Adding Features To Your Website

Today, we've got a way to add more features to your website.

We're going to talk redirects, and we've got tips for choosing the right guest for your show.

Welcome to Podcast Website Tips, the ultimate guide for podcasters who want to level up their online presence with no coding required.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, this show gives you practical, actionable advice to build and optimize your podcast website.

We cover everything from design and content to SEO and monetization.

Get ready to attract more listeners and take your website from good to great.

Here's your host, Dave Jackson.

So in this episode, we're going to talk about some tools that I have discovered.

And one is an events calendar.

Now, if you're new to the show, this is the official podcast of PodPage, which is a website that makes pretty websites for podcasters who don't want to learn how to code.

And I use it for a website.

Akron podcast dot com.

I live in Akron, Ohio, and that is about, I don't know, 45 minutes to an hour from Cleveland.

We have a fair amount of theaters and live venues for plays and musicians.

And in the summer, we have a thing in Smack Dab in the middle of downtown.

It's this big outdoor pavilion and we have bands there and all sorts of activities.

And I was like, huh, I need some sort of events calendar.

And I looked at a bunch and I had one that I was using and it was a Calendar tool for WordPress, but they also had a version that didn't need WordPress, and they shut it down and I was like, ah.

And so I did a lot of searching and I found Elf site.

Now, I don't know what's going on lately with websites that are just kind of weird because I'm like, Elf.

Like, is in Buddy the Elf.

Yeah.

And so they have a ton of scripts that, again, if you're a person that doesn't want to learn how to code, this is great.

And so everything from if you wanted a LinkedIn feed or social media, well, social media icons are on Pod page.

But I saw it and was like, holy cow.

You know, if you wanted a countdown timer or if you wanted a job board or all sorts of stuff, and I saw they had an events calendar because I could have gone into Pod page and made a custom page, but I would have had to manually update it.

When, you know, the concerts already happened, this now happens automatically.

And I was like, wow, this is actually pretty cool.

And all you do is you can make a custom page in PodPage.

And then from there you basically log into your Elfsight account and I added my, you know, the different people that are coming to town, et cetera, et cetera, and.

And then you copy a small bit of code and you paste it into your custom page and voila, you have your whatever it is you wanted.

In my case, it was an events calendar.

Now, if you want to kick the tires on this, they do have a free plan.

Now, it's only for 200 views and you only get to play with one widget and it has some Elfsight branding.

But if you want to, you know, check it out, I'm on the $5 a month plan that gives me three widgets, 5,000 views.

No, you know, it's ad free and it's actually pretty cool.

I was really surprised if you wanted to, you could get all of their apps for $15 a month.

But right now I'm, I'm playing with the event calendar and I saw one where I might use on the school of podcasting website, where I could display the artwork from all of the members in this somewhat rotating carousel that would go across the bottom of the page, but thought it was pretty cool.

And it solved my problem of needing an event calendar.

We have been doing a lot of talk with our customers at PodPage and we found out a couple things that we have services that they didn't know about.

So the first one I wanted to mention is we do have an affiliate program.

So if you're someone that works with podcasters and they need a website, you can earn 20% commission on all payments within the first 24 months of that paying customer.

So keep that in mind.

You can go to podpage.com affiliates and then what's really handy is in podpage you can go to Settings and then you'll see a link there to affiliate program.

You can sign up there, but you can also put the link, your affiliate link in there.

And then if somebody sees at the bottom where it's like powered by podpage, if they click that, then they're clicking your affiliate link.

So it's kind of, it's mild, it's not blatantly hitting people over the head with your affiliate link.

So that's kind of handy.

And then we had a fair number of hidden treasures that I wanted to let people know.

We have over 70 videos now on our YouTube channel.

We have a help desk with a lot of knowledge base articles to help you go.

We have a Facebook group and of course you could always email us.

We do a New user orientation every Tuesday.

And you can get to that under the help menu.

You'll see these as well as you can schedule a live call if you are stuck on something with support.

And then if you're an Elite member, you can actually book coaching sessions where we can talk more than just podpage with me.

And we recently launched this.

If you're a Yearly Elite member, then you can receive a free design polish.

Now, what's design polish?

This is where the founder of PodPage, Brendan Mulligan, he was on the last episode.

He's going to personally refine your site using your brand colors.

And so he's just, again, it's just going to kind of polish things up.

And again, that's for people that are on the yearly Elite plan.

And so we also recently hosted a webinar on Getting the most out of PodPage.

And I'll put a link to that.

It took us a bit to get that one out because I had to do some editing.

But one of the things we made was a Getting the Most out of PodPage Cheat Sheet.

And so if you are a current PodPage user, well, I'll put a link to that and you can download that.

And all it is is it explains what the feature is, why and when you would use it, and a link to a tutorial to show you how to use that.

So we just want to make sure everyone is up to date on what you can do with PodPage.

A quick podcast tip for those especially that are doing interviews.

And so when it comes to finding a guest for your show, really if you kind of think they might be a good fit, that really means no.

And there are great platforms like PodMatch or podcast guests and they've really kind of revolutionized how we connect with podcast guests.

They almost gamify it now.

It's kind of pretty cool.

But a time saving truth that you should probably really look at is if your reaction to a potential match is anything less than enthusiasm, you should probably just skip them.

Yeah.

When you catch yourself thinking, hmm, you know what?

Well, I don't know, maybe.

Right?

That's not the, that's not the reaction you want.

You don't want any hesitation.

Anything that's lukewarm is going to lead to wasted hours trying to uncover value that isn't naturally there.

It could be struggling to kind of bring up the meh, you know, the meh content to just make it acceptable.

