Latest Dreamtime is up and podcast thoughts

Episode 7 - The donkey that wouldn't die, on Hee Haw.

Lessons learned to date for all you burgeoning podcasters out there:

1. It pays to advertise in like-minded venues. A little less than 90 percent of Dreamtime traffic is currently coming from a Dylan central clearing-house, Expecting Rain, which I send an announcement to when each new podcast goes up.
   
   The bulk of the remainder of the traffic is coming from another Dylan-related site, White Man Stew, where a couple of commentors had some kind things to say about the podcast. The rest is literally only 20-30 visitors a week who have found Dreamtime through some sort of search, or friends/family come to visit and support.
   
   
2. Placement increases traffic dramatically. ER was giving me somewhere from 300-400 visitors each week, until this week where the Dreamtime announcement was in first position in Monday's list. That drove over 1500 visitors to Dreamtime in one day. Visitors from White Man Stew also started moving from the tens into the hundreds after the blog's owner permalinked to me.
   
   
3. Being listed in podcast directories is worthless, with the possible exception of iTunes (see below). Being listed in the Yahoo podcast directory may help, but that's been broken every time I've tried to enter my RSS.
   
   
4. The download/play numbers are interesting, although I'm not sure how reliable they are.
   
   As far as I can tell, I currently have about 70 subscribers (or at least subscribers who listen) through iTunes or some other RSS reader. I'm gauging those numbers based on posting the mp3 on Saturday but not making an announcement until Monday. In the interim, I had those 70-odd downloads. To be accurate, I'd probably need to have the file, sans announcement, up for at least a week of tracking.
   
   I've had about 300 download/plays of the latest podcast directly from the site (released on Saturday, announced on Monday), which indicates that the vast majority of Monday's visitors either read but didn't listen or just left without doing either.
   
   That may be content. Episode 7 dealt with Hee Haw. The most popular to date, Episode 5 - Two voices from Chronicles, which was of more likely interest to the Dylanphile than Hee Haw, had nearly double the amount of downloads/plays when it was released, and still remains the most-listened to Dreamtime each week. #2 is the Baseball episode commentary.
   
   
5. People want to read as well as listen. A lesson I already learned from business podcasting, where my #1 request was to include a transcript (#2 was the ability to play directly from the site w/o bringing up a blank Quicktime screen or the WMP).