110: How to Optimize Your Podcast Website, With Brenden Mulligan

This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and The New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guests' internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. You don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And overall, the audio quality is way better. Riverside also now supports text-based editing. You can now edit your high quality video and audio content by browsing a transcript of your recording and editing the text just like you do with a word processor. This will speed up your editing process and you can even edit your content without listening to it. So if you're recording your interviews remotely, hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Visit Riverside.fm and use my code Grow15 that's GROW15 to start recording studio quality sound and video and to get 15% off a membership plan. How easy is it for you to update your podcast's website? Do you even have a website for your podcast? What does it look like? Is it easy to navigate, easy to discover? When someone searches for your podcast on Google, does your podcast website show up first? How much time and money do you spend on the design, upkeep, and maintenance of your podcast website? Now, in my experience, serving over 5,000 podcasters for free, coaching over 115 podcasters in the Grow the Show podcast accelerator and in taking two of my own podcasts past a combined half a million dollars in revenue. What I've found is that most podcasters fall into one of two camps regarding their podcast website. Either A, they're completely overwhelmed, have virtually no web presence and don't even know the first place to start or B, the opposite is true and they've actually spent too much time developing their website and SEO at the expense of both time and money and at the expense of growth and monetization ironically. Whether you are in either of those camps or maybe somewhere in between this episode of Grow the Show is going to help you. That's because today we're joined by Brendan Mulligan, the creator of pod page, which is an easy podcast website creation platform, kind of like Squarespace, but easier and designed specifically for podcasters. Today, Brendan is here to set the record straight on these questions that continue to plague podcasters to this day. So if you're a podcasting entrepreneur who wants to maximize what they get out of their podcast website while minimizing the time and money spent on it, stick with us. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your audience and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. Today, we're going to be talking about your podcast website and how you can make sure that your show has the right presence and shows up on the top of Google search results without spending tons of money and time or learning how to build and maintain a confusing website yourself. All of those lessons are coming at you right now here on Grow the Show. My name is Brendan Mulligan, I'm the creator of pod page. I spent the first few years out of college working for a record label booking agency management company in the traditional music industry. And then sort of in the mid 2000s, my space had kind of exploded, iTunes has exploded. There's a million ways to get your music online and the industry didn't really know what to do with it. And so I left sort of the traditional business side and started building technology that helped musicians syndicate content across all these new different marketing channels because it was kind of unclear what was the valuable ones. You know, my space was the biggest, but there was 50 my space copycats that some of them looked better, some of them were great for a specific music niche, some of them were allowed you to download music. There wasn't really a clear, you know, this is the future. And so most musicians spend a lot of their time trying to get their stuff everywhere. And so I was doing that as a music executive and I just knew that it was a better way. So he built artist data, which gave musicians an easy way to keep their data up to date all across the different web platforms. And then that just got me into tech. And so I was doing music tech after that company, I built a actually a web platform for musicians, because during that time, my space fell apart and all these musicians that put all of their time and effort into getting popular on these very specific platforms, driving their audience to go friend them on the platform. And when my space fell apart, their fan base disappeared. This is a familiar trope in recent times, my space, Vine, countless others. It was just like these distribution platforms are amazing. And so they put all their eggs into the basket of these giant companies in that case, my space, but now it's Apple. And so I ended up building for musicians just a very simple way to spin up a website, start collecting email addresses. And so that was called one sheet and it's worked on that. And that was my last sort of music business venture. But Brendan ultimately decided that he didn't want to work with musicians. When you're building for the people who want to be famous, I've noticed that one of two things happen. So they get started. They start using your tool. If they get famous, it's because they're talented and they're amazing. And they shouldn't have to pay for your tool anymore. They shouldn't have to pay as much because they're so great. Yeah, if they don't get famous, it's because your tool doesn't work. Instead, he focuses energy on a new industry that was