One of the best ways to make your podcast episodes more interactive is to use Chapters. This allows you to upload an image, a call to action/sentence, and a link, all from your Captivate dashboard.
This is great for special offers, promos, and more. And with 25 and counting podcast apps supporting this feature, now listeners can enjoy your podcast even more! Better still, Captivate fully supports the Podcasting 2.0 JSON format, which means podcast apps will automatically update your older episodes with the newly-added Chapters - no need for your listeners to re-download. Sweet!
Here’s how to add Chapters to your episodes.
When logged in to your Captivate dashboard, click Publish Episode
Follow the usual steps of adding your audio file, show notes, AMIE, etc
Below the AMIE section is the Chapters section
Click Add Chapter
Now you can choose to use an image to make the Chapter stand out more, or just a sentence for listeners to jump to that section, and whether to include a link or not.
If using an image, click on the image icon to upload your preferred image. This needs to be a minimum 1400px by 1400px, a maximum 3000px by 3000px, and less than 2MB in size
Add the Chapter Title. This can be either a call to action (if using an external link), or just a title explaining what the chapter is (so, “Guest X talks about Topic Y”, for example)
If using the Chapter as a call to action to an external link, add the target URL in the link box
Choose the position of where you want the Chapter to appear by either dragging the chapter marker line, or manually typing in the timestamp in the timing box
If you want to add more Chapters, follow the process above. Once complete, schedule or publish your episode as normal.
That’s it - your episode now has Chapters added to it, and listeners will now be able to jump to these relevant sections or click to your target external link!
Recommended reading: Podcast Chapters FAQs