Key Factors to the Best and Worst Podcast Websites for Your Show Home Base

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Hey everyone, this is Tracy and Tom on feed you'd brand and we're going to talk the worst and the best podcast websites. And I think we should qualify podcast websites because we don't mean websites that have a podcast. That's not the same thing.

Yeah, and I guess to say it differently, we're not talking about criticizing any of your websites or anybody else's website out there that has a podcast on it. We're talking about different website platforms that you might use or you know, choose between to build your podcast website on to create your platform.

Right. So almost in a way it's like podcast websites, creators, not by people. See, that's why this like titling was a hard thing for us. So you have to be really careful when you title. Right?

You do. And the reason this issue has come up a lot lately, I mean, those of you, you know what, everybody out there, I'm sure, has a website of some kind, one kind or another.

And if you don't, you should get one right now.

Right. And the reality is when you're going to start a podcast, it's time to sort of take stock of your website, see what condition it's in. Is it an appropriate website to add your podcast to and your blog to, or is it really time to start fresh and create a new website? And regardless of the answer to those questions, we don't really need to debate that here. What we do want to discuss is when it's time, what are all the platforms you can consider and what are the pros and cons of them? Because we've been experiencing this a lot lately, especially with new customers coming to transfer to using our production. And some of them have come to us with websites that are just in really, I guess I would say not ideal is putting it nicely. Some of them are actually in really bad shape in terms of being able to expand them.

Not ideal conditions to develop a blog. Podcast pages too. And that's because many of you have very outdated websites that it just happens you've had them for a long time and it's a lot easier to just upgrade and do some things on it than it is to start from scratch. So those that are at the stage of like creating from new, you're at an advantage because you get to choose between these podcast website platforms and really take a look at them and decide which ones are best so you have an opportunity to do it just a little bit easier and quicker. The only thing that I do want to say, Tom, is that I think that we have a bigger list of worst podcast websites than we do best.

No, we definitely do. And in fact, you know, I'd like to say that and you know, to add to something you just said a minute ago, Tracy, regarding, you know, it might be easier to upgrade an old website than to build a new one. I actually have found that's not the case.

No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that most people have found that it just was the path of least resistance for them to just make a change, make a change and continue in the past. In the past. And yet. But when you go to make this significant end of a change, which is really shifting a site from being just like informational basic only to being content driven, it's a very big difference in a shift. And so there are certain website platforms that just aren't conducive to it. And I think we should go through maybe say our top three criteria for that. And the number one, one, which is super simple and is that it needs to rank really, really well on Google.

Well, and in fact, it is the content, as you've heard us talk about on past episodes of this podcast, it is the content created from your podcast that is the fuel for ranking your website on Google. So if you don't have a really friendly system built into your website for creating and posting blogs and for configuring them properly for the best organic keyword phrases that you want to rank on in Google, that's a very difficult thing to build into an old website if it's on a certain system or if even if it's hard coded.

Right. And I don't want to get into the web development weeds here in any way, shape or form, but just there's a lot of old terminology to how websites were created. They used to be created with frames which kind of like think about it like it's like holding all your information in a little box, right. And so it wasn't friendly to Google spiders going through. So creating a more open form website is exactly the way that WordPress does it. And there are many others out there that attempt to do that, but they also have their own sort of framework that they've developed to make it easier for you to drag and drop and plug and play and do it yourself. And that's really what we're talking about is there's lots that say, hey, we're super podcast friendly, but they're not super Google friendly. And so that's our number one criteria. They need to be Google friendly.

They do need to be Google friendly. I agree with that. The other thing I think it depends on, there's a huge difference in having a website that is very friendly to having been created in the first place, and one that's very friendly to being worked on on a daily basis, right?

Having content added every single day is very different than having it designed and created from the get go. And sometimes oversimplification on the design and setup side makes tremendous amount of work on the content. Content input side of things.

Yes. And you know what? One, and again it comes the content, like I said, is the big issue, right? And the content we're talking about in this case that has all the SEO power is blogs. And so I've even encountered a few web developers saying, well, your website can be hard coded and then you can just have a WordPress blog for your blog, but that blog is not on the same domain name as your hard coded website. And I want to make sure I'm clear about this right now too, because you want your blogs contained within your primary domain name, that you want all the value, all the keyword benefits of that to be fueling, right?

So that's our number three, right? So we have that, we want it to be very Google friendly, we want it to be very easy to add content on a daily, weekly basis, whatever your pace of podcasting is. And number three, so that it's all supporting your primary domain, your main URL, your main dot com, right?

Because what you're doing, I mean, you're building equity into your website. It's backlink equity, it's organic Google keyword equity, it's referring domain equity.

