2 Reasons Why Your Podcast Needs a Website (Podcast Websites: Part 1)

Alright, Proffitt Podcast listeners, y'all know that I love trying new things, right? I mean, it's this podcast would not be here. If I just didn't have the confidence, we'll just call it that to go out and try new things. And then I come back, I report back to you, right? I feel like you're my, my manager. And I'm just like, out there. I'm grinding, I'm doing the things. And then every once in a while, I'm like, Oh, I gotta go report back because I tried this thing out. Here's how it worked.

Okay, so in the beginning, like I said, we are starting a we'll call it a mini series, right? We're going to do part one today. And then on the next episode, we're going to talk about part two of creating your podcast website. So there's another reason why I wanted to split this up over two episodes. And that's because today we're going to talk about the basics of podcast websites, mostly for beginners and brand new people. And then in the next episode, we're going to talk about people that may be a little bit more seasoned, or those of you that are looking for ideas on how to level up. So this is another reason why I was like, throw everything into one episode. I just don't feel like it's going to hit as well. So like I said, we're constantly experimenting. I don't typically stretch out an idea over two episodes. But you know what, like, I have told y'all this so many times. It's my podcast, I make the rules. And I want you to have this same thought for your show as well. So there are no rules when it comes to podcasting, guys. We have a lot of guidelines, and we have a lot of suggested things. But don't think that just because you start your podcast one way that it's set in stone and you can't change things up and have a little fun from time to time. So first and foremost, everything we're going to talk about today can be found in the show notes. So that is KrystalProffitt.com/episode263. That's where you're gonna find I'm gonna link to a few podcast episodes that we already have, and some other really cool resources that I do not want you to

Okay, so I wanted to start today's episode. I'm laughing because I'm a little embarrassed with the story I'm about to tell you. But it has to be said. So I cannot talk about podcast websites without telling you about my very first experience creating a website. So a few years ago, we're talking 2014 2015 we lived in a really small town in East Texas that actually wasn't too far from my hometown. So if you've ever, ever heard the podcast and you're like, Where's Krystal exactly from? Where's this accent coming from? I was born and raised in Athens, Texas. Yes, it's an actual place, not Athens, Greece. Whenever I tell people like oh, I'm from Athens, or like Greece. And I'm like, Really? That's your first thought when you hear this accent? Is that girls from Athens? Greece? No, no, maybe Athens, Georgia, because they got the twain too But no, Athens, Texas is my hometown. And we had an opportunity to live in East Texas area again. We are in a small town called Bullard so shout out all my my Bullard Texas peeps, like I know there's like two of you all. It's so small. It is such a small community. And while we were there, I was a stay at home mom. This was like the very, very early days of my journey as being a stay at home mom and exploring what I wanted to do with my time and I started Writing a lot. And I also started taking the kids to the library. Because if anybody's been at home with kids for a long time, the question you're always asking yourself is when can I see adults? When can I see other people, and it was typically, at storytime at the library every single week, I would just be like, come on, kids load up, load up the minivan, we are all going to the library for storytime, right, like, quote, unquote, it was for the kids. But really, it was. So mama had some other adult interaction, let's, let's just be real. If you've been at home for any amount of time with small children, and you're just looking around, like I will talk to the mailman, I will talk to anybody. Yeah, that's that that's the place of desperation that I was at. So we hung out a lot at our little community library. And it's important to know that this library was not state funded, it was not funded by the city wasn't funded by the county, like they basically were a community run library. So their funds were minimal. And when I say minimal, I'm talking about it was the building next to the donut shop that looked like it was about to fall apart. And you're like, Oh, wait, that's a library like you, you've just had no idea. So whenever I started hanging out there, I got to know the director and the head librarian. And we were chatting, and I just felt the need to offer up my services, which is funny, because I'm like, I didn't have any services. But I'd say hey, is there anything I can do to help you all around here, you know, I'm have the kids and everything. But you know, if you if you have anything, I'd be happy to help y'all. And the director said, You know what, we are trying to redo our website. Do you have any experience doing that? And I thought, um, no, but I don't know. Like, I don't like that's not my thing. I don't know how to code. I don't know any of that fancy, like web language like developer, like, I don't do any of that, like, I that's not my thing. And then basically said, Well, you can't make it look any worse than it looks right now. So I went from having all this self doubt, to all of a sudden being like, Whoa, okay, like that. That was a boost of confidence. Like, I can't break it, right. I'm not gonna break the internet if I tried to do this website. So long story short, I built or I didn't build, because it wasn't from scratch, right? They already had something there. But I kind of helped them incorporate new images and some new navigation and just doing some new things with their website library. And that little baby step was a boost of confidence. So whenever I actually went to create my own website, I kind of knew what I was doing, and was able to do my own thing. I didn't have to hire this out to a developer and it was kind of fun to to be able to play on their platform again, knowing that I couldn't make it any worse than it already was. Those are their words. Okay. I don't want to say that's my words, that that was their language of how they spoke about their website. And they were pretty happy with it whenever I was done, but it was nice to not have the pressure of like, Oh, my gosh, I have to invest all this money to figure out how to do this. What if it doesn't work? What if I end up wasting money? I didn't have any of that because it wasn't for me. It was for them. It was for me to help them and coming from that place of service just really motivated me to get it done and to do a good job. So that was my first website experience. And then I mean, here we are five, six years later, and I have learned so much about websites. Oh my gosh is so so much from hosting your own website with WordPress to having one on kajabi to creating one in weebly. Like I have learned so many different things. Now, to be clear, I am still not a developer. I don't code a bunch of things. I don't do a lot of really fancy things with my website. But what you see on Krystal Proffitt.com and ProffittPodcasting.com, which is where I host my courses and my products. I've developed those I've had some help from copywriters and other people that have helped me develop some of it. But I mean, 80 to 90% of it was me, like in the background, writing things and doing

