Creating Effective Podcast Landing Pages To Drive More Traffic To Your Show

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today.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.

Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard, long my co host, Tracy, and we have a really important topic for a lot of you podcasters today, and Tracy's going to introduce the topic. But I want to set this up slightly because I meet with about 10 podcasters every day that are not working with us at Poditize. I mean, they're auditing their podcasts, which, by the way, those of you that want an audit, go to poditize.com audit and you can sign up to get one to learn what you may not know about your podcast. It's probably holding you back from being found by more of your ideal listeners. But I want to share this because like I said, I meet with about 10 podcasters every day and I can't tell you how many of them who've been podcasting for quite a while. 25, 50, 100 episodes or more that are not following a best practice on this issue. So Tracy set this up for what we were going to share with our listeners today.

Yeah, we're going to talk about podcast landing pages and a landing page particularly. And when we say landing page here, we mean on your website. And I really want to clarify that this isn't like a funnel landing page. This is a website landing page for your podcast. And the reason we recommend this is because when someone finds your podcast, they might want to check it out. And when we create these landing pages for our clients on their websites, what we see happen is that they get about 60% of what you would consider to be outside traffic going in to find their podcast comes from Google, comes from search outside of the podcast listening apps. And when we don't see someone with this landing page, they don't get it. And that means they're leaving listeners, they're leaving potential organic traffic on the table that they are not getting into their show. You're missing out on subscribers because you don't have this page that someone can go to. And I want you to encourage it to call it like your podcast home base. That's what we're going to kind of call it here.

Today.

So it's technically a podcast landing page, but it's your podcast home base and it's a part of your main website.

Which is a part of your total platform. As a podcaster, you really need to think about it that way. If you are have been thinking, yeah, I have a podcast, and it's all within the podcast ecosystem. It's all within the listening apps. You're limiting your platform. You're holding your show back from being found by more listeners. It's shocking how many people I meet that are podcasting, putting a lot of effort into it, and all they're doing is posting to the listening apps and yes, posting on social media, but then sending all that traffic to one of the listening apps like Apple or Spotify.

Right, right. And by having a podcast landing page, by having this home base for it, it allows you to send them to one place that you control so you can see where they came from. If you have your Google Analytics set up, if you have tracking, you can use UTM codes. For those of you who are more sophisticated in your tracking links that you utilize, you're now trafficking them to your website where know who they are before they go out and hit the subscribe button and link on Apple. If you send them straight to Apple, you are giving Apple new members. Right. And Apple isn't going to share that with you. So you just gave them people to go subscribe to your show. Hopefully they didn't get distracted and they actually do subscribe. But even still, you have no idea that they did that and that that's directly associated with the post that you may have put out somewhere. So that's why we use the podcast landing page. It's super simple.

Now, if we're posting about an episode, we're going to use our blog pages that go with those. But if you don't have a blog, this podcast homepage is the best idea for you to utilize it in one place. And what I do want to be clear is this is not the podcast hosting page from your hosting service. So it's not a Libsyn page, it's not a podbean page, it's not a anchor page. It's none of those things. It is on your website.

Okay? So I want to do something here with all your listeners or maybe viewers out there on YouTube live right now on LinkedIn watching this. I want you all to raise your hand if you have a landing page, but it's an anchor landing page, or it's a Libs and landing page, or a Podbean page. And it's okay to raise your hand because I can't see you doing it right now. This is a one way communication, but if you're raising your hand or you're nodding, you're like sheepishly, yeah, that's me. Okay, wake up people, because that is not serving you. In fact, you're allowing your podcast hosting platform to hijack your traffic from Apple, from Spotify, from all the listening apps and bring it to their website. And it doesn't even matter if you've got a custom URL. There are some of them out there. Oh, well, I don't need a website. They're giving me one for free. They're doing me a favor. Actually, they're not doing you a favor. They're helping themselves at your expense.

