The Ultimate Guide to Rocking Your Podcast Website With Melanie Gorman

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host. Today I have with me a special guest, Melanie Gorman from Crownsville Media llc, I believe. And Melanie's been on the show before and I decided this was an ideal episode to have her back as a special guest expert. And let me set this up first is that Tracy and I recorded an episode six years ago next month that was called the best and worst podcast websites. Ended up being a very popular episode and an even more popular blog post on our website. And we were thinking about that. Melanie, you and I, when we had a episode you were a guest on a couple months ago, we talked about that particular blog post in reference in that episode. And Tracy and I realized afterwards, gosh, that was almost six years ago, we probably should do an update. So just a side note, all you podcasters listening six years ago recorded a podcast that was very popular. And because it's been six years, it's time for an update. You should make a mental note and could do that for some of your past episodes too. Technology changes, times change, the economy changes. And I think is a really good idea. You can, you don't always have to come up with a brand new topic for an episode of your podcast. You can refresh an older one. So, Melanie, thank you for being here for today, what we are calling and I love our new title, the ultimate guide to rocking your podcast website with special guest Melanie Gorman. So thank you for coming.

Thank you, Tom.

You're welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. Love to be here with you. You're awesome.

So where I thought we would start, to me, I was thinking through this and all the different tools and platforms that are out there to help podcasters create a website for their podcast. There's really three different groups or major groups. I mean, I think there are subgroups and niches, but there are podcast hosting platform websites. There are these sort of what I would call cookie cutter websites that are really only meant to be for your podcast. And then there's conventional website CMS platforms. And CMS platforms, by the way, stands for content management system. If I remember that correctly, right?

Correct. You're totally right.

The operative word being content folks in that. In CMS. But I think the CMSs, the real website platforms, are where we probably want to spend the most time. But I thought we'd start with sort of the simpler ones, working our way to the more comprehensive ones. Does that sound good to you?

Okay.

Yeah. So all of us podcasters out there have a podcast hosting platform. Like Potatoes, you know, we are a podcast hosting platform. There are competitors, podbean, Libsyn, buzzsprout, Transistor, Spotify. For podcasters, there's tons of them and each have their place and different strengths and weaknesses. Pretty much all the ones that I mentioned there say that, oh, they give you a website. For those of you listening to the podcast, I'm holding up my fingers and making air quotes there around website. Because they even say, hey, you can have your own domain name, your podcast dot com. And it just goes and forwards to your podcast website that's hosted on our platform.

That if you have nothing else and you're really bootstrapping it, sure, you can do that. But I'm here to tell you folks. And I'm curious, Melanie, because we haven't really talked about this one, but what it is, is you have pages that are out there, but it's really on that platform's website. You may have a URL pointing to it, but you're not going to set the world on fire. And when people are on that website, it's not really your own, is it?

No. No. So when you build a website, you buy a domain name, right. Melaniegorman.com Crownsville Media. Right. Feed your brand, whatever they might be, dot com, buy a dot com. And when you do that, everything you create on that domain is owned by you. It's managed by you. It's controlled by you. Once you go to members, dot Whatever, whatever. Right. You're not on your brand. Now. You can have a sub domain. We talk about WordPress or other proper websites, and I'm not disparaging other templates, but I definitely feel like you are losing SEO. You're losing brand ownership by giving your content to other sites. And the bigger thing is that you're at the mercy of that domain's SEO for whatever organic traffic you get. So part of the goal of doing a podcast is to talk about topics that people are interested in learning about so much so that they look them up themselves. What you need is you want that interest in your business to grow so that it's less work down road, right? So if you are a podcaster and you're doing an episode a week, right, hopefully a year down the road, your traffic has grown enough so that you're paying for your podcast through the traffic that you're getting in some way that's meaningful to your business. And if your domain is really not your domain because it's hosted and owned by another site, what's happening is you're feeding their domain, right? So. And this is common for courses too. So thinkific or Coursera Udemy, like, there's a bunch of these sites, when you build a course on those platforms, you might own the content and the intellectual property, but. But you're not getting the traffic from that content back to your domain. So if you quit that platform, it all goes away, right? So that's the first thing to know. And if you want to change domain names, you can't take any of that traffic with you, and you haven't built it for yourself. So the value of podcasting and writing blogs and doing all that kind of content production over time is that you're insulating your brand so that when you take your vacation every year or you go to jury duty, right, Your business doesn't fall apart. And if your content is all on another person's website, then you're at risk for whatever crazy stuff goes on with that brand. And further, you don't own it. So it's always challenging and you're always trying to optimize, like I do SEO and I'm always trying to teach people you are optimizing within the other platform. So if they're already known for the topic because some podcast or before you did it, you'll never be on the first page of search. If every podcast there is about automotive and you're about photography, you'll never grow, right? So there's all of these nuances there. But the bottom line is, if you're on a sub domain of another brand, you're dependent on the quality of their website, the quality of their traffic, and the topics that they talk about so that you can grow. And that means you're always going to be spending money marketing, right? You're not going to get those extra benefits that you get when you own the content and you're working it from an SEO perspective. So it's not great.

