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Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast answering any podcasting questions along the way. Welcome back. Last week, we talked a little bit about rebranding and renaming your podcast. But what if you want to move podcast hosts? Today, that's what we're talking about moving podcast host, what's involved with it. But first, if you've not joined our community, now is the time to do it. Podcastanswers.com/discord.
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So that's right. Last week we talked a little bit about branding and how to re-rand your podcast. But what if you want to re to move your podcast to a different host? That happens because sometimes you have another you in the the scheme of things podcasts hosts have been around for a while and sometimes new ones come on the scene and you want to have some of the new features that they have. I mean podcasting 2.0 again is a thing that is is happening.
It's something that you it's caught having a lot new features and some hosts don't support those new features yet. And so podcasts, some, some hosts do support those features. And so if you want to get onto a podcast host that supports those features or just in general, aren't
happy with your podcast host. A lot of times when we start podcasting, we don't know podcast host A from podcast host B. And so we just pick one based on, you know, word on the internet or who we're learning how to podcast from, but we don't really know how to, how to podcast And so we do, we just pick whoever, whatever podcast host our friends tell us about.
And so if you went to move podcast host, it's fairly easy, but there are some things that you need to know first, some things that you need to actually have your knowledge on as far as your particular podcast. What feed to podcast host and directory or sorry, podcast directories have for you. Is it, you know, is it, is it what, you know, because you could be hosting in power press, you could be creating your feed in power press or your host, your host could be actually providing
that feed for you. You need to know where that feed is created and what directories, you know, Apple podcasts, Spotify, etc. What podcasts feed that they have for you. Another thing you need to know is do you use something like podcast mirror to mirror your podcast feed? Because if you do, this is going to be a separate process. It's actually going to be a little bit easier if you have podcast mirror than if you don't, because there's just one setting to change in there. So here's how you do it.
You sign up for your new podcast host. That's really easy, right? You decide which podcast host you're going to go to. And I personally, I like I like Captivate. Captivate is a good podcast host and that's the one I use. And if you want to try it out, it's podcastanthers.com/captivate will get you there. You don't have to, but that's just one I use. So you sign up for your new podcast host. And then what do you do? Well, most podcast hosts
are going to ask when you sign up, if you already have a podcast. If you do, you just need to simply put in that feed. Now, they're not asking for things like what your Apple podcast is, your Apple podcast listing is. You're actually looking for your RSS feed, and that's something that you can get from their current host, but you put that in there. And then what they will do is they'll
actually go and get all of your media files for you and create your episodes for you. So, if I sign up for Captivate, and I did this actually within the last year, I switched from podcast host a to podcast host, captivate. And what I did when I signed up with captivate is I just put it in my RSS feed and they went out there, they went out to my feed.
They downloaded each podcast, uh, MP3 and as well as the title and show notes for each one and they created that they replicated that on their site. Now, one thing to note and most podcasts hosts are going to do this for you, But you're going to want to have the episode, GUID the same. So each episode that you produce has what's called a GUID or a unique, I, a globally unique identifier for that particular podcast.
And why this is important is because that's how podcast players know what to consider an episode for you. So it could be anything, but as long as it's globally unique. And a lot of times podcast hosts, when you create your episodes or they will, they'll create a good for that episode. And it's going to be unique for that episode globally. Now, one thing, again, what you have to have is you have to have those stay the same.
So your new podcast host needs to, to when they create your new episodes that you're pulling from your old host, use that same good. Because if you don't, then everyone is going to download your episodes, like all of your episodes again, because even though it's the same, even though it's technically the same show, they're going to see it and go, Oh, it's a different GUID. That means it's a different episode. It's a new episode. So it's obviously new. I'm going to download
all 67 episodes of your podcast or whatever, however many episodes you have. So that's one thing to note is, are they going to create the same GUIDs? Because if they do, that's important. You need to have that. Now, you need to have put in a 301 redirect in your old feed. Some podcast hosts have that ability right in their GUI, in their zero interface. So you can go
in and say, "Hey, I want to redirect to this new feed." And sometimes you're going to have to actually contact them and have them tell them, "Hey, I'm moving away from your service, but I need you to to put in a 301 redirect for me. A 301 redirect is simply a specific kind of redirect. So think of it if you go to something like podcastanswers.com/captivate. What that does is that actually redirects you to the captivate site. It redirects you there and that's a redirect.
Now you need to do that in your feed, but there's several different kinds of redirects. One, the 301 tells the whatever is getting your feed, "Hey, I am no longer going to be here at this address, so you need to update your bookmarks. You need to update what you're going to pull to this new address." A 302 redirect just basically says, "Hey, I'm temporarily not going to be here. I'll be back, but I'm not fully going to be gone. I'm just temporarily going to be gone."
