Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a podcast designed to help you launch and grow your own podcast. I'm Gino, your host, and I'm a podcaster myself. And in this show, I'm gonna help pass down all the things that I've learned from running my own podcast to helping my clients with my Business Pleasant Podcasts, so we as podcasters can grow together. Hello. Hello. And welcome back to Help Me Podcast. I have another monthly episode for you, with everything that I've
learned in the past month about podcasting. So this is my new format where I do one longer podcast episode a month, but I wrap up all of the things that I have learned within that month. So I got three things that I wanna talk to you about today. A podcast website, updating your Spotify for Podcasters account, and TikTok. So last month, the month of April, I took the whole month off of releasing episodes from my podcast Learning Towards a Purpose with the main goal of trying to get a website
set up for it. I recently came to the decision that I wanted to have my own podcast website for a couple different reasons. And I've also been looking to get away from GoDaddy, for a long time now. And I have my Pleasant podcast website on GoDaddy, or I did have my Pleasant Podcast website on GoDaddy. And it's it's just very expensive, and the website builder that I use through them is very limited.
Unfortunately, because I did use the GoDaddy website builder when I launched my podcast website, I basically had to rebuild the whole thing, using WordPress. So, basically, I went into the month of April knowing that I had 2 websites to build with WordPress, and I've had a little bit of experience in WordPress before, but not a whole lot. So it was a big task, but I got both of the websites done and published. Links in the show notes, so you can check
them out. But I'm here today to talk about my website for my podcast and some things to think about if you're thinking about having a podcast website. One of the main reasons that I wanted to create one is for the possible future of monetizing my podcast. For me, that's things like maybe finding potential sponsors in the future. And a podcast website is a great way for somebody to learn more about the show and, you know, see what it is, see
all the episodes that I have. To give my show a little bit more credibility, you know, if there's a full built out website for the podcast, it may look better for sponsors. And, also, to potential guests, if maybe you're trying to have some bigger name guests out there, you know, they look you up and they see that you have your own website, it may look a little bit more professional than just, like, you know, a podcast that's a
hobby, and you may be able to land bigger guests. And, you know, not not to build a whole website just to impress somebody, but I think a website helps to better show off your podcast and show people what you're doing. So, you know, in the case of maybe an interested sponsor, you could just send them the link and you don't have to, you know, try to create this material that describes your show.
Your website will be showing off your podcast for you. But another reason why I did it was also the ability to put a ship to print merchandise site on it. And I didn't quite finish setting that up yet. Probably more on that next month. But, you know, a website can be a place where you can sell your own merch for your podcast, t shirts, mugs, sweatshirts, hats, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the website is a great place
to put your merch store. Another reason why I wanted to have my website is because I wanted to be able to show up on Google. Because I noticed that when I was searching my podcast, it was really difficult for anything to come up. Even when I typed in the title, Learning Towards Our Purpose, teaching really came up. And I think the biggest issue is that because with your podcast host website, it's not really your website. It's, for
example, mine's Transistor. So it's transistor.com/workingtowardsourpurpose. Learning, therefore, it becomes really difficult to, like, actually show up when you Google it. So that was kind of an issue that I didn't like. And then also just thinking about, like, SEO, you know, there's not that many people that are gonna find that through the keywords of my show and the show notes. So really thinking about, like, organic
growth on the Internet. The best way for people to to find my show is, a, to have a website that shows up when you type it in, but also just to have, like, articles written for each episode because that puts a lot more keywords out, and it just it's different ways for people to find you. And, you know, especially the way that my show is set up, where I'm mostly interviewing other people, it gives me a chance to highlight them, to put backlinks in.
So that way, it gives more opportunities for people to get to the site. And kind of just puts the show on the Internet more than it was before. So with the intentions to grow and, you know, deciding that I wanted to really put a lot into my podcast this year and take it seriously, a website was the decision that I came to. So in building out the website, I think the the first thing that I figured out was I wanted to make it as
simple as possible. You know, I think you can easily over complicate a website, which makes it harder to build and then also harder on the user end. You know, nobody really wants to come to a website that has a 1,000,000,000 tabs and it's confusing. So I really wanted to keep it very clean and very simple. And the main section of my website, the main, like, meat of the website, is going to be the episodes page. And this is basically kind of like a blog post, but each different post will be a new
episode. So I have my episodes tab, which highlights all my guests, and then I have a my story tab, which gives a little bit more information about what the show is, Then then I have a leave a review tab because getting reviews is obviously helpful for your podcast and you wanna get more. And then I also have a button where you will eventually be able to buy some merch for the podcast, but it's not completely set up yet. I also have some social media buttons
down at the bottom that don't clutter the header. And then, eventually, I'm also going to make a contact page to have the possibility for future guests to reach out to me or for people to, you know, leave some feedback about the show. That's one of the future things that I'm going to implement that I haven't gotten to yet. So, you know, a website, for me, anyways, is always constantly evolving, constantly updating.
