A Smart Guide To Switching Your Podcast Host Without Losing Listeners

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard, and along with my co host and partner, Tom Hazzard, we are going to cover an interesting topic today that not everybody needs to deal with it, but it's something that you might come across, you may not be really happy with your podcast hosting company. And so we are gonna give you a smart guide to switching your PO host without losing listeners. Because we hear this on the other side, we end up picking up the pieces many, many times when it's been done badly and done wrong. When you've switched podcast hosts and all of a sudden your feed's gone, your listeners are gone, everything went wrong for you, and we want to prevent that. So we're giving you this smart guide today to switching your podcast host.

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Tracy, for introducing that topic. I thought I would just very briefly state why you might want to switch your podcast host or what are some conditions under which that might either need to happen or might be a choice. We actually have had two podcast hosting platforms disappear and go out of business in the last year. So that's the first reason you might need to do it. Is your host. Like happened last October or November, one hosting company announced to all their podcasters, hey, we're going out of business. You need to switch your host by January 31st or your podcast will cease to exist. That's a pretty scary one in my book.

Yeah. There's the more positive one where you might be switching to a hosting company that's going to offer you advertisement, and then when your contract fails or doesn't do what you expected it to do, which happens also very frequently with those companies that offer that, that as soon as you can, you can't wait to leave them and move back over and they don't make it easy for you.

And then if you are not doing everything yourself, if you have a producer editing your audio and doing things for you and you change producers or you've been doing it yourself and then you finally work with a producer, they may tell you, oh, you have to host on this platform. I only work with that platform. I just want to tell you right off the bat, that's a bunch of garbage. You don't have to do that. Now, there might be some conveniences. Advantages are a good reason why you might want to do that if you want to make it easier on your producer. But anybody can publish your episodes on any platform. And then obviously there are platforms that have more features, better analytics, ad insertion that you have control of, automatic intro and outro, some editing features, all sorts of things. Or a unique player. Like we have the Showcaster at Potatoes that has some advanced capabilities that aren't available on other platforms. But today I'm going to share. Really.

So wait, wait, Tom, hold on. Because in full disclosure, which you kind of glossed over it right there, Potaties is a hosting company. So while we're giving you advice to how this works, we are a hosting company, but we're a hosting company that works pretty differently. And we've developed most of those products and services because we've seen it go wrong so often. So this is. We're providing you the framework to do do this, but we really doesn't matter whether you come to us. Although some of these things do not apply if you move to us because we just take care of it for you.

Yeah, that's true. I was sort of gonna address some of that.

I wanted to do it up front because we're live streaming.

Yeah, okay, that's fine. I think people that host with us don't have these problems because we do it all for you. But like Tracy said, we have really picked up some pieces of some really bad situations of podcasters that weren't served properly by another host. And then when you decide to leave them, they're like, okay, you're dead to me. And then they aren't going to help you.

Why don't we talk about some of those things? And now that you'd said some of the reasons you might want to switch, why don't we address some of really the things that could really go wrong that could cost you.

Okay, so some of the pitfalls are things you want to make sure you avoid. And before we're done with this episode, I'm going to go through a list of best practices in sort of the order in which you may want to do things so that you avoid some of these. But one of the number one pitfalls, or I guess I would say errors I see a lot of people making when they switch a podcast host. They say, all right, I'm on a new host. Oh, I have to register it on Apple again. That's like a really big no. No.

So then you end up with two feeds, right?

Well, you don't necessarily end up with two feeds, but you do end up with two podcast listings on Apple. Like, you search the name of your show and you'll see two of them there, and you're like, how'd that happen? And then I've seen people that have changed hosts two or three times and have had three different listings on Apple. And let me tell you, that is a very unfortunate situation you really want to avoid. Because while there's nothing inherently wrong with there being three listings, people can get your show through any of them if it's done properly. And footnote, when we get to what we call a 301 redirect for your podcast, we haven't gotten there yet, but as long as it's been redirected properly, all three of those listings will have your latest episodes. The problem is, is confusion. You will find the one that the listing that's the oldest is where all your reviews and your ratings are, and the new one has none. So it doesn't really put your best foot forward and make the best impression. When people search and find your show, there's three listings. They click on one. Oh, it has no reviews. People must not like this show, right?

