Don't Get Stuck! How To Avoid Common Hosting Migration Issues

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today, and I am recording today what I would call a podcaster service announcement. It's really a guide of things to avoid when you switch podcast hosting platforms. So this is so you don't get stuck. How to avoid common hosting migration issues. I'm sure many of you who launched your podcast just started hosting your podcast on the first platform you came to know and you thought, hey, this company can do it. That's great. You may not have done a whole lot of research to make sure that host was going to meet your needs for months and years to come. And even if you did, which I did when I first started, your needs change, circumstances change, and there are lots of good reasons why you might move from one host to another. Now, on the other hand, I also hear from a lot of podcasters. Oh, I've been with this one forever. And they have all this anxiety over moving. And do they need to move? Well, like I said, there's lots of good reasons why you might want to move your podcast hosting from one platform to another. I'm not really going to go into all those reasons why, because that's really not the subject of today. I am going to talk about when you've decided to move. There are some very important things you need to know so that you can avoid common mistakes, pitfalls, things that might make you regret that decision later. So, of course, within your podcast hosting platform, whatever it is, and I'm talking about the major platforms, okay, obviously Poditize is one. There's Buzzsprout, Transistor, podbean, Libsyn, Spotify for podcasters, Blubbery, soundcloud. Gosh, there's so many. I'm really surprised how many more come up all the time. So there are lots. And you know what? You can't even host your podcast on your own website. I very strongly recommend you don't do that because it's complicated. It usually taxes the server that your website is running on. And then there's questions about what kind of analytics do you have and all sorts of feature issues that you can do. It doesn't mean you should. I think last week Melanie Gorman and I talked about one of these all in one website sort of programs, Kajabi. Yeah, Kajabi can be your podcast host too. I think there's many, many good reasons why you shouldn't do that, even if you're a Kajabi website user. But anyway, not going to go further down that rabbit hole today. So let's accept. Okay, you're moving from one platform to another. What are a lot of the migration issues? I'm going to start with the first one that as a podcaster myself, when we were creating the Politize platform, I was determined to not let this be an issue with anybody migrating from another platform to Poditize. Podcasters, a lot of them are very detail oriented and become very attached to their download numbers, their historic download numbers per episode or for all episodes of the show. The people keep an eye on that. And I was just meeting with somebody yesterday, said, yeah, I've finally reached 11,000 downloads total after a dozen or two dozen episodes or so. And then others saying, hey, Now I've reached 100,000 or I've gone over a million downloads now. People get very attached to that number and I understand that it's an achievement. Well, when you move from one platform to another. I actually don't know of any platform other than Poditize and I'm not saying none exist that do this, but I haven't seen it yet where you can take you your historic download numbers from your old platform per episode. Like I've got 300 plus episodes of my show. Each episode in total has received so many thousands or so many hundreds of downloads depending on how old the episode is. And that's a number that's very important when you switch platforms. I think a lot of people, if they care about their download numbers, are hesitant to move because they don't want to start from zero. Well, at Poditize we made sure that doesn't happen. And honestly, any platform could do this if they wanted to. I just think very few want to. So you can export your historic download numbers from pretty much any major podcast hosting platform and get a spreadsheet. This episode got this many total downloads and you have that number. Well, Poditize, not only do we migrate your show for free, and I'm going to talk about what that means in terms of importing your show in a moment, but in your RSS feed is just all the data of your episode titles, descriptions, the MP3 file itself. There's no information in your RSS feed about how many downloads each episode has received. So you can export that from pretty much any platform. But most platforms don't have anything that you can do with that. But at Pallettize we do. You can either provide it to us, or we can export it for you. And then we back fill, meaning we add those historic download numbers into our system for every single episode. We have a very easy way to do that. So then it populates your total download numbers for all shows. And if you ever look up the downloads for any individual episode, which you can do, you'll have the total downloads for that episode. And then obviously your new downloads and your destination platform of choice start accruing as soon as your show is redirected from the old host to the new host. Now, if you're not familiar with redirecting your RSS feed, it's really not what this episode is about. But there is a mechanism every podcast hosting platform accommodates where they create a 301 redirect from their platform to your new platform. And in a lot of hosting platforms, you can do it yourself. On some, you need to reach out to their technical support, give them your new RSS feed at your new podcast hosting platform, and request a redirect and they will do it for you. So that's sort of the mechanism to actually make the switch. And by the way, here's a little tip. When it comes to exporting those historic download numbers, you do not want to export them from the old platform until your show is redirected. Now, there may be one or two platforms, and you need to check on this that once you redirect the show, you no longer have access to the old analytics. If that's the case with the old platform, then you need to export those historic download numbers just before you do the redirect. But I don't recommend that. The vast majority of the platforms will still give you access to the analytics as long as your account is still open even after you've redirected it. And the reason you want to redirect it first is until you have redirected it, more download stats are accruing in that platform. Every time somebody plays one of your episodes to stream it or download it, it is going to count as a download in that platform and you've got numbers you will have missed. So redirect first as long as you can download the analytics after that's happened, because then your analytics are accruing in the new platform. And then the total download numbers from the old platform will be accurate, all they will ever be, because no more will accrue there. I hope that makes sense. That's probably the most technical thing I'm going to really mention today, so hopefully that made sense. And we'll have in the blog post for this episode a few screenshots and a few references for you that'll be very helpful in this. All right.