So it was important to me to, like, get, you know, 80% of the website up there and to not be delayed by the details and the little nice to have things. So I think that that was a big lesson that I also learned in part in creating this website was, like, you don't have to make it perfect. Just get, like, 80% of the way there, you know, use the 80 20 rule and, don't let perfectionism stop you from putting it out there. So there was a lot of things
that I needed for the website. There was graphics and pictures and, you know, I made some stuff on Canva. I was getting pictures from my guests. That was something that I needed to go ahead and do. Some of the episodes that some of the earlier episodes that I had. I didn't really have any, headshots or or pictures of my guests, so I needed to do some research to find those. And then, you know, the bulk of the work was just creating the articles for each episode.
So like I mentioned, each episode has a blog style article where I have my embed player, from Transistor that I linked with a little bit of code, and people can listen to every episode in the episode specific page. But, more importantly, it also has kind of a summary that I've created. And I kinda came up with this template. It took me a little bit for each episode, but I have a template of what each page looks like. And it's basically,
you know, just a summary. So, you know, there's a handful of paragraphs being the summary of the episode and talking about, like, what we discussed on the episode. And then I have under that, like, the the best quote that I found in the episode, just a short quote that I can put in bold text, and it kind of catches the
eye of somebody who doesn't want to read the entire write up. And then below that, I have the cover art for the specific episode and then a list of bullet point topics to again, if somebody doesn't want to read the whole episode description, they can kind of glance at those topics and be like, Okay. That's maybe something that's interesting to me. Maybe I'll read this further or maybe I'll listen to the episode. And then at the bottom, I have a bio of my guest along with their links.
So I think I've intentionally tried to set it up because not everybody's gonna read the entire teaching. But I think, like, giving somebody something to grab on to to see if it's interesting to them, you know, if they stumbled on the page. You don't wanna, like, bore them with, you know, just a ton of writing. So I've tried to make it really simple and visual. You can go to the link in the show notes to check my website out.
Go to the episodes tab, and you can even, you know, steal my template for my episode podcast for your own podcast website and, you know, make it your own and add some more stuff too. So all that being said, the biggest tool, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without this, is my podcast AI platform, Cast Magic, that I use. And if you
haven't heard of Cast Magic, it's a great platform. And basically what it allows you to do is just upload an MP 3 file and then it creates all this content and copywriting for you. So what I did was, for each episode, I uploaded it to Cast Magic. It wrote speaker bios for me. It helped me with the bullet point topics. It helped me grab a quote. It also helped me write the entire
article for me. Cast Magic is cool, where, like, you can pick what you want it to spit out for you, but then you can also, chat GBT style, have a prompt to where you can ask it anything. So, basically, what I did was for each episode, I would go and ask the prompt and say, hey. Can you write a blog article for this website? And it just spit out, you know, 4 or
5 paragraphs depending on which episode. And, you know, what it wasn't perfect, but it got me again like 80% of the way there to where it was very easy for me to copy it, paste it into my website, and then read it through and edit the way that I wanted it to sound. So it still had my voice and my flavor, but, you know, all the heavy lifting was done for me. And without that, it would have taken
me way longer to build my podcast website. So probably couldn't have done it without Cast Magic, And using that platform is also gonna help me keep releasing these blog articles for my podcast episodes because it's not gonna be a ton of time invested since AI is doing 80% of the work for me. So, yeah, I'll have a link for Cast Magic in this episode also because, you know, it's a tool that I think is really helpful for me. But I know that there's other tools
out there too. Alright. Now that brings me to the second topic that I wanna talk about today, and that is some updates that the Spotify for Podcasters is doing. So Spotify for Podcasters, we used to be called Anchor, is Spotify's free podcast hosting platform. A lot I know a lot of people that use it. I have a lot of clients that use it and I don't
use it personally. But the reason I know about this change is because one of my clients sent me or forwarded me the email And basically, by the by May 11th, which is next Saturday, they want you to basically change your password. There's a link that I'll have in the show notes. But, basically, I think what they're doing is combining their different account types. Because I know that it was, like, super confusing to have a Spotify for Podcast log in and then a
Spotify account log in. So it seems that they're making their login process a little bit easier. You basically just have to go to the link and update your password real quick. It shouldn't take you very long. But one of the cool things that they're adding with this is they're now allowing you to have multiple podcasts under one account, which used to be one thing that, like, really hindered that posting platform. Right? You you used to have to have a special