So from a digital authority perspective, and I often refer to the SEO value, the keyword rankings and traffic you get from that as equity, you build in your own website, you're actually building equity in their website, aren't you? Yeah. All right. So now. And you can have your own domain name. That is true. And they'll. You can forward it into their pages and. But it gets complicated. But if you don't do that, if you notice, like I'll. I'll give you an example. Like if you're on Libson and it was feed your brand, your website initially is feedyourbrand.libsyn.com. you're creating a sub domain under their domain name for your show, right?

Yeah. And everything online is based on reputation. So if Libsyn is known for. Libsyn's a directory. So it's no different than like Psychology Today or Wikipedia or the Dictionary. And so everything sort of, it's a small subset of the whole. But you won't get. These sites are known as being directories. So they can rank for things like best podcast or best podcasters under 20 or whatever, but they're not necessarily going to rank for your core keyword. So you just have to like if you're going to go that direction. And what you said at the beginning, I think is fair. Like if you're bootstrapping it and that's your only option. What you want to think about when you get into those relationships is how do you exit them? How do you exit them with your content? How do you take all the pages that you've already built, all the words, all that good stuff that you spent time and money building, how do you take it with you and, and what's involved in doing that? Because you know you'll end up spending a ton of money to save content, but you're still start from scratch. But if you have to do it that way, you need an exit plan. If you have an exit plan, you can bootstrap and then exit when you're ready and then move to the next.

Tier, the next level. Yeah. Well, so to that point too, these websites from the podcast hosting platforms do is basically you publish an episode of your podcast and the only pages that are generated on that website are automatically generated from that same information you've published. Your podcast title, your podcast description and an audio player to play it. That's all they do. You can't build other pages. It's very automatic in cookie cutter and that content, it's not enough in depth content to move the needle and get attention with Google anyway.

No. And it's also a really siloed audience, so it's not enough related content. So we all have different learning styles. You may like to read. I might like to watch, right? So everybody, part of the value of having a podcast is that it's really malleable. You can take the words, you can translate them into print form, you can take the print form, make them into articles. But if you have a website where you're not able to do those things, you. You're really limited in what you're doing. And so that's why the exit plan is so important, because you got to get off that when you can so that you can build the brand that's around the podcast. Unless your goal is to be the next Joan London. And I know I'm dating myself by saying her name, right? But like, unless you want. Or Barbara Walters, right? Unless you want to be the next like big interview person, you're not going to have a lot that you can sell around that because it's just you talking to people. And usually podcasters have other aspirations. I want to sell a book, I want to get do services, I want to sell products or whatever it might be. So while you're in that kind of a silo, you're really limited.

All right, well, let's go to the next level up from the podcast platform. Websites or web pages, which actually, before I do that, I should say, I apologize, we do not provide such pages because we don't believe in. It's in your best interest as the podcast. Right now some people will think, oh, well, part of this doesn't have web pages, so somehow we're inferior to the others. I would respectfully disagree with that kind of comment, that we are acting in your best interest. And that is you really should have your own website for your podcast. So. All right, having said that, so let's go to. There are what I would call the middle range as these. I think technically they would, maybe you could call them a cms, but it's very limited. Cookie cutter. These are podcast specific and I would say podcast only websites. Then I'm going to share a few names. PodPage is one of them. Podcast page.IO is another on Podium. Podcast page I believe is another one. So we have Pod page and podcast page. Talk about brand confusion between them. Podcast websites is another one where these are platforms that truly you do have your own website, but it is meant to be really just one step above. It's truly your own website on a server that's hosted somewhere, so you own it and you have your own domain name that populates. There could be feedyourbrand.com or whatever, but it's meant to be automatic and connected to Your podcast RSS feed, which is how your podcasts are distributed. And so the website is designed to read the RSS feed regularly, at minimum every day. And it probably really does it every hour of every day, looking for new content. And when a new one's published, it creates a whole new landing page for that episode. But again, it's meant to be easy and automatic. It's just displaying the same information that's in the listening apps, but on a web page.

