Creating a Podcast Website: Must-Have Features and Tips – PCI 393

Speaker 0 00:00:00 A lot of website platforms, if you don't keep things up to date, can be hacked. And especially if you're also handling other things with your website, that would require people to sign in with some personal information. So a lot of times you don't do that on a podcast website, but you know, sometimes people have websites that do multiple things. Definitely want an SSL certificate. That's the, uh, the difference between HTTP and H-T-T-P-S. In your, uh, address, you are listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and McKenzie Bennett from the blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcasting. With all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome, let's dive in.

Speaker 1 00:00:54 I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry.

Speaker 0 00:00:58 And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of Customer Relations at Blueberry.

Speaker 1 00:01:02 Today, we're explaining the essential elements your podcast website needs to be effective.

Speaker 0 00:01:06 Well, first off, one of the questions we get a lot is, do I need a website?

Speaker 1 00:01:11 This yes and no, but really yes, ,

Speaker 0 00:01:15 Yes, it's the best practice and it's the blueberry way. But yeah. So, uh, anyway, let's get into the meat of the subject.

Speaker 1 00:01:24 Yeah, so we recommend that you have a website for your podcast so that it has a home. And one of those first things is the RSS feeds. Mike, this is kind of your specialty.

Speaker 0 00:01:36 Yeah, of course. In our case, you want to use PowerPress with WordPress to create your site and to create your RSS feed. But that's not necessarily the only way to do it. But this is the easiest if I can be so humble. But you wanna configure the RRSS feed specifically for the podcast. You know, WordPress in particular comes with a lot of RSS feeds. You know, the blog posts have a feed and there's other feeds available in WordPress. But you wanna configure a special podcast only feed, which is what PowerPress does for you, but to not let you get it distributed to Apple and Spotify and all the other podcast apps. I gotta quit saying Google Podcasts since they're no longer a thing here in the US . But if you're outside the US Google podcast is still a thing.

Speaker 1 00:02:27 So one of the other important things to have on your podcast website is a robust podcast player. This is super simple. There's a bunch of different players that you can choose from with WordPress or whoever you host your website with, but you just wanna make sure that your show is actually available on your website as well. Yes, you can recommend that people go listen to it in their favorite podcast app, but it is essential to have it on here as well, for people to be able to listen.

Speaker 0 00:03:01 Yeah, and for sure you, you wanna have a player that has all the cool functions too, you know, like our blueberry player that comes with power press if you're hosting with us, has, you know, the play and pause and forward 30 seconds and backward 15 or 30 or whatever it's set to, I forget. And also it allows you to speed it up. So if you wanna listen to it at two x, I don't know, I can't even handle it at one x sometimes . But you know, you wanna have a pretty functional web player. 'cause a lot of your podcast listeners, especially if you are demographic skews a little older, they, they definitely use the website to listen to the show. And again, we don't care how you listen. It's nice to have it in a, in an app so you can take it with you and all that stuff. But having the player on the site's pretty important. One of the reasons to have a site is for search engine optimization for people to find your podcast and you can emulate or emulate, where did that come from? . You can implement search engine optimization techniques right on your website. And it helps the visibility, helps it rank well in the search. And that will get you more listeners usually.

Speaker 1 00:04:13 Actually I was, I was kind of thinking about it with the player as well, is these descriptions and titles that you have for your podcast might not necessarily be easy to find in a podcast app just because, you know, looking up a specific phrase is not always gonna get the best results in various apps, but if people are just searching for it on Google in general, this is gonna help with that. That is kind of the SEO optimization of your website a little bit, is making sure that you're using appropriate keywords for the, like the show notes that you're doing as well. 'cause we tell people one of the things that they should also have is an episode archive and all of that is just building your SEO over time of having these categorized, you know, setting them up by past episodes, by date, topic, guest, really whatever you would like to do, but just a clean and simple way for Google and people to be able to understand what is happening.

