Top 5 Podcast WP Plug-Ins We Can't Blog (Or Podcast) Without With Alexandra Hazzard

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Foreign.

Hey everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazard and I'm doing a special intro today because I'm not giving you coaching today, neither is Tom. We have somebody else doing the coaching today, so on occasion we have members of our team and today we have Alexandra Hazard. And yes, there's a relationship, you'll have to figure it out for yourself. But yes, she's related to us. But Alexandra is going to do a episode today on the top five podcast WordPress plugins that we can't blog or podcast without. And she's covering that because she's really an expert on managing our web team. She's an expert in managing our entire team. She's our operations director and chief operating officer and she's been that and built all the systems and team for everything we do, especially on the website. And that's something that, that's why she's the expert here, not me, not Tom. And we wanted to bring her in to talk with you about what those things are. So let's go to the coaching call that Alexandra hosted for us with our clients that we're sharing with you as today's episodes and we'll be covering it for the top WordPress plugins that you can't podcast without.

We as a company, as you all know, really Recommend Having a WordPress website and the reason for that is because we found that it is the most effective for Google Assistant SEO. What I mean by that is we've found that we can get the best organic results with WordPress websites, in growing the keyword rankings, in growing that organic traffic through podcasting the way we do with the transcription based blog posts rather than on the other platforms. We've split tested the same items, the same recommendations with wix, Squarespace, Kajabi, Weebly, webflow, Scalex even has some stuff in their stuff we were testing in there with SEO, making sure it's ranking when we do posts through them and messages through them, that's working well. So yeah, so we've been testing every platform we come across that you guys have HubSpot's Another one, we've tested HubSpot before and there's also a few random ones out there too. Simplero, that's a kind of a website builder. We've tried. We found all of them. None of them compare to WordPress. We can get about 60 to 80% better results with WordPress than we can with the other ones. Now the reason why I give you that range is because it depends on which platform you're looking at. So that's why we go with WordPress. Now granted, WordPress is awesome because it has that SEO value, but it also can be a bit of a headache because with WordPress comes plugins. So let's talk about what a plugin is. A plugin is a tool that some other developer, a third party developer a lot of time not hired by WordPress built. So that way people who are working in WordPress and want to do some other function that they are WordPress Theme or Builder, or just website in general, can't do, a developer will make a plugin, they might make it paid so they can make some money from their work and then they post it up into the WordPress plugin area plugin store so you can download it, install it. Sometimes you have to go to the developer direct to download and install a plugin, other times it's just listed in the generic WordPress plugin sort of shop, if you will, and you can search for them. So that's sort of what a plugin is. Now, that being said, not every plugin works for every website, so it's always very important to test your plugins when you want to try one out for the first time. And we always do that when installing them on your websites. That being said, there are a few key plugins that every WordPress website, whether it's really a podcast website or not, should have. But I'm going to go through the top five ones every podcast website specifically, specifically should have. And that's because maybe you're not aware that you should be having these things and you want to add them in and start using them. If you are one of our done for you episode production clients and we're doing the blog post production for you on your episodes, do not worry about these plugins. We have already examined these five plugins, made sure they're working and installed or figured out a workaround if for some reason we couldn't use that one on your website. So don't be alarmed if I mention one you weren't aware of before. We've handled that for you, but if you aren't a production client and you're curious about these plugins, feel free to reach out to us, to our emails. You have them. Success is the success team's email. And then we have helloties as well for the more generic email. So that way you guys can go ahead and get that information if you have any questions that I don't go over today. So the very first plugin, we want to make sure every WordPress website, whether it's a podcast website or not, has is some kind of Google Analytics connection. That Google Analytics connection has to be set up from day one of your website being live, or Google does not have analytics to show you, which is really sad because there's a lot of information that can be learned from setting up, just simply setting up that connection. Now you can't just set up Google Analytics in a WordPress website. It doesn't quite work like that. You need a plugin to do it right. So with us, we actually use a plugin as a part of our whole website management process. We have a website maintenance program. I'll go over at the end. But in that program we use a specific set of plugins for security, performance and all that kind of things. And it comes with a Google Analytics plugin we like to use. It's called Beehive Pro. We love it. If you see it in the back end there in your website, you're able to view the last month, even week and different ranges there within the back end. But it'll only show you a couple key areas of information. And really it's the stuff you want to know, it's the general traffic, how many users, how many sessions. Those general things are what's going to display in your WordPress backend side of things. But then you also have your Google Analytics property, which is the literal connection between the website and Google Analytics that lets them read each other. So that way Google can tell you, hey, this is how many people actually visited your website in the last month. Literal people, not just sessions, not just how many visits or views, but literal individual users. It can tell you. And so that can be very valuable information to you. And then you can even dive deeper. It gives you demographic information, like basically all of that data that Google is collecting on all of us, scary Big Brother data. It can show you all of that for all the users for your website. And you can dive in really deep over in Google Analytics. So if you didn't have Google Analytics set up when we started working on your episode production, we did go ahead and Set that up for you. If you want to be shared the Google property, we can absolutely share it and change ownership over to you. It's easier for our team usually to just set it up for you and make sure it's at least connected. So it's there collecting the data. And then from there, as an as needed basis, we go ahead and share it with those of you clients who are interested in it. Some of you don't seem to be interested in it, so we just like to make sure it's connected. So let us know if you want that connection. We'll make sure it's there. But if you already had Google Analytics set up, then we just let it be. We didn't change anything. We just wanted to make sure it was at least there to begin with. So that's the number one plugin. Every WordPress website can make sure they have some sort of Google Analytics plugin that connects it up and displays a little bit of the data for you in the back end of WordPress. So that's the first one. So the second plugin we have is Yoast SEO. So Yoast SEO, that is a third party plugin. It isn't owned by Google and that's a very important thing to know. Okay. So this second plugin is important for telling Google what information to display in its search. So Yoast SEO is a tool that ends up showing up at the bottom of every post in the back end when you're editing it, and at the bottom of every page even too, where you can set up the title. It's called the metadata information, but some people will put the dash in between and metadata is that information. When you like search in Google and you say, I want to pull up all the article artery health and you type in best Artery Health into Google and those items pop up. It has a little title of every article, the URL and then a little blurb, and sometimes it even will have a picture. If you're like pasting a URL into social media, it adds on that picture as well. So all of that information is set in these metadata settings within Yoast SEO in your website. So this metadata can be set individually separate from the title of the post. And whatever content you've put on the page, whatever photo you've set as the featured image, it can be separate from it. Which is why some of you have not wanted us to put that square image as the featured image on your website, because it messes with what's displayed in other areas. That's fine. What we end up doing is we make sure this metadata photo is the square version at minimum. So that way, when it's out on the Internet, everything is talking to each other the way that it should. Right? So this plugin is mainly used for that. And it's an important thing you need for every page, every post throughout your entire website. Most people, when they're building a website, don't check that, and most developers don't follow through and do that. So you need to make sure you're doing that. If we have hosted your website, we do an entire SEO audit, including checking that information before we send you on your way. So don't worry, we cover that. But just know most developers don't. So you need to be checking every single page and post. If we are not your website maintenance team, okay. To make sure SEO is set that Yoast SEO plugin.