Yeah. And so to some degree, minimally, that's going to get you further than the first version. Right. Because websites need to have a certain amount of information on them to build authority in the podcaster or the business owner. So homepage, about page, contact page, service pages, like all that sort of stuff. And if these platforms, if the value of them is that they then allow you to have those landing pages, and then you can have your podcast and it spits out a version of it. What you have to watch for with that is duplicated content. Now, duplicated content on Google is a total misnomer, right? Like, this is like. So I'm just going to, like, bust a myth here for a second. You can absolutely have duplicated content, right. You're not going to get penalized. Google's not going to kick you out of the off the team. Right. You could still be in the index. Right. If you have duplicate content, the problem is Google gets confused. So anybody that's ever heard me speak, this is something I say a lot. And one of my mentors coined this phrase, right? And it is. Google is a child. So you want to think about Google like a child. So if you say to your kid, you can have these strawberries or these strawberries or these strawberries, the kid's going to pick strawberries. So we got that right. But are they the best or the freshest or the organic or the sweet ones or the sour ones? What are they? Right? There are rules within Google for how many pages from a domain that it will index for a particular keyword. So if you have 10 pages on your podcast all about strawberries, it's going to pick two right? Now, will they be the best? Two?

I don't know.

Will they be the worst? I don't know. Will they be one good, one bad? Maybe the problem is you have no control over what Google picks. Because once your pages are indexed and they start climbing in search and they start getting traffic, if you've got too much competing content, they. We call that cannibalized content, right? So cannibalization is when you're competing with yourself and you're pushing something down because it's missing diversity and certain things are the same. So it's great that it spits out the pages. You don't have to do that process, you don't have to think about, you have to build it right. But the problem is if too much of it is common content versus original content for that page, Google will get confused. So you have to assess the product, the output of what the pages are putting out there into the world, how they're indexing with Google. And you have to really think about is the stuff that's showing too much the same page over page over page. The because what happens is like a child, Google doesn't index everything. Google indexes what it sees, gets traffic. So a lot of people think, oh well, it's here and it's going to show up in Google. Here's a little trick I'll teach everybody. If you want to know what of your website indexes, which means it's available to people in search, use the word site. So S I T E a colon, no space and then you're domain. Right? So for me it would be site column colon crownsville media.com Right. That's what I would put. And what you will get as a result is the number of pages from your website that are indexed. And chances are if you have a problem with this, you have fewer pages indexed than you have in your inventory. That's how you know right off the bat that this kind of solution doesn't work for you. So it's tricky. Every one of those has to be looked at independently to figure out if they can do what you want them to do. And absolutely no guarantee. Absolutely no guarantee.

Right. Okay, well so that's actually eliminating. Great tip. Thank you so much for the site calling your domain. Now the other thing about these mid tier platforms is they're really meant to do just one thing all about the podcast. So if you at all want a website that is also a personal brand site, maybe you are not just a podcaster, you have a book, you're an author, or you do speaking and you're a public speaker, whether that's in person events or virtual events, or you aspire to do any of those things, this kind of a website just for your podcast is not going to meet your needs because they're very limited in what they do, in the capabilities they give you. So again, this is going to be a very short stop on the journey to whatever you want to achieve with your show and. Or as an entrepreneur or a business person, or even if it's a passion project and you aspire to do more with it, you know, like you said, plan your exit strategy because it's probably going to come sooner than you think. Right?

Well, that's the thing. I mean, you have to figure out, can you get out of that? Can you take your podcast episodes with you? Can you take your. I mean, you own the content. Do they make it easy for you to get it? Because if you go to the next strategy, you've got to figure out, how are you going to get that, all those files, all the everything, right. In some format that a developer can say, okay, got it. And now we're going to unpack it over here. So it's not as simple as it sounds.

It's really not. Yes, I agree. All right, so let's move on to content management systems in the conventional sense. Although there are sort of two categories of these that I want to talk about. Oh, and yeah, see, Melanie and I didn't even talk about this. And I see we're thinking the same way. There's really the all in one sort of systems, which I tend to refer to as a Swiss army knife of websites, and then there's the true, more pure CMS content management systems that are. Allow you to do anything you would need to do for your website, but aren't trying to be all things to all people. So let's sort of. All right, so the Swiss army knives and I'll. I'll. That analogy makes sense in a moment. I'm talking about Kajabi sites. I'm talking about. Go High Level is one of the newer ones, by the way, didn't exist six years ago when we did this episode. So that's one. That's an update. Another one called Marketing Madness, which is a close cousin to Go High Level. Or you have platforms like Shopify. What Are there any others, Melanie, you would put. Oh, you would. Are they really all in like Kajabi that's trying to do everything for you? They do that too.