It's really members and listeners and viewers and everything. It's like one place for them to go, right? And so when you build all that equity in one place that it needs to do a lot of things, and that's where you need the robust and accommodation of all three things that we just talked about as. As power needs to do all of those things at once.

And you know, a lot of new or aspiring podcasters will think, well, I'll just create a new website for my Podcast and I'll have my main website over here. And you certainly can do that. And there may be very good reasons why you might want to do that. But understand that if you're creating a completely different website for your podcast, all of that value and equity that you're creating from the content is going to be in the new website. And yes, they may be linked and closely related to your main website, but the new website may rise in ranking a lot higher than the old one. I'm honestly most always a fan, and again, there are exceptions, but I'm most always a fan of creating your podcast page on your blog within your existing main website. So you continue to build on whatever author equity and traffic value and link value you've already built over time. And if you want to have a new domain name, a new www.whatever my podcast.com so that you can market that and drive people on the site, you can do and just forward that domain name into the podcast page of your site. It doesn't have to be a separate site. You can have ingredient brands or even related, different brands coming into one site.

So forwarding is the proper term.

Yeah, you don't want to point in terms of the DNS, and if you don't know what that is, then definitely don't mess with it and talk to your tech team. But you don't want to point a DNS for two different or two or more different, you know, dot coms or dot cos, or domain names, whatever they are, into the same website, because that will actually hurt your website ranking with Google, among other things. So. But forwarding them, domain name forwarding is acceptable, essentially. You know just what it sounds, forwarding it into the site, that works.

And usually when you go into wherever you bought your website from, wherever you bought that URL, they have a whole way to do that and just do it properly because it can actually damage your Google ranking. So I want to point that out.

All right, so let's now talk about the best and the worst podcast websites. And the reality is we've got a lot more worst than best on this list, right?

Yeah. And. And I want to say when we're talking about these website builders, that a lot of them are marketing to you guys as podcasters out there. I'm like, that's the hot thing for them to do. So they've just been, you know, website creators or website builders, and of course, people have been making websites for some of them for a decade or more. And so when you look at this as a website Builder, they're perfectly fine. But they've decided to market it by adding like a little feature for podcasters or a PODC player or a simple way to press your podcast and some things like that. So they've just started adding some features and marketing now to podcasters. Didn't mean that this was designed for podcasters to begin with. Some of these.

Right. And, you know, our perspective from this is not as an end user, it's as a company that goes into. I don't even want to think about it, hundreds of websites every week to post blogs with our done for you service. So we do this a lot.

So you see the really good, bad and really ugly ugly of website design and website build and website function and.

Themes and, you know, ways to access all the information. So let's go with one again. We're starting with sort of the worst and not the best. So let's take a site like wix. Okay. Wix, this is one that we've come across in the history of our business. Somebody has a WIX website and, you know, they want us to create their blogs on that site and their podcast page.

And WIX is really easy. Like, that's why it's of appeal. I'm sure that it was just like, I need something really quick. It's drag and drop. It's a super easy platform to design a website on, especially when you have no design skills.

And it is, I think it accomplishes that goal. But in order to make it easy to use, especially for the layperson who has, you know, no website coding abilities, which is true, you know, it does a great job of that. But in doing that, it oversimplifies certain things. That does not have a robust library of plugins you can use to plug and play different key functions, including configuring blog posts for SEO. They just do not have a good, you know, feature set for that. So everything has to kind of be done manually the hard way, and it takes longer. And I don't think that it's as well done, quite honestly.

Yeah, I don't think. I think it's harder to do it right to make sure you didn't miss anything, to make sure it's absolutely correct, and then to make sure that you're getting the Google power from doing all that work.

And the same thing with, you know, podcast players for when people come to your site if didn't know you had a podcast or they haven't subscribed yet. And, you know, we always recommend allowing people to play your podcast episodes Right there on your website. There's a lot fewer track players and podcast players available on a platform like wix.

Yeah, a lot of these podcast website platforms have to had to create their own players so they have limited functionality, they have, you know, whatever works within the system. And so if you want to compare them side by side, it's not as easy to compare them to the robust podcast players that we have out there on the majority of the websites that we we service.

Now there's two other platforms that I think are very similar to wix in really a lot of what we just said for WIX would apply to these other two. And one of them is Squarespace and the other is Weebly. And I don't think we need to belabor each of them. They have some slight differences between them, but they're all really doing the same type of thing, like we said, trying to make it easy for you to build a website and put it out there, which it does. But it's not so easy to integrate a podcast and blogs and do it to the best level of how would I say they don't let you achieve those things of blog posts and you know, podcast players and things like that to the best level of execution that you would want or hope for. There's always going to be caveats, exceptions, compromises you're going to have to make for the way things work and the way things look.

