Does Your Podcast Need a Website?

0:02
You’ve got your podcast, great! Now, where do you put it? Sure, you’ll submit to major distribution sites like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, but don’t you need a website as well? A place where you can put extra content and perhaps even start ranking for popular keywords? Today on Podcast Your Business… we’re talking all about podcast websites! Take it away, Mr. Radio Man. Podcast Your Business!

0:39
Okay. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Podcast Your Business. I’m Sunny Gault. I am a podcast coach and mentor. And I’ve been podcasting for Okay, let’s count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 17. That’s right. 17 years guys, who’s counting? I guess I am. I’m also the founder and CEO of Independent Podcast Network, and I am here to help you create amazing podcasts specifically for your business. But even if you’re not producing podcasts for your business, you’re gonna get a lot of great information out of this episode. We do this by mastering the Five P’s of podcasting. So what are the five P’s of podcasting? This is something I created when I was designing my online course I have a podcast course is called “How to Launch Your Profitable Business in 30 days… did I just say business? Profitable Podcast!!! Hopefully, hopefully, you’re already on the right track with your business. Like that didn’t sound right. Okay, so the five P’s are prep, plan, produce, promote, and profit. Now, everything you need to know for your podcast can fit into those five Ps. So let’s quickly review those. Prep means should you even be starting a podcast? What do you need to know before you even make that decision? Plan? What is the look and feel for your podcast? Produce? How do you create all the amazing content for it, promote? How do you tell everyone about it? And then profit? How do you make that money? You know what I’m saying? Right? Radio Man, what are we talking about today? Promote.

2:16
Promote. Yep, we’re talking about promoting your podcast more specifically, how do you promote your podcast through your own website. And here are some of the topics we’re going to be focusing on today. First, we’re going to talk about the importance of having a home base. This is what I call it a home base. For your podcast, a place where it is uniquely yours. It’s not dependent on anything else, or decisions other people make. It’s just for you. Now your website can be your home base, we’re going to talk about that. Also, we’re gonna determine if a podcast website is the right approach for you. Because it may not be it really depends on some different factors. If you do push forward with a website, what essential items should you include on your site. And then finally, I’ll wrap it up with some of my favorite resources for quickly launching a podcast website, we’ll get started right after this quick break. At some point, you’ll need to make a decision about whether or not your podcast is going to have a website. I recommend you do this is part of your planning process for your podcast. But some of you may have already launched your show. So let’s just go ahead and dive right in.

3:35
Let’s talk about the importance of having a home base for your podcast. Now, what do I mean by that? Your home base is kind of like your home, your house, your apartment, wherever you live, right? It’s the place you always come back to, you may go out and do other things in the world. But you will always come back to your home base. It’s something that you can control. Now your podcast is going to need this as well. It doesn’t necessarily need a separate website. And we’ll get into that as the conversation unfolds. But you need to have a place you can call your own. And that’s what I call a home base, you’re not going to want to link like when you know someone says, Hey, let me listen to your show. You’re not going to want to link to some of the other distribution sites like you never really sent out a link directly to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Google Podcasts. Because most of the times they don’t pull up an episode page just for that episode, it kind of pulls up your whole thing and the people gotta find the episode and it’s a mess. So you’re not going to do that. Why would you send traffic somewhere else? Right? Keep your traffic because you can use that for multiple purposes, right? If you have your own business, you can start selling you know them, you know your products and services and all that good stuff. So when you promote your podcast, you are going to promote your home base link. Right? So consider that. And your options really are this create a website or use a wesite you already have or get a domain, right, and then forward that URL to another place that people can find your podcast. So again, you’re not going to do that with the main distribution sites. But there are a couple places I recommend. First, and yes, this is a little bit of a shameless plug. But if you’re with a podcast network, and it just so happens that I run a podcast network, a lot of networks will provide you with your own podcast page. So you can forward that main URL to that podcast page, also, your podcast host provider, a lot of times, they will provide you with a page as well. So if you’re looking to get something up super quick, that is one way that you can go, you can just buy the domain, and you can forward it somewhere else. Now, I will say I have had a couple of issues with just forwarding domains. Because when you forward, you can’t guarantee that the link is secure, right? You can’t have one of those certificates for security purposes. And so a message could pop up on the person’s screen that says, Are you sure you want to go to this site, it could be a safety risk. And that could deter people from, you know, clicking through. So just want to give you a heads up on that… I have had that issue before.

5:19
So should you create a podcast website, which is you know, a website that’s specifically for your podcast? Well, if your podcast is focused on your business, right, which hopefully is a lot of you that are listening, then the answer’s no, what you want to do is use what you already have, see you don’t want to create extra work for yourself. If you have a business website, put your podcast on your business website. Now here’s what you’re going to do in the main navigation for your business site, you’re going to create a new link, and you’re going to call it podcast. This is for SEO purposes, call it podcast. And then when they click on that link, you got some options, right? Ideally, what you’re going to do is link to a page that tells people a little bit more about your show includes a little bit more information. But if you really want to get the most out of SEO, then each episode for your podcast is going to have its own host or page, whatever you want to call it. And that’s really important because it’s going to give you a unique link with all those yummy keywords in it. And again, that’s what you’re going to use to promote your podcast, to friends, family, the guests that you just had on the show, right. So that’s in a perfect world. If you don’t have time to do that, then the next best option is to still include podcast in the main navigation, have it go to a page where you can explain what your podcast is, you know, have some, you know, links where they can subscribe and follow you all that good stuff. And then you can have an embed code that lists all of your episodes. So through that code, technically, they don’t even need to leave the page, and they could listen to whatever episode they want. If you’re a podcast host provider doesn’t provide that Apple Podcasts does. So there is a way when you look for your show on Apple Podcasts, you can click through and basically grab an embed code for all the episodes in your podcast. So that’s an option. If you don’t have a podcast that’s focused on your business, or you don’t have a business website, then yes, you have to have a home base. So you are going to have to have a website for your podcast.