Now, there's a lot of nuances with Yoast SEO, and we get a lot of questions about it. I talk about this in the faq, and you will hear the same regurgitated information from our team again and again because it is so technical that they copy it out of our FAQ when they get questions. But with Yoast SEO specifically on your posts, you'll see scores in your backend. And some clients will ask us, well, I have green on SEO. I have green on everything except for readability. Yoast is telling me my readability is red or orange or something like that. And you might be curious why, because you'd think if a company is saying, hey, this helps your SEO, why is this SEO score showing up anything but green or good, right? So I have personally gone through every single item on this checklist with Yoast SEO, with our team, our development team, to make sure that the items that show up commonly as orange or red are items that are considered readability. These are items that Yoast SEO has deemed important to a user's satisfaction and feeling like the article was easy to read. That's a very subjective thing to be measuring. It's something that's very different for each individual, and it's hard for a computer to tell you a real true score for that. Also, side note about that, these posts we're posting for you guys are not truly intended to be read. They're more intended to be seen by Google's bots and give you guys all the nice traffic and rankings you need. So people find you and listen to you or watch you if you're doing video, right? At the end of the day, your users, the people who are going to engage with you. They're going to go to social media after their website, they're going to give you their email and engage with services. They're going to listen to the podcast or watch. Most people aren't going to skim through that blog post, but it's there and ready for them. And we have run it through Grammarly and all that jazz to double check even human error and make sure that even though we have it going through a very nice QC process, that it also is being run through some sort of system checking for that grammar and spelling as well. And that's what ends up publishing. So rest assured, even if your readability score is the grammar and spelling will be correct, it should flow nicely along with the audio file. If you're listening to it together, you should be able to follow along and understand it well. And then beyond that, all of the SEO power is really for those Google bots so those listeners can find you. Because your listeners aren't going to search feed your brand. Our listeners don't our listeners search help me launch a podcast or our listeners search how do I plan my next podcast topic? Podcast topic planning. I need help finding guests. Things like that is what they search into Google and they don't know potatoes is their solution. They don't know feed your brand is their solution, much like many of you didn't until they stumbled upon it on the Internet. And so we're trying to help you guys get stumbled upon on the Internet by those people really looking for your topics that you're talking about. And so anyway, so the Yoast SEO score. Keep in mind it's a third party company. You're welcome to follow the readability scores if you would like our team to follow them more closely. We have a few clients who like that. We're happy to do that, but it's not really recommended. At the end of the day we find that 37% conversion that we can get off these podcasts come from these blog posts we've been doing and we test all of those items that Yoast flags for you guys. So if you have any more specific questions on that, you're welcome to send in an email about it. Check out our FAQ under Performance questions. I list all of the the more jargon about it essentially, if you really want to know the technical behind all of the different readability stuff. So please let me know and I'm happy to share. Anyway, so that's Yoast SEO. I know, that was a really complex one. The next three are super easy and we're going to breeze through them. So, yeah, that's Yoast SEO. So the next plugin we have is Hide Featured image. So this will depend on your website. Each website's different. If you have dv, Hide Featured Image won't work on your website. So Hide Featured Image. It does exactly what it sounds like. There's a little image setting on every single blog post within every WordPress website called a featured image. This has to be set for SEO. If you don't set this, it's a huge problem.