Speaker 0 00:05:20 Yeah, one of the keys to getting good SEO is to have, you know, your site easy for humans to do to, uh, navigate. Now Todd will always say something like, you know, write for Google and do your show for your audience. Well, it's true to a point, but Google, their goal is to make information findable by humans. Mm-Hmm. , you know, if you make your website human friendly you, you're gonna do okay in SEO, but there are some other techniques and things you should use for that. But another thing on a website, and I hate going to a website and them not having a search bar, almost all website creation tools out there allow you to have a search bar so people can come to your site and search for a particular episode or a particular topic that you're talking on. So,

Speaker 1 00:06:14 And you know, if someone doesn't have it, I'm gonna do it with a keyboard command if, if it doesn't exist, I'm still gonna search for it that way.

Speaker 0 00:06:22 But that's, yeah, that's not gonna dig deep into the archives. Nope. You know, usually on the front page of a podcast website, there might be 10 episodes showing and if you have a hundred episodes, well those won't be included in that keyboard search. So definitely, you know, put the search bar in there.

Speaker 1 00:06:41 Yeah, that can definitely go into your episode archive functionality as well. Yeah. So one of the other things that we tell people not to forget is a, the subscription options, you know, people are gonna subscribe to your show, they're gonna follow it, you know, whatever it's called on whatever app that they're using. But you need to make all of those ways to follow you available on your website. We actually have a really great subscribe widget that we provide to people in PowerPress because we think it's super important and it's one of the first things that we think should kind of stand out on your website.

Speaker 0 00:07:20 Certainly. And don't just do Apple and Spotify. Yes, they're gonna be the ones that get you the most listeners, but have an RSS link as well. And I know that won't make sense to a lot of people, but that helps. The search engines know it's a podcast for one. That's great. And for those that know how to use an RSS feed, it's invaluable to them. You know, I suggest, you know, apple and Spotify of course, but you know, maybe something like Podcast Index or Pandora or you know, whatever other ones you're in, you know, it never hurts to have more be everywhere. Okay,

Speaker 1 00:08:02 Sure.

Speaker 0 00:08:03 .

Speaker 1 00:08:05 So part of that be Everywhere is effective social media integration on your website as well.

Speaker 0 00:08:11 Oh yeah. You definitely wanna have a link to your Facebook or X or Instagram or whatever social media that you partake in, you know, have a link there for sure. And you know, with, you know, sharing of episodes, that's the other thing, you know, with a website, you should have a post for that episode. That's what you wanna share out to the social media.

Speaker 1 00:08:38 Yeah, there's really two ways to kind of go about this when it comes to social media. So you want people to be able to share the post very easily where they can just kind of click on it and it has that shared capability of, I want this to go to my Twitter and have, you know, that that prompted notice or like caption and with the URL to what you wanna share. But then there's also make sure that you are including your own social channels for them to follow somewhere on the website as well. You know, it's very common in the sidebar and the footer and the header, the about page, whatever you wanna do

Speaker 0 00:09:18 With that. Yeah. And it kind of goes both ways. You know, you promote it on social, but you also promote your social Yes. And promote it so that they can also share that episode if they so chooses.

Speaker 1 00:09:30 Yes. If you want people to share your content, you have to make it easy for them to do.

Speaker 0 00:09:35 Yes, I was, I had that problem this morning. I was trying to share a, a post and you know, and I know how to just go copy it out of the address bar, but a lot of people don't.

Speaker 1 00:09:47 So, and especially if you're on mobile, you really don't wanna poke around and find it. You just want it to work. So

Speaker 0 00:09:54 Yeah, yeah, definitely for mobile and you know, and that a lot of people now don't even have a computer. Yeah. They're doing it all on their phone or their iPad or their whatever Android thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:10:06 So that, that definitely leads into, we wanna talk about a contact information page as well as an about page. Sometimes people will combine these, but generally for Google's sake, it's good to keep them separate. Like and for your site map, if you choose to do a site map as well, it's good to keep these separate contact information is just how can they actually contact you. That might be a good place to add your social as well. Encourage your listeners to provide feedback, engage with them. They can send inquiries about, you know, I would love to be on the show or congrats or the best is always when someone tells you that they hate it. That's kind of a, like a badge of honor for some podcasters.

Speaker 0 00:10:47 That's never happened to me.

Speaker 1 00:10:49 No . So they really, they really just need like a contact form for the most part. And then the about page is kind of when you can get a little more personal and add some more of your own personality and flavor to your website as well. So talk about the podcast mission, the host, the background story, and just about yourself if you're comfortable with it.