Yes, a lot of it can be the way things look, but it's the ones that create limited and functionality or limited in Google power that we get the most concerned about. I think also just want to bring up the awareness that Squarespace is one of those ones that's really marketed a lot to people who have retail stores. Just happens to be that's the way because it has some cart functionality to it. And so that is supposed to be simple and easy. And there's a couple of new ones that people have been saying and they think like when they call us, they think that they're going to create a website this way. That cartoon is the big new one. They say, oh, I have a leadpages website that's not a website. I just want you guys to be really aware. Squarespace is yes, but the ones that have just like our shops in and of themselves and only the cart side of things for others that are disconnected from it. Like a lead pages where you're really just. It's a sales page, it's not a full robust website. They don't have plugins, they don't have Any of these things. And it's not possible. It's possible to hook them up together. So to make a really good core podcast website that then connects to stores, sales pages to complete shops, and all of those things absolutely possible to do. But the informational site is separated or should be the starting point of everything. And this is really common. Like big, big brands that we work with and help create sites for. They do that. They have their information sites and their core brand shopping sites separated for a reason. Because traction doesn't happen when you connect the two. Because it all looks like sponsored content then.

Sure, absolutely. All right, well, let's move on now to one that I really was kind of surprised to come across recently, which, you know, I remember doing this, boy, 20 years ago as we were creating some of our first websites in our business. And that was. I came across a completely custom, hard coded website created by a web development agency service provider that, you know, I hadn't seen anything like this in a while. I mean, obviously it was. That's the only way it was done. 20 years ago and maybe even 10 years ago was a lot more common. But this company, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna rattle off a bunch of acronyms here, just of different sort of technologies that are used to create custom websites in terms of the language. And this may mean nothing to a lot of you, but I'm gonna rattle them off anyway because.

But agencies might tell you that this is how they code or this is how they create, right?

That they're. Oh, they're an expert because they choose the best technology based upon the job, your particular need for your website. And the different technologies include PHP, HTML, CSS, Smarty, MySQL, MySQL, jQuery, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and more. Now the ColdFusion one made deja vu happen.

Yeah, that was really old.

We had a cold fusion website, I think in like 1999 or something, 1998. And it had benefits at the time because you could design a website and you had a backend interface that we could go into to make changes to things, right?

And this is things. You should not knock a developer who has all of these skills and everything, because you'll use css, you'll use php, you'll use HTML. Like all of those coding things are great when you want to do something custom, when you want to break a theme or something like that and create it so that it looks better for what you need to do. And having someone on your team and having your back on your website. Who's got this information is great, but that's just not the main way to create a website nowadays. It's not the number one important thing.

Or at least the kind of websites that most of us listening to this podcast need.

That's right.

Okay. There are again, always exceptions, but most of us really, it's really like trying to kill a mosquito with a shotgun, you know, just doesn't make a lot of sense.

That is such a, like, I mean, we don't even have mosquitoes here in California.

So what?

So like that is such a weird expression to be coming out of your mouth. I'm sorry, I just, I just lost it here.

My point is that it's, it's over. Overkill.

Yes.

It's like, all right, I'll use another one. You know, you're gonna travel 10 miles and fly in a 747. Okay, is that better?

Right? And that's the thing is it's like most of you are starters. Most of you have starter websites. Most of you have websites that don't have high commerce needs, high web traffic needs, where they're gonna crash because you have hundreds of thousands of people hitting it at the exact same moment. It just doesn't work like that for most of what you're doing. Yes, it's a one to many proposition with your websites and you want that to be the case, but really, today's websites are so robust that they can handle a lot of traffic and a lot of commerce before you run into problems where you need something so customized.

Well, and so here's the problem we ran into recently with a potential customer is they have an existing website that they've had for years now. Like you said, Tracy, it's an informational website. They don't have a blog and they want to start a podcast. And they were hoping we could do what we do with most customers and just add a podcast page and add a blog and configure the blog on their existing website. And I, you know, just took one look at it online and did a little analysis and I could tell, wow, it's not Wix, Squarespace, Weebly or WordPress or anything. It is completely custom coded. Even could see the company that did it. And I knew that, okay, this is going to be a really difficult thing to achieve at a reasonable cost. To add all the podcast functionalities and a blog to this particular website and be able to easily maintain it and update it going forward. You know, I mean, maybe you could make some changes is not the end of the world. But constantly updating it as things change. I mean, it's always going to be something you have to go back to that big web development company to do. And I didn't recommend they do it. I recommended they actually start a new website for their podcast and use really what is my number one best and recommended platform to build a website on? And that is this. These days it's WordPress.

Right. And WordPress has, I mean, what, more than 50%? I think it's like 65% or something like that. At the last time, yeah, the last.

Time I knew it, it was at least of the websites on the Internet were WordPress these days. And they really have become the standard for most websites. And there are really some natural reasons and really, I think logical reasons that that is Right.