So you could end up with listeners in some of those other ones that then when you do get this adjusted, fixed, and consolidated, they disappear.

So, Tracy, here's the real unfortunate and frustrating pitfall of ending up with more than one listing of your show on Apple. And it can happen on other apps, too. It's just most often we see this on Apple because people do tend to register their shows or a producer will register it for you again when they shouldn't. When you have more than one listing on Apple, people are going to find it and start listening in each of those listings. What I want everyone to understand is you can ask Apple nicely, you can threaten them, you can be angry with them, but they will never, ever, ever merge two or more listings into one. They do not have that capability in their software system. So you either need to leave them all there and live with it, which I don't think is a great situation, especially when one has 50 ratings and reviews and one has none or one, or it's just not. Again, putting your best foot forward, not making the best impression, or the only thing Apple will let you do is delete listings. So the duplicate ones that probably have fewer listeners, you can delete them the problem is those people won't even realize you've deleted it. You've sort of cut them off and their Apple podcast listening app won't serve them up the next episode that publishes. So it's a really unfortunate situation and it is completely unnecessary.

So we want to prevent it from the beginning. We just don't want to do it.

Just beware, if you have your shows already on all the listening apps when you change hosts, if it's done properly, you do not need to register your show on those apps again. And that's something not everybody knows.

And anyone at any hosting company or any producer who tells you otherwise is wrong, just outright wrong on that. That does not need to happen if you're registered. Once you're registered, correct?

Now, another footnote to that is make sure you have control of your Apple listing or the company that syndicated you to Apple is willing to transfer that to you. It is easier a lot of the time. Like at Potitize, we register our customers shows on Apple for them, but we also are completely willing to transfer that ownership to the podcast, toast the owner of the podcast, and then they can still give us access to it through our Apple account. But that doesn't always happen. And we find some producers and some other hosting companies end up holding that app listing hostage. And you don't end up easily with control of it. Now, there's a way to sort of yank it from them. There's a way to do that, but you have to at least have control the RSS feed. So I'm getting too deep in the woods on that already. But Apple listings, you just get some help if you don't know, seek some advice. You don't want to end up with multiple Apple listings. It just causes confusion. It's unnecessary and ultimately not your best interest. But I have seen it. Where a show gets so far down that road where they've got so many listeners and ratings and reviews on more than one, that's just like, all right, it's going to be confusing to people, but I'm going to leave those two listings up forever. I have had other customers though, say, I don't care, stick with the original one, kill the old one. I'm going to rip the band aid off, deal with whatever pain that is of listeners not finding me, and they may have to resubscribe to the original one, but I only want one because I don't want that confusion. So, all right, enough about Apple listing. So let's talk about something that I think is often on people's minds when they switch hosts. And that's analytics.

People think that they're going to lose their statistics when they switch hosts.

Well, and most of the time they do, quite honestly.

So let's be honest about it. Yes, most of the time you do lose your statistics. We do not have that here at Potatoes. They do not lose their statistics when they come here to Potatoes. That is something that we decided when we were going to create a hosting company. We were not going to allow that to happen because why would anyone choose to come to us if you're going to lose their statistics? But there are many, many hosting companies out there who say that's the cost of leaving us. We want you to lose them. So like that's why you're going to choose them.

They want to make it more painful for you to move. And so they don't export the analytics in a way that can be easily. Well, actually it's not even that all of them you can export the analytics, it's that none of the platforms have a way to import analytics from platform. At Potatoes, we do. We built that in from the get go so you can have your historic play or download numbers per episode and in total from another platform. I don't know of any other host that does that other than us. And we also do it for you. We just need the exported spreadsheet of analytics from the old platform. We can import them into Poditize. So you continue to build on the old numbers going forward.

Yep. So number one thing to remember is you can export your data and keep it. So that's a good practice in and of itself is to export your data. Make sure you save it no matter where you're going. In our particular case, we'll just take care of it and import it for you. So that's not an ongoing issue for us.

