The Perfect Guide To Syndication: The New Complete How-To For Podcast PowerPress Plugins

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Hey everyone, welcome back to Feed you'd Brand. This is Tom and Tracy and we're together for this episode.

Woo hoo. Yeah, I know, my voice is really rough though. I have to warn you, the girls are making me sick again.

Well, you know what, that's right. It's great to have you back for another episode together and to be able to have a dialogue rather than a monologue. And I think most of our listeners like that. They probably like you better than me. But anyway, I've done a lot of episodes lately. But anyway, here we go. We got a great topic today.

My live streams are killing your episodes.

Your live streams are killing it. No, no question. And you've been doing a lot of those, which we've been turning into episodes. Yeah. So anyway, we got a great topic today. There was an announcement in the podcast world, a press release really put out by Blubrry and they are the makers of the WordPress plugin called PowerPress, which we've talked about in past episodes. For one reason or another, many of.

Our podcasts use them on their websites. You guys use plugins all the time. And The Blueberry Plugin, PowerPress Plugin is a very common one.

Yeah. And it's a free plugin. And it's also if you have your podcast published by your website in any way, even if you're using podcast websites, remember that's a company that you know is a platform to create your website. And podcast websites is using PowerPress plugin as like the backbone of their podcast publication on their websites. We have a lot of experience with this plugin and there are a lot of great things about it. It's a fine plugin. I want to make sure, you know, I'm upfront about that. I am not.

We used it for a long time.

Yeah. I'm not disrespecting this plugin and there's an appropriate situation where people might want to use it and it's very useful to them.

But there are also a lot of other plugins emerging on the market. And so in an effort to be, I'm going to call it competitive or in the News again, like be able to put out a press release. Sometimes companies add features and that's what they've done here is they've added some new features. But here's the thing. Tom and I are always really cautious about utilizing new and trendy features without high level of testing first, because there are so many feeds and so many things directories that you are listed on that your show should be listed on. If you've done it yourself and you haven't listed your show on anything more than itunes. First off, get on that because that is a huge mistake there because that's a small subset of the audience that you're going to have to.

Yeah, you need to be on a minimum of six platforms. That's what we put everybody we work with on for them. Itunes, Google, Podcasts, Stitcher, Tunein, Spotify and iheartmedia. Those are like the top six. And we'll put people on more at their request. There are others, some people like C Suite Radio or they're doing other things that are not the mainstream podcast destinations. But there are other places you can syndicate your show. So you need to be everywhere as much as you can.

So syndication, that's called syndication. That's what we call that. Right. You're syndicating your show. Your show is still hosted on your website or hosted on your RSS server or wherever it is that you're hosting from. Hopefully potatoes would be nice, but if not, that's okay too. You just need to be hosted from somewhere. And part of that though is a distribution platform. How are you getting out there and how are you publishing that article or that episode, I'm going to call it? Okay. And so we also have some language difference. People call them shows episodes, and it is weird because we call them show notes, but it's really episode notes. It's the traditional term is show notes, which is. We call it the full length blog post, the transcription blog post. Right. So there's some language differentiation between sort of the old school radio people who started podcasting and really what it has turned into today. So I just trying to clarify a few language things here for us, the way that we're going to use it. So when we say show notes or episode notes, we're talking about for your single show, not your entire catalog, because that's truly your show, your podcast show.

Yeah. When people. I mean, you're right, these words do get tossed around interchangeably. And this is not the main subject of this episode.

No, but I want to clarify that.

Yeah. So when you say you Have a podcast and you're a podcast host. Typically, people, what's your podcast? Well, my podcast is named Feed your brand. In this case, I refer to that as my podcast. I refer to it as my show.

Right.

And then when it comes to individual episodes, I do refer to those as episodes most often. But people will say my latest podcast. And what they mean is the latest episode or the latest show. Some people might think that's the latest episode. So these terms often are tossed around a little bit interchangeably. But you're right, Tracy. I think when we talk about a podcast or a show, we're referring to your entire show, inclusive of all your episodes. And then when we talk about an.