And we should also be careful out there. If you've got a free WordPress site. There are two kinds of WordPress sites. There's a.org and dot com. So WordPress.org or WordPress.com is where you register your site. So if you were to go in and like log into the backend, you'd be going into one of those two places typically. And usually you'd be going into your website, WP Admin or something like that, or login, if you were on the paid side of WordPress, because there's a free site. So if you've got a WordPress.com site, so if that's where you went to sign in, login, that kind of thing, you have a free site essentially, because WordPress offers these blog sites for free. And it's great except that you can't use plugins and you can't use some of these add ons, so you can't expand it the way that you would like to. While you can create a page, don't get me wrong, you can create a blog page and you can do all of that. You can expand it to add lots of the SEO plugins, lots of the podcast players. You can expand it to add all of these things to it without upgrading to a paid site. And so you can go to WordPress.com and you can get them to transfer your site over to a.org and you go and buy a hosting package is essentially what you do.

So I want to sort of bring a little more, I guess, basic clarity.

I'm a little more in the weeds than you here.

Yeah, you are actually, which is kind of role reversal for us. But yeah, what this really means is WordPress was originally formed as a blog site. And if you Wanted a blog. A blog was usually completely separate and disconnected from your main website. If you even had a main website.

Right. There are other examples of that. Blogspot would be one of them. If you've got a blog spot site or if you've got a. What's the one with the frog that got a pad. Something pad. Anyway, Type pad. Type pad, yeah. If you've got a type pad or a blog spot or like this older WordPress.com like that kind of site. It's straight blog site, sure.

But then WordPress as a company evolved many years ago and created the fundamental software, a real significant platform upon which entire websites can be built on, that also includes a blog.

Right.

And that has become the absolute runaway standard of website development today. You can actually download the software from WordPress.org but most hosting companies that you might use to host your website, like a Network Solutions or a GoDaddy or, you know, Bluehost, a number of them, you can just go pay for an annual or even monthly contract for hosting a website. They've got the software right there. You pay for it as part of your hosting and boom, you can build yourself a website or have someone build it for you on the WordPress platform. And I want you to think of the WordPress platform kind of like Microsoft Windows 20 years ago. It was like this open architecture as opposed to closed operating systems or computers. Like in the early days of the Mac and all that. Windows became used everywhere because it was open. Anybody could more easily write software for it, write plugins for the computers. It's the same thing with WordPress. And there are hundreds of thousands of plugins available for WordPress to achieve different functions that you don't have to reinvent the wheel and pay a web developer to hard code and build everything you want. It probably has been done by somebody else already.

Okay, and just for clarification, here, we are not being paid to sponsor WordPress or say anything about this. We're just trying to clarify and make sure that you guys understand why it's become so big and why it is the standard here. And really it's such a powerhouse. It's really hard for these other sites to compete with that.

I think the other sites, their days are numbered, quite honestly. I just can't imagine it. So WordPress is a really wide open, very versatile, flexible platform. And a lot of people have made not only plugins, but what they call themes, which are sort of the visual appearance aspect of the website, but they also have some functionality. Yeah, templates that can make it very easy for you to drag and drop and create your own website within WordPress and you don't have to code anything. You can do that if you want want, but it also is customizable. And this is where Tracy was saying, having a good web developer that has some of those coding capabilities to do things that you just need to do this one or two things that's really going to make your website perfect and it's unique. It's something that they don't have a plugin for. Well, that's relatively inexpensive to have a coder go and make those changes for you, who knows what they're doing. But in any case, there are particular plugins, a ton of them, to provide podcasting functionality within a website, within a WordPress site. And also obviously all the different aspects of a blog or let's say even monetizing your website or there are plugins to integrate click funnels if you've got click funnel pages. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

Well, and I also want to be really clear here. One of the reasons why, when we see that we've got a WordPress.org site, right, we've got one that's in the right platform and we evaluate it, we look at that and say, oh, here, yes, no problem. That's kind of why our pricing structure is the way it is. We can add a page, we can add a podcast player, we can add all of the good SEO and all the things that are necessary from a plugin standpoint, which we do standard for our clients. We can just add that it's going to be not a problem and it's not going to create a safety or privacy problem on your site because all of those things are very secure. It's not going to break your theme.

Yeah, it's not going to break your theme or your security or anything. So. So we only use plugins that are proven and tested.

That's right.

We don't go putting some brand new plugin on a site without testing it. And we'll also test it on our own sites first. But it's just become abundantly clear that it is much more difficult much of the time to use some of these other platforms. It takes you longer to do the work and to test it and to get it to look the way you want.

Did you skip any? I thought there was one that was actually called Podcast Websites.

No, I was getting to that one. And the reason I wanted to talk about, talk about WordPress first is because podcast websites is built on the WordPress platform. Ah.