Correct. So I'm going to move on from analytics. Okay. Another thing that you probably haven't thought of now this is only if you're on a platform where you have ads inserted into your episodes. Okay. Not every platform does this. Poditize has the ability for you to have ads deployed into all your episodes. And I'm not talking about what we call programmatic ads that are streamed on the front end. I'm talking about ads that end up being, at least temporarily, a part of the downloaded MP3 file. Before you move platforms, you gotta make sure you remove all those ads from your episodes. Otherwise when your show gets imported to the new platform, it's imported with those ads in it and it's the only way to remove them is to edit them out the hard way. If you've got 50 or 100 episodes that got ads in it, it's gonna cost you some money or an awful lot of time if you do it yourself. So there is a way to remove all ads from your episodes before your show is imported to another platform.

So this is something that we have to remember that if you're, especially if you come from a platform where you move to them so that you can have ads put in that it doesn't have to stay there, that that's something that you may not realize is that those ads don't have to stay there. There may be a way to remove.

Them that's as long as they're being added with a software system that's a part of the platform. If they've been edited in the hard way and they're going to live there forever, well, you made that choice when you did it, and they're going to live there unless you edit them out. So now that I mentioned something in that about the ads before, you import your show to another platform. So I want to explain what that means. So every show has an RSS feed. That is the mechanism. Your episodes are delivered to every listening app. In fact, that your show identity, the listing is made available to every listening app. So you absolutely can. When you move from one platform to another, you might be thinking, gosh, do I have to re upload all those episodes one at a time? Well, no. Pretty much every podcast hosting service has the ability to take an RSS feed from another platform and read it and import all your episodes into their platform. We certainly do at Potatoes. So basically you just all we need is the RSS feed. You paste it into a field, you click import, and in five or 10 minutes, depends how many episodes you have. We have one show imported to our System had over 1500 episodes that took maybe 15 minutes to import. But it'll do it all for you. It will duplicate every episode, every title, every description, all the details of each episode into the new platform and duplicate it. Which is great because you don't have to redo any of that work.

You don't have to do it manually. Right, right.

Although there are a couple of pitfalls that you want to be aware of in doing that. While certainly it makes it easy, there are things you may end up copying over from the other platform that you didn't realize are being copied over that are really not in your best interest. One of those key things is an episode Web link, which you'll find if you're an Apple Podcasts user as a listening platform. In every episode, there's the title, the description, some links and info, and then there's this link called Episode Webpage, which in the world of politized production goes to a unique blog post for that episode. And that's great. But there are some platforms that we've talked about this in some ways when we talk about platforms that really try to hijack your traffic or sort of benefit from your listener traffic, they'll create a webpage on their own website. And I'm going to go ahead and name a few. Libsyn does this. Podbean does it. There are lots of different platforms that create a page on their website for every one of your episodes and they put that link in that episode web link field for the episode. When you're on one of those platforms that does that, when you import your feed to another platform, they don't change that episode web page link. So you could move from Libsyn to Poditize and guess what? That link for each episode is going to go back to a Libsyn page, which is really not in your best interest.

Now, that's not going to actually happen here because we will fix it for you. So you just need to message us and let us know and we'll take care of it on our RN for you. If it didn't fix itself automatically in the process, which sometimes it doesn't, it just in the import process, it doesn't always fix itself. But you just message us and we'll take care of it for you.

Sure, yeah. Podties, we care about these things and we're watching for it. But when you move from one platform to another, I mean, pretty much they're like you're on your own. And so those links are going to come in as to whatever they are.

Yeah. Because it's an automation. So if it was in the feed, it's going to still be in the feed that way. So you just need to recognize that. Now, in full disclosure, if you leave Poditized, and we really hope you don't, but if you do decide to leave Poditized for whatever reason, that when you leave, and we've done this for you, putting your blog link in there, your blog link should just be fine because it has nothing to do with Poditize. We don't let you put in our hosting platform. We don't hijack it. We don't want that. We want you to have your blog link as Your episode link. So when you move from Potitize to somewhere else, you should just be fine.