9:38
So let’s now talk about the essential items that you need to have on this site. You’re going to need to have an about section tell people very plainly and clearly what your podcast is about. And again, as I just mentioned, if you can have a new page or post for each episode that is going to be best for SEO purposes. You’re also going to need links to subscribe or follow you now that’s really important. I’m always so surprised at how many podcasters don’t make it super easy for listeners, I guess could be viewers too if you got a video podcast to subscribe to them. Because that’s going to be your easiest downloads guys. Make sure you have those subscribe buttons like right out there. Very easy to find. I’d put them on all of your episode pages if you can do that. I also recommend that you create a mailing list or some sort of newsletter that goes out that promotes your episodes. This does not have to be elaborate. For my podcast that I have for New Mommy Media all my parents thing podcasts, I have it set up according to my RSS feed. So there is an automatic email that goes out, I don’t even touch it, you guys, you know, I formatted it properly, it took a little bit of time to do that. And now, whenever I publish an episode, and the newsletter goes out, that’s the easiest way to do it. And what’s nice about that is you’re gathering email addresses. Because when people listen to a podcast, you really don’t have another way to reach out to them. So if you do want to promote your business services, and all the cool things that you have coming up, maybe you just launched a book or, you know, you’ve you’ve got a new course that you want to tell everyone about how are you going to get in contact with them. So you need to start collecting email addresses, you also need your contact information on there, because if they want to reach out to you, you need to make sure that they can.

10:49
Now, let’s talk about some things that are optional for your website. How about a blog, I have blogs, both on the independent podcast network site as well as my New Mommy Media site, it is a fantastic way to get people to find your website through keywords. So consider that you can also put transcripts on your website. Now, that hasn’t helped me so much with SEO purposes. And people necessarily, you know, finding it because of keywords. However, I’ve been very, very surprised that a lot of people link to my transcript. So they may not link to the episode page where the actual episode is. But I’ve had plenty of people linked to transcript pages, which I find interesting. So it can still help you that way. You can put your guests profiles on your website, because your listeners or viewers may want to learn a little bit more about your guests, I do that with the shows for New Mommy Media, you should have a donate button. And if you’re not asking for donations, that’s fine. Maybe you want to put some information up there for advertisers. Maybe you want to list advertisers you’ve worked with in the past, have your media kit maybe have a form. So if people want to work with you, they can contact you more easily. And then if you do have a store, I have dabbled with a store one time, it was not a pleasant experience. So I’m not going to go into a lot of information about that maybe I’ll tell you my horror story another day. But if you do have some sort of ecommerce store, maybe that’s also tied to your business, then you can put that on your podcast website as well.

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Now let’s talk about some of my favorite resources. If you are going to create a website, if you know you’re in this for the long haul. And you are going to do a lot of these extra optional things that we just talked about. I recommend that you go with a WordPress website. WordPress is formatted really well for SEO purposes. A lot of stuff is already built in. There’s a ton of great plugins. And you can find a bunch of different designers that are used to working on WordPress websites. So that’s the more elaborate approach. But if you are just dabbling into podcasting, please don’t spend a lot of time on your website. Really, podcast websites are good for people initially finding your podcast, but your regular listeners are just going to listen through the podcast distribution sites. Okay. So this is really for your diehards and people to find your podcast initially. So if you don’t know if you’re going to do this long term, don’t go the WordPress route, there is a resource that I recommend that I have personally used, it’s super easy to use, it is called Podpage, p-o-d-p-a-g-e. I’ll include alink in the description. You guys, this could not be more simple. Once you’ve launched your podcast, you can take your RSS feed, and literally have your podcast website up and running in less than 10 minutes. You just have to put some information in there make some design decisions. And seriously, it could be up and running with a lot of those optional things that I was talking about. You can have a blog in there, you can have donate buttons, you can have a store if you want. It’s just unheard of all the cool things you can do with this site. So I have tried that with one of my podcasts. And it was a great fit for the podcast in last because as you know, I like to test things out and see what types of podcasts will work and what types of podcasts won’t work. That was one I have a lot of fun with. But it didn’t last. And I’m really glad that I didn’t invest in a huge website for it. So it wasn’t hard. I just purchased the pod page site for a year. Then after a year I was like yeah, this isn’t really doing much. So in fact, I just decided to take it down. But I’m a big fan of Podpage and you can actually save 10 bucks if you want. I’m going to include the promo code that we have for a Podpage in the description below. So in addition to your podcast website, are you looking to upgrade your podcast equipment because I have a free guide that I’m going to tell you all about. On the other side of this commercial break.

15:07
You can spend a lot of money on podcast equipment and guys, you really don’t need to. I’ve compiled a guide with three different setups that vary depending on your mobility, and your podcast budget. Plus, there’s links to all of these products on Amazon, you can check out the links in the description. Also, as I mentioned earlier, if you don’t want to mess with all this podcast website stuff, my network IPN- Independent Podcast Network provides you with a free podcast page. Regardless of whether you have a free membership with us or a paid membership. You can check out IPN at https://independentpodcast.network and see if it’s a good fit for your show. Until next week, remember, you should start a podcast!