So I have some experience in doing websites, and I want you to have more confidence that your podcast can have a website. Okay, because I get this question a lot is, do I actually need a podcast website? If I'm just getting started? My answer is always going to be yes. But it depends on your situation. because believe it or not, there's not just one way to have a website. There are so so so many different ways. You can have a website and actually, there is a product that is for sell right now, like as we're recording this as this airs. That is me teaching you how to create a podcast website that listeners actually want to visit. And this is part of the BC stack promotion. That happens once a year. So I'm not going to make like a whole sales pitch about what we're going to do. You probably heard an ad for it whenever you're listening to this. But if you go to KrystalProffitt.com/bcstack21. You can learn more about this and I'm going to go into detail, it's going to be a live training. And it's going to be very much in depth. So if you like what you hear in today's episode, and in the next episode, then it could be something for you. But it only comes around once a year. And it's from June 13 through June 18 2021. So if you're listening to this, I hope you stick around and listen to more about podcast websites. But I did want to like give a shameless plug for this masterclass training, because it's going to be incredible. And y'all bc stack is $47, I'm not trying to sell you, you know, a $10,000 product, it's 47 bucks, it's less than $50. And the product that I'm creating alone is valued at over $100. So I definitely want you to go check it out. But I want to talk about why your podcast needs a website. That's really what I wanted to hone in on

So the obvious reason why your podcast needs a website is organic reach. Okay, organic reach is so stinking important, especially with and I don't know about your experience, but I'll just give you Instagram. So whenever I post something on Instagram, I don't get as much engagement as I have in the last six months unless I put out a reel. And there was a point in time we have episodes like where we talked about Instagram reels, or I was doing them on a very regular