And they're giving no value to what you're doing there because it sends them no information about you. It only gives them exactly what a listener already got from the listening app. It's a duplicate of it. So there is no additional information that really is about you at the end of the day.

And in fact, in speaking with many listeners who are not podcasters, and I try to do that as much as I can, you know, how do you listen and you know, what are you using? And but these listeners, when you are using a, only having that landing page that's made available by your host, and as Tracy said, when it's really just a duplication of the same information that's in their favorite listening app, when they click that episode webpage link in Apple, for example, and they are listening to you there, they leave the listening app and they're going to the landing page. It opens up even on their phone, that landing page in their browser, if it's Safari on an iPhone or if you're listening with another app and you're on an Android phone, it's going to open Chrome on your phone and go to that landing page and that has the same information that it did in the listening app that they were in. It annoys them, it frustrates them. You're providing no additional value. Value. You just took them from a display of it on the listening app to a display of it on a webpage in their browser. And it's like, why did I come here? What is this doing for me? Annoying your listeners is not recommended.

And if they're taking the time to click through, they were interested in getting to you. Not getting to Libsyn, not getting to SoundCloud, not getting to Anchor, they were interested in getting to you and you didn't let that happen. So that's why we were such big proponents of what we call this podcast home base, this podcast landing page. And so today we really wanted to talk with you about what makes great components of it. But there's a couple of structural things that I want to know. This is not for someone who only has a podcast website. So you have an entire website that is for your podcast. I have the bingefactor.com the homepage of that is my podcast page. Right. So it's its own entity. The whole website's focused on the podcast. Only this is different. This is if you have your podcast as a component of another website, it could be your speaker site. That's perfectly fine. It could be your business site. It could be some other type of site that you have. We highly recommend WordPress here. We've done I don't know how many dozens of episodes about why that matters. But even if it's not, these rules still apply to what we're going to talk about. And that is that if it's a component of an existing website, you want a top menu item that says the word podcast, not the name of the show. So says the word podcast.

Why wouldn't I want the name of my show there, Tracy?

Well, because the name of your show isn't necessarily something that I know yet, Right? So if I'm searching through your website and I see the term feed your brand, I don't know what that means. Like, it just sounds like a sales message. It could be a course. I have no idea. I'm trying to understand who you are and what you do. And I've stumbled onto your website through some Google link or something, and I see the term podcast there. That's a sign I'm going to get free content that it's easy for me to consume, and it's something that I am going to want to check out. And that's why we use the term podcast. Plus, it's really consistent with how we navigate everybody else's site. It's like all of a sudden, you know, not calling it a meet or an about page like that confuses people, too. We've gotten more, I'm going to say, systematized in how we create menu items to make it more accessible to your average viewer, listener, and someone coming to your site.

And it's really important what you just said, Tracy. And I want our listeners to really understand you think about, well, yeah, I should use my name for that menu item, the name of my show the difference is, you know the name of your show. Other people don't necessarily. So you've got to think about the context of an uninformed site visitor and saying podcast is like, whoa, that gets their attention. Whereas if it's just a brand name of something, or the name of your show may not. And I'm not saying the name of your show and it says podcast at the end either. I mean, that would make too long a menu item.

Right? That's why we don't recommend that unless you have a really short name to your show. But we don't recommend that because it's just simpler with the word podcast up there for everyone to figure that out. Now, if you are making verbal announcements to it, it's great. So like we have FeedYourBrand Co or the bingefactor.com right. And it's gonna forward to this page. You can always do that when you're somebody else's show, when you're promoting it on a podcast or a video cast. So you can always have a forwarding URL that hits you on that particular page straight on your website that you announce. That is easy because otherwise you don't want to say poditize.com forward slash podcast. You don't want to give somebody that long URL. You want to give them something to forward to. So. But that's when you verbally announce it places. Right. And so you can create that. But this page is going to go under the top menu item, podcast, and it's going to be this page that lets people learn about and find your podcast. And our goal here is to get people to actually click and listen to some of the podcasts while they're there, because the longer they spend on our website, the more site value we create over time as well. So this is one of the key components. The number one key component we want to have is somewhere on this page should be what we call an archive player. But it's basically a player with all your episodes in it or a very decent sized subset of them if you don't have all of them on it. Right. So it should be at least a minimum sample of at least a dozen.