blowing up app developers, again, this creative class of people who should be spending their time building apps and not spending their time building websites for their apps, you know, marketing websites or tracking reviews. If you're listening closely, you're sensing a pattern here. First, Brendan built a platform to allow musicians to easily build websites so they can focus on their craft. Then Brendan built a platform to allow app developers to build websites so they can focus on their craft. You can imagine where this might be going. Anyway, the platform that Brendan created to help app developers was called launch kit Google bought that so I spent a few years of Google working on various projects. And there is where Brendan noticed a third class of creators who needed help. I started seeing some very similar patterns to what I'd seen in the music industry in the podcasting space, you know, you search for a podcast on Google and the entire front page of the search results page is all Apple Spotify. It's these big companies. It's not like the actual podcasters themselves. There just wasn't a big awareness on like how dangerous it is to put all of your eggs in the basket of these distribution platforms. And then I started looking around at the tools and it's just there wasn't anything sort of perfectly geared towards podcasters and sort of the aha moment for me was. I think the worst thing you can do when you're working with creatives is give them more work to do. And I like there's just too much effort like these people should be focusing on a single thing which is creating great content. That's it. Everything else should be automated if possible. And once they get big enough, they can hire a team to do it. And so I was like, they don't have four hours a day to work to do this thing. They don't have, you know, an extra day of the week to breathe focused on whatever the things someone was pitching me was. And then about a year and a half ago started working on pod page for podcasters. That brings us to pod page a website creation tool that creates a full website for a podcast in a matter of minutes, which if you've ever tried to build a website before even through Squarespace or Wix. You know that it usually takes ages, but pod page takes like five minutes and that's largely thanks to the unique way that the podcast world is built. Once I realized that on the podcasting side, they're just reading an RSS feed and this RSS feed was public. And I could use it to generate a website if that was sort of the thing that clicked for me because I was like, oh, cool. Not only can I help someone build a website, but I can make it a 10 second process for them because all the other agents are there. Yeah, as you got into serving podcasters, is there anything you did different this time around? There's one thing that's harder and more frustrating in the podcasting space, which is people are in podcasting for so many different reasons. Yeah, which makes it really hard to build a product for them because it's, you know, it's like there's so many different customer profiles. People have a podcast to promote their book or they have a book to promote their podcast to promote their consulting business or their other law firm or they have a podcast to promote their startup or they have a podcast to make money. There's so many reasons. And so that's been the biggest challenge for me is having to figure out how to build something that works for everyone. But ultimately, after jumping from creative industry to creative industry, Brandon has found that podcasting is where he thrives. I think the podcasting community has been like just amazing. There's very few people who have been sort of like. Certainly an angry and there's a lot of musicians who are amazing, but there's part of the musicians attitude is like I want to be famous. I want to play in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I am amazing, right? And so like there's an arrogance that this is total like generalization. Yeah, and you see this actually I won't even pin it on musicians like music executives. They're all like just they're just think the best thing. When I was in the music industry, literally they wouldn't talk to you unless you were important to them. No way. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, you know, what you see on an entourage is same in Hollywood. No, it's like that's not that's not like made up. It's just like there's this arrogance and these people have built amazing things, right? But when I got into tech, everyone was a lot more welcoming. And I feel like podcasting is that people are just a little more genuine because people are doing podcasts not to get famous because they love raising chickens in their backyard. And they just want to talk about it every week, right? And so like they're just happy to have a website to be able to help promote like to talk about it. Yeah, it's not people who are like, I'm want to be bigger than the Beatles. The other side for me that I thought is that they're it's not a place for easy money. You know, and so it doesn't attract people that are just kind of in to get rich because it's not easy to get rich with podcasting. I think another thing actually between podcasts and musicians. And this isn't entirely true because I'm sure that there are exceptions to this rule, but like there's not a lot of podcasts that I've seen that have gotten successful. Any other way than the podcaster continually putting out great content on a regular basis for a long period of time. Yeah, I feel like that's very rare that I