The Beauty Of Short And Sweet: How To Mention URLs In Podcast Ads And Shows

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we have more of a tactical subject to talk about, but it's very important. All of you need to be aware of this and hopefully doing what we're about to suggest or recommend to you.

Yeah, we want to go granular sometimes and we really need to think about these details because they have a compounding effect, because we do them again and again over different episodes. So this is one of those topics where it really sounds tiny when we're talking about it here, but the effect on your show and the effect on its outcome and most importantly, the effect on the conversion rate of your show and whether that conversion rate is engagement or actual calls to action for sales, totally different thing doesn't matter. It still has a compounding effect. So we do want to dive and go granular occasionally, and this is one of those days.

So we're talking about is podcast URLs today.

And this is not the URL of your show. Let's keep that in mind. We're talking about podcast URL mentions. So when you say a URL, and a URL is a website, like a www. Although don't say WWW anymore. Like that's just old school.

That's very old school. I remember even back in the late 90s or early 2000s, I was still typing www into browser windows and the browsers then were already set to put that in for you. So you certainly don't have to do that.

You don't need it anymore.

But we're talking about the web address, your.comor.org, net edu, whatever you've got.

Right?

There's so many. Now, your web address or any web address that you are going to mention.

So it's any web address mentioned. So that's what we're saying when we Talk about podcast URLs, we're mentioning it on our podcast episodes. So. So that's what we want. It's also sometimes in our outro. So you also have website mentions in the outro. So this applies to all uses within your show. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the uses on your website. So, like, what's different about the way that you might use it on your website as well?

The first thing I want to talk about is let's talk about the URLs themselves. So conceptually, our goal is to get you. And we know that this works again and again and again from all the clients that we've worked with over the years and from our own shows. So we know that this is the best method. And the most effective way to mention a URL is to use the same one every single time, right? Use it again and again and again. So when we mention feed your brand, right, we say FeedYourBrand co. Now, sometimes we'll do a forward slash, right? That's where we get granular, or we have a call to action, or we're doing something, we're advertising something like whatever that might be. But the FeedYourBrand co is the thing that we want to impress in people's mind because they're out there jogging, they're at the gym. Oh, well, maybe not everywhere right now, but they're at the gym, they're watching their kids. You know, they're doing something else. They're driving, right? And so when that's happening, they don't have time to write this down. So the repetitiveness of having it be the same every single time is critically important. The other thing is our brains can't take too many pieces of information. And so having it be one URL then, and I've already got it in my head then when I go ahead and put that forward slash and whatever comes after it.

I now only have to remember that portion. And so that's really important too, because now that's the key factor of what I have to remember if I want to do something, I want to take action from a show. I've given them much smaller piece of information because I spent the time laying the groundwork in my show to repeat again and again the main URL that I want them to remember, the main website.

You know, Tracy, this is so important because I was just speaking with a client of ours, longtime client for years of ours, using a social media agency to help them with their promotion. And that social media agency. Well, first of all, they told me they're making one post a week about their podcast episodes. Not enough.

Not enough.

You should be doing one a day. If you're doing a weekly show, you.

Should be promoting three a day sometimes.

Yeah. But not only that, they were not driving people to a URL from social media to their own website, which I told them in that call, it's like, I think that's a mistake. You should. All roads should lead back to your website. They were saying, well, the social media company is trying to have us grow our social media audience, which is great. I'm all for that. You want to grow your social media followers, without question. But there are ways and tactics to do that that still involve really highlighting and promoting your website, your URL. And that's what we really need to do. Use social media to get the wor out, but bring them back to your website.