There's nothing you would need or want to change in that regard. Right. The other one you want to watch out for is the official email address for your show. A lot of platforms put an email address in your show listing. This is the show level, not the episode level. But you know, you have your show cover art, your show title, your show description, your copyright line, and there's an official email address line for the show. And if you haven't put in a specific email of yours that you want as the public facing email address for the show, the other platform will put in an email address for them for their platform. I've seen this on Transistor, Libsyn Pod being Captivate, all sorts of different platforms. We don't do that at Politics. There's no reason to do that. It's not in your best interest. If there's a temporary reason to do it because you're needing to get some service from Apple and we're communicating with them on your behalf. We might do it temporarily, but we would always put it back. All too often I see shows come in with an email address for another.

Platform or another producer.

Or another producer. Right. I mean, if someone else was in control of your listing, created it for you, you just want to be aware of these things and double check, hey, are all these details in my best interest? Is it set up the way it should be? You got to look at those things because when it imports, it's going to come over and whatever it was from the other platform. Now, things like that, you can fix either before you import the show to a new platform or after, because those things are changeable in the show settings. Right. But anyway, very important. Okay, so now I think we should talk about whether people really need to worry if they're going to lose listeners when they change platforms. I think aside from analytics, that's probably the number one concern.

So we said losing stats is a big anxiety point. Losing listeners is an even bigger anxiety point because you definitely don't want to lose your listeners. Now, we talked about what happens when you have multiple feeds, that there is a potential for losing listeners there. But assuming that that doesn't happen when you move hosts and you move your RSS feed, Tom, are you going to.

Lose your listeners if it's done properly? No. Okay, now that is a caveat. If it's done properly, I can't speak for what other platforms do. And of course, if you're going to a platform that's truly a DIY do it yourself platform. And they don't provide any support for moving your show and importing your show. I can't speak for what they do. I can only speak for our experience and what we do at Politize. And when your show is imported to our platform, we absolutely make sure you don't lose any listeners. And I guess what I'm here to say is there's no reason you should. As long as it's done properly. You may be doing it yourself or again, when you come to apologize, we'll do it for you. But the listeners, the subscribers are at the app level. I want to make sure that that's clear. People subscribe to your show through their favorite listening app. Apple, Spotify, Iheart, whatever, any good pods, doesn't matter. Any whatever. There's so many obscure apps these days that's at the app level. So behind the scenes of the app, your show is fed to the app by the RSS feedback. So the mechanism. This is going to get too technical for some of you, and I apologize if it is, but the mechanism to update all the apps globally, anywhere that it is syndicated, is to redirect the RSS feed. It's called a permanent 301 redirect done at the old host level. We do this for our customers if you give us your login credentials to.

Your old platform so that it doesn't get messed up. Right, because it can happen. And so the 301 redirect model is continuity.

It is what happens. Basically, let's say you were on Podbean and when I listen in Apple podcasts and I press play, what does the Apple app do? It goes to Podbean and says, hey, play me that episode. What the 301 redirect does, which would be put in place at Podbean. And let's say to go to Politize, when I am as a listener, play that episode. It goes to Podbean, and Podbean says, nope, don't come here. Go over to Potatoes and that's where you'll find it. And it immediately plays. And the listener has no idea. That's the point. Your end listener is still subscribed to your show because they're subscribed to your show through the app, not your host on the back end. That redirect tells the app, hey, get all the information from the new host, not the old host. And all the apps will eventually update their system so they no longer look at the old host. They look at the new host. And that's why when you do change hosts and you do redirect your show, you need to leave the old host live for a few weeks. We recommend three weeks. So all those apps update before you shut down the old host.

So that means that at some host you will be paying two places. Right. Let's be clear about that.

You may be playing overlap for a month at most. Yeah.

It's one of the reasons that we very often offer free 30 days when someone signs on with us, so that there is that allowance of the overlap period. So that can happen there. But it is one of those things where you will want to make an overlap purposely so that it can make sure that it is done correctly. The apps all update and before you cancel your old host, double check that.