So downloads podcasters who fear moving their hosting from one platform to another, fear, oh, but I'm going to lose all my analytics. Well, in our opinion, apologize, you should not. And when you move to Podtize, you do not. You can keep building on those download numbers that you've had forever. Okay, so that's one. All right, so here's another one that really frustrates me that a lot of podcasters fall into this trap. It's a bit of a rookie error, a newbie error in podcasting when you move from one hosting platform to another. There is this belief that a lot of podcasters have, and I also think there are some producers out there who are also, I would say, green and new at producing podcasts and hosting them and don't really understand all the ins and outs of hosting platforms and how syndication to all the listening apps actually happens and works, that believe when you change to a new host, you've got to register your show again on Apple and Spotify and Iheart and all the different listening apps out there. Please understand that is incorrect, plain and simple. No two ways about it. Once you've registered your show on the listening apps once, you do not need to register it on the listening apps again just because you move hosts. Okay? And when you do, or if you do register your show again, it actually creates quite a problem. And unfortunately, I end up doing triage on an awful lot of shows that have moved hosts 1, 2, 3 times before coming to Potitize. And it's really disheartening when we look into that show, because when you move to Potitize, not only do we migrate the show for you, move the stats for you, we're going to populate all your links to where your show is syndicated, meaning all of those app links, your show on Apple, your show on Spotify, they all exist and we copy those and provide them to you in your account on Poditized so you have a handy reference for all of them. Those links should exist once when you create your show new and it's registered or as we say, syndicated on all those listening apps. The first Time, and it should never change again. Unless there is some very unusual or rare good reason why one listing had to be deleted and a new one created. It almost never happens. It's not even worth considering because the 99.9% of you will never have that problem. But when I come across shows that have moved, usually more than once, from one platform to another, I go look up their show on Apple and there's two or three listings of their show, meaning I type in the show name and you see three of that same exact show in the search results. And when I click into each of them, very often they're all identical. They all are showing the same number of episodes. The most recent ones are all the same. The key difference is I usually will find one of those listings has a large number of reviews and a large number of ratings. And usually the duplicates do not because they were created much later and just either don't have any ratings or reviews or have very few. Once you go down this road, it's really hard to fix this, and it causes confusion among listeners. Which one of these should I subscribe to? And maybe they're looking at the one that doesn't have any ratings or reviews and they think, oh, this show has no ratings and reviews. Maybe I don't want to listen to this show when if they checked the other, or what was probably the original show listing, it has all these good reviews and ratings for them to use to help evaluate the show. Do I want to listen to it? So why does this happen? Usually it's laziness and lack of awareness. Honestly, it's either laziness on the part of a editor or producer who says, oh, we're moving you over to this platform that I prefer, and oh, I'm going to register your show on Apple, and they do it through another Apple id. So you know what? I could probably do a whole episode on this subject, and I'm not going to do that today. But please just understand, you only ever have to register your show on Apple once. You should have control of it as the host or the owner of the podcast. As long as you do own it and you're not doing it for a company you work for and they own it. And that happens. Okay? But if you're an independent podcaster and you're on your show, it should be submitted to Apple through your Apple ID or transferred to your Apple ID after it's registered on Apple. And it should only happen once, because when you redirect your show from one platform to another, that's entirely behind the scenes. It doesn't change anything about all the listening apps and than getting your episodes and your show information. Listeners won't ever know the difference when it's done right. You can move from one house to another to another at any time and maintain that listing. But when you get multiple listings, it causes confusions. You start getting listeners on multiple of those listings and it becomes an unraveling sweater that's very hard to knit back together. It can be done, but boy is it painful and it's confusing. And there are some things that are not easy to do because Apple's the biggest culprit in this. Honestly. Apple will let you submit your same show as a show to the Apple Podcast listening app multiple times. You have to do it each time. You do it through a different Apple id, I believe. I don't think you will be able to do it through the same Apple ID if I remember correctly. But anyway, Apple will let you do it. I don't know why they do. They shouldn't let you do it, but they do. And so that causes complexities and confusion. And one thing I also know is a certainty from long hard experience with Apple is that they will not let you merge those listings together and combine all of the subscribers that you have into one. All you can do when you have more than one listing is either keep it or delete it. Now, like I said, there's a way to very long road and painful in some ways process to get all those people listening in one listing to go listen to another. And we've done it. But it's not easy and most podcasters don't really want to go through that. So anyway, just understand you don't need to do it. So that's one of those other big mistakes, sort of a rookie error people make when they switch hosting companies. They register their show on listening apps. Again, please don't fall into that trap.