Right? So this is the first foundational thing to remember. We got to get a great name, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. We got to make sure our URL is easy, but once we have it, we want to use it everywhere. So whether it is the vanity URL that we use on social. So you can do a vanity forward and you can do all kinds of smaller links like, you know, you see those out there, bit ly's and other things. You can do a vanity version of that. And so you can have various things like that. But what you want to do is make sure that it's always going back to the main blog post for your episode at your main website, no matter what. We're not sending people to Apple. Apple doesn't need more subscribers. We're not sending people to Spotify if they're not a Spotify member. We don't want to expose them to going there instead of going to our stuff. So at the end of the day, it is our repetitiveness everywhere we use it. Whether we're saying it verbally on our show, we're doing it in our videos, we're putting it in our YouTube descriptions, we're putting it in any of our social media. And sometimes it might be in the main post like Tom's talking about, and sometimes it might be in the comments. Comments like, so that there's other ulterior ways to kind of get it in there and make sure it's there and available for those that want to partake and those that want to connect with you. We want to make sure that that's where they choose to go again and again and again is to that website, because that's what we're reinforcing everywhere. So let's talk about the URL choices. So sometimes we have really long or difficult podcast names, right? Podcast names have gotten lengthy in some cases. And so we have to come up with shorter URLs because it's a lot to mention. So the first thing that I like to do is look at the length. And if the length is more than two words or two words with the word pod added to it, not podcast, but pod added to it, then I rethink it and I say, is this the best URL? The URL. The name of the website does not have to match the name of your podcast or the name of your business doesn't have to match. So it can be something simpler. It can be forwarding to your website for people. So a great example of this is a podcaster and great author who I interviewed on Feed you'd brand. His name is Mike Michalowicz and I absolutely adore his great books, Clockwork Profit First. Just really, really interesting guy and he's got a fabulous following. But try to spell Michalowitz. Now, Tom and I have a. Tom's sister is married, someone who has one of those Polish last names that are incredibly difficult. And my aunt does too. So, like, it's a little bit easier for us. Cause I've been spelling these difficult my entire life, but it's not easy for most. So he has a URL that almost has nothing to do with any of his podcast names because he has multiple shows, multiple books, and it's called mikemotorbike.com and anyone who gets to know him on his show knows how he loves to drive fast and loves motorbikes and like, gets it, so it's easy for them to remember. And Mike Motorbike is not hard to spell, so that's what he says. He never spells out his name on the show because he doesn't have to. Now Tom and I have the problem of hazard. So every so often we have to say hazard with two Z's, right? Because otherwise people won't find us on social media. And that's a huge problem for those of us with unusual names or unusual spellings of names. So we know we've been doing it our whole lives. We know how difficult that is. So don't make the mistake of making that always be the case in the way that you mention your show. Make it simple, make it easy for people. Come up with something that feels personal, that feels right for the audience that you're attracting, because that's what we really want. So our website for wtff, we could have gone and we have WTFFF podcast, but we figured people would not put the right numbers of F's they get confused. So we have 3dstartpoint.com as our website. Super easy to remember, not difficult at all. It's what we want to be known for. We want to be the place you start to think about 3D, right? So thinking about names that you could use that are super, super easy and, and easy to say on the show, that's the other problem is we write them out and we like look at them and go, oh, that's a cool name. Or we put them in a logo and we like, that's a cool logo. And we don't realize we have like double letters and like weird little things that happen that make people question when you type it in and squeeze it into one single word as a URL. Right. So we want to do that and we also want to say it because sometimes we trip up and it's hard to say.

Well, not only do we want to choose simple words that are easy to remember, we want to be careful not to choose words that are inherently hard for people to spell.

Oh, Conscious.

Conscious is one of the number. And we actually have some podcasters with conscious in the name of their podcast. We don't recommend it, but they do. And you know, that show may have. It did exist actually before they worked with us. But you know, that's a very hard word to spell and that's going to make it hard for you to be found. Even when people are just searching, if they know the podcast name and they search in the podcast app for you, very often they spell it wrong and aren't gonna find you. Same thing here applies with URLs, so don't pick complicate conscience. Science.

Science isn't as bad, but yeah, it can be. So I before ease. Anything with I before ease gets really confusing to people, I have to say. Like, that's a common one. When you also have something that's really long, you can short it. So like, we have a lot of clients who have the word transformation right in their podcast name and their website name. There's no reason not to shorten that to transform, which is super easy to spell a lot shorter. There's ways to work around that. So these are some things to consider and think about. So I want you to write it out, figure out how long it is. Make sure it's not more than two and like a half a word, right? A three letter word. And make sure you say it out loud to make sure it sounds really good when you say it. That it's easy to say. It rolls off your Tongue. And it sounds great when you say dot com at the end or dot edu or whatever it is that you have at the end. And then make sure that people who don't know, like go ask your 11 year old, how can you spell this Right? If a fifth grader can spell it, you're good, right? That's how we do it here. So those are the main things to do when you're picking that URL. And remember again, I just want to reiterate this, it does not have to match your show or your business name or even your name personally as the example of Mike McCallowith. So really thinking about that.