Episode, we call it your episode or your blog instead of your show notes. And so that's why I wanted to clarify that here. Because when you're using a plugin like PowerPress, you're only publishing a single episode at a time through the plugin. You're not publishing your entire show. You publish one episode at a time in the single plugin player.

True, but what PowerPress is doing is using the blog post publishing function of WordPress to not only to do two things at once, to publish your podcast episode, to syndicate that episode out to itunes and all the other distribution channels, and also to publish a blog post on your website. And we have another episode where we talk about more deeply this plugin, if you want to hear that, definitely go check out that episode about the best and worst podcast websites on feed. You'd brand.

I forget, it's not the worst. It's not listed as the worst. Just want to clarify that it actually is among the best.

Among the best. Although we're critical somewhat of it. I mean, still, it's a great plugin. But there are some things that we do caution people about about that plugin. But that's not what today's episode is about.

No, today's episode is about the fact that they've made this press down announcement that they've added some upgraded cool features, updated features to the PowerPress plugin. And what we want to caution you about is utilizing these can break some things in your syndication because we have seen it happen in other areas very recently and because we touch so many shows and so many different episodes every single week, we see things like this start to break down the feeds that are going out to the different distribution networks. So while they say it's compatible, remember every time you update a plugin on your WordPress site, if you have no experience doing this, it breaks your site more often than not, and it can break your feed here. So we want you to be really cautious that it can cause problems.

Well, let's talk about what break your feed means. Break your feed maybe is a little bit more. Well, maybe it's a little going to alarm people. And then by break your feed, what we mean is that what we've seen happen is that certain other distribution platforms or plugins on your website may not be able to read your feed properly. So let's talk about it. So one of the two changes of PowerPress is that it is now allowing you to use emojis in your podcast episode titles and descriptions. And I'm sure for a lot of people who like emojis and like to use them or others that want to appeal to more of the generations, I would think your millennial and younger generations that are really emojis are a very common part of their communication style. They're thinking, wow, that's great, we can use emojis. So this is a word of caution that Tom and Tracy are bringing to you from Feed you'd brand is that if you're going to start using emojis, you need to test, test, test publishing. Start with one episode that uses emojis and test it everywhere now and then.

What we mean by test it is that you hit publish. You publish it in your PowerPress plugin, you publish your blog, then you go to itunes and you check it. You go to Stitcher and you check it. You go to Google Play and you play it. You check it everywhere and you check how it visually looks because you may end up with weird characters with disruption. Sometimes it actually breaks the rest of the description and the rest of the description doesn't feed in. So these are things that can happen because of character problems in the feed.

Well, and now the folks at Blubrry in this press release, they claim, and I have no reason to doubt them, they claim that the emojis are compatible with both iTunes, iOS podcast and Google podcast apps. And that's great that they've done that testing. I'm sure they've worked with those people behind the scenes and made sure it works. But those are not the only two platforms out there people are listening on. I mean, Spotify is becoming incredibly popular, as is iHeartMedia. There's a lot of new things have been happening on each of those platforms and they haven't said anything about it in this press release. Now, that doesn't mean it won't work there. I'm just saying if you're gonna do this, you need to test it.

And the other it's not as easy to get on Iheart and Spotify and stay in the listings there and be found. So the last thing you want to do is break that.