ever hear like this episode on this podcast is viral. I think some of the best musicians actually take the podcasting approach and like we're just going to keep putting out music. We're not going to try to have hits. We're just going to build an audience slowly over a long period of time. And those people end up having these like really long term passionate loyal audiences. Passionate loyal audiences are what fuel a podcast business. And yes, a podcast business is a marathon, not a sprint, but part of the challenge of being a successful podcaster is that you have to balance long term patience with short term urgency. You must have urgency in action urgency in publishing and you must have urgency in how you spend your time. Everyone here knows that it's important to have a website for any business or creative project. I think that some people vastly overestimate how important it is, but yes, it is indeed important. But building a website takes serious time and energy, especially if you're not super technical. And that's time and energy that's taken away from the craft of making great podcast episodes and growing and monetizing your audience. This is the problem that Brendan set out to solve with pod page. And he aims to do this with several features that are designed to make podcast website creation happen really fast. So the first one is automatically created episode pages. So whenever you release a new episode, you don't have to do anything. There will be a fully search engine optimized page created for that episode on your website. It will have your media player from your podcast host. So if you're a bus rat person, you have your bus rat player on that page. It imports your artwork and import your show notes. It puts all the player badges on the page. It also makes it pretty URL that Google loves. So if it's episode 46, you can always go to your domain.com slash 46 and it'll forge you to that page. So just first and foremost, like the episode page because that ultimately is like what, what it's all about. I'm very, very, very against anyone who built a website that is just like on the front page. There's a big media player that has all your episodes in it. Like you should have a page for every episode. That's how search engine optimization works. You need to have like a home fridge. So that's the first and foremost, and it happens automatically and it happens whenever you release an episode. Other things are like reviews. So we'll pull in reviews from Apple podcasts soon pod chaser. And so every time someone leaves a review for your podcast, he gets pulled in it gets posted to your website. You get an email about it. It's easy. It's got a link you can click to share it on Twitter really quickly. It looks really pretty and nice when you share it on Twitter. And then you also, if you want to, you can also collect reviews on your website. So people can leave you review directly on your website if that's something you want. Nice. We have player badges for everything. So you never have to like create a, you know, listen to me on Spotify badge. Like you just enter your Spotify link that stuff shows up. We integrate with all the different donation platforms whether it's like buy me a coffee, glow anchor, Patreon, PayPal. So like you just basically give us a little bit of info and we build a page for your revenue. And there's a whole sponsor section. So you can just load in your sponsors for each episode or for your podcast. And they just wow those logos will show up across the page or on your episode pages. And so like, same with guests. You can build guest profiles. And once you build a guest profile, you can associate it to an episode. It goes in a guest directory. You can send people a link. Guests a link to fill out their own profile. And I can intake form where they sign a release for your podcast. Like it's just like. It gets done. Pacific. It is for podcasters. I'm drooling over here, man. That's like a replace my entire team. Like it's just stuff you don't have to think about. And it's there for you. There's a voicemail feature that people can leave you a voicemail by default. You don't have to like use a third party service. It just works. It really does just work. It's nuts. When I started doing research for this episode, I signed up for pod page to poke around and see if it really was the real deal. So I plugged in my RSS feed for Philly Who, my other podcast. And within about seven minutes, I had a whole fully functional website that sold merch automatically updated. And that connected members to supercast and that already had separate pages for each of my 70 plus episodes dating back to 2018. It was nuts. I immediately deactivated my WordPress account for Philly Who. I fired my WordPress developer and I deleted like 20 steps from our episode release checklist because they weren't necessary anymore. I had no plan on migrating my site over to pod page at all, but within 30 minutes, it was already done. It was insanely fast, which is good because I can't tell you how many podcasters I see get completely consumed with website creation design and optimization. And Brendan sees this too. One big mistake I see is being overly focused on design perfection and not focused on like tools to connect with an audience or ease of use. So like, and this is a self serving statement, but there's a lot of people who like love WordPress because they can have like the perfect theme and they can make the colors the perfect colors and make fonts the exact right size they want. And they they can install a 52,000 plugins. I think that yeah, look