Yeah. And you know what? It's not near as effective. And in my mind doesn't count if you say, well, no, I have all these different pages on my site for each episode and I have a track player for that episode within there. Well, that's great. Do that. But if you're making people take multiple clicks through your website, you've got A homepage, then click to the podcast page. When you're on there, you've got to click an individual episode link before you get to a place where you could actually play it. You're losing so many people with every click. You really want to reduce the number of steps it takes for people to try and play your episode. That's why we recommend this kind of a window player. On the podcast page, every episode is right there. The latest ones up top, just click Play. You want to look at an earlier one. People can scroll while they're listening to the latest one, read through descriptions, and then click play on those if they want to.

Absolutely. So we have what we call the Showcaster Player. We're going to link to some episodes that we did on the show Caster player, so you can understand, because there's all different kinds of ways to do this. So when we had our WTFF podcast, we had so many volumes because we have 650 episodes. It's too overwhelming to put a single archive feed with 650 episodes. So we broke it up into volumes. We have the opportunity to. You could have your best episodes in the first tab of the Showcaster Player and just say, basically, start here. If you're new to the podcast, start here. And then you have your regular feed that follows in that place. So you have lots of options with that Showcaster Player and it was built for this landing page idea. It also has some of the many things that we recommend in a player. So even if you're not going to choose ours, that's okay. Everybody has stylistic differences and things that they want to accomplish with their website, look and feel and function. But what we recommend is that you need to have a way to link out to an email. You need a way to link out to subscribe links. You should have a search function and you should also have obviously any way to play within it. And it should have the functions where anything that's a hot link or an HTML link, you know, where you can have a URL in there, should be showing and displaying. Some of them are plain text only and you get no ability to click any of the links that are in it. So those are the few things that we recommended.

Anything I missed, Tom?

There are some social share opportunities within that that are there too. That makes it easy for people watching it there. They can click Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever, and it'll open up that in a new tab on their browser. And obviously if they're already logged in, then it just invites them to share about your podcast. On that platform. I don't know how many people really use that, but that function is there.

So at the top of the page, obviously you're going to put the name of the show. You're going to have a picture of your cover art that's nice and big, even though it's maybe small on the player, but you want to have that nice and big. So at the top you remember we're under the podcast tab of our menu item, you're going to have the name of the show, the COVID art, so they know they're in the right place. You can format it differently. It doesn't have to just be the square. You can make a rectangle version of it so it spans the top of your web page. You can do things like that. We like to have the description on that page. Now I recommend putting the first paragraph of your description or the first couple of sentence of it above the archive player and then maybe a Read more and have the rest of it. But we do recommend somewhere on your website to use the entire 4,000 character description. And if you don't have a 4,000 character description, there's another feature brand episode where we really tell you why you have to have one. And so that's another thing. But having that on that page is tremendous. SEO search engine optimization for your website so that everyone understands the value of this podcast, all the keywords associated with it. If you don't put it in that page somewhere, there's no way for that to get across to Google. So while we may not want everyone to have to see all of that language because it's a lot of text on a page, we may want that opening paragraph, those first couple of sentences, and then you can hit Read More and it could drop down if they wanted to read it. But either way, whatever's below in the Read More, Google will still read it. And so that's the important part of it. So we'd have a nice little short paragraph, then the player, and then below the player we like to put really large, nice sized links to some of the popular apps. So you might go out to Apple and Spotify and Google Podcasts, you might have a couple of those. You might have an email where they could click and get on your email newsletter list. Just have some major links to links out to subscribe to the show. And so we would put subscribe here and click to these things that they could go out to. So don't have too many of them. Three to five are fine.