I agree. If you don't test this and make sure it works everywhere, it may be a long time before you figure it out. And then it becomes a much more difficult situation to try to fix it after you've published many episodes that might have special characters in it. So but here's another example aside from let's just say for the moment, let's assume, and I hate doing that, but let's assume that all the other distribution channels, they tend to follow itunes in terms of their technical capabilities and what they'll allow in your podcast RSS feed. So let's assume that they all are following whatever changes have been made to iOS and Google Podcasts and these emojis or any other special characters will appear properly and your feed will load properly. Well, that's not the only place that you need to confirm and test this. We have experienced in fact quite recently with some of our customers when we are creating their blog post on their website. And there are other plugins that people use on their websites to distribute their podcasts. One of those plugins that's very popular is the Smart Podcast Player, which is a paid plugin that creates a very nice looking player usually on your podcast page or your website, and also has a very nice looking and customizable looking track player that you can put into your blog post so people can listen to your episodes. Well, we recently encountered somebody we work with that all of a sudden the Smart Podcast Player was not loading on their website. It was just the spinning wheel, spin, spin, spin all the time. And it wouldn't load any podcasts. And we thought, hmm, what's going on? And everything we were checking at first was with that plugin. The Smart Podcast player, is it up to date? Is it the latest version? Is the license code correct? Was something about the license code inadvertently changed and all of that checked out and through a very lengthy and frustrating process of elimination, we discovered there were some special characters. This particular customer that we were working with had emojis in their descriptions and had some other special characters. And it was one of these special characters used in either the title or the description of the episode. I forget which it was. That was incompatible with the Smart Podcast players reading of the RSS feed. So because it wouldn't read that one episode, it wouldn't read any of them and it would not load. It was going to spin indefinitely. Right.

And we have this problem again and again with people who have custom coding on their website or a section of custom coding, and now that whoever did their coding is no longer working with them and they don't even realize they have custom HTML code on their site. So these things happen all the time. So if you do not have a lot of skills here and a lot of ability to update and check all of these things, you need to be very cautious with just jumping on board and saying, woohoo, I get to use emojis. My daughters would be thrilled. But you also have to be careful. And the other thing I really also want to mention and caution you is that there are some inappropriate emojis. And may I remind you that you must mark your show explicit and not explicit. And I'm very certain that this is going to apply to your emoji characters as Well.

I agree 100%. Traci and Fox.

And be cautious on this.

We have seen more and more people. I mean, I'm a member of a lot of podcasting private community groups on Facebook and other places. And there's been a lot of discussion recently about podcasts that have been taken down by itunes without warning because they had some explicit words in the description of an episode. Even if it wasn't a word that was spoken in the episode, it wasn't audibly. You know, you weren't able to listen to it. If you listen to the show, that explicit word wasn't there, but it existed in the description or the title of the episode. And Apple is really cracking down on that sort of stuff now.

Right.

So I'm sure emojis are gonna be the same.

Exactly. And that's. And we do highly recommend. Just be really respectful of the fact that we have kids in our cars and we are searching through titles and we're doing these things. Even if your show is marked explicit, we like to keep the titles and the descriptions clean just for that purpose. Cause you don't know.

I think it's a good idea to do it. Obviously, it's your show. It's up to you. But I do agree with that, Tracy. I think it's a best practice. I don't think it really has much of a street value or credibility to have an explicit word or character or emoji in your description. If even if it is that those words are contained within the audio of the episode you're going to listen to. I don't know that's going to draw in a lot more listeners. So it's probably just a good idea to keep those things out of your titles and descriptions in general.

Also just a general public service announcement regarding WordPress plugins. I think most of us have WordPress websites and you should. When we talked about best and worst podcast websites, WordPress is our favorite platform from position of a lot of long hard experience.

Okay, hundreds of websites of experience here.

Right.

But it is very important, and this is just a public service announcement recommendation from Tom and Tracy that always be cautious when updating any plugin of any kind on your website, whether it's podcast related or not. We have experienced all kinds of nightmare scenarios when people have auto update configured on their plugins on their website, and whenever there's a new one, the website will update the plugin automatically and you don't get a choice to manually do it or to prevent it from doing it. Even a plugin that would seem innocuous and has nothing to do with podcasting, it could be a Gravity Forms plugin. And if you don't know what that is, then I'm not going to go into that. But I mean there's lots of plugins that relate to how websites function that seem very benign. But when you update these things, it can cause conflicts and problems with other plugins on your website. And the last thing you want to have happen if your podcast is Publishing from PowerPress, which is a function of your website, last thing you want to have happen is an update to some other plugin all of a sudden conflicting with PowerPress and taking down your podcast off of from publishing itunes and everywhere else. And we see this happen. It does happen periodically. It's one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of using PowerPress, because so many things with your website can then interrupt your distribution of your podcast unknowingly. But it is a fine plugin and a lot of people use it very successfully. And that is very true.