Speaker 0 00:11:11 Yeah. And it doesn't have to be an email address. Now email addresses are kind of the traditional feedback that podcasters way back when used to put on their sites. And that's fine if you're okay with that or maybe have a special email that, that you just use for show feedback. You know, Google email is for is free, make one of those up for it or whatever. But have some way that you can get feedback talking about mobile. You know, so many websites out there look beautiful on a 27 inch screen on your desk or on your laptop screen, but they look like crap on mobile . So make sure your website works well on mobile. Again, most or a lot of people now do not even own a computer. They're mobile only.

Speaker 1 00:11:59 And because of that, Google will decide like how well your site is doing based on mobile first and then desktop just solely based on the fact that more people have mobile phones than they do, you know, full laptop devices at this point. So definitely consider that. It's super easy to figure out, you know, whatever browser you're in has all of these options to view what everything is gonna look like. There's plenty of articles out there on how to do this. Um, so don't be intimidated by it, but just know the importance of it, I think.

Speaker 0 00:12:40 Yeah. Yep. And this next one, I could get super geeky, but I'm not going to Okay. a blog or a news section on your site. And you'll notice that podcast insider.com has blog and podcasts together. So we have our news articles and our announcements and all of the other things intermixed with the podcast episodes. That's kind of the way I like to do it. But you can also, and again, not getting geeky, you can have a special blog section on your podcast website and there's nothing at all wrong with that as well.

Speaker 1 00:13:20 Definitely good for the SEO for sure.

Speaker 0 00:13:22 Yeah, yeah. Having other content other than just podcast episodes is good for SEO.

Speaker 1 00:13:28 Well the next thing we wanna talk about is analytics tools, specifically Google analytics. That's just, you know, the main source to monitor your website traffic behavior and engagement metrics. But those Google analytics, if people aren't actually going to your site because there's no SEO optimization via your episode archive or your podcast player or the blog post, then you're not gonna get a lot of Google analytics to look at. And people get frustrated over that because they're like, no one's coming here. You have to give them a reason to come there. You have to lead them there. So. Right.

Speaker 0 00:14:01 And don't, and don't confuse Google analytics with podcast analytics.

Speaker 1 00:14:06 Oh yeah.

Speaker 0 00:14:07 Google will not do anything with the actual podcast analytics. They can tell when people visit a site, a PA particular page on the site, how long they stay, that kind of stuff. But it does not do anything for your podcast analytics, which, you know, in our case with blueberry, you know, you go to blueberry and look at those which are completely and utterly different

Speaker 1 00:14:32 there. Yeah. There's a reason that we tell people to implement these and that when people are like, oh, well, do I actually name podcast Dots? Yes, yes you do. And you need Google Analytics. They are not one and the same. So,

Speaker 0 00:14:46 Or something like that. I mean, a lot of web hosts have their own analytics as well, so

Speaker 1 00:14:52 Absolutely. Just make sure you're keeping an eye on both of 'em at least a little bit. So,

Speaker 0 00:14:56 And accessibility, that's, that's something that is also important on a website. Making sure that your website is accessible to all users, including those with visual dis disabilities or, or even, you know, hearing d difficulties now with, you know, with podcasts, they're, they've generally been hard to access for the hearing impaired. And now with all these tools out there for transcripts and closed captioning and all of that stuff, it's becoming more and more accessible.

Speaker 1 00:15:29 I think we've really seen a huge lead in this movement on social media platforms and on like YouTube and just kind of the downfall of sound mixing in any TV and movie that you watch that has made people turn on the captions when they're watching whatever content they would prefer. But I think it's good to just provide all of this similar to the mobile responsiveness, like don't be overwhelmed by it. It's very easy to kind of figure out how to implement these things a lot of the time. Like things like alt text for images and compliance a lot of the time, like your web host is gonna point these things out for you and say like, this is not the way that it should be type of thing. So just keep an eye out for it, I think would be the easiest thing

Speaker 0 00:16:22 For sure. And you know, a lot of WordPress themes in particular do have accessibility features or, and or features that allow you to have a mobile responsive version and an accessible version and you know, all that. So you might check into that. In fact, the next item on our list is themes and visuals. . Yeah. So I'm not a very designy type person, so a form follows function , you know, but you know, you wanna make it look decent.