Spotify account for every podcast that you had. So now they're kinda opening it up to having more than 1 podcast. And, you know, like, the paid podcast host that I use, Transistor, allows me to do this. So it's cool now that this free platform is now giving you this option that you didn't have in the past. So really, I think what Spotify is trying to do is be competitive with the podcast hosting platforms that are out there. And, this kind of helps get one step
closer. So just a reminder that, you gotta go change your password before May 11th. And, that was kind of a quicker topic that I had. And the last topic that I want to talk about is TikTok. And, you know, TikTok is something that is been a struggle for me, I guess. I'm I'm not a social media person. I don't like interacting on social media for the most part. I think a lot of it is a time waste for me, and I don't have the self discipline to just go on there and use the, beneficial parts of
it, if you will. So it's been something I stayed away from for a long time. But since in my last episode when I talked about Opus clips, I'm creating all these clips now that I went back and got from all the old episodes that I've done, and I'm, like, man, this would really be a good time to start a TikTok so I could just podcast, like I probably have almost close to a 100 clips now because I have, like, 2 to 3 per episode. I got
about 30 episodes. So, like, I could just keep posting them on TikTok and see if it does anything and not really have to put too much work into it. That being said, it's a new thing. Never used it before.
So, you know, there's definitely a little bit of a learning curve. But I did make an account, and what I did learn was TikTok has a desktop based app that you can use, and you can actually schedule posts out for, like, up to or a little bit over a week, which has been really helpful because I've had my account for maybe 2 weeks now. And, basically, I just go in once a week and upload, like, 7 to 10 clips
and then don't have to go in again. Because I think what first happened when I made my account is I was, you know, podcasting, and then I was like, okay. Well, now I gotta get followers, so now I have to go interact and maybe I should go find like accounts and similar accounts and, like, start commenting and, like, engaging. But what I found out is that that's just a huge waste of time for me, personally. Some people may like that, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But, for
me, I didn't find it helpful. For me, I just wanted to get my clips posted and then get out of there as soon as I could. So it was working good for a little bit. I didn't really have any ridiculous, like, numbers or nothing going viral or anything like that. Like, you know, tens of views we're teaching. Not not a lot, but but it was something. And I also created my podcast website to have, like, an embed for a TikTok video. So the idea was to get the videos on
TikTok and then be able to embed them on the web page. So it's another little trickle of information that somebody can read from your website or watch from your website to engage them into listening to the whole episode. So there was kind of a purpose behind the whole thing. And everything was going good up until a couple days ago when I went to sign in to upload some more, videos, and I found out that my account has been suspended. And I didn't know why, and I never
got notified. So I looked it up, and it's possible for my account to be suspended for up to 15 days. And, basically, you're never gonna know the reason why, and there's never any rationale. So I looked into it a little bit. Not sure what I did to get suspended. I guess, now that I'm talking about out loud, perhaps, it's because I don't spend any time on the platform, but I'm posting every day. Maybe they don't like that. I I don't know. But, I guess, we'll have to keep you updated on what
happens with that. Kind of a bummer because it was a easy way for me to get my clips onto my website. So if that doesn't work out, I guess I'll have to find a different way to do that, which I'm not looking forward to. But, you know, we'll see what happens with the TikTok. I'm I'm kinda bummed because I I found, like, a workflow that works for me and a way to get my videos out there without having to kill a bunch of time. And then I got suspended, which
was, you know, obviously disappointing. So, that's been my experience with TikTok. More to come on it, hopefully. Hopefully, I'll get unsuspended. But, yeah, those those are the 3 things that, I kinda learned this month, the 3 major teaching, starting a website for your podcast, making sure you get your Spotify for Podcasters account updated, and my introduction to TikTok. So hopefully some of this was helpful. Thank you so much for learning, and stay tuned for my episode next
month. That will be filled with everything that I learned in the month of May. So I'll see you then and happy podcasting. This show was produced by Pleasant Podcast. And if you need help launching your own podcast, go to pleasant podcast where you can check out my offerings and some of my freebies to help you launch and grow your own podcasting And if you haven't signed up for the help me podcast
newsletter, you can also do that with the link in the show notes. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you on an episode real soon.