And for people who are doing it yourself, it sounds like it's easier because you're going to publish a post and you're going to do it all in one place. When you're using a service like ours, it just doesn't make sense to do it because why not have us take the extra step to keep it separated for you and keep your RSS server, the place that serves your podcast, to all of those directories, keeping it separate from things that go on in your website?

Yeah, it just keeps it isolated and prevents one from infecting the other. And we Just think that's a best practice, but okay, I'll get off my soapbox about that. Now, the other function, though, of PowerPress that is notable that we want to mention is called skip to position. Now, if you've been a podcast for any length of time or you're a longtime podcast listener, you probably have noticed in the past when you go to a show notes post on somebody's website, sometimes they have what I would call timestamped highlights of things that took place in the episode. And in the old school sense, 10 years ago in podcasting, this was much more common than it is today, and it was always used as just a reference point where. Hey, if you want to hear where my guest talks about this subject, go to 7 minutes and 32 seconds in the episode and you can hear that. But before plugins made this automatic, you would just actually play the track player and slide it ahead or click ahead till you get to about 7 minutes and 32 seconds and start playing certain plugins in the past, I think simple podcast press does this, among others. You can actually make that time code clickable. And so if somebody clicks on it, the podcast will start playing and jump ahead to that point. Well, that's.

This is what PowerPress has done here, right?

That's the same thing PowerPress has done here. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's a good function.

Except that I hate it. Except that I hate it. From the standpoint of a marketing machine that you are supposed to be and the efforts that you're putting into your blog posts, your audios, your videos, and all of these things that you're doing, the last thing you want is people to start skipping ahead.

Now, I want to make sure this is clear to our listeners. We're not just talking about PowerPress here. No, we're talking about all of them. Any of them that do this, any of them that provide you even time stamps for where things are for you to even manually go to, skip ahead with a track player or the ones that make it clickable. We're saying we don't like that. Tracy's using a little more strong words.

We never do that.

But we don't do it for some very good reasons. I think that they do podcasters a disservice, quite honestly.

Yeah, they're going to do your show a disservice. At the end of the day, you lose value by someone not listening all the way through an episode on you. So every time somebody plays it and they haven't played the whole episode, you're not getting the value count from that in the overall count and statistics to your podcast play that you want or your episode play that you want. So you're devaluing your show that way. That's something we don't want to see happen to you. There's also a great benefit in putting things in context, so you really want them to listen to what came before and what comes after that rather than just skipped ahead. You also have your show notes, right? You have your blog post notes. And when you've got your blog post notes, you've got highlights and you've got headlines and subheads and you've got things bold faced and you've got those links right there and quotes pulled out. So if there is something really important, it's already going to be highlighted as you scroll down the page and be very easy to see it. And what you do want them to do is scroll down your blog post and find it. Because when they scroll down their blog post, they're also sitting on your page longer, which is giving you higher Google ranking. So overall, it does a marketing disservice to you to use timestamps. So we don't believe in them. We won't be using them. We don't use them.

We never have used them.

We never have used them. We advise clients against them, and we've never done them on any show notes except at a client's request.

Right? And I think I can count, I mean, we work with hundreds of different podcasters and I can count the number of people that require timestamps on the fingers of one hand, honestly. And it's few digits in that, I think, because the reality is you're inviting people to skip ahead and like you said, Tracy, pull things out of context. And I don't like that. The only way that this seems remotely reasonable to me is if a host wants to provide a convenience for their listeners in that they're assuming that their listeners listen in the car or while they're at the gym and they can't skip ahead to anything or they can't rewind easily and listen to something again but they heard something, they don't remember the detail or, wow, I'd really like to hear that again. And so later they might go to.