Speaker 1 00:16:55 You do, you wanna make it look decent and feel like yourself, you know, you, you want people to be able to associate what your website looks like, kind of with your overall brand. And I'm not saying that in like a influencer, I have to have a brand type of way, but more so the way of the look, this color scheme matches this person in real life.

Speaker 0 00:17:18 Yeah. The look and feel has to be cohesive on a website. You, you know, don't get overly don't overanalyze it and make that stop you from having a website. You know, get something up there and you can always tweak as you go. But uh, you know, you definitely want to have a decent logo and keep all the colors and you know, so that they're not clashing too badly unless that's what you're going for.

Speaker 1 00:17:41 And a lot of these make it very easy to, you know, kind of just like follow the step by step guide and make it fun to kind of play around with these, these things. You know, do we wanna add this here? Do we wanna make this color this? You definitely don't need a graphic designer to do this for you or any type of, you know, consultant. I mean, if

Speaker 0 00:18:03 Extra one, that's kind of nice, but if you

Speaker 1 00:18:05 Don't wanna do it, you can have someone do it for you. But it is, it's kind of fun

Speaker 0 00:18:10 . Anyway. And then I guess the last item, you know, something you gotta think about is security. Yeah. Well, lot of website platforms, if you don't keep things up to date can be hacked. And especially if you're also handling other things with your website that would require people to sign in with some personal information. So a lot of times you don't do that on a podcast website, but you know, sometimes people have websites that do multiple things. Definitely want an SSL certificate. That's the, uh, the difference between HTTP and H-T-T-P-S in your, uh, address.

Speaker 1 00:18:49 Can you explain how someone would go about getting one?

Speaker 0 00:18:52 Well, a lot of web hosts give them away for free. A lot of them charge you lots of money for them, . But, uh, and I won't call out any particular company that ticks me off about that, but, uh, but basically you, on your web host especially, and or if you're using one of our blueberry websites, it's somewhat automatic. You log in the first time using your domain, you hit enable SSL, boom, you're done. You know, your mileage will vary on various other websites. I know Squarespace, I think just by default it all there, everything's https. So

Speaker 1 00:19:27 Yeah, that's, yeah, a lot of the times these companies will lead you in the right direction in this scenario, .

Speaker 0 00:19:33 And one thing is, okay, the most popular web browser out there is Chrome. Mm-Hmm . If you have a website that doesn't have H-T-T-P-S or SSL, then your web players will not work on that person's computer on, on Chrome. And so that cuts out a lot of listeners, and I do believe Apple now requires that on the RSS feed. I don't know if that

Speaker 1 00:20:00 Honestly Good. Yeah.

Speaker 0 00:20:01 You know, so get it. They're either cheap or free with the most web hosts and you know, except for one, which, like I said, I'm not gonna name, I wanna, but I'm not going to

Speaker 1 00:20:12 . Yeah. Well also speaking of security, I mean, even just this morning I logged into some website and they were like, oh yeah, your website has been found on the web for this. You should go ahead and change it. So

Speaker 0 00:20:26 Password.

Speaker 1 00:20:26 Yeah, I feel like everyone that has a podcast, because they're, you're gonna have your own website. You're gonna be logging into blueberry or some or something else. Get a password manager. I use LastPass and I have for many years. It's, I mean, it's nothing fancy, but you need something generally to keep yourself from going crazy over all of your passwords.

Speaker 0 00:20:51 Yep, for sure. And so I guess as we wrap it up, you know, thanks for listening of course. And just remember that, you know, having your own place on the internet, you know, even though you're doing a podcast and people can, you know, go view it on or listen to it on all the apps, or say you're doing a YouTube channel even, you should still have your own place on the internet

Speaker 1 00:21:18 If you don't want to go out and do it on your own. And if you're a blueberry hosting customer, we give you a free WordPress site that we manage for you. All of those security measures that SSL, those themes and plugins that you choose from, we all lay that out for you. So if that is something that you are not interested in doing yourself, there are solutions.

Speaker 0 00:21:42 Yeah. But you know, you still have to do the work as far as, you know, publishing your show and all that. But it's no different doing it from a WordPress site than it is doing it from our dashboard. You know, there's, you know, that looks just slightly different. But all the stuff's there. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. To check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease. We couldn't afford the ease.