You have two main options for publishing private content to your private listeners with Acast+ Access. You can either publish extended content, at the beginning or end of your regular, public episode, or you can make an entire episode available to private listeners only. Let’s cover the publishing flow for making entire episodes private first.
We’ll also cover changing who gets access to the episode at a later date and time in this article.
How to publish an entire episode to private listeners only
Make sure your show is set up in the CMS (episodes can be published or in draft mode) and make sure that the show has been Access-enabled by the Acast tech team.
Open the episode and click on the ‘Publish settings’ tab.
Set your date and time for publishing as normal.
Click in the box called ‘Listener Access’ and select ‘All Access Subscribers’ from the drop down menu. Note: All episodes are assigned to ‘All listeners’ by default and ‘Public Feed’ assigns the episode to public listeners only.
Press ‘Save’ or ‘Publish’.
Nice! That episode will now only appear to private listeners. It will not be visible in the public feed at all.
Publishing multiple episodes to private listeners
From the main episode list, select the episodes you want to publish to your private listeners using the checkbox.
Click on the ‘Assign tiers’ button near the top of the screen.
Select ‘All Access Subscribers’.
Press ‘Apply’.
Nice! Those episodes will now only appear to private listeners. They will not be visible in the public feed at all.
Scheduling a change to listener access
If you want to change who gets access to the episode at a later date and time, you can use the ‘Early Access’ feature within the CMS.
Open the episode and click on the ‘Publish settings’ tab.
Click the ‘Change Access’ toggle so that it is ‘on’.
Set the date and time for the change.
Click in the box called ‘Listener Access’ and select the listener group who should get access at the date and time you just specified. Note: ‘All Access Subscribers’ assigns access to private listeners only, ‘All listeners’ assigns access to all listeners, including all private and public listeners and ‘Public Feed’ assigns the episode to public listeners only.
Press ‘Save’ or ‘Publish’.
Nice! Your episode will now be automatically published at the specified date and time to the chosen audience.
How to publish bonus, or extended content to private listeners only
Make sure your show is set up correctly in the CMS (episodes can be published or in draft mode) and make sure that the show has been Access-enabled by the Acast tech team.
Note: Since you are adding private content to a public episode, the ‘Listener Access’ within the Publish Settings should be set to ‘All listeners’, which is the default for all episodes. This means that both private and public listeners will have access to the episode, but by following the steps below, only private listeners will hear the extended content that you add.
Open the episode and scroll to ‘Dynamic content’.
Within the ‘Upload private intro and outro’ section, add your audio. Note: if you want the private content to appear at the start of the public episode, add a ‘Private intro’. If you want the private content to appear at the end of the public episode, add a ‘Private outro’.
Click on ‘Publish settings’ and press ‘Save’ or ‘Publish’.
Nice! That content will now only be available to your private listeners. Public listeners won’t notice any difference.