So you do need to have a 301 redirect because 301s are going to be what you need to get all of your, what happens is when, when, let's say Apple podcasts checks your feed next time they see 301 redirect and it redirects them to podcast host B new podcast host B.com/ whatever your feed is. It's going to say, I know that this, I don't want to look to this old feed anymore because I have a 301 redirect. So I need to look always from now on to this new podcast
host for this feed and no longer look at the old podcast. So this is how you get all of your people who are subscribed to you to continue saying subscribe to you, even though they are now using the new feed because every time they check, they're going to say, Oh, 301 redirect. Let's go ahead and update where we're checking to the new one. So you'll still keep all of the people that are subscribed to your podcast episodes. That's
really, really, and really important. Now, the other thing that's really, really important is you need to keep that 301 redirect around for, I would say a month. It's probably not any, you don't probably need to do it any longer than a month, but a month is probably going to be sufficient to have everybody check your podcast feed and update. You know, some of them take a little bit longer to update, especially if you've not published a episode.
So I would suggest keeping your old feet around for a month. And so you'll need to continue to paying for your old podcast host for one month because as soon as you get rid of your your account with them, they're going to delete the 301. So you don't want to do that. You want to keep that 301 around for at least a month. And then you can go ahead and get rid of your old podcast host because most people
will be up to date by that time. And but I would also suggest publishing an episode two because a lot of times, sometimes when, and I don't know that this is the case necessarily with a 301 redirect, but I do know if you rebrand your podcast, sometimes you need to go ahead and publish an episode before they'll actually update it because they may see the name has changed, but sometimes whoever's generating your RSS feed doesn't update the
last updated time to a newer time. And so sometimes people don't actually check and get new data because they see that that time is old. So I would suggest publishing a new episode, even, even though I don't think you need to necessarily for moving your podcast
host, but I would, I would go ahead and do that. I would, I would keep your old podcast around for feed for around for one month, but then I would also go ahead, like I said, and, and have them be really publishing new episode as soon as you move to your new feed
host. That way you also know which feed people are getting to, because you see if, if a podcast directory like Spotify doesn't update, doesn't get your new episode, then you know that they have not updated to the new location because they're still looking for the old location because they've not seen the new episode that you published. So now I did mention in the beginning here, if you have something like podcast mirror, and these aren't the only
services there's several, several other services that do mirroring of your feed. But the reason you would use that is cause a couple of different reasons. Let's say you're, you're publishing on your own, with your own WordPress, like I do. I use WordPress and my own podcast or my own host to host my website, host my feed. I don't keep the mp3 files there, but
I keep my feed there. And so I don't want thousands of people hitting my website because my website host isn't dedicated for that, isn't specifically, it's not dedicated as as a podcast host. And so it's not necessarily set up to hit, have that many people hit it that often to check your feed. And so what I use is I use something called podcast mirror. And what they do is they actually check my feed once every 20 minutes or so, and see if I've published anything new.
But then I take their feed that they give me, 'cause they just essentially mirror it. Like that's what podcast mirror is. They mirror my feed. And so there, I submit my podcast mirror feed to all of the directories and everything because they check podcast mirror, podcast mirror has the infrastructure set up to take all of those people hitting your podcast and not, you know, not, it's not gonna take them down.
And so they have the infrastructure set up for that, whereas my cheap web host doesn't necessarily have that. So essentially I have one person checking my feed, podcast mirror every 20 minutes. And then if I update something, they update their copy. And so they have a copy and then all of the directories are actually choosing podcast mirror as what they're looking at. And so if you have, if you're using podcast mirror, this is really
easy to move podcast host. Again, you're going to want to keep your GUIDs the same because again, if you, if it, if your new podcast host doesn't keep your GUIDs the same, those are going to change no matter what, because it's just a mirror copy. But the nice thing about podcast mirror is it allows you to take that feed that you're checking because you tell them in their back end what your feed is. All you have to do is update that and then they point to the new one.
So it's really easy because you can just switch it there. You don't have to worry about 301 redirects or anything like that. You can just quit your old podcast host once you've got the new media files and a new RSS feed up somewhere and point your podcast mirror out to that new feed. And it's all good to go. You don't need to keep the 301 redirect. You can immediately
get rid of your old podcast toast. So that's why I like doing that. But guys, this is, this is easy, but if done wrong, this could be an extinction event for your podcast.
You could lose all of your listeners, all of your subscribers. If you don't do this It's an easy thing as long as you do it and you do it right, but you put the wrong thing in a 301 redirect That could be a problem because then you end up having to go to different places because they are They're looking at a different feed that doesn't even exist now if you put the wrong thing in there So you don't want to put the wrong thing in the 301 redirect So it's an easy but again you don't want to
Have an extinction event for your podcast if this is done right no one will even know the difference No one will know that you've changed podcast host unless they're a geek and they're looking at the RSS feed and see that your URLs for your episodes have changed. But I am available guys for one-on-one consulting if this is too hard for you, because again, this is definitely can be hard and I'm available for one-on-one consulting and you can reach me at podcastanswers.com/contact.
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