At its most basic level, a Podcast or Vodcast is simply an RSS feed.  Users can subscribe to your feed through any of the standard RSS methods including news aggregators and readers and browser plug-ins such as Live Bookmarks.

To begin, you first need to determine what media you wish to present to your subscribers.  Your audio and video clips can be original music and videos, presentations, instructional videos and tutorials, or any other form of media in which your subscribers would be interested.

Keep in mind that Podcasting and Vodcasting were originally designed for use on portable media devices such as Apple’s iPod.  You should format your media accordingly and I’ll discuss that later in this article.  But that doesn’t mean that you are limited to those devices, it simply means that you need to make sure your subscribers know what they’re getting.

The first step in this process is to get your media into the correct format.  Many news aggregators such as Apple’s free iTunes and the open-source Democracy Player support many different playback formats.  However, if you want to be compatible with the highest number of readers and devices you should stick to the standards.

The most popular format for audio distribution is MP3 and the most popular video format is MP4.  If you have a direct audience, you could easily distribute AVI, Flash, or any other file type using the same methods I will be presenting to you.