Yeah, I think this can go too Far. And you and I differ a little bit on this, Tracy. You know, we don't always agree 100% on these things. I don't even like having him on that page personally, because I don't want to invite people to leave my webpage. And hopefully there's enough reason. People are already playing an episode right there in the player. And it's only after they decided, yeah, I like this show, I want to subscribe, would they be going to those links? But there's more ways, more value people can get right there in your website from your podcast. But it is important to provide the links for those people that are new to listening to podcasts. You do want to be able to point them in the right direction, have them go to a link where they're going to find your show, either on an app built into their phone or maybe they've heard of an app. They probably don't have a favorite app if they're a new podcast listener. The reality is, if someone's listened to a lot of podcasts, they don't even need that link. They're just going to go to their favorite app and search for the name of your show now that they've been on your website and they've seen it. Right?

Yeah, we have some heavy Apple users who are serious overcast fans because the playlisting ability and some of the other things that you put into overcast is just so much easier to use. And so they'll go straight to overcast and they'll do it whether or not you list that. So it won't matter to them. They're going to go to their app. But I like to have it, and this is my reason for it. So I want to explain to you because I told you, we tell you why we do it. I like to have them nice and big on the bottom there because the archive player on a mobile dev can get small, so the subscribe links can be relatively small there. And it. So it's not as easy to do it. But we want to encourage them to follow you. Right. We want them to get your episodes. And so whether they're sitting there playing them on the player and listening right at that moment, if they're clicking the subscribe link and then they subscribe out on Apple or Google podcasts or Spotify, now your episodes are going to be pushed to them, reminding them to listen. So if they didn't listen on that page now, you've got a definite distinct push reminder to them. So they're in your ecosystem and that to me is like, the important part of what we're trying to do is you're trying to capture their attention in some way, shape or form and get them to listen to your content. So if it's not happening on the page, the next best thing is for them to click that subscribe link and get it pushed to their phone later. So that's why I like to have both at the same time. Now, I'm not a big, big fan of rate and review, but that would come next. But there are people who really want the rate and review. I think you haven't earned it yet, like, and so I'm not a big fan of having it. But so usually I'll put it in a kind of a section that says, if you love this show, please rate and review. Right? And it's just got a link out to a page that is a whole rate and review that tells them how to do it. Because it's complicated. It's not simple to rate and review a podcast. For those who are really sophisticated podcast listeners, they already know how to do it and they'll just do it within the app and they don't care for this piece.

I agree with you on that, Tracy. I think it is important to have a rate and review page on your website after your show is out there, launched, syndicated everywhere, because you want to take a couple of screenshots of it there have step one, two, three, here's how you do it. But it's really for that newbie listener, uninformed listener, who doesn't have a lot of experience doing it. But where you put a link to that on your podcast page or on your website, I think there's a lot of different options. And yeah, we. I don't like to put them up.

In a top menu unless your whole website is a podcast website. It's all about the podcast. That's the only time that I would maybe put a rate and review page up at the top menu. So this page is the place to kind of put it in there and then link out to that page. But it's kind of a less easily navigable page within your website. But we do it because if you run a rate and review campaign, you want to be able to, like, have a page at which you can send people to. So if they don't know how to do it, they go right there. So we do like to have them. But again, this is a choice. That's the one piece that's optional, but we do recommend some place to put it. And this is Not a bad place. So now we had it, the branding of the podcast, a description paragraph, the player, the big subscribe links, including your email newsletter list or your email list. Right, that needs to be one of those links. And then we have maybe the rate and review section. And then below that you probably want to have some kind of, I'm going to call it like simple blog feed. So it might be the top episodes, it might be your most recent episodes. You don't want to have every blog and just like keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Like you just want to have a sort of simplified feed because you probably already have a top level. And if you don't, you should have a top level blog section that's completely separate and that you can go and navigate to all of the podcast blogs or all of the show notes. Some people call it episode blogs, whatever you want to call them, they're navigable through either the topic area or through some major blog page section which is top level, like your podcast. And so you just really want to have it where essentially anything that you do here is going to link you into that section. But it's just enough to get an attractor in case someone doesn't want to use the player. And so it gives them like a bigger visual of the episode and some descriptive paragraph or something about it or information about the guest that's on the title of this episode. Just give them a sample in a much bigger way. But below everything, that's the bottom of the page. That's it. It's simple.