Yeah. So the WIX and Weebly sites, I mean, so part of what sets these sites apart, like just at a basic level is are you buying hosting or are you getting hosting? Right, so that is a fundamental. Like with most of the sites, all the sites you just named, it is all inclusive, Right. So everyone has to be investigated, but by and large they're inclusive. And what that means is think about. The analogy I use is like, think about your. Where you live. So the plot of land that you build your house on is your host. Right. And that is the longitude and latitude on the Internet for where your particular domain lives. Right. So every time someone goes to your website and they look up feedyourbrand.com they're going to be directed to one place on the Internet and pop, there you are. Right. So when are doing these sort of Swiss army knife. I like that when you're doing that, you don't buy hosting. Hosting's included in most of these instances. And so they have tools. You can you open them up and you're like, okay, I want a six page website, I want to do it like this. They have wisiwig kind of things where you can go through and fill it all out. There's limitations all over the place. Right. So there's tons and tons of limitations. So what are you going to say?

Yeah, well, no, there are lots of limitations. Let's take Kajabi for example, because I probably have the most experience with that one. We as a company have experience with all these because we have customers that are on all of them. Where Kajabi has a builder to build web pages. Sure, but and if you are going to sell anything on your website, they have a way that you can sell it. And a lot of these have their own even merchant account system you can use through them. Went to take credit cards and all that and now Kajabi even can host your own podcast. You want podcast hosting? Oh, they do it too. But is it a good podcast host? Do you get the same analytics and do you have enough bandwidth to handle thousands of simultaneous downloads? And what about people in other countries that are getting it? Are they getting it locally in their country or it's going to take them longer to get it coming from the U.S. it's kind of the Swiss army knife is because, hey, I can get a Swiss army knife that has 12 tools in it. And I've got a little saw that I can saw little branches and in the woods if I need to. Is it a really good saw? If I'm going to saw nothing but branches, do I want to use the Swiss army knife saw? Probably not. I probably want a saw that's made to saw some significant volume of wood very efficiently and easily. If I'm going to travel really light and I can take one tool with me, I'll take the Swiss army knife and I could do a little bit of everything, but I can't really do any of those things really.

Well, yeah, and these sites. So for the do it Yourselfer, right? The people that are like, I like to tinker, I like to do my thing. Right, they're great in a lot of ways. Like, people can kind of get into them, they can build all their stuff. There's limitations with lytics, which is going to tell you who comes, who listens, who downloads, how much, when time on the page, like all of these details and data points as a content producer that you need to understand so you can think through things like, wow, that topic was really popular, I should do it again, right? If you don't have topics like that, you're not going to be able to do any of those. Like, if you don't have that kind of data, you will not be able to know what you're doing, so that you'll be picking topics blindly, which is problematic. So the do it yourself are often when I talk to them, what they want is control. They want to be able to say, I like this color, I like this font. And so I went this way. I. I don't know how to set up Stripe or another payment processor, so I went this way. What people don't often understand is that what you get in the beginning by doing this easy process yourself, you lose in SEO, organic traffic ownership. So it's got some of the same problems. And a lot of people end up moving over to what we're going to talk about next, which is like the word presses of the world. Then they end up moving over because you have the flexibility. It's a little bit like, do you want to build your Legos using a kit or do you want to be creative with it? Right? And sit down and go, I've got all these Legos. What do I want to do with it? Those that all the Legos freaks people out sometimes because they're like, man, there's too many options. That's why you need someone to help you strategize and think through it, so they can take all of the possibilities away, but they hear your vision and they're able to understand. I really want something that's unique and different. So that's the fundamental difference is if you want a lot of information about what's going on, you have to know the analytics and what these sites offer and get past the idea that it's super easy and frankly, less expensive at times. In the very beginning to jump on a Kajabi site. Now, I'll tell you this. I had a client literally 2 hours ago who emailed me because she was getting a bid to do a Kajabi like, she wanted a funnel. Right. So Kajabi also does that kind of stuff too, right?

Landing pages, funnel pages, a lot of these, all in one Swiss army knife ones have that kind of function available. Guarantee you it's not quite as good as if you were going to use clickfunnels or something like that, right?

Not at all. Right. And the bid for her to do this was three grand. So it's not. So part of what happens is when you get into these systems and you're like, okay, I'm using the Swiss army knife. Well, you can't get away from using the Swiss army knife, so the prices creep up. So when you're thinking about your business, the due diligence you have to do is to say, this is where I am today. Today I'm starting a podcast. I want a brand. I'm a this, I'm a that, I'm a whatever, and I need a basic website. Where are you going to be in two years, three years, four years? Right. Because you can expect, if you do your job right, you're going to have listeners, you're going to have people that want your stuff, you're going to have people that want you to expand, and your creativity is going to expand, and you need landing pages and sales opportunities that can do that for you. And if she had something different, as opposed to Kajabi right now, it wouldn't be a $3,000 upgrade. It would be a thousand dollars upgrade or $1,500 upgrade, which is a heck of a lot different. So just be thoughtful. It might be cheaper today, but it's not necessarily cheaper in the long run.

