@warner No worries! Hopefully I’ve understood you correctly here and am not telling you what you already know. 🙂

Generally the best first step once you’ve set up your podcast (and added an episode to it) is to submit your feed to Apple Podcasts. Other apps like Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro scrape submissions to Apple and present them in their own directories. Podcast search sites like Listen Notes will then also display it after a day or two, where you can also claim the show there. Sometimes you have to be patient for things to appear.

Services like Spotify and Amazon require separate submission, with the former re-hosting your content (somewhat controversial), while the latter apparently doesn’t.