at the plugin director, like they want that Uber customization and what they end up doing is customizing himself into a corner where like they've built like a pretty site. It kind of breaks when WordPress comes out with a new version or a plugin chain. There's like all these things that can break it, but they don't spend the time just like thinking about how they're going to connect with the actual audience. So I have a lot of people who contact me and say like, oh, really a pod page is great. But like, how do I customize these 50 things? And I was like, I usually say go use WordPress. But like the real answer is like, don't worry about those things. Instead think about how you're going to get listeners to leave you voicemails and then put them into your show or how are you going to. How are you going to build an mailing list? What are you going to provide? Like what value can you provide your listeners if they actually give you an email address? That's the stuff I think they should be thinking about not thinking about. Making this website this perfect thing. I think some people go away overboard with the SEO strategies. Ultimately SEO is hard. I think making sure that when someone searches your podcast name, your number one on Google is actually relatively easy. You just buy a domain name that is your podcast name had a decently optimized website and then you added into your feed like make it your RSS feed main website instead of your host website. And then you wait a month and a lot of times that's enough to put you at the top because Google will look at your website and be like, well, this has got to be more authoritative than the Apple podcasts link. Right. So we'll just put it up. That's easy. I think everyone should do that. Even if you have like if you use the simple cast, like if you use one if you use your host website, you should still buy your domain name. Yeah, 100% of the time, like never have your website be whatever your podcast. Buzzbrow.com, like always have to be your domain name. Right. But then people want to like they go over optimizing on keywords. And they're like, oh, we want to rank for beekeeping. And it's like it's going to be so hard for your podcast right now to rank for beekeeping. Like focus on the content. Don't worry about the fact that like you don't come up for beekeeping podcasts. Overall, this should be easy. We shouldn't be spending all of our time and money on website design in SEO or podcasters. We should be podcasting someone who he was 80 he wrote me yesterday. I asked him for some feedback. And I didn't know he was 80 and he wrote he's like, I'm an 80 year old man. I have no clue how many of his works. I think I'd asked him like why he hadn't used a feature. I was just curious. And he was like, I just needed a website. And this is just this is primating. That's why I don't want to learn WordPress like. Yeah, I think WordPress is amazing. Like I probably off board and graduate, you know, handful of people every month from pod page to WordPress because I'm like, you're huge. Yeah, I mean, if you customize your site more, you can probably make more money because of your monetization. Like you should have more than pod page gives you go to WordPress. Pay someone a few thousand dollars to build your really good website. Like because they're ready for it. But I would say most people don't need that. Of course, pod page is not the only option here. In fact, you might already have a perfectly suitable podcast website that comes with your podcast hosting platform. I'll say like there's a million people who have a WordPress. I do don't need something that complicated. Yeah, probably there's a bunch of people who don't need pod page right podcast host website is perfect for them. And I usually give this talk or I talk through like the different options. And I usually say before you do anything else, look at, you know, go to your podcast host website and see if you see if that does what it needed to do. There's a lot of them not everyone, but a lot of them have pretty good websites now above all else. Let's get a website going. Have your own domain and move on. The goal is to make it like really, really easy to figure this stuff out. It's got to be, you know, effortless to set up and not a pain to maintain. Yeah, if it's either one of those things that takes away from the time they should be spending on creating the thing that they're trying to put out into the world. So how much time are you spending on your podcasts website? If it's a ton of time and you're one of the folks who has a big bulky WordPress, it might be time to consider simplifying. If you're a business owner who needs more than what a simple podcast website offers, that's fine too. Just make sure your time and energy isn't being usurped by constant website tweaks, redesigns, plugins or updates. And if you're not really sure where you fall in all this, join us in the free Grow the Show Facebook group where I and over a thousand other Grow the Show listeners can give you direct feedback on your website and let you know if you've checked the boxes you need to check. Oh, and if you want to give pod page ago, Brendan has graciously offered Grow the Show listeners $20 off any pro plan. If you simply use promo code, GTS, the letters GTS for Grow the Show. The link for that is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was produced and written by me and Catherine Nails with post production by Jeremy Bishop and a very special thanks to Brendan Mulligan. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidtland. See you next time.