That's a great point. Another example, and I'm curious where you put Squarespace in the camp of all in one or not. But I'll give you an example that we encounter a lot. We do have customers with Squarespace sites and we're doing production for them and creating the blogs. But we also have potatoes, our own players, like, for not only your track player, which every host does, has a track player or a big window player for all your episodes. And what we learned is, well, some of our customers that started on Squarespace, because it's easy for them to do, like you said, what you see is what you get, the colors, the fonts on that. But when they go to install our player, which is an embed code, an iframe, embed code, usually, although we have a script also. But in order to put that embed code in, we discovered, oh, your Squarespace website account doesn't allow you to put in raw HTML embed codes, you had to upgrade to a higher level of Squarespace. Then it opens up, okay, now you can choose a raw HTML sort of module to put onto a page and then put your embed code. So you have to pay them more in order to do certain things. So a different level of limitation. At least you could do it. But you got into this thinking, hey, I can do this really cheaply. And then guess what? Not quite as cheap as you hoped.

No. I think Squarespace falls in the same camp with the WIX and the Weeblies and the kajabis of the world. Squarespace is arguably the most beautiful of them all. Right. When somebody's really visually drawn, right, they're like, it has to. That vibe has to be there. One of the things that Squarespace has done so well is it's allowed people to create storefronts, sell products with beautiful pictures and all that good stuff really easily. But it wasn't until like two, three years ago that they even started doing SEO. Like, I worked on Squarespace websites five, seven years ago, and you would put the page title in. So the page title, if you don't know, is the blue links. When you go to Google. So you're at Google, you're doing a search. Every blue link you see from a website is arguably a page title or supposed to be. And you would put the page title in and it would appear on the page, right? Because they would double dip with the fields. So that kind of. Oh, let's make it. I mean, I'm a huge believer in, like, if you do it once, it should work 10 times. Like, that's. I'm a big believer in that. Or you should be able to use it 10 different ways. But that just fundamentally doesn't work so well. And they're doing better. With SEO, you can get pages to rank on Squarespace now more easily than you used to, but it's also a host. So I built a website for a client. This is like a year and a half ago. And we had to get her off square because these sites also let you buy domains. So instead of going to the godaddies of the world, you can go to Squarespace or WIX or Weebly and you can say, great, I want to buy this domain and I want to have my email with it and I want to do my player and I want to do this. I want to do all of it. And the problem is when you try to detangle yourself from it, there's all of These little things. And email is something people don't think about. Like, they're like, oh, I'm on whatever website and my email set up through it. And then you migrate them to their new site. No, like, but my email doesn't work right, because all of these things are connected. And so the value of Wysiwag and the value of the Swiss army knife is lost when you have to spend a lot more to get all of these details untethered from each other. So. And people are where they are, so there's systems to untether people. But if you have the opportunity, what we're going to talk about next, my professional opinion is where you want to be.

And I agree. And we were of that opinion six years ago when recorded the very first the best and worst podcast websites episode of feed your brand and blog post on our website, which by the way, ranks on a lot of keyword phrases on the first page of Google search and still brings us traffic, which is part of the whole point for all you podcasters out there about getting the greatest value out of each of your episodes is converting it to content that does rank and gets traffic for free from Google. So what we've come to believe is that WordPress is the best CMS from an SEO and ultimately building that equity in your own domain name that's going to continue to serve you for years to come. But I think we should acknowledge other platforms, other CMSs like WordPress to really consider or not so much.