So is it like a theme?

Well, it's more than a theme, actually. What this company called Podcast Websites has done, and we've encountered this a lot lately. I think we've had three or four clients come to us recently who already have a Podcast websites website. And actually when I went to PodFest in February, they had a trade show booth there and I checked out the podcast websites, you know, offering what they were offering people. And I can see why it's attractive to, to a potential podcaster, you know, a new up and coming podcaster. But I really couldn't judge it until we had a few clients actually using it. And people on our team, and me myself have gone into the back end of these websites and experienced what Podcast Websites does. So now I can speak a little more intelligently about it. And so what Podcast Websites does, it's built on WordPress. But unless you really understand, have a lot of experience with WordPress, you wouldn't really realize that, that you were on WordPress because they've recreated the entire user interface of the backend, the user dashboard for creating and managing the site, for creating and posting blogs, and for posting new podcasts.

Okay, okay. So they created it so like you're logging into a whole different place than the backend of your site. So you're logging into a much more user friendly dashboard.

Well, I think Podcast Websites thinks it is a more user friendly dashboard. I actually personally take issue with if it's more user friendly or not. They're trying to, you know, you have a website that, their whole idea is that your website is more specifically about podcasting and the content created from it, including blog posts. So they do allow you to create blog posts, but they've also made it very cookie cutter. Again, trying to make it simple. They've limited the functionality, limited the things you can do on your own. And quite honestly, in our experience, it's more of a pain in the neck for us to deal with than a normal WordPress website. And I'll give you one example. There are a few plugins we install on every client's website for a special podcast player, which is a paid plugin we pay for, our customers don't pay for it, but we put it on their website. That's a very nice podcast player plugin and a track player that you can do in all your colors of your brand and you can, you know, put images into it, all sorts of stuff.

Right. And that podcast player, which we really like, it was developed by Pat Flynn, who is of you know, and arguably one of the early podcasters who teaches most people and who I learned from as to how to podcast initially or at least studied. But his player, I compared them all before we settled on that one and it had the most robust features, but more importantly the best user friendly style. So that it was easy to read, easy to access, easy to share stuff.

Exactly. To me, yeah, it was all more about the look than the function. I mean, there's a lot of podcast track players out there that function very well. But this one, it's about the look of it and how you could customize the look of it that we really liked. So we've standardized on that and you know, not every customer has to have it on their site certainly, but we recommend it and we put it there. Well, you cannot search for and install any plugin you want to, even on your own podcast website. You have to submit a request and ask permission to have a plugin installed on the site. And it takes them, you know, a couple of days sometimes we found to be able to go install something that normally we can log into a site and do in five minutes. And so it's, it's really slowed some of the process down and been very frustrating. The other thing that we found that they would do is not just load a new plugin, but you know, the people that do it in their customer service department make an assumption that, oh, you're installing this one, so you must no longer want this one and they go ahead and deactivate some other one, which we didn't want them to do and it caused problems on the website. So anyway, that's just one example, but there are many more where it's just in an effort to try to simplify it and make it easy for a layperson to understand and work with. They've limited functionality and not, and I would say not streamlined the process. In fact, they've bottlenecked the process.

So do you think, Tom, that it's hurting Google ranking?

Well, I think that you can get a podcast website to rank properly on Google. I think you can. It just takes more work to get it there, configure it and set it up so that it is perfectly optimized to do so?

If you were just using it as like a podcaster, in your opinion, does it mean that they may not know they're doing all this work, they're loading all this content in and because they don't have that kind of back information that, oh, I should configure my SEO like this and I should do this because there's no plugin giving them hints or directionality to it. They won't know if they're doing it right or wrong.

That's the thing. I think that their oversimplified system can lead users into a false sense of security, that they've achieved everything they need to. And for any web developer or coder to go in and really help configure it properly, they just can't do everything themselves. They have to ask permission and get some gatekeepers to unlock certain things for them.

Yeah, you know, I think that that hits on the key to this whole what makes the worst and the best podcast websites. Tom, is that what you just said there is that there are so many things that we actually go behind the scenes and you have to know because we work with people who have a thousand websites. And so when you work with someone who has a thousand revenue generating websites that all have to rank on Google, then you have this information about sometimes things aren't configured right and you have to hack the system. You have to enter in specialty code, you have to enter in special plugins and you have to do these things just to make sure that you're getting the best results out of the Google ranking that you possibly get. And so no one, I mean, it's hard for the layperson to keep up with that. It's next to impossible, I think.