Okay, I want to talk about missing podcasts next and this is going to tie into importing your RSS feed. So I'm going to tell you every good podcast hosting platform and we do it poditize have a way to import your show from another platform to theirs by taking your RSS feed and they have an import function. You just paste in the RSS feed, click go. It reads the entire RSS feed, copies all the information exactly, duplicates everything including all of the episodes, copies the MP3 files over and all that. Wonderful. So when you do this though, you've got to make sure when you're Moving that. And you understand that that's only going to copy over all the episodes that have already been published. If you've scheduled one, two or three more to publish in the future, which is great. All of us podcasters want to be ahead and have some breathing room before that next one publishes. Unless you're recording live and publishing in real time once a week or a couple times a week, and that might be different. But most are pre recording and scheduling ahead. So just beware, any of those episodes that you have either in draft or scheduled to publish in the future are not going to be copied over in that RSS feed import. So that either means in most platforms you want to wait to import your RSS feed until all those episodes have published, so you don't miss any. Or you'd have to manually republish them on the new platform, which you certainly can do. You're essentially doing the work of publishing or scheduling an episode to publish twice. But you could wait until they're all published and do it At Poditize. We even have another feature of our import where let's say, all right, we import your show once and get most of the info there, because we're going to start backfilling all the per episode download data and get ahead on all that. But you have a couple more that publish in the week or two following before you're ready to redirect from the old show to the new. Well, we have a feature where we can put in your RSS feed and tell our system to import only missing episodes, any new ones that publish that are not already in our platform. And our system's smart enough to know that. So you can then import the later ones after they publish real quick, whatever 2, 3, 4, 5 that might be, and then you're good to go to redirect from the old platform to the new. So just you need to be aware that importing your RSS feed is a wonderful thing. But understand what will and what will not import, because there is a difference. Only what's published is going to import. Okay, now let's talk about broken links or missing links. So this comes down to another one of my pet peeves of a lot of other podcast hosting platforms, publishers of podcasts out there in the podcast ecosystem. And I'm going to call out this one because the biggest culprit here, and it's Spotify for Podcasters. I see this all the time, people that migrate from Spotify for podcasters to Poditize. And what Spotify for Podcasters does is tries to hijack your traffic with that episode webpage URL that Apple app especially uses. And a lot of the Apple clones use. They'll populate Spotify for podcasters in particular, and other platforms do it too. But Spotify for podcasters will populate a link to your episode on their website in that URL. And that's bad enough that they're trying to take your listener traffic and send it to their website. And it's not really what users expect to get to when they click on that link. I think I've talked about this in a past episode, but in any case, best practices, you have the ability as a podcaster to put a link to a page on your own website if you have one. And again, that's another one of my pet peeves, is that all you podcasters should have your own website for your show. If you don't, you need to go and do that, highly recommend it. It's like you go from being just a podcaster with an audio show to another level of being a podcaster. It's very important and it's really long term in your best interest. But for those of you that either don't have a website or never put a link in every episode because you didn't know where to do it. Because guess what? Spotify for podcasters and those other hosting platforms don't tell you they are not open and honest about it, saying, hey, remember, every episode you want to put a link in here to your website or a landing page for this episode on your website, whatever it is. They don't tell you that because they want to get the web traffic going to their website, they're acting in their best interest at your expense. But here's the worst part. When you import your RSS feed to a new platform like I was just talking to you about, in that RSS feed contains that link to your episode on Spotify for podcasters. And that link imports in all of the other platforms too. So you move your show, you import it to another platform, and let's say you have 75 episodes where you've got 75 links, one in each of those episodes to a Spotify for Podcasters link for that episode. And now if you don't realize this and you don't change it, or your hosting platform you're moving to is unwilling to change it for you, like potatoes is like we do for our customers, then you moved your show, great, you're on a new platform, but that link is still sending everyone to your show on Spotify. For podcasters, that's not in your best interest. And I would think for all you podcasters, not what you would expect to have happen. So it can be tedious going through editing every episode and changing out that link or removing it. But that's what you would need to do if your podcast host doesn't have a more automated way to do it or is not willing to do it for you. So beware of that.

