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Does Your podcast need WordPress anymore? Thank you for joining me for the Audacity to podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. I've been using WordPress since 2003. I think version 0.72 was my first, but the world of website options for podcasters has changed significantly since then. If you'd like to follow along with the notes for this episode, they are a simple tap or swipe away. Look at the chapters or go to the audacitytopodcast.com NeedWordPress now quick disclosure. Some of the links in those notes and these providers and options that I mentioned in this episode I do have affiliate relationships with, but I earn commissions only if you purchase through my links, which I'd love for you to do. But none of this content is sponsored and I recommend things I truly believe in regardless of earnings. And some of the things I recommend, I don't earn anything from those options. So keep that in mind as I go forward with this and you can get those links in the notes for this episode. Simple tap or swipe away or@the audacitytopodcast.com NeedWordPress and before we get to that, there's a fundamental thing I need to remind you. Your podcast does need a website. I've come to hate the phrases Find my podcast in Spotify Apple Podcasts. Fill in the blank with whatever podcast app or the phrase wherever you get your podcasts. My disdain for the latter deserves its own future episode, and I will get to it at some point. The biggest problem with these phrases is that you're telling people to basically search for your podcast, and that puts you at the mercy of not only the frequently changing search rankings, but it also especially depends on the assumption that there are no other podcasts with similar names, or that you're the top result now or in the future. For example, I love this one because it's so meta. There were 19 results as I prepared this episode. 19 results in Apple Podcasts 4 think outside the box. Some of them were thinking outside the box, some of them reworded that, or rearranged those words a little bit. But still, 19 results for think outside the box. And even though some of them were thinking outside the box versus think outside the box, that's enough to confuse people, thinking, wait, is it think outside the box or thinking outside the box? And those are 19 podcasts that are not thinking outside the box. They're very much thinking thinking inside the box. And that's just right now. So if you have to start telling people which search result to choose like you say, yeah, search for think outside the box and then pick the one with the red cover art. Well, what if another podcast starts in the future with red cover art? But if you have to start getting that detailed in your call to action, then you're already overcomplicating it. The simplest thing is to point your potential audience to your website and let your website link to the most popular platforms. Even if your potential listeners want to follow your podcast in less popular apps, they will probably search for your podcast by name. But if you've given them your domain, they can see your branding there. Because I assume your branding is at least somewhat consistent between your website and your podcast cover art as it appears inside the podcast apps. So they can very quickly see, oh yeah, that's the right one. They don't have to try and figure it out. Tapping into different podcasts, looking for which one is yours, they'll see right away. Another way to look at this is a podcast without a website is a homeless podcast, because your website is the home on the Internet for your podcast. From your website, you can collect email addresses, you can promote special events, sell products and services, solicit feedback, and much more. You can't effectively do that in podcast apps. Some of that is downright impossible to do inside podcast apps right now and for the foreseeable future, even with things that Podcasting 2.0 is bringing, some of the stuff just isn't even on the radar for that. Regardless of what powers your website, the most important thing is that you use your own domain for your website, because that allows you to make timeless calls to action, no matter how you change your technology. And if you ever have to change the domain in the future, make sure you redirect your old domain with all of its paths to the new domain. So oldpodcast.com redirects to newpodcast.com, and oldpodcast.com follow redirects to newpodcast.com follow. That's called a wildcard domain. So you don't have to do a follow to slash follow. It's just anything that comes after the slash for that. Whatever's there also put that on the new domain. So the main point here is, please assume that the answer to the question, does my podcast need a website? Is always yes, that might be on an existing website. That's a completely separate issue. But your podcast does need a website. It needs a home on the Internet. So with that foundation laid, let's move on here. Podcast hosting website providers have much better websites now. Than they did before. Captivate, Buzzsprout, Transistor, Blubrry and other podcast hosting providers do offer basic hosting for websites with your podcast hosting, and that is for each podcast that you host with them. These websites are often simple, but can also still be attractive and designed to make your podcast prominent and easily listenable, sometimes even watchable. Along with promoting ways to follow your podcast on that website, these sites also let you publish extra pages and blog posts on your same website. Some of the hosting providers even let you collect email addresses for your email newsletter, or to solicit feedback from them, or receive financial support from some method from your audience. The most important thing is for such a website to work with your domain and be an actual website, preferably with only your own branding. And what I mean by an actual website is that you're not simply a web page on a directory of your podcast hosting provider. That's what some of the lower quality podcast hosting providers do. They give you a webpage on their domain with their prominent branding. Sometimes even if they allow you to map your own domain to their website that they provide for you, visiting the page still looks like you're visiting a page from them, not from you. It needs to be branded primarily to your podcast branding. That doesn't mean that the podcast hosting provider has their own logo, maybe