Podcasting Websites: Your 2024 Guide to Success – PCI 410

Welcome to this episode of Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry. And I'm Todd Cochran, CEO and founder of Blueberry Podcasting. Today, we're gonna talk about something very close to my heart. It's about podcast websites and what you need to do in 2024.

You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. You guys covered this on the new media show, so we figured this would be a good opportunity to, break it down a little bit.

Yeah. You know, it's it's one of those situations where we're starting to learn a lot more about podcasters. And, for those of you listening, yes, we're talking to you. And it really depends on where you are in your journey and what type of, customer you are. So I'm just gonna use a a couple of scenarios here to talk initially about what we're seeing, and then we'll talk about the benefits and and some other stuff.

The those of you that are churches, business owners, essentially, anyone that already has an established website, we see from the get go that that really 95% of you that have an established presence on the web already are and especially if you're on WordPress are immediately using PowerPress and or you're publishing back to your your website if it isn't WordPress through our dashboard. Basic, you're taking the embeds and and everything. You're just

taking it back to your website. And, that is, again, about 95% of you that already have, our brand website, doctor, dentist, whatever it may be. So you already understand the value of having a dotcom and building your brand. Whereas someone brand new that's coming in, many times they don't even care about a website whatsoever. They don't care about a landing page. All they care about is getting their show onto

Spotify and Apple Podcasts and having that distribution. And when they're doing their show, they don't even mention a website. They don't say go over to, such and such dot com or such to such and such, landing page. But as shows mature, then what we start finding is number 1, they say, oh, yeah. I definitely need a landing page. I need to have a place

to send people. And then number 2 is, yes, I need a landing page, but I want it to be my own website where I can sell merch and I can do have it, you know, collect the emails for a mailing list and so forth. So, really, this kind of transition happens in the season you are

as a podcaster. So we know creating website for podcast really offers several benefits and serves multiple purposes. And, of course, enhancing the podcast reach and engagement overall success is what a website is designed to do. And, of course, at Blueberry, our DNA is built upon building a brand on our own .coms, and we highly, highly recommend a website. Right. But again, maybe you're not ready for it.

Mike, go ahead. Yeah. Both both of us started out as bloggers and, you know, we were playing around on the web before podcasting even existed and, you know, so that's kind of baked into how how we deal with this. But, you know, a lot of these new people that are new to podcasting, you know, social media is their moon base alpha, not

their own website at first. And then, you know, later on as they, you know, get success and build an audience and all that, there is a reason to have a landing page for your show. And, you know, and it could be everything from, you know, just a simple landing page all the way up to, you know, a full blown website that does a whole lot of other things. But, yeah, there's a there's a ton of reasons to to have a website for your podcast.

You know, and if you're at that stage where you're just promoting on social media and wanting people to subscribe or follow you depending on where you're sending them, whether it be Spotify, Apple, or one of the other 100 different places where podcasts are consumed, that's great. And the best part about being a podcaster is there's no rules. You do. You you you you build the way you wanna build.

But I will go back and really say that there are some central themes about having your own website that you may not have thought of. SEO, branding, engagement with your audience, monetization, analytics being web analytics. Again, a place to put your podcast player, episode archives, show notes, contact info, announcements, merch store. And those are really some of the high level, and we can go into each of these a little bit on it's beneficial

to have a website. Then on the opposite side, there are some reasons why you may not want a website. We'll talk about that. But let's talk about the pros first, on why. Mike, you you you said my favorite word, moon base alpha, and people are kinda like, what is moon base alpha? Well, you know, if we had a base on the moon, it would probably be called Moonbase Alpha. And, that's where people would live and their life would be, would revolve around it. Whereas my website is

my Moonbase Alpha. It's where everything from my show originates

and then is distributed and syndicated out into the podcast ecosphere, including all those pay places podcasts are consuming, Apple, Spotify, etcetera etcetera. So, again, a central hub for your show. But for me, my number one piece has always been SEO. Can I win the SEO search game for not my just my show, but for the episode? Can I have my episode rank very very high? So SEO is another big piece of having your own website and it's gonna become more important as more parties are