It has happened after when that is done. I do have a list of best practices I want to share with everyone before we are done with this episode. And one of those things is specific to checking that. Well, yeah. And especially with Apple. Just because I gotta tell you, in our experience, looking at all the thousand plus shows we've launched and then others that we just host on our platform, the vast majority of podcast listens are coming through an Apple listening app. There's very few shows that's not the case. I mean, could count them on the fingers on one hand for whatever reason. There's unique Circumstance. But between 50 to 90% of podcasters listens in our experience are coming from Apple. So it's the most important one. You want to make sure it's properly switched.

So Apple and then Spotify can sometimes be flipped depending on your show. So this is one of the good reasons why exporting your stats and double checking them and knowing where they're coming from helps you be efficient at who and where you care about checking.

Right. So, all right, let me go through the best practices.

Before you go through the best practices, Tom, I want to recap for everyone. So losing listeners doesn't need to happen. It needs to be done correctly so that there's a permanent 301 redirect. Am I using the terms right?

Yes.

And when that happens, within about three weeks, everything should be cleared through all the apps and that shouldn't happen. So losing listeners doesn't need to happen. But it is a concern that many podcasters have when they switch hosts. And if you do it wrong, it will happen.

Yeah, we've had people leave a platform, let's say like blog, talk radio or I've seen them, there's another radio these Internet radio networks are notorious for this. You move your show from them, but they say, oh well, we own the Apple listing. You don't. I'll tell you that's wrong, but they'll try to tell you that. And so they tell you, well, you just put it back on Apple again. Well, guess what? You're starting all over with listeners and you don't want to do that. So doesn't have to happen, right?

So losing listeners doesn't have to happen. Losing stats does frequently happen. Doesn't happen on Poditized, but it does frequently happen in other places. And some podcasters don't care about that. It's not important to them. And that's fine. You choose what you care about in the process of things. But if you're looking to do advertising at any point in the future, you do not want to lose your stats. And I want you to think that through your historical stats matter in an advertising model that is a ppm, cpm, whatever you want to call it, like those numbers that you might be using in the future for AD$, will matter if you lose that. So think that through.

Advertisers want to know, you know, they're not going to advertise on the hope that you're going to get a certain level of listenership in the future. They want to know what's your history, what have you been getting per month? And you can export all that from the old platform and have that data and transparency if you want to.

And then the third thing that you said that I think is really critically important, that I want to reiterate, make sure everybody heard this, is that if you have what we call dynamic ad insertions or ads being inserted in some kind of streaming way, some kind of model way where they end up attached to your file, that you want to make sure that you remove them before.

Before you import your feed to a new platform, because then your mp3 files come in clean, aren't burdened with those ads that probably will become outdated at some point, and you're then free to insert new ones on the new platform as long as they have that capability. But put them in, take them out. And the point is, you don't want to burden yourself with either the having to spend the money or the time to remove old ads the hard way, which means editing software offline, re uploading a new MP3 file if you've got a hundred or a couple hundred episodes, that's going to be tremendously laborious and or expensive to pay someone else to do it.

And then the fourth thing you said is episode links. Just knowing that they're there, that you may have to update them, web emails, all those things, you may need to check them, but they are fixable on one way or the other without a lot of labor and time. So that is it. Can. You can either do it before you move or after you move. Doesn't matter. But make sure you fix them at some point in the process. And I think there was a fifth thing in there. What am I missing?

So it was like, well, we talked about duplicate listings, I think. Did we mention that? I mean, that's something that usually doesn't happen before you move. It usually is just an error. I see. Honestly podcast owners or hosts themselves doing it, just assuming they need to, and it's just unfortunate unforced error that they did not need to do. If you're already on a listening app, you don't need to do anything. All right, so let's run down the best practices so that everybody has. This is Tom's list of best practices when you are going to move podcast hosts. Number one best practice. Shameless plug. Just come to Podotize and we'll do it for you. You don't have to worry about it. But if you don't do that, here's your list of best practices. Okay. Update your podcast website and email address in the show listing before you move. Just makes it a little cleaner and easier. Remove ads. As Tracy just said, remove all ads from the ad insertion system. So your episodes are just the original MP3 files. They before you ever put any ads and turn off any ad system just to make sure when you import that feed somewhere else that there's nothing there.