in the footer or a name like this website is generated by whatever hosting provider that is. That's okay. But I'm saying at the top of the page, the most prominent branding needs to be your own. So if you need only a basic home for your podcast and your podcast hosting provider offers a good one, then go ahead and use it. As long as you use your own domain with it. So now let's get to WordPress, because WordPress gives ultimate power with costs. Once you get your own domain and web hosting, Most of the WordPress ecosystem doesn't cost any money. You can get a great theme and countless useful plugins free on WordPress.org and through the theme and plugin catalogs accessible inside your WordPress site. But to quote from the Spider man comics, often spoken by Uncle Ben in the movies, with great power comes great responsibility. Or to quote an often repeated line that I loved from the Once Upon a Time TV series, all magic comes with a price. Note that when I said you can get some of these things for free, I didn't say that using WordPress is actually free. Sure, you might not have to buy anything, but it will cost you. It costs you time and knowledge to get things working well and then further time and knowledge to keep them working well. For example, if you want a contact form from your website to collect feedback from your audience, you have several free and paid plugin options out there for WordPress, and they all require some level of manual setup. And if you want to monetize your site in any way, whether selling products or memberships or taking donations or anything like that, you'll be looking at many more steps and complications to do that. Yes, you can do it, but it takes more time and knowledge to be able to do it. You could even generate your podcast RSS feed completely from your WordPress website with a plugin like PowerPress, which is what I recommend. If you're going to do that, use PowerPress to do it, but I recommend that only when paired with Blubery's podcast hosting, because that ties in seamlessly with PowerPress. So you can manage everything about your podcast from PowerPress, and you're working around some of the stability and performance issues of using WordPress to create your podcast RSS feed. So only do that if you do it with Blubrry or you're prepared to handle several geeky complications. And that's the way I do it right now, with several geeky complications. But then what do you do when something goes wrong? I've had multiple WordPress websites compromised before, requiring me to invest valuable time to find the problem, patch the vulnerabilities and repair the damage. So yes, WordPress gives you great power with your website. In fact, I feel confident saying you can do almost anything you can imagine with a WordPress website. But that power will cost you in other ways. So what else do you have as an option? There are website builders out there that have gotten a lot easier and better. Whether you're looking at a page builder plugin for WordPress, like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, or even the increasingly powerful Gutenberg Editor. Or you're looking at third party website providers like wix, Squarespace and such. They've all gotten a lot easier to use and to make your website look and function great. And much to my delight, they're also finally getting better at supporting the niche needs of podcasters. I still don't recommend third party website providers to host your podcast media and RSS feed like Squarespace, wix and such. Don't use them to actually create your podcast feed and publish your podcast only for your website, not for the feedback. But if you get your RSS feed from your actual podcast hosting provider like Captivate, buzzsprout and such, all you need to Turn your website into a quote. Podcast website is audio players for each episode and subscribe or follow buttons for popular podcast apps. And then boom, you've got a podcast website. That's really all it takes to turn a website into a podcast website. But maybe that's a little too complicated for you, or maybe that has too many extra steps, or you just don't like the way some of those other tools work. So PodPage and Beamly provide a new way. In recent years a hybrid option has emerged, and that is third party website providers designed specifically for podcast websites powered primarily from your already existing podcast rss feed. The two most popular options are PodPage and Beamly. And Beamly was formerly known as Podcast Page. So can you see why they rebranded? That was a smart decision for them. So it's now podpage is one option, Beamly is the other option. These not only both often give you great looking websites, but their feature offerings are starting to rival what you could make with your own custom WordPress website, but without the cost of so much time and knowledge to do it on your own WordPress website. For example, both PodPage and Beamly let you sell different types of memberships to your audience, allowing them to financially support your podcast on an automatic recurring basis. And you can define that membership however you want. And it can offer whatever benefits you want within that ecosystem. It could simply even be a way for only your audience to give to your podcast on a recurring basis, even if they get nothing exclusive with that. But that's built in there with both of those options. And both PodPage and Beamly also allow you to sell some products directly through your website. Both providers let you add additional blog posts and pages on your site, like an about page on your site, even if that's not in your RSS feed. And they both offer a whole lot more on top of that. Between the two, I usually recommend PodPage more, but you look at them decide what's right for you. In my opinion, even though I've recommended Podpage even before this happened, I think it does help that my friend Dave Jackson from School of Podcasting now works for PodPage. And the reason he works for PodPage is because he recommended PodPage so much before that. And I am an affiliate for both of these providers. But that doesn't change what I recommend here. I think PodPage is the better of these two options. But you pick what's right for you. You might decide that Beamly is better for you as podge. Plenty of people have. But looking at all of these top level options that I shared with you. Which one is right for you? Well, I don't usually recommend only one option for everyone because there is no one size fits all for