I agree. It's very difficult. Now there are, you know, the whole idea of podcast websites is not only are they trying to simplify the creation of a website, but they're trying to give you a one stop shop for hosting your podcast and your website and publishing your podcast episodes to itunes, Stitcher, Google Play and all that and publishing your blog post at the same time. And what they're really doing is using PowerPress, which is a plugin for WordPress, but they're using it, isn't it a free plugin? There's a free version and I think there are also some paid versions or some paid features you can add to it. PowerPress is a fine tool, tool, you know, to host your. Well, essentially what it does, instead of having a hosting account on Libsyn or podbean or you know, Potatoz, our own platform, that you would just host it with your website. And when you publish a blog post, you add into that the information about your MP3 file.

The MP3 is an audio file. If you're new to podcasting or you're just about to podcast and you're not familiar with that yet.

I'm sorry, I should have. Yeah, I should have qualified that. But most of you may know that. But in any case, when you have you load the MP3 file into the blog post and you write a blog post about your podcast and that part of that blog post becomes your description of your episode on itunes and it becomes your blog on your website, PowerPress.

It'S kind of a one place. You insert it all in one place. I think it's really user friendly.

It is user friendly in that regard. And so Whether you're using PowerPress on WordPress as a WordPress site or using podcast websites and you're effectively doing the same thing thing, the reality is your one blog post is sort of doing a double function, dual duty, if you will. So it's publishing the podcast and publishing the blog post and they pitch it as isn't that wonderful and simple? And to an extent it is. But we've also experienced. This is why I'm not the biggest fan of using PowerPress to publish your podcast from your own website, is that there are several reasons. It's going to give you the top three. When your podcast gets to be really popular and you have, you know, five or ten thousand for every episode, as soon as you publish a new episode and it pushes to itunes and all those places, you're going to have all of a sudden a rush of downloads coming from your website and your own website is serving that MP3 file. And that puts a lot of stress on your website server. And so that's one thing that you need to have a really robust host that can handle that kind of web.

Traffic, like Productize, like Libsyn, like SoundCloud, like all of these places. Right.

So the second reason I'm not a fan of it is that there can be problems if your website goes down for any reason then. And it happens to everybody. You know, everybody thinks it'll never happen to me. But we've had a number of customers, including ourselves, in the past, in our, you know, four or five years ago.

Yeah, we got hacked quite a few times for a while there.

Or you had just have a virus happens, or you, you know, you have a.

Or a plugin does disconnect and it causes an outage. And it can happen, Right.

You can have an update to a plugin happen that has a conflict with other plugins. In any case, there could be a number of reasons your website can have a problem or can go down. And when that happens, that affects your ability to syndicate your podcast to itunes, meaning you can't publish Any new episodes while the site is down because they're.

Not in a separate place.

Right? They're all being. The function is the podcast is being published by the blog post, by the website. So if the website's down, you can't publish a new one. And if your website's down long enough, your RSS feed will go dormant and fail to be served to itunes and can eventually get delisted. Now it takes quite a while for.

That to happen because it's cached for a while, right?

Absolutely. And then the third reason is we've seen customers go in, they have all these blog posts. So here's a good example. Your episodes published to itunes chronologically based on the order of the blog posts on your site, the podcast related blog posts. So we've had people go in and have in air quotes here, an SEO optimization company go in and make some changes to a bunch of their blog posts to try to get them to rank better on Google. Google. And then.

And they redate them all.

When they do that, right, they update it to a new publication date, which you don't have to do. But in this case they did that. And you know, they're not thinking about the podcast. All they care about is updating the blog post. And the reason they want to update the date is because there is a factor of ranking of a blog post if it's more current. So if it was a six month or nine month or year old blog post, because that's when you publish the podcast, they want to update it and have it, oh, the publication date be now. But if you do that now, all the order of your past episodes gets messed up because again, it's going to pass and syndicate to itunes and Stitcher and Google Play and everywhere. Oh, and based on the chronological date. So I've had people, you know, have this happen to them and we actually do the work for them, we create their blog posts and they say, hey, you know, palletize, why are all of a sudden all of my episode order messed up on itunes? And we go in and While you're using PowerPress to syndicate your podcast and the date order of all your episodes has changed. And fortunately in this case, WordPress keeps a record of who changed each post when. So we could actually see the dates that they were changed and who actually logged in to make the changes. And it was this, they said, oh, I hired this firm to help me with the blog post and make some changes. Well, they should have used the original publication date, only updated the post. Now, fortunately, we could also go in in and retroactively set the publication date to a date in the past and we're able to reorder them, get everything looking right on itunes. But it took quite a bit of effort.

Yeah.

So I've always been a fan ever since those kinds of experiences of separating your podcast publication and syndication from your blog post and not have them dependent on each other because it just can end up one can cause problems for the other.