now pulling data off the web. And you traditionally think about Microsoft and, Google and those major search engines, But the large language models like Anthropic and, OpenAI are also pulling stuff off the web. So if you have rich show notes and rich descriptions, you then become the authority not only for Google and for Microsoft, but also for Anthropic and for, you know, all these services

out there that are building up history. So I think it's gonna be more important than ever for you to have a website with this rich rich metadata that, is being able to be put on websites. You know, the prime example, of using our our podcast AI assistant production tool and having rich, rich show notes compared to what we may have had a year ago. Mike, what's some of the other reasons,

for having a podcast website? Yeah. One of the the great things is branding. You know, a lot of, companies and podcasters and organizations and all that have a specific, you know, color palette, all this stuff. And then it's it may seem a little vain to to worry about that.

But, some sometimes, you know, having your brand be consistent throughout all of your, you know, social media and all that, but, you know, adding the website to it, definitely gives you complete control over your branding on that website. Another one is engagement. Having, you know, say, a forum or a contact form, an email list sign up, or and all this kind of stuff gives your listeners a place to interact with you. You

know? They know, okay. I'm listening on Spotify, but there's no real way to contact you through Spotify. So they know if you tell them in the show, hey. Go to my blah blah blah.com and, you know, do this, do that. It it gives you a place to send them to, engage with you, which, you know, a lot of podcasters, you know, they think they're talking into the ether and, you know, getting engagement is a real motivator for a lot of podcasters. This is a a a really good way to do that.

Of course, monetization, your own site gives you a place to promote your sponsors, sell merch, or your own consulting services if that's, you know, or maybe your dentist or a lawyer or whatever it may be. Of course, you can run AdSense ads as well if you wanna do that. Sure. I mean, a lot of people you can a lot of people that make money in podcasting aren't making money for talking on the mic. They're making money with their service or their business or

or whatever. So that's, you know, a good good way to do that.

One thing that I do is I add extra content. I have writers that put out blog posts, on a regular basis each month, and it just keeps kind of feeding that, that machine out there that is, sucking data in and and building, rich historical information on a website. Also, you can set Google Linux or another web analytics system and get some more information about how your listeners and web visitors use your site.

You know, one of the statistics I'm proud of on my personal site is the amount of time people stay once they come on the website. And, you know, if you're seeing people leave after 3 seconds, that's a bad thing. But if they're staying for 2 or 3 minutes, that's gold. That means they've kind of peaked around for a little bit, read a few articles, and and then left. And you get enough of those 2 or 3 minute hang

ons. It makes for a big difference in in, basically, Google saying this site has, authority, and it get drives you more traffic. Yeah. Of course Yeah. Nice thing, you know, a nice thing about, you know, doing the extra content and doing the web analytics is you know, say you have an article that shows up that's not a podcast episode. You have an article that shows up in somebody's search. They come to your site. They read the article, and then they poke around a little bit, and they say,

hey. There's a podcast here. So you get, you know, some podcast listeners that way and vice versa. Your podcaster, you know, listeners say, you know, hey. Let's go to the site and, check out, you know, what what the site's about, and then, hey. It's writing other articles that are of the same, you know, genre. And, you know, that is a a great way to kinda double up on, on your viewers and or listeners.

And, again, some of the very basic stuff that doesn't need much explanation is you got your podcast player for your episode. You have an episode archives from previous episodes or a playlist player that can have as many episodes within a limit on your on a page, expanded show notes, your contact information, special announcements about stuff that's going on. I make an announcement. I'm going live and have that schedule up there through one of our widgets.

You could have a merch store associated with it, of course, ads and so forth.

