So you have a podcast, or even multiple podcasts – That’s awesome! Many podcasters choose to only focus on recording the actual podcast, without making any “marketing” efforts like posting on social media or creating a dedicated podcast website for their shows. Podcasters often debate whether they should create a site for their podcast. It’s true, creating a website can involve more work, and perhaps expenses too, but for some podcasters it’s a no-brainer. A website can really ramp up your game, boost your podcast discoverability and increase your listener base or audience. In this article, we’ll cover some key benefits of creating a podcast website.
If you are asking yourself right now “Isn’t it enough to just have my podcast on all the podcast directories?” The short answer is probably not. You may get many or most of your listeners through podcast apps and directories, but you are missing on many more.
Why is a podcast website important?
Creating a website for your podcast means you have more control over it in your own hands. Controlling your podcast’s online appearance, your brand, your audience, and more are key to growth and success. So what does creating a website have to do with all that? Let’s jump right to it –
1. One main online hub for your podcast
By creating your own podcast website, you can finally establish some additional branding around your podcast. You get to choose a domain name, decide how to design the site, what to include in it, and how to promote or brand it.
A website really gives you a way to build one main online space for your content. Whether it’s just your podcast, or also includes a blog, a newsletter, videos, and more – it can all “live” within your main website.
Unlike sharing your generic “link” page like Linktree and all the similar solution, you’re actually moving visitors towards your own site on your own domain.
Not only it is better for your site’s SEO (and we’ll cover more on that later), you also keep the listeners in your own online hub instead of sending them to visit some other platforms like Anchor or Apple Podcasts, where they could wonder off to other podcasts by other creators.
Promoting your own brand
When you only add your podcast to Spotify, Apple Podcasts and so on, your podcast is just one out of millions of podcasts out there. You must find ways to get your podcast stand out and make it easier for people to find it and listen to it.
If you share links to your podcast on Spotify, Anchor, Apple podcasts or others, you’re essentially promoting their brand instead of yours. Setting up a custom domain for your podcast website is highly important and would help you promote your own brand. Saying something like “Check us out at “my-podcast dot com” is a thousand times better than just saying follow us on “x podcasting platform” or “find us where you listen to podcasts” and so on. Furthermore, by controlling the website, it also gives you more stability in case your podcast gets banned or removed by some podcast platforms.
Finally, If you have more than one podcast/show, a consolidated website is a great solution to circulate listeners from one of your shows to another within the same website.
2. SEO – get more potential listeners
You don’t have to know much about SEO in order to benefit from it. It’s important to understand that even if you don’t know a thing about SEO, just having a dedicated podcast website still includes tons of benefits in terms of SEO. You can start getting organic traffic via search engines, and this can drive more users to your site, and eventually many of them can become listeners.
Your site is the one place where you can easily display all of your episodes (without being limited in total the number of episodes, like in some platforms) and enable discussion or additional content.
Whether you understand SEO or not, creating a website with unique content, with podcast episodes on separate URLs, and adding even more content like custom pages or a blog would eventually drive search engine traffic to your site. (assuming the content is diverse enough and that you’re not specifically covering a super-competitive niche).
We wrote an in-depth article about Podcast SEO which you should definitely check out if you want to learn more both about website search engine optimization and podcast platform optimization.
It’s key to get your podcast website in the web-based search results on search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo or Bing. These search engines are basically crawling through the web, trying to understand what each website is about, and rank them based on different algorithms. If you rank high enough on certain keywords, potential listeners can find you organically, and these listeners were (theoretically) not specifically looking for your podcast, but rather for a certain set of keywords which matched well with your site.
If you’re intermediate by the technical aspects of Podcast SEO, you can always use a podcast website builder platform that deals with it for you, like Podcastpage.io.
3. Growing your audience
Growing your podcast isn’t always easy, but a dedicated podcast website can get you closer to your goals. Many potential listeners can find your show by organically stumbling upon your website via a search engine (or social networks), as mentioned above.
Your audience would be definitely happy if they are able to find everything they need in one main site. Being able to contact you directly via your site, browsing through a list of all your episodes, getting additional content shared solely on the website, and many more options would make a great impact.
Growing your podcast while building a website also means that each new episode you add can be the source of many potential future visitors that could find your episodes through a search.
Most importantly, a direct way to communicate with your audience is important. You can add a newsletter opt-in form on your website and turn podcast subscribers into email subscribers. You can include comments, feedback opportunities, posting news or updates, requests or FAQ sections, and so many other types of pages that would help both your podcast and your listeners.
Direct access to your audience lets you better communicate with them, and provide a better experience for the listeners who also visit your site.
Analytics & insights
If you add analytics to your site, it might will help you understand where your listeners are coming from. You can also see how they get to your site, and what they are looking for once they’re there.
The web-based analytics are beyond the actual podcast stats you might get from your podcast host or other services. The podcast analytics and website analytics are complementary, so you can only get the entire story if you have a website for your podcast.