And another reason is if you want to go back to one of our older episodes here on Futurebrand about replays. So what will happen is, is now that it's served up. So if you update the date on your website, on the blog post, which seems like a reasonable thing to try to get better Google ranking and update that, you know, number and get some more power for it. But then when you insert yourself into a different order in the itunes library, now all of a sudden you're essentially going to get treated like a rerun and they're going to be annoyed and go, I already heard this. And so then you piss off a few, few, you know, longtime listeners, subscribers. Yeah. And so you don't want to have that happen. And that is also another reason why separating. It has come to be a powerful information for us. But also, you know, I'm experimenting with this new membership site and I've been working on it for a while. And we have this, the thing where we actually want to have our blog posts have a different date than our audio because we want the audio to be in a certain order so that you can listen to it in the correct connection with everything. So we've got a bunch of. Of experts on the site. And so the experts will talk. And I have topic episodes and I want to pair them together, but they're not necessarily in the way that they recorded it in the order that they record. And everything's recorded in video and in zoom and these office hours situations. And so I need to let them also be seen in the order that they happened on the date that they happened. Because somebody was like, oh, I missed Thursdays. I want Thursdays. But I don't want them to air that way if somebody was to listen. And so I've been able to break the two and separate the two and put them in whatever order I want wish by having them that way. So it gives me a lot of control. Especially for you video casters who might be video casting want to keep the original air date that it was on Facebook or YouTube or wherever you zoom, wherever you started it Especially if you've got a big open live group call and you want to have that date match and then. But the blog post and. Or you want to separate the blog post or the podcast date and have it date go on a different date as well. So keeping those things and having the most flexibility to be able to do that is. Is of value. You. And you won't realize it when you're starting out, but these will be things that will happen as you start your podcast and you get farther along and you get a little more sophisticated, add different things that you want to do.

Yeah, that's a really good point, Tracy. And, you know, you bring up another interesting point, that however you start your podcast, it's always more painful to change how things are configured down the road as you have more episodes, because the volume of material to change over just, you know, is much greater. So. So that's why we wanted to talk about this, especially for you aspiring podcasters, that you might consider these things and hopefully do it right from the get go. But there's one other thing, Tracy, that's become an increasing trend in podcasting that podcast websites and PowerPress, and I'm lumping them together because they're both using the same functionality is really not providing for, and that is to be able to easily have different RSS feeds for different categories of your episodes, whether that's seasons or you have an archive of your older ones and being able to easily move them from one feed to another, it's a much more complicated proposition on those websites. So, you know, if you're thinking of putting out, you know, your seasons of episodes in like a series of 12, or maybe you have hundreds of episodes already, but every Monday was a certain category of episode, and now you want to break those off so people can just listen to the Monday episodes. And that's a specific kind of a topic. Right. So again, those are the areas where. Where these different platforms and they're just not flexible enough. Yeah, they're not.

So I have a quick question for you, Tom.

Yeah.

And so how hard is it to migrate from like a WIX site or any of those sites? I mean, is it fairly easy to migrate over into a WordPress site in.

Reality from any one of those, like Weebly, wix, Squarespace? It's actually, you'd be rebuilding the whole site. I mean, a web developer would just be copying over information from one site to another. And it's not. Not, I would say, a plug and play integration.

Right. But so it's not a total. I Mean, it's not like you have a redesign or anything like that. You could pretty much duplicate what you have there in any WordPress site visually and functionally. Sure you can, and then get more. Now, I know that WordPress.com and WordPress.org they work together, and if you need to migrate, they will do that. It's paid service, but they'll migrate it for you. And it happens in like 24 hours. It's really fast.

Well, and even on the WordPress.org sites, let's say you have one website under a certain domain and you want to move all those posts you created to a new WordPress site at a new domain, there's actually an integration function built right within it. You don't have to pay anything for. You just point the new website to the old website. As long as you have the credentials, it'll pull the information and migrate the posts over. That's pretty easy, too.

What about podcast websites? I mean, at the end of the day, it's still a WordPress site underneath it all. Can you get access to that and own that and have it be yours?

You know, you do own your stuff for sure, and you have access to access to it. The migration functions, because it is fundamentally built on the WordPress platform, must be there. I haven't actually tried to do that with a podcast website yet, and I'm sure it could be done. But I think like anything else, it's going to be bottlenecked and we'd have to request permission and gain access. And it certainly would increase the lead time to accomplish it. But it probably can be done. But I unfortunately can't speak from direct experience on that one.

Okay, but this is just something that I want to make everyone aware of, is like, we really go in, into. Let's just say you're going into podcasting. You're like, I just want to spend the least amount of money possible. But in the end, if you're trading that off for an extensive amount of time or for limited power, you know, limited results that you get from that, I really want you to consider that twice. Because the difference in cost is not tremendous between doing it right and the difference in time is not tremendous at all. I mean, sometimes we build websites in a couple of weeks, you know, whole websites. So it's not like there has to be the difference between, oh, I need a WordPress site and it's going to take me two months to do. It doesn't. It's more of the information you want to put into it that takes Sometimes months for you to get out and generate than it does actually building it.