So Tom, let's talk about how you do mentions on a show. We restrict our clients. We tell them not to say anybody else's URL in their show.

We strongly recommend they don't. Not everybody always follows that practice, but it's really the best way to go. I mean, of course when you have guests on your show, they probably want to recite their URL and make sure they get that mention. We always let our guests know, hey, we're going to introduce you, we're going to give our listeners your content information and how to find you so you don't have to worry about saying that on the episode. Now, they may think we're going to do it in an intro or in an outro that we record after we're done with the interview, but actually we won't. We're telling everybody, go to our website, the blog post@our site.com, whatever that is, and you will find all the contact information for the guest and any of the links that you need and all this sort of thing.

Or you can go within the show notes that is right in your app and be able to get that. And for most people, that's where they will go first is that they'll just open up the longer description and they'll go, oh, that's how to get to that person. And it's right there and it's easy to do. Now we still try to disguise that. We still put our website with a forwarding URL to that person. So we do that sometimes. So if you still want to keep it really clean and keep it only being your mentions, that's a great way to do it. So it will forward through some social media and some other things. Have issues with forwarding URLs. So you do want to be careful in that if you're really trying to do a service to your guests, you want to put a Straight mention in there.

Yeah, but I don't even like doing that in the podcast description because you're inviting the listener to go right from that app directly to someone else's website without going through your website. You want them to view your website as the resource, as the hub of information. All roads to anything about your show go through your website. So you want to put, obviously there is in some of the podcast apps and I use Apple podcasts and actually that's where still today the majority of podcast listens are coming through an Apple app of some kind. And they have a link in there to the episode webpage right within the app. And we, that if you're working with us to, you know, create your blog post for every episode, we already set that episode webpage link to go to the blog post for that episode on your website. That's really where you want to train people to go, right? And I don't like, like I said, you know, anything that's going to send people directly from your. They're listening in the app away to someone else's site. No, go to your site first. Your site is where they get the value, right?

You want to be known for the provider of all of these great resources and the connection to all of these great people, if that's what your process is with having guests on your show. So that's really where we want to look at all the show things that happen. Now on the blog post for those episodes, you. You will have a link through to whoever it is. Now we put out a special bio section that's kind of our way of doing it and has a link out to the guest. We usually put at least two links, like one of their social medias, if not multiples of them, but typically one of their social medias, whichever one they prefer the most. And their main website mention or whatever it is that they're. If sometimes they're promoting a book or something, so it might be their book site, but whatever that is, we will put one in. We don't embed hundreds of links in there. We try to keep it limited to maximum of 2 throughout the whole post anyway that goes through it. Now, if you want to start taking sponsors, if you want to start creating or being a resource, a tactic might be for you to create a forwarding URL or a tracking URL for every single mention of any other website that you do in your post. Now this is an advanced tactic. You know, Tom and I are trying to do more of these granular, advanced tactics here. This is one of those, you really need to know what you're doing here. You really need to have a concerted web effort to be able to follow up on this and actually track it. But you can create like jump links, tracking URLs, ways that you know, so that if somebody clicks and goes to your guest LinkedIn, you actually know that that click happened from you, that it happened from your blog post, that you're sending traffic. Now, this is a tactic that we tried with our 3D start point site that we were referring to earlier, where we would track mentions of 3D printers and we would go to those printer companies and we'd say, look at how many times your mentions in just our organic mentions in our show. We didn't even do a show about you yet or a review of your printer, but look how many times people went from our links to your site. So because we would have concerted tracking of that and that meant that we could go back to them and ask them to pay to join our directory, or we could ask them to sponsor the show, or we could ask them to do if we could do a review of it. And very often that led to a sponsorship conversation following. And so those types of things are really great if you're building this more influence style business and an ability to take ads in the future.

