How to write your description
It’s a good idea to write your post text in a word processing application (such as Microsoft Word), and then paste your text into the Post Description Field. This can make spell/grammar checking a bit easier. It also allows you to save the text in case there is a problem with the submission.

Links
Please make sure to link to sources where appropriate. You definitely do want to link to bloggers whenever referencing them or their work. While you don’t want to over-link to bloggers just for the sake of it, you do want to seek out and cite experts in the fields you’re covering. Think about the user-experience and how it can be enhanced by referencing the bloggers.

Linking to wikipedia.org makes sense, only if it’s for a term/subject where the audience would want further information. You don’t want to saturate your post with wikipedia links, especially when they aren’t relevant.

To insert a link in your post text, simply:
1. Open a browser window.
2. Go to the page you want to link to.
3. Copy the entire URL
4. In the post description field, paste the URL in front of the words to be linked.

Do not include any punctuation

Example:
I have lots of political websites that I visit, but http://politico.com this is my favorite.

What you should write
Your post descriptions should be pretty detailed. They should (obviously) be interesting enough to make people want to watch/listen to the podcast.

The headline should grab people’s attention.

The first paragraph should let people know what it’s about why they want to click to watch/listen.

The rest of the post should include as many of the keywords relevant to the podcast as practicable while maintaining readability.

Tags
In order for a word to be a tag, the word should be in the post description. If you want a word to be tagged and it isn’t in your post description, then this should be a red flag that your post is poorly written. Ideally, your title should also be comprised mostly of keywords that will be tags.

Please place all of your tags in the Tags field in the publishing request form. Separate the tags with commas like this:
Apple, iPhone, Bob’s Big Boy, chocolate

Include all names of companies, products, people, buzzwords, and other keywords relevant to your post.

Make sure people can find your post!
The title, text, tags, and file names are all very important for people to find your posts and download your podcasts. It’s highly advisable to create a top-down list of keywords associated with your podcast. Think about what will get your post discovered. Company names, product names, and names of people in the podcasts. Before submitting your posts, make an attempt to include as much of your keywords appear in order of importance, from left to right in your titles and file names (while adhering to the specs). Also make sure all of the keywords appear in the post description so they can be tagged.

Spelling and Style
Please be sure to spell check your posts before submitting. For company names, please visit their website and spell it exactly as found in the copyright notice (usually at the bottom of their homepage). If you can’t find their copyright notice, look at the title bar in the web browser, or visit their About page. These all take spelling precedence over how it’s shown in the graphic logo. For example, it’s CNET, not c|net.

Before writing posts for PodTech, please take a moment and read through many of our existing posts to get a sense for how they are written.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online is highly recommended, as is the book.

Corrections
If you find that your post contains an error, simply send a new copy of the text to publishing@podtech.net. Please realize that often your text gets pretty extensively marked up with HTML code for presentation. Therefore, for minor changes, it’s helpful to paste the entire text, and highlight the changes in bold or italics. If the text is being completely or significantly re-written, you can just send an email with the new text as plain text.

While we are happy to update and change text descriptions, please make sure to spell-check and fact-check before submitting your publishing requests.

More difficult to change are titles and filenames. Our URLs are based on the titles of the posts. We can break this association and have a different URL from the title. On the other hand, if there is a mispelling in a name, and this shows up in the title/URL and filename, this would be a hard thing to deal with because it would break links and bookmarks. Furthermore, when post titles change, it confuses the audience, especially when it comes to subscriptions.