So WIX does a good job. It's still in that your host and everything's kind of compacted together. WIX will rank out of all of them. It will rank the best for SEO and there is flexibility. But you will know a WIX website the second you look at it. Because it's always, every time I see them, they're the same font, the same layout. So the uniqueness of it's really lost. But WordPress is the only site. I mean, the way that you go about doing a WordPress website is you buy your domain, right? From GoDaddy or whatever domain provider you want. You buy hosting, right? So I host my site through SiteGround. There's lots of other hosts. You don't want to host with Johnny's site site down, down the street, right? He's got a box in his house. Like when Johnny's Internet goes down, your site goes down, right? So you want a host that's going to do a daily backup. So when something happens, because something happens, right, you're prepared, right? It's the same way you have batteries in your flashlight at home, right? So you want to think about the rainy day because the rainy days happen. So you host someplace that has a daily backup, right? And then you have a WordPress site that's built. So most WordPress sites are built through templates and there's thousands of templates out there. When you build the, there's a handful of like major templates that you use. Each developer is going to have ones that they know really well. The more your developer knows the template, the easier it is and the faster and the most economical they're able to kind of push those. Your sites live faster, but they all effectively work the same. And there are thousands upon thousands of WordPress people across the globe. So like, I'll give you, I worked for a publishing company in New York for 10 years, 12 years, and we were built on a Drupal platform. So Drupal was, would have loved to have been like WordPress, right? So Drupal is most notable because the White House's website was built on it, right? So like it was a new platform, it was really internationally connected, right? All kinds of like developers across the globe. And then there was a big shortage of developers and everything slogged to a halt. Right now that may not be where they are today, but when you're thinking about your website, you need to have someone that you can say, can learn it yourself if you're a do it yourselfer because it isn't that hard, I'll be honest. Right? And if you want someone to update stuff for you, you can find people super economically to do it and they can do everything and it connects with everything. So there's plugins, Plugins are like, you know, when you build a PowerPoint and you're like, put it in this theme, right? So I want everything to be have this look and feel. Plugins do different thematic things to your website so they will give you connections to like I use AWeber for my email list, right? Connected to AWeber through a plugin. If you use Mailchimp or Constant Contact, same stuff applies. So most, you know, plugins are feature sets that will do different things for you and there's some plugins everybody needs. This is kind of going down the rabbit hole, so we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But plugins allow you to make your website a little different and function with all of these different processes you need so that your website does what you want it to do. So someone signs up for your mailing list, you get a copy of that email in your constant contact account, somebody, and then they get an email with their free gift. Right, so WordPress does all of that.

Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. WordPress, it is a structure, a system for building a website. What I love about it. Well, first of all, the most important thing to me is functionality and that it is. And I always say this, and you can correct me if you think I'm wrong, Melanie, but I always say it's really the most in alignment with Google that I have experienced. So that what you're going to create in a website is already in the right condition for Google to read it and understand it. And there's sort of no roadblocks in the way of that. So that to me, functionally is very important. But let's just say aesthetically there are, as you said, thousands and thousands of different themes I think they're referred to as for how a website will look. And then aside from that, there are different builders. And what the builders are is a user interface for creating the pages, editing the pages. And there are lots of them. Some of them are easier to use, that are a little more visual, what you see is what you get and others that are more basic, where you're just typing in all of the content and it doesn't look at all like it is and you have to preview the page to see what it looks like. But whether you want something that is, your brain works better. If you're editing the environment while you're looking at how it looks, you can do that. If your brain works a little differently and you don't necessarily need that, then it may be a little easier for to do things. But regardless, what I also love about WordPress is it's really a platform that there are even, I believe, hundreds of thousands of different plugins. And just to give you example, let's say you sales funnels are a big part of your need. You can have a clickfunnels account and you can build your funnel pages there, but there's also a plugin that integrates ClickFunnels with your WordPress site. You can actually create the funnel Pages within your WordPress site and you have all the functionality of click funnels, but each of those funnel pages is actually a page within your domain name of your website. So it really gives you the best of all worlds. And so this is what I tell people too, especially new podcasters that need a website and don't have one. You can start with a very simple three page website, a Podcast, landing page, an about page, and a contact page. I mean, there are certain things every website needs to have. I guess you need technically have a terms and conditions page too, but you have in order to meet Google's requirements for trust, which you have to build before you're going to rank on anything, you can have a very simple website that it's just those few landing pages. And a blog I'm going to highly recommend with a unique landing page, a blog page for every episode. Some of you may not do that initially, but I do highly recommend it. But then a WordPress site, when you ready to add this function or that function, or you got to have a course you're going to now have available, you're going to sell people, or you're going to have a book, or you're going to start to sell services and actually do commerce through your website, whatever it is you, your future needs are. You don't have to throw out the old WordPress website to do it. You can modify it, add on to it, right?

Yeah, there's a ton of things with that. Like, so starting at the beginning, Google reads WordPress the best. You're 100% right. So because the way that your pages are laid out and the way that you write your content is you can direct Google through your heading tags and through your links. Like, you really have a lot of control over what you're doing. And you can check it, of course, to make sure it's all working, but it does indexes faster. Like all of these things that are really critical to your business work faster. With WordPress. I think of it like having a lemon seed in a straw, right? So if there's something blocking Google from being able to like get the content, it just doesn't get the content. And you can check, when you build your website, you have posts and pages, right? Pages are your landing pages, posts are your articles or. And your articles are not necessarily like blog articles. They can be, obviously, but they can also be like, here's an introduction to this podcast, here's an episode, here's the player. Embed YouTube videos in them. You can do a million different things with it that allow people based on their different learning styles to read or listen or watch what it is that you want to say. And Google, frankly, rewards multimedia content. So there's a lot of pluses and upsides with that. So as you're thinking, yeah, it's a.

