.
Today we're going to talk about doing it the easiest way as an Amazon flash briefing in the Amazon Alexa Environment. Now a flash briefing essentially is an Amazon Alexa skill that people enable that gives them basic content every day. With that skill enabled, all they have to do is tell their smart speaker to play their flash briefing or "what's in the news" and it will go through all the flash briefing skills they have enabled. Hopefully they've enabled yours because they want to hear from you each and every day.
Now, how do we go about getting it on the Amazon Alexa Environment? Well, first off, you've got to find a host that can handle that type of feed. Now, I particularly use SmartSpeakerHub.com. They're very reasonable, very easy to use.It's a very simple interface. You literally put your title in , the link you want people to click to. You upload your episode and you put the date that you want it to go up. That simple. If you want to find out more about Smart Speaker Hub, just shoot me an email, give me a comment and I will put you in touch with them. But you can also Google other flash briefing hosting services out there.
The reason you need a separate hosting environment as opposed to your regular podcast hosting feed is that an Amazon Alexa feed is very unique. First off, you should only have one episode listed in there. Whatever that episode is for the day, that should be the only one listed in there. Why is that? Because the way that Amazon Alexa works, if you were to have more than one episode listed in there, it's going to play the first five episodes it finds in that feed back to back. Now, if you've got people that are looking forward to hearing from you once a day and now all of a sudden they've got to skip through all the ones that they've heard for the last four days, they're going to drop you like a hot potato and so would I.
So you definitely want to have a unique feed just for the flash briefing environment and this feed needs to have just one episode in it. Also, Amazon much prefers the feed to be in the JSON format. That's J-S-O-N as opposed to XML, which most of your podcast feeds are. They'll still take XML, but it can just cause a lot of problems. So let's find a host that specifically focuses on flash briefings.
Now once you've got your feed set up for your flash briefing, then you have to register for an Amazon developer account. They're free, but you have to register it to be a developer at Amazon.
Once that's approved, then what you do is you go in and you create a new Alexa skill and you select the flash briefing preset for that. Then it's just going to walk you through a whole list of forms. You just fill out the forms, go through the whole process and at the end you need to have uploaded at least one episode to your feed. This is critical because they will not approve your flash briefing until they've heard one episode.
What I recommend is making that one a preview episode, so kind of tells people what they're going to expect and give them a date of when you plan to launch. Now once you've got that in your feed and you filled out all that form with Amazon and you'd submit it, you're probably going to wait usually less than 24 hours, but they say to give them up to three days to do it and they're going to come back and they're going to say, you're approved and you're good to go.
Now they may come back and tell you that there's a problem with your audio file and then they'll give you some ideas on what you need to do to fix that. If that's the case, you need to not only do it to your preview episode and then resubmit, but you're also going to have to do that to any subsequent episodes that you do to make sure that they're compliant with what Amazon is looking for.
But if all goes well, you're good to go and then you can just at that point just start uploading things to your feed, having them scheduled day after day and it runs like clockwork. And you can also go back into your developer account and even see statistics on how many people enabled your skill and how many people listened to it as well.
Now tomorrow we'll get into what you want to do if you want to set up your dailicast with a podcast feed, so basically becomes a daily podcast for people to subscribe to.
That's all for the "Dailicast Moment" for today. If you want to find out more about dailicasts, how to do them, just step on over to Dailicast.com That's dailicast, d-a-i-l-i-c-a-s-t.com and you'll find all that information there. I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Have a great day!
