Your sermons already publish a podcast feed. Nothing extra to record, nothing to upload twice.
The feed
It lives at your church's own address with /podcast.xml on the end:
yourchurch.org/podcast.xml
If you have not connected a custom domain it is your
yourchurch.easychurchapp.com address instead. You can also copy it from the
Sermons page in the app, where it is shown as Your Podcast Feed with a
Preview button. The feed lists your 100 most recent published sermons.
Getting listed
Submit that URL once, to each directory you want to be in:
- Apple Podcasts: via Apple Podcasts Connect
- Spotify: through Spotify's podcast creator tools (formerly called Spotify for Podcasters)
Apple confirms who you are through your Apple ID. Spotify emails a verification message to the address inside your feed, which is your church's Public Email in Settings, Church Details. Set it before you submit to Spotify, and use an inbox someone actually reads. That address is public: anyone who has your feed link can see it, so use your church office address, not a personal one. If you have not set one, the feed leaves it out and Spotify cannot verify the show. Both can take a few days to review. After that they check the feed on their own schedule and new episodes appear without you doing anything.
You do not need to submit anywhere else. Most other apps read Apple's directory.
What becomes an episode
Any published sermon not marked Members Only whose Source URL is a direct audio file (an address ending in .mp3 or .m4a, for example). A sermon that is a YouTube or Vimeo link only has no audio file to serve, so it does not become an episode. That is the single most common reason a church says an episode is missing.
A sermon has one Source URL, so a sermon cannot carry both a YouTube link and an audio link at the moment. If you want a sermon in the podcast, give it the audio file's address. Hosting audio files directly in EasyChurchApp is a separate add-on that is still being rolled out.
Before you submit
Check that your church has a logo uploaded. The feed uses it as the show's cover art, and each episode uses its own thumbnail when it has one. Podcast directories expect cover art, so a show without it may be turned down.
Listen to one episode through the feed, on a phone, before sending the URL to Apple. The two things that go wrong are audio recorded too quietly to hear in a car, and a forty-minute file that starts with eight minutes of announcements.
Neither is something this software can fix, and both are much easier to correct before a directory has cached your first ten episodes.
Telling people
Say it plainly once: "Our sermons are on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Search for [your church name]."
People do not think of churches as having podcasts, so the announcement does more work than you expect. Put it somewhere permanent too, not only in a notice that scrolls away.