I actually like it when a podcast page lets me navigate to all the podcast blogs.

Well, some of them do like. But all of them here and you just lick the link of the title section.

I agree. On the podcast page, I don't like it when it scrolls forever and every episode is there. That's information overload. And I don't think that's very helpful. But having three, five or six, depending on whether they're tiles or they're sort of in a list, having some there that update the latest ones always there, or like you said, your favorite ones, but having a button or a text link down at the bottom where you can see older episodes or more episodes, something like that. So you can get that from there, that would be, I think, very useful and helpful. So that's sort of what I like to do. But definitely you got to have some on that page so that it's very clear. Whoa, there's more content here.

And the other reason I don't like to have like a Giant section of it. And I like to have this more to smaller section. So whether you do it like side by side carousel or just have like three to five like we were talking about is that if you also then have a video channel or a video show, I like to put that below it at the bottom. So then there's the YouTube channel and it might be actually that playlist of all of your episodes in the playlist. So it's of course with the most recent on top. So the most recent is there. And so that's a great way to brand that video cast version of it. Now you could swap the archive player and the video player if you're in a promotion period where you're trying to get more video watchers. But it's not, it's the podcast page, not the video page. Right. And so like keeping it below the blog is actually a great strategy for, right for this moment. But again, another place where they're going to scroll down, they're going to go, oh yeah, I'm just going to watch the video. I'd like to see what they look like. I'd like to like get a little more, more detail or wow, that sounded really visual. Let me go down to the, the video player and play it.

The other thing I want people to understand, when you have your own podcast landing page, you can change it up over time. You know when you just have a page that's from your hosting provider only they have one way they do it and that's it. Take it or leave it. You can adjust it, you can change, change it up. You get feedback or you're just tired of it and you want to freshen it up. Or like Tracy said, you want to emphasize video versus the audio. Lots of things you can do. And when you have your own, guess what, that's sort of one of the benefits.

Move it up and promote it. It's just a little bit different messages like. And the last thing I want to leave you with on the structure of this page is this is not the page to have a sidebar or sales messages mixed in. This is not the page for that. The blog pages can have a sidebar which has your courses and your books and your programs. There should be no sales messages on this page. This is a content first page, so you do the full width, no sidebar, and don't mix in extra messages. It confuses things and it makes people think that your podcast is a sole vehicle to sell your book or a vehicle to only sell your programs and courses. And while that Might be true. We don't need to make that so blatantly obvious that that's the only thing we care about by inserting sales messages onto this page.

Great point, Tracy. I agree. That is important. Don't confuse people. Get people to focus on you and your message to the world. Listen to your latest episode, then they'll get more on other pages. Makes perfect sense.

So that's all I got.

I think that covers it. I don't think we need to belabor it or overemphasize it, but it's just really important. You need to have it. And again, I know a lot of you podcasters out there who are listening to this who are not already working with us. You only have an anchor page for your show, or you only have a Libsyn page and you think, no, so I've got my website covered. No, you really don't. You need a real website, and whether you're bootstrapping it, you're gonna make it yourself perfectly fine, or you want to get some support, either way, you need it. It's in your best interest. In the interest of your show being found by more listeners at the end of the day, but providing them some real value, additional value outside of the podcast listening apps. Can't emphasize this enough. You need it.

Absolutely. Well, let's drop the mic right there. So thanks everyone for listening to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with my co host here, Tom Hazzard, and we will bring another interesting topic. Deep dive into the tactics that are working in the podcasting industry.

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