Can you just out a couple of hosts that are that way?

Megaphones like that, megaphones, one transistor. I think even podbean has some level of ad system you gotta check. Like Libsyn, a lot of platforms have programmatic ads. Not all programmatic ad systems are the same. Some of them are only working when you're streaming, and that means they're not permanently in your episodes. But others are making it a part of the downloadable MP3 file. So just make sure if it's part of the downloadable MP3 file, you've got to turn it off.

Right. So if you hear an ad on your episode and you click download episode, listen to it again and there's no ad in it, you know you're good to go.

You're good. Yeah, because you from any system, you can Download the Public MP3 file. And you'll hear if the ads are in it. Yeah. Okay, so remove ads first. Okay, here's a little thing. I didn't go into too much detail, but if you have any episodes in your old platform, because you've recorded ahead and you've edited them ahead, but are scheduled to publish and have not been published yet, they will not import in your RSS feed. So beware of that. Let's say, hey, I just published an episode this week, I have next week's episode and the week after that already scheduled. And you think, oh, well, I'm going to import my feed into a new platform. Everything will come over. Well, only the published episodes are going to come over. Ones that are not yet published but scheduled to publish will not. So you have two choices. You're either going to wait until all those episodes have published and then import your feed to a new platform, or you're going to have to re upload those future scheduled episodes to the new platform there manually. Hopefully there's only a few.

So that's why a good practice is to have the overlap so that you can copy and paste and move over.

Need to have a little overlap. Yep. Okay, so let's see another thing. This is again, a couple things before you import the feed, and then we're going to get to what happens after you import the feed. This is the next big one. Actually, this is after. I'm sorry, I'm mistaken. That. So the next thing would be take your feed and import it into the new platform. Okay, that's something you need to do. Sometimes you can do it yourself. Sometimes you have to have them do it.

What about the stats?

The stats come after, and there's a very good reason why.

Ah, okay, very good.

I. I almost did that myself. You heard me sort of hesitate and then I was going to say something before the feed, and even I remembered, no, that's after the feed. So here's the thing. Import the feed to the new platform. Once that's done, double check it, make sure the same number of episodes are published in the old and the new, make sure there's not an error. And as long as the same number of episodes exist, old feed, new feed, then you're going to do the 301 redirect. Now, a lot of times you can do that yourself. What you're going to need to do is take the new feed from the new platform and you're going to paste that in a 301 redirect feed in the old platform or some platforms like I Believe Anchor and some others. You have to email their support and request them to redirect it. You can't do it yourself, but they will do it usually within a day. So here's the important thing. Once that redirect is in place, then you export your stats from the old platform. Because if you do it before you redirect it, you're going to export all these files with all the downloads. But there are new plays happening every hour, every minute, every day, and you'll miss those. They won't be in the export doc.

Ah, so you want to wait till the 301 redirect takes place and then export the total.

And the way you know that it's taken place is in the new platform. You'll start seeing stats accruing. So this is not something you have to rush and do immediately. Do the 31 redirect, wait a day, make sure it's there. Look in the new platform, if you have stats accruing, the redirect has worked. That's how you know it's worked. You're not going to get stats accruing in the new platform if the redirect has not happened. So once you know that's happened, then you can export your stats from the old platform. Now, if you're getting dizzy on all this tech stuff because it's like overwhelming again, move your show to potatoes. We do this all for you. You'll give us the login credentials to your old platform. We'll export the stats at the right time. You don't have to know, is it the right time, is it too early? Or we just do it for you. Okay. And then the last thing. Did you have a question, Tracy?

No, I just also want to remind you this list will be in the blog post for this episode@potatize.com under Feed your brand. So like we will have this list written out so you do not have to be writing this down while you're driving.