Right.

That's not our goal.

It's like, well, that'll do.

That's not the goal.

Or you're missing opportunities to transform content that's actually good into something that's exceptional, that will really get people talking.

And your podcast deserves your excitement.

And that's the other one.

If you're not excited about the guest, that's going to show.

So, you know, guard your time, guard your energy, and make sure it's safe for those kind of matches that are right.

I can't wait to interview this person.

Because the difference between good and great content often begins at the selection stage, where your instincts, your gut.

Right.

Are the most valuable guide.

And remember, if it's not 100% yes, it's a no.

And so, on the school of podcasting, I interviewed Tracy Johnson, and in the book Mic Drop Moments, he talks about the triple threat filter.

And so the first filter is familiarity.

Like, does the audience know this person?

Relevance.

So are they relevant to the target audience?

Like, are they going to bring value and then entertainment?

Do they have a spark?

Do they have a story that can be made entertaining?

Because there are plenty of people that are famous and.

And they're relevant and they can't spit out anything.

You know, they're.

There is entertaining as a yesterday's toast.

Right.

They're just dry.

And you want to basically hit on all three.

If you have two out of three, it's a little heavier lifting, but it can be done.

But those are the three things you're looking for when you're looking for a guest.

Does the audience know them?

And for the record, I've had people that my audience didn't know, but they had really relevant information that was amazing and they were really entertaining.

So again, it doesn't always have to be three out of three, but that last one, if they can't say their story or whatever is their content, that can be a deal breaker sometimes.

So keep that in mind if you're dealing with guests.

All right, let's talk a little redirects.

And I thought I had talked about this on this show, and apparently I have not.

So if you're new to the show, this show used to be called your podcast website.

Now it's called Podcast Website Tips.

But I had that domain, and it's easy to just forward a domain.

But I didn't want to lose any of my SEO.

And this website had been around for a while, and it had not just the front page, but it had those pages for episodes.

And, you know, the ones where it's like, you know, your podcast website, dot com, this dash is dash the episode, etc.

Right.

Those longer Links.

Well, if somebody had linked to them previously, now they were going to be dead.

If I just did a forward.

And that's where I found, again, kind of a weird domain redirect.

Pizza.

Yep, dot pizza.

And it has a feature called forward with dome with path.

So forward with path and anything that was slash, whatever on the old domain, when somebody clicks on that, it will forward to the new domain, but also add the slash, whatever.

And that is really handy.

Now, they have a free version, but if you want to see how many times the redirect was used, that you have to pay for, and it's not ungodly expensive.

It's the basic plan starts at 1495amonth, and that allows you to do 15 different names.

The free version lets you do five source host names and a hundred thousand requests a month.

So if you had a really busy website, you could do that.

But it really comes in handy when you're trying to rebrand something and you have to, you know, make sure you don't lose any of your SEO.

Speaking of redirects, we've got a tool for that in PodPage.

We had a video about this on our YouTube channel.

But if you're on WordPress and you're using something like PowerPress, which is a really popular plugin, and there's nothing wrong with this plugin, by the way, but you are using it for your feed.

I personally would not trust anything as important as my feed on WordPress.

But what had happened was a podcaster had found PodPage.

They're like, this is amazing.

And they went over and they canceled their WordPress subscription, not realizing that when they did that, yeah, they killed their feed, which means they killed their podcast.

Oopsie.

Now, what saved them is in PodPage, you can do what's called a 301 redirect.

Now, that's a very nerdy phrase to simply say it's a change of address.

And so they were using, in this case, podbean as their media host.

So what we did is they redirected and they set up their domain to point at Pod Page.

And in POD Page, you can go to Settings and set up a 301 redirect.

So we just recreated the address of their old feed and then said, hey, when somebody comes to this address, go over here.

And in this case, look at podbean.

And so consequently, the apps that we're looking at, that when they fired up, they would see that change of address and they would update the app and to go look at the media host feed which is always the one I recommend doing.

I realize that people go, yeah, but if the media host goes out of business, you lose your show.

Then don't host on a media host that's in danger of going out of business.

And I've only known one kind of website that went out of business.

And they gave us two weeks notice.

It was like, hey, I know it's the week before Christmas, but we're going out of business and you have till January 1st.

And it was like, wait, what?

So for the most part, at least, the host I recommend, which are companies like Captivate, Buzzsprout, Libsyn, blueberry, you know, RSS.com transistor.

I don't recommend free media hosts because free is a horrible business model.

But the beautiful thing is I just was working with a client today.

They're kind of brand new.

They've got about 13 episodes into, you know, the public on their podcast and they're moving from one website to another, but they're not changing the domain name.

So the whole pizza thing really doesn't come into play here.

That redirect tool.

But they have, you know, I think he said 13 episodes that are out that are pointing at the old website.

Well, he can come in and make quickly 301 redirects for all those old addresses and point them to the new location of those episodes.

June 5th, put that on your calendar.

There's a link in the show notes where you click it and you can put it on the calendar.

But we are doing our monthly meetup and this month we are going to be talking about utilizing the audience listener survey in PodPage.

A lot of people use it and are getting great results and some people don't even know it's there.

And I went, well, we got to fix that.

So we're going to spend an hour, it's at 2pm Eastern Standard Time on June 5, talking about the audience survey as well as just open Q and A.

If you know somebody who's trying to get more traffic to their website and have a more successful podcast, tell them to go over to podcastwebsitetips.

Com.

I'm Dave Jackson, head of podcasting here at PodPage.

Thanks so much for listening.

Podcast website tips is part of the power of podcasting network.

Find this and all of Dave's shows at powerofpodcasting.

Com.