Oh, I agree with that. In fact, I would say most of the websites that we build on WordPress are built within a week. As long as we again have all the data, have all of the copy that you want to put into it and the images and such, it doesn't take that long. It actually has so frustrated me when we've come across a couple of customers and we have that pay some web development company, you know, $2,500 or more to build them a WordPress and nine months later they still don't have a website. I'm like, well why on earth not? Did you not give them what they needed? No, we gave them everything. And you know, that drives me crazy. I don't understand how that actually happens just as a business, but we've seen it happen. There's no reason for it to happen. But I'll tell you, WordPress and this is why WordPress is really the only one on our best list of platforms to build a website on for podcast websites. And that is because we have experienced it not only as a very simple 3, 4 page website homepage. About Us Podcast blog Boom. That's it. You know, all the way to a website that has 150,000 members with a membership gate that's like a membership community website all built on the same WordPress platform. So it the capabilities to meet the needs of the independent individual who doesn't need much all the way to, to, you know, company that needs a majorly powerful website with a lot of unique functionality can all work on WordPress and you can even have a website where part of it is WordPress and part of it is custom coded. Like maybe your front end sales Pages are all WordPress and your blog is WordPress. It's all under the same domain but you still have custom coded portions of the website in the back end for unique functions. WordPress is really versatile in that way. So you, you can make it what you need it to if you have the right resource and are willing to pay them to make whatever you need.

That's custom, right? And so that's why I sit back and say, hey, it's the fastest, easiest way is to do this. It's also the most secure, also the most flexible and also has the best opportunity for you to rank on Google is for you to start with a WordPress website and then from there it doesn't cost you any more. You can use free themes. Most of the plugins we use with the exception of the podcast player, are free. Free. I mean, I don't think there's any ones. That's true.

Occasionally there's a theme that you pay for that's the visual aspect, right?

And sometimes it's just one time $60 or one time thing. But think of it like having paid a designer to design that 60 bucks is nothing. And so thinking about going in and just doing that and paying in those small ways and then when you're ready, add these extra capabilities, add these other features and that's really the way that I, you should set out and go look at your podcast development. So, yes, you want to get in there with the lowest cost, but you also want to get in there with the most flexibility that allows you to last the longest you can without having to invest again until you're really sure you're at your, you know, your maximum. And I guarantee what's going to happen is, is you go in there and you kind of do it so cheaply and so everything free. There's all these interactions, there's all these hassles that happen from trying to make things work. And then what occurs is that you end up, end up stressing yourself out and utilizing all this time trying to fix problems instead of actually podcasting it. And you will give up.

Well, and that's the worst thing. We don't want to see anybody give up. We don't want this tech to be holding you back, bottlenecking you, preventing you from achieving your business goals, because at the end of the day, it's a business tool.

So now that we've scared you to death about all the tech side of things, we don't really do a lot of sales calls here. It's not that kind of thing. I just want to remind everyone that we'll evaluate it full. You, you just simply need to make an appointment with us.

It's actually really easy. And you know, with a web URL, in two minutes we can look at the data of the website and know how it was built and if it's something that can be easily worked with or expanded upon or not.

But we can also tell you the rank of your site, how things are going. So if you don't have access to that information, I just want to remind you that you have this opportunity to book an appointment, have your site reviewed, do all of these things and connect with. Actually probably you'll connect with Tom most often. And you can do that by going to feed your project and clicking Inquiry in the menu.

Yeah, absolutely. You can book an appointment right on my calendar and I'd be happy to talk with you and go over, you know, your website. But you know what, hopefully not many of you have these problems and you've already got a decent website that just needs to have a podcast page and added and maybe a blog configured and you know, you'd be good to go. Most sites that come to us are in pretty good shape and maybe some people want to make some decisions, changes to them just because they're ready to do that, but that's not a big deal either.

So anyway, so I think we should have a follow up episode where we go over what our favorite plugins are.

Oh, I'd love to go over favorite plugins. Yes. And I think we could also take a deeper dive into some of these new systems. Like because a lot of people expand their websites with click funnels and infusionsoft integration and merchant account integration for different things, there's definitely a few deeper dives we can take into, you know, pros and cons and options there.

I think we should invite Alexandra into that.

Oh, definitely. She needs to be a part of that one because she knows more of the details than we do.

That's right. That's right. So invite in the expert as always.

So if you have any questions actually about any of those sorts of things, any suggestions for what you'd like us to cover in a future episode, please reach out to us either as a comment in the blog post at FeedYourBrand Co or reach out to us anywhere in social media.

Edyourbrand so thanks again for listening. This has been Tracy and Tom on.

Feed your Brand Brand.

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