How can I vote for a favorite podcast in iTunes?

The first and most obvious answer is to simply tell everyone about them. If you have a blog or podcast of your own, mention the others that you like and offer up an overt endorsement. Bloggers are also enamored of "blogrolls" as a way to promote fellow bloggers who are interesting, informative or cool.

But you're talking about a podcast, and it turns out that there is a way within Apple's iTunes Store once you can figure out how to find a podcast within their system. The key is to run iTunes itself on your computer, then you can search, find, and vote for your favorite podcast.

Let me show you by indicating how I voted for my friend Robs' Startup Story Radio podcast...

As a first step, launch iTunes and go to the iTunes Store. This is a bit tricky because there's an entry labeled "Podcasts", but that's only those podcasts to which you've subscribed, and even then, it's not the iTunes Store entry but a list of those entries you've saved on your computer. Anyway, here's what you'll see:

You can dig through the "podcasts" directory, but I think it's faster just to type in the name of the podcast you seek in the search box on the top right corner. In this instance, I'll search for startup story radio and find:

You can see Rob's podcast on the top right. Rather than click "subscribe", though, just click on the image associated with the podcast (I'm showing just the relevant window now so you can read the text):

There's no indication of it, but if you scroll down you'll find reviews and - most importantly - the chance to enter your own review:

Click on "Write a Review", finally, and, after some verification of your identity and creation of an iTunes Store nickname (if you don't already have one), you can enter a review of your favorite podcasts:

Spend a few minutes, get better at working with the iTunes Store, and you can probably rate your favorite dozen podcasts during your lunch hour, and the more positive ratings podcasts get, the higher they appear on search results. The more visibility the podcasts get, the more traffic they receive.