podcasters, but I hope the guidance that I've already shared in this episode will help. In addition to this, you could even consider this a workflow to helping you make this decision. So we'll call it steps here. Step 1 if you love WordPress and want total control, use WordPress with PowerPress and BluBrry hosting and then you're done. Or move on to step two. If you don't love WordPress or you can't afford the time and knowledge to run it, use the podcast RSS feed from your podcast hosting provider and then move on to step three. Or following step three then is if you want a bare bones site you barely have to think about, use your own domain with the basic website from your podcast hosting provider. Or move on to step four. If you want more control and don't mind some extra steps for every episode, use a third party website provider like WIX or Squarespace. Or if that's not good enough for you and it's not podcasty enough for you, and I wouldn't blame you for that and you want more built in features, but without manually cross posting your episodes like you would have to do with WIX or Squarespace, then use Podpage or Beamly. But no matter what, I've got two important tips for you before I end this episode. Important Tip number one Update your RSS feed's episode links. If you choose any option other than publishing your podcast from WordPress and that is with PowerPress and BluBrry, or using your podcast hosting provider's website, then you'll need to ensure you copy the webpage URL for each episode into the episode link in your episode editor from your podcast hosting provider. This will ensure your podcast episodes properly point to your episode webpages for each episode instead of pointing to the podcast hosting provider site that you're probably not using if you've got a separate website. And the way that you do this, for example on Captivate is that you paste the episode webpage URL into the Episode URL field after you click to open the Transcription and Discovery section or in buzzsprout, paste it into the custom episode webpage field after you open the See More Options section of the episode editor. And then Important tip number two copy or redirect all old URLs. If you've ever given a call to action with a specific URL on your domain or you want to keep any kind of search engine optimization that you've built up and search engine ranking that you've built up for individual pages or you have certain domains and URLs that you've spoken or used in multiple places, whether in your podcast or in print. Like for example the audacitypodcast.com giveback. It's that slash give back part that I'm talking about. That's what I use for if you value the podcast, you can go there to be able to give back to the podcast whatever you feel it's worth to you. If you've used that in your podcast, anywhere on the Internet, on your website, on business cards, anything like that, any of those URLs that have personal propagated anywhere into the world, digitally or physically, then make sure those will always work. Whether you're changing things around on your current website or you're switching to a completely different website option, like moving from WordPress to PodPage or vice versa, make sure that those links still work so all your calls to action will still work and be timeless and nothing will break then. And the benefit there, especially if you ensure that all of your episode webpage URLs still work and redirect or still work the same way with the same URLs on your new system that you're using for your website, is any kind of search ranking that those old web pages had will carry over to the new page. And speaking of search ranking, all of these options now I think they include great search engine optimization tools built in with them so you don't have to worry about that very much anymore like you used to have to. So these are some options for you to consider if you'd like to comment on this, share your own opinion, ask further questions about that, or just get the notes in these links that I've mentioned. I'd love for you to use my affiliate links. If you'd like to take advantage of any of these options, then please look at the show notes. A simple tap or swipe away inside your app. Consider the chapters or go to the audacitytopodcast.com and speaking of chapters, I would love for you to try podchapters. You can try it free over at podchapters. Com, no promo code necessary for you to try it free over there. I have gotten such great feedback from the podcasters already using it, saying things like wow, this is so much better than any other AI system that I've used for suggesting the Chapters for me or others, loving the ability for them to paste the outline that they already have into pod chapters and then it turns that outline into chapters, timestamped inside of it and being able to easily add the images and so much more with that. And did you hear that Apple Podcasts is going to start supporting podcasting 2.0 chapters? So you could continue embedding the chapters in the mp3 files like you could before, and Apple Podcasts and other apps will support that. But also you can start using the podcasting 2.0 chapters that podchapters can even host for you if your podcast hosting provider doesn't already do that. And you can start doing that easily with Podchapters. Overcast is also going to start supporting the podcasting 2.0 chapters. So I'm really excited about that and I'd love for you to try podchapters Free over at podchapters. Com. There's no deadline on that, no special promo code, no fake limited offer or anything like that, no fake scarcity. Just go to podchapters.com, sign up, try it, let me know how it works for you. Because I built this for myself to solve so many problems and complications that I was running into and the cost that it was for me to make my own chapters, taking 30 minutes or more and five different apps for me to add chapters to my own podcast. Now it takes about 30 seconds for me to do so. If your time is valuable, like I feel like my time is valuable, and I spent a couple of months to build this tool because I wanted to reduce how much time I spent on chapters. But if you feel your time is valuable and you want to take advantage of these really cool, engaging features in podcasts that you can do in many podcast apps out there, both legacy chapters and modern chapters, then go over to podchapters.com and now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from the audacity2podcast.com thanks for listening.