Our team sets it with your square image, so that way it all flows properly for that metadata we just talked about in Yoast SEO. And if we are able to, we prefer to embed that banner image, which is the longer rectangle 1, within the post content, because that's actually what's better. Because then SEO sees, or Google sees, that you have an image at the top that has that alt text with that keyword in it. And then we flow into the post. It's really nice way to start it. And the Google box, love it. So we usually use a plugin to hide the featured image from defaulting to the top of the post. Whenever you set a featured image in the blog post, most websites start with displaying that on the front end at the very top before you go into anything, even the title of the post, blog post. We find that's just not effective because you want that photo to be different from what you want displayed at the top of your blog post in most cases, because that image, that featured image also displays on your podcast page, where you see that list of every single blog post we've ever published for you. And it also displays out on the Internet. And we find that it just needs to really be a square. And so for us, we prefer to make that a square and hide the featured image. Again, that varies for every client. We have plenty of clients we don't do that on. And we make that featured image a banner and we don't hide it. So it is completely up to you and what your needs are. But that plugin is a little hack. It's literally called Hide Featured Image. When you go looking for it, if those of you out there who aren't our clients are looking for it, it's a super easy checkbox. You just check it and it literally makes the featured image no longer display at the top. It's just that simple. And then for db, it's a global setting. You have to go into all the posts throughout the whole website and set them all to Disable that featured image from displaying at the top. So if you have db, just know it's an all or nothing thing with all your posts. You don't get to do it on individual episodes like we do for our other clients. The reason why I like Hide featured Image is because if we have a client that does blogs outside of the podcast, they could keep that featured image as they had it before we worked with them and keep displaying it by default on the top. And we can disable it on only our posts with this plugin. So it's really nice and it allows your whole team to sort of decide for each category of posts you're making making on your site if you want that featured image there. So that one's really nice. So then there's number four. Better click to tweet. Better click to tweet. I love this plugin. It makes social media a breeze. Mitch Russo always talks about it because he loves it. So basically we take those little quotes. We take about a sentence every couple of paragraphs. We alternate it. Usually we try to make it so there's a tweet and then a couple paragraphs and then a caption graphic and then a couple paragraphs and a tweet. Because as you guys know, those blog posts get really long. Because if you're talking for 30, 40 minutes on a podcast, that's a lot of words to have to go into a transcript. And it can get overwhelming if we don't break up about every third or fourth paragraph. Right? So these elements help us do that. The tweets need a special plugin in order to work because unfortunately we don't work with Twitter. We're not Twitter. Right. So you need a special plugin to be able to do that. All it does is it takes that quote that we've said our coffee team has selected for you, puts it in the plugin, and it displays it as it looks like, literally like it's going to be a tweet on the page. It's like kind of a call out. You guys have probably seen it before. And then when you click it, it opens Twitter in a new tab. The quote's already in there. It gives you a little short URL to the blog post, so you've got your link back going. And then it'll even tag your Twitter handle if I program it into the back end. And our team now usually checks your website. And if you have a Twitter listed, we've already programmed it in there because we want to make sure that you're getting tagged when people use this plugin. So that is better. Click to tweet. It is such a great plugin. I love using it. They even have a paid version and you can customize the colors if you so choose. We do that for Tracy's websites because she's a colorist, so she loves to mess with her colors on her site. But if you're one of those people, you could upgrade yours as well, and we're happy to configure it for you. So, yeah, that's better. Clip Tweet. And it literally is spelled and sounds exactly like that. Better clicked. Tweet is the name. So the final plugin that I want to recommend to you guys is a duplication plugin, some kind of plugin that allows you to duplicate pages and posts. And I know it Sounds funny, but WordPress doesn't come with that by default. And this is where WordPress falls a little short from a user interface perspective for your average person who just wants to build an entrepreneurial website. It's really intended for developers who know a little bit more about websites and what they're doing. And so they don't have a clone feature already for the pages and posts and you have to install it. Luckily, Yoast has one, so we just use Yoast's version. It makes it really easy and make sure the permalinks stay correct. Because Yoast is all SEO conscious already. They make sure that when it duplicates, it is adding on A2 to the URL and it is changing it. So that way if it accidentally published the duplicate, you wouldn't have any SEO issues going on with that. So that's why we like to use the OST SEO Duplicate Post plugin. It is literally called Duplicate post by Yoast SEO. So that one, it just adds a little duplicate option next to every post and page in the back end so you can clone it. It clones it as is every setting comes and clones so it looks identical. That's what our team does because it ensures that if someone's sick and I have to have a new blog or do your blog post that week because I happen to have someone gone, it's going to look the same every single time because everyone has been briefed on your sop and we even duplicate the previous post to make sure the next one is following that same format, even if you made an adjustment in that previous week, because we're duplicating the most recent one.

