Why Every Podcaster Needs a Website: Insights from Dave Jackson

Dave Jackson [0:00 - 12:13]: Welcome to your podcast website, the ultimate guide for podcasters looking to level up their online presence. Whether you're a seasoned podcaster or just starting out, this show is your go to resource for mastering the art of building and optimizing your podcast website. From website basics to advanced SEO strategies, we cover it all. No tech jargon, no confusion, just practical tips and actionable advice you can implement right away. Here is your host, Dave Jackson. Hey, if you want to buy something, where do you go? You probably had a name. Just show up Amazon.com. You want to go watch a video? Where are you going to go? YouTube.com, more than likely. Whereas telling people to go to a website, and that's the first question we're going to answer in this podcast. Do I need a website? Well, if you don't have one, how are people going to find you? I'm assuming you want them to do something, whether that's follow your podcast, contact you. Here's a good one. Share it with a friend. Hey, found this new cool thing. It's over. It's somewhere. Just google it. Maybe it'll show up. Yeah, you need a website or whatever things you have going on. You can't just say, yeah, just, you know, and some people, I could always use my Instagram. I could use my TikTok. And there was a study where someone asked some people who are their favorite podcasters and they were able to name them by name. When they asked who are their favorite TikTokers? They couldn't. It'd be like, oh, the, the one girl with the green hair and then her husband always dumps water on. Yeah, they have a relationship with TikTok. Not so much the podcaster or the TikToker, I guess we should say, but you need a website. And so many podcasters go, yeah, I have a podcast. I'm not getting any interaction. Well, a solution to that is to have a contact page on your website. I am not making this up. I just had some very kind words said about me on a video podcast and I went to their website to say, hey, can I use a clip of that? And you guessed it, not a single contact page. Nothing. I had to go to Twitter to finally or x or whatever we're calling it to contact. You don't want to do that. If you want people to interact with you, you have to make it easy. How do you make it easy? By having one website to remember. Ours is yourpodcast website.com and you'll see there's a contact button right there at the top. Another one is it may be hard to get listeners to act when there are multiple things that they could act on. It might be, hey, contact me or buy my book or hire me or visit our sponsors or whatever it is. And now you've given them 15 calls to action. Or you could just have one website. I'll give you a great example of this, my friend Jordan Harbinger. Does the Jordan harbinger show. You can find it at jordan harbinger.com, but he has multiple sponsors. Well, I can't remember. Go to this website.com, jordan. And that website.com jordan. And, and this one and that one is slash. Whatever. So what did Jordan do? He gave people one website address to remember. Jordan harbinger.com deals. How is he able to do that? Because he has a website he controls. Now everybody gets all excited about YouTube and we should. It is the number two search engine. But what is the number one search engine? Well, that would be Google. More specifically, Google search. And what is the purpose of Google Search? Well, according to our good friends at Wikipedia, Google search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide. The main purpose of Google search is to search for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers, as opposed to other data such as images or data contained in databases. Yeah, it's searching for text. And more importantly, Google's looking for good words because otherwise you could just throw up a word salad and become number one. Google likes words, and more importantly, it likes good words. Now, this next part, gather around, children, is uncle Dave tells you some stories, especially if you're under, say, 40. You may not know these and it's important and it helps explain why you need a website. We're going to go all the way back to 1997. Back in the day, there's a website called MP3.com and all sorts of musicians would put their music on this website and you could sell your music on that website. There were a lot of users. At its peak, it delivered, remember, this is back in 1997. It delivered over 4 million MP3 audio files per day to over 800,000 unique users on a customer base of 25 million registered users, or about four terabytes of data. Again in 1997, delivered per month from three different data centers. It was a big website, huge. People were making a living selling music on MP3.com. And it was so big that you were like, well, hey, it's too big to fail, so I'll just tell people to go to MP3.com. My name. What happened to MP3.com? Find out right after this. So I'll just tell people to go to MP3.com. My name. And then it got sued and then it got sold, and then it got sued and sold and sued and sold and sued and sold. And everybody who never had their own website lost a path to their audience. They're like, I don't know. MP3 is down. I don't know where it went. And my favorite artist, I don't know where to get them. Because in 1997, there wasn't social media yet. Solution, have your own website. We'll talk about email lists as well. But for now, if you had your own website, people would know where to find you. That was in 1997. In 2002, there's a thing called Friendster. In its peak, it had 115 million users. It was basically kind of a MySpace kind of thing before MySpace, and it was shut down in 2015. But 115 million users in 2002, wow. Way too big to fail. Well, in 2003, this little thing called MySpace came along, a 150 million users as well. And it was bought and sold and bought and sold. I remember when Justin Timberlake got involved, they were going to bring it back. You know, he was bringing sexy back. And MySpace, one out of two ain't bad. And in 2016, after being sold to Time magazine, it got hacked so bad. Like, everybody's information. Eight years of information. Yeah. So if you had information on MySpace, yeah. And it was not just the dark web, the really dark web. And at that point, everybody ran away from it. Of course, in 2004, well, our good friend Facebook was born. Fast forward to 2023, 3.5 billion users. But if you weren't around when Facebook came on board, it was like, hey, build your website on Facebook. Go ahead, just put your website, facebook.com, mybusiness, whatever it was, there were commercials for that. Everything was going. It was so easy, it was so simple. Except you didn't control it as we found earlier. In fact, last month, they announced that you can no longer live stream into Facebook groups. So you want to have something where you control what you want to do on your website. When you take some sort of social platform and use it as your home base, you are building your house on rented land. Last example, 2019 clubhouse. I remember when people were saying right before the pandemic, a clubhouse is going to be the podcast killer. Well, 2024 is here five years later, and in April 2023, they cut 50% of their staff. Not many people talking about clubhouse these days. It is still around. But the bottom line is, again, when you make a platform that you don't own your main home base. You are building your house on rented land. So do I need my own website? Yes, so that you can inspire your audience to do whatever you want them to do in a way that you control. And it doesn't cost a gazillion dollars to have your own website. Many times it's around $20. That's less than a dollar a day. If you're not sure where to start, check out our website, yourpodcastwebsite.com, and click on resources and we will call it there. We're just going to do kind of one topic per episode. And if you want to get the episodes the minute they're ready, you can go to yourpodcast website.com follow. That's yourpodcast website.com follow. In the future, we'll be talking about SEO, we talking about how to make your website super flexible because I see this happen all the time and many other things while you're out at our website, which of course is, you guessed it, yourpodcastwebsite.com. We've got the email list which will have additional information. And again, the nice thing about an email list is even if your website goes up in smoke, you will still have access to your audience. And yes, that'll be a future topic. Thanks so much for checking out this first official episode of your podcast website. You know somebody else who's struggling with their podcast website? Could you do me a favor? Forward this over to them or just tell them to go to yourpodcastwebsite.com. I'm Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting. I help podcasters. It's what I do. Your podcast website is part of the Power of Podcasting Network. Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at www.powerofpodcasting.com.