Right. So the last thing in this list of best practices I want to share with you that you can do, it's a choice. I probably would do it if it were my Show. So the 301 redirect automatically starts all the apps going to get new episodes and also all the play requests go to the new host instead of the old host. And each app is supposed to and usually does update their systems with the new RSS feed. Have seen it happen where that doesn't happen that automatically. So here's a recommendation and this goes back to make sure you have control of your own Apple listing. Again, Apple being, I think the most important platform where most of your lessons are going to be coming from and already are probably so the three owned redirect. Yeah, Apple will start getting them from the new host and should update their systems. I have seen it where Apple system glitches and it doesn't automatically do it. But guess what? As long as you have control of your Apple listing or politize on your behalf, if we have access to it, just log in to your show through Apple Podcast Connect, which is the interface where you probably registered your show in the first place or someone else did it on your behalf. You can go into your listing for your show on Apple and update right within that to the new RSS feed so that they won't even be going to the old one and have to be redirected. You can actually put the new RSS feed in there for your show and it's immediate.

Can you do that on Spotify too?

I don't believe you can.

Yeah, I didn't think so at the.

Time at least of recording this. My recollection of the interface. All you can do is claim your show as a host from Spotify. Like if another producer syndicated it there and it's technically under their producer account that it was submitted, you can claim your own show and get access to whatever. Few analytics are available through Spotify. But I don't believe you can just log in and update the RSS feed. Now Spotify is constantly changing things and they may allow that at some point. So you should check, especially if you're listening to this episode months or half a year later or whatever. But Apple is the only one I know of that gives users that kind of control to not only update the RSS feed, but also to look at some special beta analytics that are only available by logging into Apple. So definitely just be aware of that. I would update my Apple listing on my own and then the major best practice of what not to do. I can't emphasize this enough.

So instead of doing this, don't do this. Absolutely don't do this.

Don't do this. As long as your show's been on Apple, you know it's been there. You see it when you look up in the Apple Podcast listening app. Your show is there. You can play the episodes. Then there is absolutely no reason to submit your show to Apple from the new host again. So please don't. It's just going to cause you problems and headaches.

Okay, great. So Tom, recap really quick. Your steps all Right.

Best practices Update the website URL and email remove ads. Make sure that any future scheduled episodes are either already published before you import the feed, or just know that you're going to have to re upload them and reschedule them as future episodes in the new hosting platform. Import the feed then at that point to the new platform. 301 redirect. Go ahead and redirect the old service to the new RSS feed from the new service.

So you do that at the old host, you put that in at the.

Old host, you're putting in the new feed URL from the new host into the old host, either yourself or if you have to reach out to their support to request it, you need to request it only after you confirm that has been done properly. And again that's after you're seeing stats accruing in the new platform. Then you export your old analytics. Your export your download stats per episode, ideally. And then the total number.

Well, and then just a second on that. So save them if you're going to save them so that you have them so that you can use them if you need them, or if you're with Potitize, send them to us and we'll update all your episodes.

Right. But you may want them on your own, just so you know. What are the historic download numbers? Yeah, absolutely. There's good reasons why you might want to save that, just to have that data in case you need it. Maybe you're creating a show one sheet talking about certain stats and then update Apple manually if you have that access. That's just not a have to, but a recommendation.

Check everywhere and update Apple if you need to. Yeah.

And then do not submit your show to Apple again.

No. There we go.

So I could have gone on a little deeper dive, believe me, than this than I did technically on a few things. I probably lost half the listeners halfway through when I did that. But if you're a do it yourself customer, pay attention to the details, understand them and make sure that my biggest concern is you don't unintentionally trip on a landmine or fall into a pitfall of problems that are just going to take you a lot of time and energy and you may have to make some compromises and sacrifices in order to undo something that you accidentally dead trying to help you avoid that.