But that kinda brings us to the next topic. Why may you not want a website? And, there is a list of, you know, perfectly good reasons, and we know many of you don't have a website. Maybe you fall into some of these categories. But you know what? I think probably the biggest one on this list is, Mike. Yep. I know. Short short on time. We're scared of maintaining 1. Yeah. You know, website maintenance can take some time, effort, or you have to hire somebody, and then the cost

goes up. So, you know, you've gotta weigh whether or not you want to get into that learning curve to maintain a website. Now, of course, here at Blueberry, we give you a WordPress site that we maintain for you, not the not the content, but the the structure of it and all that. So that that may save you some time, and it's free with hosting. So the cost isn't too bad. But, Yeah. We back it up. We have we maintain

the plug ins. So a lot of that little administrative stuff that I do on my personal website is done automatically for you by having the, the one provided by the team here at Blueberry. Right. You know? And, also, you know, technical skills. Again, you know, not everybody's cut out to build a website. You know? It's not so hard and, you know, a little learning, it's not hard to do, but, you know, not everyone wants to mess with that. You

know? When we built PowerPress sites or now Blueberry WordPress sites, the the goal of it was we wanna build a WordPress site for people who don't wanna mess with WordPress.

So, you know, you put the content in and, you know, make it look pretty and call it good. But, and another thing that people, you know, balk at sometimes is the cost. You know, domains are still fairly cheap, but, you know, you have to pay for those, if you're not gonna be using some, you know, free or included website. You know, web hosting, that's, you know, another bill, you know, and that's similar in cost to, podcast hosting. So, you know, that that can be,

you know, something that'll put people off. You know? And if you gotta hire someone, again, there's a a lot of cost involved with that. You know, I always giggle too because, you know, the cost of hosting here at Blueberry is very inexpensive as compared to all the add ons people need.

You know? And, there's some popular sites out there that people are using to automatically build their website, which, you know, they're they cost twice or 3 times as much as our hosting plans, yet you are still considered a syndication site because it's being built within our assess feed. It's not a true origin point for the content. So in it looks like you have a website, but you really have a syndicated

a syndicated site. So, sometimes going with those real easy routes to create a website can have a negative impact on search results. But the best part here is if you want true origin of content, Blueberry will give you that and give you a website with the podcast hosting combined. And when you post on your dotcom, through the Blueberry website, you are the origin of the content, and you can take that with you and that authority with you if

you ever leave Blueberry to another website. So I think that is something that is a main difference with us than some of these other platforms that do provide you, an easy to build site. But I don't think a lot of people think long term when it comes to Google, and I think we do and we understand the implications, of the difference between being a point of origin for content and a syndication. So but, you know, at the same time, if you wanna have just

a landing page on Blueberry, that's fine. We do provide that for you. Yeah. Well, you know, we have the, regular directory listing here at Blueberry. We also have a thing called quick links, which is can be a kind of a landing page. So, in fact, let listen to the last episode. They talk all about the the, quick links landing page. But probably another reason people don't set up a website, they just wanna do the show and not mess with the rest and keep it simple. And here's the best part.

You you do you do the way you wanna do it. We we provide you all options here at Blueberry, and we're not about locking you into a specific way. We can we can suggest and, you know, prod and and, you know, try to get you guys to to think like we do, but, you know, you're maybe not ready for that. And, that's that's okay. Keep it simple. Keep on podcasting. Do what you love to do about creating content. I think that's the most important part in the end.

And, of course, again, some of you live on social media, and that's where you build your audiences. That's fine. That's you know, I think if your listeners interact with you, that's awesome too. And the interaction, I think, is, you know, a big part of the motivation to stay podcasting. So, we don't pooh pooh that at all. No. You know? And, again, as Todd said before, you know, there's no rules in podcasting. There's a few standards to make everything distribute right.

But, you know, here at Blueberry, we give you all the choices and, you pick what you want, and you can always graduate to something else. That's that's the beauty of it. No no rules. Do you? I do. I like to say we have the best in class options for everyone. So the for the options that we give and basically having a landing page or having your own.com with Blueberry or going out on your own and having your own WordPress website,

we give you the best of class. So those even though you may only have a landing page, it still is it's very, very powerful giving you the data to grow your show and be found, all the way through again and going to the complete, side of having your website using PowerPress stand alone. And tens of thousands of you do. And, that's why we built the platform the way it is. I guess unless you get anything else, Mike, I think we'll thank everyone for listening.

We'll do a little housekeeping here. We're gonna be at, Podcast Movement, probably while you're listening to this. But if you happen to be in the DC area, come check it out. Also, next week, we're going to we're gonna attempt to record show, at at the, podcast movement. So, anyway, thanks for listening. Check back next week, and we'll catch you later. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information.

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