Help! My Podcast Won’t Work Because I Don’t Have An Enclosure Tag

Look, I’ll be honest.

I just started podcasting last month, so I don’t know all of the ins and outs of it yet.

But last week, when I tried to push my new episode live, I hit a snag.

The post appeared in my FeedBurner feed, but it wasn’t iTunes wasn’t updating appropriately. The link worked, the feed (technically) worked, and still no iTunes download of my latest episode.

The quick solution (at least, for me): Put the link to your podcast first.

Here’s why…

I googled this problem for a few days here and there before I finally found what the error was.

Finally, I went to PodMedic in FeedBurner at the advice of Roger on the Apple support forums, except PodMedic sucks because it’s super vague:

“A general error occured [sic] creating the enclosure. We sincerely wish we could provide more concrete detail, but alas, it eludes us.”

As it turns out, the podcast post in question started with a link to an image, not the link to the audio file (even though it contained the audio link). Since FeedBurner looks for the first eligible link around which to put the enclosure tag, it wasn’t seeing the media file I wanted it to.

For me, the solution was to bump up the link to my podcast so that it appeared first in the feed, and I put the image below it.

My iTunes feed was fixed within seconds, and the latest episode of The Martial Arts Podcast was ready for download to the dozens and dozens.

By Adam Bockler

Adam Bockler is a B2B marketing professional, a black belt martial arts instructor, DDP Yoga instructor, and a personal trainer.