Big deal, which is why we recommend every podcaster, because many, many of us are recording video and putting it on YouTube for episodes too. We embed those YouTube videos on those landing pages. And this is kind of old school too, but I often describe the ideal episode landing page to new customers of ours as looking like a magazine page on your website with images that are, you know, relevant images throughout the text. Embed at least one video. You could be your whole episode video. It could be shorts that you've created for YouTube shorts or for. For social sharing. Book images of book covers. If you mention a book with a link to the book to buy it on Amazon or whatever. If it's your own book, you buy it through your site. But you want this multimedia page because that is the kind of content Google wants to serve people when they search on any topic that they're looking for.

Google wants comprehensive content too, right?

And long form, right? Not just not.

Yeah, well, so here's the deal with long form content, right? So putting on my SEO hat for a second. So when somebody says they go to the Internet. So your ideal experience with your website, you have two different kinds of customers. You have people that know you. They want to hear everything you say. They subscribe to your podcast, they think you're awesome. They're going to listen to everything you say. Then you have absolute, complete, total strangers, right? That's the whole point of your website, right? It's really nice to delight people who already like you. Like, my mom is going to say I'm awesome on every Instagram video I put up there, regardless of how bad I look or something. Sound right? What I'm trying to do is to get strangers to think I'm authoritative, that I know what I'm talking about, that I have value in what I'm saying. So you're marketing your website to strangers. You have no idea what their learning experiences is like. And so having comprehensive content that when you think about what is the question someone would ask that would lead them to this podcast. Why does someone need to be here? Why are they listening? Why do they care? Right? Put your ego aside. It's not about you. It's not about me. Right? It's about the reader and the listener who wants this information. So what is it that they want to know? That's what you need to say, right? So within Google, like, no. And trust in all sales experiences is still the same. We're still the same people. We always were. They have to like you. They want to know, you want them to know, and then they trust you and then they buy from you, right? They're not doing it beforehand. So if you imagine what the question is they're going to ask. The content needs to answer the questions. So it has to be comprehensive. Because what you need to avoid is someone going to Google and saying, how do I start a podcast? Getting to your landing page, reading it and going, hitting the back button, which is fine so far, but then asking the same question. If they ask the same question, you failed them, right? If they go back to Google and they go, okay, how do I start a new podcast about making pierogies? Right? Okay, that's different, that's great. Now Google goes, oh, I didn't give you the right answer or I didn't give you that answer. So, and especially in the age of AI, where Google is working and Bing are work, like all of these sites are working to give people with some sort of like magic anticipation what it is that they really want. The human being is still the same, right? We get an answer. If it's satisfied, we ask the next question. We are having a conversation with Google. We're not just going one and done. Right now you may do one and done when you get restaurant directions, right? But by and large, if you're investigating something which fundamentally does not happen on Instagram, it does not happen on Facebook, it happens on YouTube and it happens on Google. When you are doing serious topics and you're talking about something that has substance to it, where people are trying to figure something out, you need long form content that answers the question fully, Right? And then when that customer hits the back button, they're asking a different question because you've answered it. That is how you build authority in the eyes of Google. And then your pages go up and it's a spread. So you're going to see start saying, I want to rank for creating pierogies, but eventually it's going to be potato pierogies. And do you want applesauce with it? And what about sour cream? And are Pennsylvania pierogies better than Maryland pierogies? Your website should expand as you get spend time develop being a content creator so you will get trust and you will get more. Right. And let me tell you one more thing. And when you do it the way you do it, Tom, the thing about what you do that's so great is that your podcast works. So I was on your show, what, two months ago?

I don't know, maybe longer. Yeah.

Okay. If you Google my name, if you go Google Melanie Gorman right now, you know what shows up our episode.

Really?

Yes. I'm not faking it. I didn't do anything.

Yeah. And we didn't discuss this.

We've never talked about this before.

This. I'm doing this live right now.

Melanie Gorman.

Where? Come on, Melanie Gorman.

And then scroll through the.

And it gave me images first, which is interesting.

That's normal.

Now, LinkedIn. Oh, my goodness, there it is. Mastering SEO secrets for podcast Triumph with Melanie Gorman.

Right. Shows up right there on the first page.

Right there on the first page. Yeah.

And that's because your SEO for what you did, bringing a guest like me on is trustworthy, and Google knows it. Right. And I'm trustworthy because of my reputation. So together, it's a match made in heaven. So when you're thinking about your guests and you're thinking about the right people to bring on, that's the experience you want to create for people. And listen, you have no hand in that. Google decided that. I didn't do anything. You didn't do anything. Google decided that.