So, you know, one of the things that we want all of you to get comfortable doing the more that you record is make this effortless, make it second nature. And I agree, trace with what you're saying about you can have some unique links if you want to track things. That does take a little more advanced planning because you got to know what that is before you're in the episode, if you're going to tell them that link as you're recording. But it's really good way to know. All right, which episodes are tracking, which you know, and which mentions are people taking action on and all that. That's great. But in general, just to start, because I know that we have a lot of new podcasters here that are just starting their show. Just get used to mentioning your URL, the latest blog post on your website. And I do this all the time. I want to give you an example here where I have a show I'm a co host on with somebody else, not even Tracy. And we talk about a lot of times we reference articles that are on the Internet on other sites or videos that are on YouTube and other places. And we'll be talking about a quote from the article. We'll be talking about something that happens in the video and in the context of it as I'm speaking in the episode, I'm usually the one that remembers this more than my co host. But I'll say, hey, you know what? Everybody listening to this on the podcast or you're watching the video, you're really going to want to see this video we're referencing and we've got a link to it in the blog post@our website.com. and so just casually mention it like you're talking to the listener, saying, hey, guys, you know what? I know we're describing this for you. You really are going to want to go see this for yourself. Here's where you can do it. It's really simple. And again, it's that same when I do that episode after episode, it's the same URL. They always remember it.

And that is the repetition of what Tom's doing is what's really important here is that you're getting it into their head again and again and you're reminding them at a critical moment in which they to put a plant in their brain, like, oh, I'd like to check that out. Oh, here's where you go now your brain is making a tag for that. So this is really good cognitive strategy for how you get through from just their listening to getting them through to take action. Right? You're giving them exactly the action path now, not at the end of the episode when they forgot why they wanted it. Right. You're connecting the two things together.

You got to reinforce it throughout. It's not in an overly selling way. I just want to be clear about that. This is you providing value to your listeners. Now if every five or 10 minutes in your episode you're saying, hey, remember everybody, that I sell this coaching program, you can get it there. Now that would be different. That's literally more salesy. We're just talking about you providing value, being a conduit to information, you being a resource for your listener. And it's just casually mentioned, but it's. As one of my favorite people, Bill Sterle, who's a language and communication expert, would say you're sort of, you know, you're tapping the brain a little bit. Right?

You're reminding it.

Right Again and again and again.

And so that's where we say, when you say casual mentioning, I'm thinking convenient mentioning. And that's really where you want to be thinking in your head. So you're doing a convenient mention of it right at the moment that they do need it most. And that's where you're reminding them of exactly where to go. So again, we're still doing the same thing every single time.

Now let's talk about ads view of this. So we're right in that process of working with an advertiser that we're working with. And we've had multiple discussions about this and it's been hard to get through their head. They like to use these tracking jump links and all of these things. But the reality is, is that they might change them later. They don't realize it right at this moment, but they might change them later. And I don't want to have to redo the ads and rerecord them. Number one, I don't want some lengthy weird URL to have to mention on that. And so what we do is we have a system for advertising, for putting that slash, whatever after it. So if we were doing 3D start point and we're doing an ad for HP, we would do 3D start point forward slash HP. And then we might have a little tag, like might be HP class, HP video hp. It might be something that's relevant to whatever the call to action offer is so that we use it very consistently. And it's super easy to remember. Oh, I wanted to catch that HP class. Okay, get there. Right. And so what we're doing is we're creating a system by which we will do that in every ad all over time. So they will always know. They'll get the first two letters or the first word, whoever the sponsor is, and then there will be something as to what it is as the next thing. So we're creating a verbal pattern for people who are listening to understand it so that they could kind of recreate it. They also know, and we do also always mention that they can go to the website and they'll be able to find that anywhere. Right. Like we make that really convenient and easy.

That's the fallback. And that's why again, the repetition of your website, the latest blog post on your website is critical, that being the main URL, because even though these tracking URLs, these different specific ones have a lot of value. People may not remember, they may have too much going on in their mind and they're not going to retain that. The fallback is, oh, I just go to their website and they're going to have that link right there in the blog post. And you're right, we will. And you all should too.