So that is the final plugin. So those are the top five plugins. Everyone that I really, really recommend. Now there is one that I want to give as a bonus. Now, some of you may be aware WordPress had a change in their post sort of editor, right? They have the Gutenberg Editor and they used to have the Classic Editor. I personally love the Classic Editor. I feel like I'm working in Word when I'm using it like a Word document and it feels like I'm in a text editor. It's really nice. I feel like I can embed things there like I'm working in a Google Doc almost. But in the back end of my website, I personally prefer working in Classic Editor. When I switch to the Guten Visual, like the Block editor they have there, my brain breaks and I don't understand where to find anything anymore and I'm lost. So for me, I needed a plugin that switched us to only using the Classic Editor. But my team needed the new version because they actually really liked the Gutenberg Editor and they didn't really care. So we found a plugin called Classic Editor. Most of you have it on your website already and all it does is allow you to to toggle between the two types of editors on the back end of your WordPress. So that way no matter what your team's preferences, they could use whichever version they preferred in that backend editor. Okay, so that's Classic Editor. It's actually right on the top plugins list in WordPress right now. It's in the top 10 because they know it's a popular one. So that was the last bonus plugin I wanted to give you guys. It's not really needed, but I know a lot of people struggled with that shift and so it's a nice little hack, that little bonus plugin. So that's all.

The plugins 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 at United we pod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.