The blog post, but I'd rather have.

The, well, later they might go to the blog post and with those timestamps that are clickable, you could then allow them to just get right to it and get that one thing they wanted. Okay, There may be some justification for that but I think that the occurrence is incredibly limited and rare.

So for the amount of effort it takes for you to put those timestamps in, make them linkable and do all of those things in terms of effort of your time spent, if you hot jarred or checked out the like the scroll on your page and how many people were using those links, I think you will find them have a low return on investment of time.

Very low.

Right. And it does you a disservice because at the end of the day you now become a less ad worthy show. So you have hurt the monetization value of your show because no advertiser wants to put their ads into your show or sponsor a show of which they could skip your ad.

Absolutely. And this is true. You should be thinking about even if you don't have paid sponsors, but you have your own promotions for your own book or your speaking event or your own courses, your consulting, whatever it is that you are trying to build awareness of through your podcast. I agree, Tracy. It allows people to skip over those things where otherwise it's really not the easiest thing in the world on certain phones and certain podcast players or you're controlling through your iWatch or whatever however it is that somebody is listening to your podcast and consuming it. It's not really the easiest thing in the world or the most intuitive thing in the world to be able to skip ahead. I know there are functions that allow you to skip 30 seconds if you really want to, but when most people are listening, it's not convenient for them to do it. And by and large the research, these are the real hard data from Nielsen, among others who are studying podcast listenership. It's just not that common that people do it and they don't mind listening to ads within podcasts of podcasts that they've opted into. And they want to hear the content, they don't mind listening to it. So why are we going to make it invite them to do it? It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Well, and invite more work for yourself. Like that's really. I'm all about it here. I mean this is part of why we started Feature brand is we want you to do less effort for more return. And this is more effort for less return.

I agree.

Less value at the end of the day. So great. They're adding features to it and I hope it makes them more competitive against some of the other plugins which are not as highly featured as powerpresses. They have a lot of great features, but I just don't think that you all want to go in blindly using these things because they're new and they sound cool.

Yeah. You might set yourself up for some getting lower return on your time, effort and money you're spending on your podcast. And that's not a good thing. Maybe things will change at some point with Alexa and the hey, Google Assistant. That at some point there will be a lot more functions where we'll be able to say Alexa, replay that or skip to this portion or whatever. And it'll be a lot easier to do passively.

I think Google podcasts, that's actually really likely the case.

Yeah.

Because they are already voice recognizing and in a sense tracking what's going on in the voice sense of it.

I agree. I think it's gonna happen too. But it's not something we're gonna have to spend time programming either.

No, exactly. We won't have to. But I also think it's gonna be a little weird when Alexa goes smiley face, high five hand. Like. I mean, emojis are so how's Alexa.

Gonna read that.

On tunein? We should test this on tunein. We'll have to experiment. That may be interesting for a future episode. But I wonder how that's gonna. How these special characters and emojis are going.

Well, I find it weird when I get that, like when I have my text messages read back. Cause my mother will send like five heart emojis. It's really weird when the voice reads it back to me on. Cause I hate Google on.

And how does it sound? How does it sound?

It sounds heart emoji. Heart emoji, heart emoji. It's ridiculous.

Yeah. So look, I think these things are naturally gonna happen as podcasting evolves, as the Internet evolves, as these plugins continue to be updated, it's naturally a lot of these things are gonna happen. But just some cautionary concern that we have for you. Consider these things. Test, test, test. And also just wanted to give you our $0.02 about the timestamps and skipping to position. Just because it's available doesn't necessarily mean it's in your best interest or you really should use it.

Yeah. We want to make sure you get the most out of your time and effort and money spent on everything you do to feed your brand.

Awesome. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Don't forget, you can find the blog post for this episode at FeedYourBrand code and you can find us anywhere on social media at FeedYourBrand.

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

Feed your brand.

Sam.