You can try and leverage this data – understand where it makes more sense to promote your podcast and what might interest your audience. Combined with the comments and feedback you get from your listeners, it can only help you improve and better engage with your listeners.
4. Extra content – show notes, blog and pages
Show notes are a very important part of your podcast. It’s true that planning, recording, editing and uploading an episode can be exhausting. However, that’s no excuse to avoid writing podcast show notes (aka episode notes).
Many potential listeners decide whether they would listen to an episode or not only after reading the episode description. That’s why it’s so important to invest sufficient efforts into writing show notes. These can give a sneak peek into your podcast content, information and vibe. Show notes can also help increase your traffic organically through SEO, as mentioned earlier.
We wrote a detailed guide about show notes, but we will give you the TL;DR version here. Show notes are the written content that is attached to each episode and appears on all the podcast platforms. These can have an extra added value to what has been said in the episode. When you upload the latest episode to your podcast host, it usually only includes plain text. (Or sometimes formatted text and links).
By adding improved show notes on your website, you can include additional types of content. Including: files, maps, videos, images and much more. The show notes should also cover the gist of each episode. They can include a breakdown to audio timestamps. (allow listeners to jump between specific parts mentioned in the breakdown). And at times also offer a full word-by-word transcript of the episode.
Other types of content
Show notes are not the only type of content you can add to your website. A blog is another tool that when used correctly, can also improve your traffic and SEO tremendously. Other than that, having a blog is great for your audience or for people who prefer to also read some of the topics you cover.
It’s recommended to add custom pages like an “About us” page, contact, team, or any other pages you might have that would interest the people that visit your website.
5. Monetization opportunities
If you already have an existing podcast with a decent amount of regular listeners/downloads, you may be certainly interested in making a business out of it. There are multiple ways to monetizing a podcast, and a website can help quite a bit with that.
We wrote an extended article about podcast monetization. It’s definitely worth reading if you want to learn more about monetizing your podcast.
There are multiple ways in which you can generate revenues from your podcast. You can obviously find sponsors or advertisement opportunities to air during the episodes. Many podcasters choose this method, but a dedicated podcast website can open up a few new opportunities for you.
With a website, you can enable a subscription or membership area and generate revenues by selling access to your content. You can also include some “premium” episodes that will be shared only with your paying listeners. There are several services that will handle all the subscription-related tasks, so you can focus on your podcast.
You can enable donations and add links to donate to your podcast if you have a website. It’s easy to add a PayPal, Patreon, or even a “Buy Me a Coffee” link/button to your website.
Additionally, it’s possible to sell merchandise through your site and offer additional services. Your website is an excellent platform to set up an online shop. You can sell different types of products directly from your site.
How to create a website for your podcast?
Now that you are convinced you need a website for your podcast, you may be wondering how to create a podcast website, or what it may require from you. That’s what we are here for!
Podcastpage.io is a podcast site builder created specifically for podcasters. It can help anyone create a podcast website in minutes, without any prior experience.
With Podcastpage, you’ll be able to create beautiful podcast websites in just a few clicks. It’s also packed with tons of features for podcasters and you can easily customize the entire website. There are multiple ways of creating a website. Some website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or Weebly can also be intuitive to work with. With that said, they are not really built nor optimized for podcasting.
Podcastpage is much easier for podcasters, beginners or professionals alike, when comparing to the above platforms. Also, it’s much more flexible and powerful than some when comparing to “mini-sites” or “link sites” you can get from some podcast hosts or other companies. Podcastpage requires no coding or tech skills whatsoever.
How to create a podcast website with Podcastpage.io?
Start by creating an account, then create your site by first adding the site name. (It will determine your Podcastpage subdomain, but you can easily change it later). Then, find your podcast from the list, choose a theme, and viola! Your new podcast website is ready to go.
Now you can easily customize and design the website according to your branding. Change the logo, pick the colors, add an image. Customize your audio player. You can pick whether to use our custom audio player or use your podcast host embed player. Change the colors, add a border, or even make it a sticky audio player. (Which stays part of the layout even if you scroll or switch pages).
Finally, add custom pages or blog posts. Change the navigation menu to show the relevant pages. Update the social media and podcast platforms icons to direct to your accounts. Don’t forget to connect the website to your own custom domain to keep your branding.
Conclusion
In this article we reviewed 5 key benefits to explain why you must have a podcast website. These benefits include:
- One main online hub for your podcast – controlling your brand and displaying all your content in one place.
- SEO – getting more potential listeners from search engines organically.
- Having direct access to your listeners and growing your audience.
- Extra content – having the ability to add show notes, blog posts and pages.
- Monetization options – more opportunities will open up with a website.
Need a podcast website, but not sure where to start? Don’t forget to check out Podcastpage.io – the best podcast website builder.