And then track players, let's talk about that. This is really the last piece of this puzzle I think you need to be aware of. Now, an awful lot of podcasters and I meet one on one with six to eight different podcasters every day looking at their shows, evaluate whether they're following all best practices and getting the full value out of their show that they should be or not. And I can't tell you how often I see when they've moved from one podcast host to another, they didn't think about the track players. Now, pretty much every host has a track player for a single episode. Each episode you publish, some are more basic, some are more enhanced and can be custom colored for your brand colors, among other things. And you get an embed code. And every podcast that has a even a show notes post on their website, a page for each episode, which is by the way, where that episode webpage link where you should send people to that I was talking about a couple minutes ago. But having a show notes page or blog on your website for every episode is highly recommended rather than not having one. And that's usually where you want to have the track player for your episode. Well, you need to understand when you move podcast hosts and now you're hosted somewhere else, once you close down that account on the old host and it's no longer active, all those track players you had from that previous host are not going to work anymore. So you need to change out each track player on your webpage or the big window player. If you have one player that has all episodes that a lot of people have on a podcast page on their website, you need to change those things out. Now, a good new podcast hosting platform will have a way to make that easier for you. Or if you're changing to a new podcast production company and they want you to move to a new podcast hosting platform, make sure that production company is going to take responsibility for changing out all your track players. Because if they want you to move to be more convenient for them or to be hosted where they would prefer, which I see a lot, you gotta make sure that they are aware of and considering all the consequences of changing hosts. And obviously those links I was mentioning for the episode webpage is one and track players are another. At podties, we try to make this very easy for our customers and have them have a better experience with track players on their website. So you can imagine an unsuspecting or just unaware podcaster who's been on a platform for a year or more. Let's say you got 50 plus episodes and you're going to avoid. There are lots of good reasons why you might move lots of good reasons why you might move one platform to another. You got to just be aware, you avoid some of these pitfalls. You understand what the consequences are, and anybody advising you is confirming they've either got it handled or that you're made aware of what you're going to need to do in order to move platforms. It is really very important. Otherwise you can leave yourself tripping on a landmine you didn't expect that is going to cause you a lot of pain and headache in order to get things to be what they should. And really you just want it to work right. I mean, you may move for some new feature of a different platform or better analytics or a program that's going to advertise your podcast to new listeners. There's lots of good reasons why you might move, but be aware of some of these pitfalls that I've shared with you today, and they're not insurmountable obstacles, but they do get worse if you're not aware and you move and you're sort of left holding the bag, if you will, as a podcaster, when someone convinced you to move and didn't tell you, hey, you got to do switch out all these other things or any one of the things I shared with you. They're worse to deal with when you learn about them long after the fact, and you've already made the change and much easier to do proactively, either just before or at the time you move from one platform to another. That's really all I'm saying. So I want you to be aware of that. Okay? So I hope you find this helpful. I'm not trying to scare you from switching platforms. Like I said, lots of good reasons why you might want to move. Especially one other little last tip here and then I'll wrap this one up. Is Spotify for podcasters least? Last I checked, which was only literally days ago, for some reason they're only allowing podcasts to have 600 or 650 characters for the show description and that does a real disservice to every podcast when the entire ecosystem and all the other platforms allow you to have the full 4000 characters for your description that are available to you. There's some really good reasons why you want to have such a long description because you will be found by more of your ideal listeners organically when you do so. That's the last tip and another good reason why you might want to move to a platform that doesn't limit your length of your description. All right, well, thanks so much for listening, everybody. Hope you got a lot of good value out of this episode. You want to check out any of the companies I mentioned, any of the different, different resources I mentioned? Remember, you can go to the blog post for this episode on podcasters united.org and find all that information there. Okay, thanks so much everybody. I'll be back next time. This has been Tom Hazard on Feed.

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