But we did put out quality content, though.

Over time.

Yeah, over time. And don't want to let us be done here without. I want to emphasize something that, that you said, because I think you're 100% right, that when people are looking for asking a question, they're asking it in Google or they're asking it in YouTube. Now, I would also argue, because this is a podcast show, after all. And while these days video casts are very much synonymous with podcasts, not only in term, but I think in practice. I mean, for the ties, I think about 75% of our podcasters are recording and putting out their content as video as well as audio. Now, I love the audio content myself. I'm doing my getting my kids lunch ready this morning and doing some dishes in the kitchen, and I'm listening to up first through my Alexa smart speaker. But it was a podcast that I'm listening to audio only. Right. I believe in the audio only platform, and I think all of us podcasters do. And I would argue that podcast listeners, people who prefer audio first, are going to search in their podcast app asking those questions. The unfortunate thing about the podcast apps and ecosystem is they're not the best search engines. They're actually pretty lousy search engines.

That's why you need the content with them.

That's why you need the blog content. Right. Because the listening apps are designed to give you results of shows first. And so they're only searching for the titles and the descriptions of your show listing. Even though you have all these episodes with a lot of different titles and descriptions, they're so far below the fold, hardly anybody scrolls down to look at them. So people are going to find you more, I would say, through Google first, YouTube second, and podcast search in the listening apps may be third. But that's why, yes, you need the magazine style page, episode landing page on your website in order to cast the widest net possible for you to be found. And my listeners are probably tired of me saying this over many episodes over the years, but it's really, it's so true. And I geek out on this stuff because it's just that important.

I mean, you really want to share this brilliance that you have with people who want it. And people are going to look. My husband is like, we don't watch the news anymore as a family. Like, we gave it up a while ago. But on YouTube, he found sources of news information that he really likes and he vetted and he appreciates what they say. And he's like both sides of everything. And you know, like, he needed to curate his own, like the voice he wanted to hear around him. Like, and we all have our own echo chambers that we're living in based on how we live and what we do. But people are curious. Like, as we've become less trusting of everything that's pushed at us, people are hunting for things that they can learn. And so you need to be where people are looking. Right. And so if you're doing the podcast, the translation into a blog is pretty easy, right? So, and you want that to be done in a way that your consumers are able to go, this is fantastic. And then you can do a million things with it. Like you have that long form content, you can have somebody on your team make it into carousels that you put out on Instagram or you can, there's so many things you can do with it.

So absolutely. Wow, wonderful. Well, so really our point today, yes, I mean, my point as a podcaster is to have this be kind of an update related to, you know, rocking your podcast website here. The best and worst of the platforms. I think, you know, we have a pretty clear opinion, you and me, that WordPress is the best platform for your podcast website, or really any website, to be honest. But there are other options to choose, depending on where you are in your podcasting journey or your entrepreneurial journey, your business journey, whatever that, whatever your or your personal journey is. Maybe there is a step on the way to having a full fledged website that's going to be in your best interest. But just understand the benefits and the consequences, right. Of stopping on one of those rest stops on the journey here. I would Argue. And I think you shared the same opinion. You're probably better off going right for WordPress and then doing that. As long as there's no financial obstacle or I guess logistical obstacle or workflow obstacle in your way. And if there is, start with what.

You can and have an exit plan.

Have an exit plan.

Yeah.

Understand where you really need to be long term.

That's right.

And then hopefully one of these many resources we've mentioned will help you. And as always, listeners, we have a blog post for this episode@podcastersunited.org is the official home for them. They're also on poditize.com, but we definitely have a lot of resources for you@podcast United.org and official home for the show. That blog post will have the link to every one of these platforms that we've mentioned today. So you can use that as a resource. But you're gonna have to do your own homework, Weigh the options based on your needs and then make the decision that's right for you. And that's great too. But I agree with Melanie 100%. And I want to thank you, Melanie, so much for coming on, sharing this time with me and providing your insights because it really, it's not the same as what we talked about. We just barely scratched the surface of this in that last episode, which. Ding, ding, ding, Podcasters ranks on the first page of Google search for Melanie's name, which is awesome for us. And then when people, I'm sure, will find Melanie's own website, if you do need some SEO support and expertise, we highly recommend Melanie. We use her ourselves and we recommend her to our customers who have those needs, especially when they're desperate. That has happened a few times. Right. So obviously Melanie's contact information will also be in the blog post, her website and all that. But she did mention it. Crownsvillemedia.com thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Again.

Heard something valuable today, but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social unitedwepod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.