Now, the other point that I wanted to make, and the reason why podcast websites are so important it is because it gives you the opportunity to take the next step with your audience. This is a question that I get often is like, Well, how do you connect with your audience? You're just talking into a microphone, but they're just listening whenever they listen, right? Is that a synchronous, like, Hey, I can upload this whenever and then someone can listen to it today, five days from now, 10 years from now, right? People can listen to it whenever they want. So how do I actually engage with my people? Well, you have a website, you have a place to send them. This is why I always tell you about my show notes. Because if you want to learn more about what I'm doing, you can go to the show notes. And then if you're there and you're clicking around, you're like, Oh, hey, I can go click on the about page, I can learn more about crystal or Oh, hey, she has this really cool YouTube video that I didn't know was there. Now I can go watch it. She has this incredible product, she has this awesome program, she has all these other extra resources that I may not have known about had I not gone to the website. So if you are looking to make that deeper connection with your audience, having a website will help you do that not relying just on social media, not relying on just some other platform that you don't have control over. Right? Like I really want this point to hit home because it's so important to be able to make that connection with your audience without having to depend on an algorithm. Man, I just feel like there's some. I'm ranty Today we are getting some rants out. Whoo. Let me get off my soapbox for a second. Okay. So taking the next step with your audience could look like selling your products and services already told you earlier about creating sales pages like y'all I write all of my sales pages. I've had one instance where I had someone help me with a sales page. And I had someone tell me, they were like, that doesn't sound like you. I could tell immediately once I started reading it that that just it did not sound like your voice. It didn't sound like how you would actually be talking to me and telling me about this thing. And that was really important for me to take that feedback and say, okay, like, how can I actually make this better? So selling your products and services on your website is just another way to connect with your audience. Y'all are always asking me, how can I monetize? How can I make money with my podcast? Well, if you have a website, that's kind of the laying the foundation for you connecting with your audience to sell them something, whether it's a book, whether it's a digital course, whether it's a service, a membership, whatever it is that you're selling, if you don't have anywhere to send them, how are they going to know where to go? Okay, so I think that it's really important that a podcast website can do this for you. And then another thing is list building, y'all. We've talked about list building on here, I'm going to link to some other really cool resources for building your email list with a podcast like how you can create your first lead magnets how to grow An email list with a podcast, I have so many episodes and videos on this already. But if you don't have a website, it's still doable, right? You can have an email service provider, like ConvertKit like MailChimp, like flow desk, like there's a lot of these different resources out there, that you don't necessarily have to have a website. But I believe it makes it easier for you to just figure it out now, right? Because this is what you're so scared of. You're like, creating a website. It just sounds hard. It sounds hard. Well, let me tell you, in 2015 to 2014 2015, YouTube was not as robust as it is today, okay, and it was not filled with as many experts as there are today. And I can tell you that everything has gotten a lot better, a lot, a lot better. So if you can Google it, if you can YouTube it, I promise you, you can figure out how to create a podcast website that can work to your advantage and having the ability to how's your lead magnets to create landing pages like, I'll give you an example. I use WordPress, and Convert Kit to help me build my email list. And what's cool is, you know, some people will say, Well, I don't want those long, ugly URLs that ConvertKit provides for you. This is what I'm talking about. You can do everything in ConvertKit. But you may have this long, ugly URL, and you're like, Oh, I gotta go create a Bitly to make it shorter, I got to do something else. Well, what I can do with having my WordPress site and ConvertKit connected together, I can create it KrystalProffitt.com slash whatever I want it to be, because it's they're connected together. So even though you're going to a URL that's part of my website, you're actually like ConvertKit, and in WordPress are just talking to one another. And you're going to like the same place. I know, this might sound a little technical. But at the end of the day, it's actually making your life easier because you're using these platforms cohesively as they were meant to be used. And it makes building your email list. So much easier, so much easier. And that's just another way for you to create those deeper connections with your audience. If you're not on my email list, you need to get on there, you need to get on there. Because every single Friday, I send weekly emails to my list. And sometimes they're just crazy stories, sometimes their experiences that I've had, and sometimes I share stuff there that I do not share anywhere else. anywhere else. Like I won't post about it on social media. And if I do talk about it, it's a totally different version of what I actually share. Like I go a lot deeper in my emails, because those are my love letters to my audience. And that's really the whole intent of creating my weekly newsletters to y'all. It's I want you to feel like you know me, I want you to have this deeper connection. And having a podcast website just makes building my email list. So much

So, we'll wrap up real fast with Why does your podcast need a website. So first, we talked about organic reach, taking advantage of SEO and keywords to really help your podcast stand out. And to get it in front of an organic audience. I mean, you're spending less money on ads, you're spending no money on ads, whenever you are strategically thinking about SEO and keywords. So make sure you go listen to those podcast episodes we talked about.