The idea being is that you can do everything from the place where you're listening and you're not having to be directed as we've talked in other things about you go to the Patreon or you go to the link that they say that then your affiliate link it's putting it all in the place where somebody can very easily get to it while they're listening to the show that's the goal very very good Welcome to Fanzone, your bite -sized guide to getting
the most out of the TrueFans podcast app. In each episode, we'll discuss an aspect of the app and hopefully answer any questions you may have about it. Plus, when you listen to Fanzone in TrueFans, you can earn as you listen and use your earnings to support your favourite podcasters. I'm Clare Waite Brown, independent podcaster and all -round podcast enthusiast. And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO and founder of TrueFans. We are going to talk today about the final three tabs
on the show screen. So this is a podcast level. We're talking about the whole show. The final three tabs, we've got events, blog and merch. Now, I know what those words mean, obviously, but what do they mean in my TrueFans podcast app? OK, so one of the things that TrueFans wants to be is a destination portal for creators, not just a podcasting app. So the idea is that you can drive fans from anywhere to this page. And yes, they can see what episodes you've published.
But we wanted to add more function to this page. So events is a great way. You can have offline events, real world events or online events. So you might have a live event online and you can publish the event date, time, location, if it's a paid for event or if it's free. And again, this gives your fans the chance to either see a live event online with you. And when we bring the live chat in, maybe comment in live real
time with you. Equally, it may be that you've decided to do a meetup somewhere, or if you're a comedy podcaster, maybe you've got a club that you want to do a real live event to. So again, if they're on this page, they can see the event, they can indicate that they're coming to the event. And also at the same time, if it's a paid for item, they can pay it from their wallet directly in sats or fiat. And then, yes, that money goes
directly into the creator's wallet. And we're seeing a lot more of these podcast events, individual podcasts taking part in them. So as a listener, this is a really cool way to see if your favourite show is doing an event that you could go to in real life. Yes. And one of the things that's really exciting about this is we have submitted this as a extension tag to the RSS feed. So the idea is that hosts in the future will also allow
you to create events in your host. But at the moment, you can only do this in your creator's admin dashboard on TrueFans. Okay. Blog and merch. I'm assuming then that you can publish blogs on this page and you can sell merchandise. Is that what we're talking about? Yes, so blogs are active. So in your creator's admin dashboard in TrueFans, you can go to the blog tab, you
can write a blog post. And what's exciting about that is the blog post also tells you who read your blog post and also how long they read your blog post. So how far down the page they go. So you get metrics back from your fans. The fan can also heart that blog post so they can leave it with a payment or no payment. And they can also leave a super comment. So again, we've taken the technology that we use for podcasting and applied it to blogging. So people can give you
a small micropayment. I use it now with Podnews Weekly. Buzzsprout, who is our host for Podnews Weekly, they have a service called Co -host and it produces our transcripts and our show titles, but it also produces a blog post of the episode. from the audio and I copy and paste that into my creator's dashboard to create a blog post that is complementary to the episode that we just listened to. Yeah. So that one's live. Is merch live? Merch is not live. That's coming
very, very shortly. So the idea, again, is that you'll be able to upload images of mugs, caps, whatever it is you want, and you'll be able to display a merchant store and you'll be able to buy those things using your wallet. both in sats or fiat. And we are in the process of working on that one. Okay, brilliant. This is something
we've talked about generally and... The idea being is that you can do everything from the place where you're listening and you're not having to be directed as we've talked in other things about you go to the Patreon or you go to the link that they say that's then your affiliate link. It's putting it all in a place where somebody can very easily get to it while they're listening to the show. That's the goal. Very, very good.
That's the goal. Yes, you can support the show just as like you would with Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon, but you can do it directly in TrueFans. You can have events, blogs, merch. The other thing we are bringing out is a masked domain. So the idea is that eventually you'll be able to personalize that domain to one of your own domains. So instead of it saying TrueFans slash name of podcast, it will have a domain that is
yours. And so you can direct your fans to that URL and they will just land on your podcast page, which is actually your podcast portal rather than just a podcast page. Brilliant. So it sounds like we've got a few things to talk about in the Creators Series, or the Creators Dashboard Series of Fanzone. So we will be explaining a lot more about these features very shortly. And also you talked about not going to Patreon, and then we're going to talk about funding in the
next episode of Fanzone. So thank you very much for that, Sam, and I'll see you shortly. Bye. Thanks so much for listening. There are lots more episodes of Fanzone for you to get stuck into and that show you how to make the most of the fab features that this forward -looking podcast app has to offer podcast listeners and creators alike. We'd love to hear from you. You can send us a comment on True ans. More about that in the Fan Zone episode on comments or email support @truefans .fm.