So here's what I do want to say at the end here. So Tom gave a shameless plug for potatoes at the beginning, but here's what I want. We are a resource to everyone in the podcasting industry, we want you to keep podcasting. We do not care if you host with us. We do not care if you produce with us. We want the industry to be rich with podcasters who don't pod fade and don't quit their show. So one of the ways you get very demoralized about your show is when this screws up. You switch toast and you got this big hiccup, and then you end up with no show being published for a month and you're just like, okay, fine, nobody complains, so I'm just done with my show. We don't want that to happen. We are a resource. You can message us. We have a knowledge base. We have a resources area where you can type things in and search for what you're looking for. Best practices for hosting. Go to our blog post for this episode. Feed your brand, find the information. We're here for you, and you're always able to message us and we'll get back to you. If you're not a client, we may not get back to you within an hour, but we will do our very best to get you the answers that you're looking for because we know that it matters. But keep in mind, the reason that we developed the products and services the way that we did was because you should never have to worry about these things. They shouldn't be a problem whether you're coming to us or leaving us. The problem is some of our clients. It's one of these things. Look, when you get a bad haircut, you never go back to the salon again. You women out there are going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I guarantee you, men have done this with a barber, right? You get a bad, bad haircut, your scalp is showing. You will never go back there again. You don't tell them that they did a bad job. You just walk away. Cut ties. So that's what happens when you want to leave your host. You're upset and you want to cut ties and you don't want them to know. But what we're here to tell you is here at Potter Ties, we want to know because we don't want you to do this wrong. We understand that there are reasons you might need to leave us. There might be financial reasons, there might be advertising offer reasons. We want to support you in moving you and helping you so that you continue podcasting. Because we know at the end you're probably going to come back to us. And at some point in the future, when your show rebounds, when the economy rebounds, you're going to come back to us because we supported you. So we don't want you to cut ties with us and not talk to us, because we cannot fix this. We cannot make it right for you. We cannot make sure that that transition is smooth if you don't do that. So that's where we are. That's our customer service that we like to uphold a level of. But you won't get that elsewhere. I can pretty much guarantee it. But that doesn't mean that you can't reach out to us for assistance. We are here for you.

In fact, I don't know of any other podcast hosting company that has a customer service phone number published on their website in the footer. And we do. And that's just because that's who we want to be. Now, if we're all busy with customers, we may have to get back to you. You may have to leave a message, but there's a phone number if you really want to talk to someone. So that's kind of the level.

And don't be too surprised. Tom occasionally calls people back who aren't clients because it's a sales opportunity. Yes. But he also wants to understand what's going wrong because it makes a difference in the services that we provide. And Tom is our cto. He handles our technical side, so he does want to know what's going on.

You know, Tracy, that's another good point. Just so that everybody understands. Last little point we can end on this is that we've had a couple of companies that are very serious companies that have podcasts before us, and they were hosted on other platforms. They liked our service, they liked the features of our platform, and they wanted to move, but they were seriously warning us, hey, I can't afford to lose listeners. This is the engine that runs marketing for my business. As this podcast, we're going to move to you, you need to be sure this is done right. And the reason we know all these best practices and we have experienced all sorts of problems is why we developed the best practices. And I can tell you those shows transferred successfully without a hitch. And in fact, a lot of them had problems of duplicate listings that we helped them unwind and get Back to the 1 listing on Apple that they wanted. So, anyway, experience counts for something in this.

Well, this was a much longer episode than we intended here. But this is a lot of complexity and it requires explanation and other things. Reality is, is that it's actually going to be broken up into pieces in our resource library. So if you wanted to look up, like, what happens when I get a duplicate feed. There's probably little bits and pieces of this that will be posted there. So just understand that that's available to you. Our knowledge base, we call it, but it's our resource library and you can access that at the top of the website. You just click knowledge base and you'll end up in the right place anyway. So thanks everyone for listening. We really appreciate you want you to keep podcasting. That is. The one goal that we have here at Potitize is to keep everyone going so that the industry becomes more valuable for everyone involved. So join us here next time. Feed your brand live stream, ask us questions, and if you are a client, you could be joining us in our Q and A. That's going to be happening right now as we shut down the live stream and we stay on zoom with our clients.

All right, thanks for listening, everybody. Come back for another great episode next time on feed.

You'd brand heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social unitedwipod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcast testing.