Right. And it may not just be in the blog post because these ads may run across your entire Show. So you might have a top level front thing is like check out the offers from my sponsor and you have like a little pop up or a bubble or something on that. We used to have like a corner thing, a corner tab.

Oh yeah. In the very upper corner of every page on the website. If you have something you really are promoting and want everybody to see it, no matter where they are on your website, it's kind of like it's peeling back the top right or left corner of your website and they click on it and they get to this page that has all those.

Right. And so that we would have an offer page. And so we do, in the case of hp, we have a forward slash HP page which has all the episodes in the series because we did a much more concerted sponsorship here. So all the episodes, actually all 25 of them are live right now. So you can go check them out and you can see if we go. If you go to 3dstartpoint.com HP you can see the page we laid out. As soon as we put in the ads, the calls to action for those ads will be there as well. We are going to insert the ads in the next month. So what we like to do is when we come out with the sponsorship series, we like to put the series out and then we like to add the ads later once we're through that whole series. So we're actually going to add the ads in all 600 episodes of our show. So it's going to go through like all. So we're going to have multiple different types of ads. We're going to have lots of different mentions. We're going to have some where Tom's recording somewhere, I'm recording somewhere. Our voiceover artist, who's the voice of our show is recording. So we have lots of different things. So the mentions get really important so we can track the effectiveness of a single ad. Are the ones with my voice doing better?

Are the ones I don't know about that? Yeah.

Are the ones that are more of the voice of the show doing better? Like we want to know, like does it sound more professional? And that's why people are attracted to it. Like what's going on with that? We want to be able to see that because then we'll study it and we'll remove some of the ads. We'll repeat the other ones that are work, duplicate them in a different way. So we want to be tracking them at all times. So that's another way that we can make sure that the mentions on the show, though, are still going to the same place like it, so that they're also helping us track the ad at the same time. So we're testing a lot of things and we have to test them with the audio. We have to do them in a really easy way because we don't want to have to rerecord the whole ad again if we're going to just now roll it out across more episodes.

Right.

So we want to be careful with that. The other thing is that for some of you, you'll have a falling out or you'll only be selling your ad on a monthly basis and there'll be this weirdness of it. And so what, you don't want to be giving them that continual sell or that the benefit. So if they are done with their program with you, or they bailed or they stopped paying whatever it might be, you get to take that new forwarding URL that you created. So in our case, we created 3dstartpoint.com hpvideo and so we could put it to one of our videos of one of our shows, right? Like, so we have the ability to like circumvent that forwarding URL in the future, which really helps out in terms of making sure that you never have a dead link. Number one, you never have a dead mention until you're able to like remove the ads or do whatever it is that you want. But if somebody's booked, bookmarked it, you want it to eventually go somewhere, you don't want it to go nowhere. And it has happened with our 3D printer companies. A lot of them went out of business. If we had left the pages up and didn't use a forwarding URL, we wouldn't be able to resend them to somebody else that was useful. And so what we'd usually do is if something like that happened was we would create a new thing that said, oh, so and so this printer business went out of business. Well, look, here's a great replacement for it. We do just a little short thing. We'd find forward that URL to that page and that would allow them to have access to a new resource. So we were always being really, really helpful and useful here. So these are the reasons why we want to be really careful with how we do our URLs and just really be careful about podcast URLs in general, remembering that we're in an audio model. Right. So it's a little bit different than how we do it from a digital marketing standpoint. And it's very different than how we do it. If we have the ability to, like flash across our video screen the URL, or put it at the end of it, or put cards on it, or put mentions and comments right, it's different. Audio is its own animal and we really have to make sure that we're giving it its own power in that process, because the power of that audio and the repetition is something you should be tapping into using to your advantage. And in doing that, we're branding you and branding your website URL.

Fantastic, Tracy. You know what? I think we just should drop the mic there. Well done and I hope you all enjoyed this. And we'll be back with more tactics like this that are really important that maybe you haven't been considering. Coming up in future episodes of Feed you'd brand. So thanks for listening, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracey Hazzard.

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