The Ultimate Guide To Build a Podcast Website
Discover how to build a podcast website that drives new listeners to your show.
You’re in the right place if you’ve been thinking about growing and promoting your podcast. Building a podcast website is one of the best ways to grow your show. A website offers a lot of upsides. In addition to establishing a cohesive brand with a unique domain, a podcast website offers your existing audience a better experience. Share more types of content, including videos, images, and transcripts. Get direct engagement with your audience via comments, contact forms, and voicemail.
The biggest advantage is the potential impact of SEO (search engine optimization) and organic traffic. Through SEO, people could find your podcast using search engines like Google to search for your podcast directly or for related topics or keywords that you cover on your show.
In the past, building a website for your show could have been a pain to set up. Importing many existing episodes or manually updating the site with new episodes isn’t fun.
Adding buttons and badges to popular platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify meant you had to download their official badges and manually upload them to the website. Then you need to add a nice audio player to the site, support popular options like a voicemail recording widget or a comment section, and all that is before you even try to customize the website’s colors or layout.
It used to take weeks (if not more) to create a proper podcast website with everything you needed. Fortunately, in recent years, platforms like Podcastpage.io have emerged and helped streamline the entire podcast website-building process. Creating a complete website for your podcast doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming – even for users with zero technical experience in building websites!
Why You Should Consider Creating a Website For Your Podcast
Take a quick look at your podcast’s listing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This listing is very basic – you can generally only display your podcast title, artwork, and a brief description. Each episode gets the same artwork, title, and show notes, leaving you little room or flexibility to display more content, layouts, etc.
As mentioned above, a website lets you display many different types of content. While you can’t post much on your podcast listing on Spotify/Apple, on a website, you can add videos, downloadable attachments, widgets or embedded code, full transcripts, images, documents, comment sections, voicemail widgets, or contact forms.
Besides offering different types of content on your pages, you can control the podcast pages and how they look – you can add multiple pages like a “Home” page, an “About” or “Contact” page, and fully control the content of those pages. You also can customize all colors to match your podcast’s or brand’s style.
Read Next: Things Every Podcast Website Needs
With a website, you also have a direct communication line to interact with your audience. They can contact you directly at any given time, and you can display updates and news or even set up a blog. Visitors can leave you messages, reviews, or voice messages.
When a visitor lands on your website, they focus on your content. In contrast, when a user is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or even YouTube looking around your episode, they can quickly get distracted and click on other people’s content instead.
It’ll also be easier to promote your show with a website. If you have a custom domain (for example, www.mypodcast.com) – you can mention it during your show or send the link to people who may be interested. Otherwise, you have to say something like, “Find us on your favorite podcasting platform,” and that’s harder to remember and accomplish. With a podcast website, you have your own “place” online, and you don’t rely on aggregators, directories, or other platforms to feature your content – you have full control.
We also talked about SEO above. SEO is a proven channel that can bring many new listeners to your podcast. Once you establish a website, you can start gaining organic traffic by regularly adding content to it, which could be your #1 growth strategy. When people search the title of your show online, you want them to land on your website, not on a random podcast platform – it’s a much better outcome for you. Later on, you could even find sponsors to advertise on the website and sell merchandise or subscriptions via the website directly.
How To Build a Podcast Website
What features are important to have on a podcast website?
Now that we know how important and impactful a website can be for your podcast, let’s explore the features you’ll actually need to create the perfect podcast website.
1. A professionally-designed website template
When you create a new website for your podcast, you want it to look modern, sleek, and beautiful all around. You can’t just display an awkwardly designed page without structure or sub-pages. To get started faster, consider using a dedicated podcast website template.
A good template will include starter content that you can customize and make your own, but also imports your existing episodes and helps you display different types of widgets and an audio player.
2. Podcast features and automations
When designing a podcast website, you’ll want to offload parts from your to-do list.
Find a platform that automates the syncing part between your podcast RSS feed and the website so you don’t have to post or import episodes yourself. Furthermore, an audio player is an absolute must, even better if you can play episodes directly from the homepage. Many sites use a “continuous” or “sticky” audio player that keeps playing at the bottom as the user browses through different pages on the site.
Another critical part is to display icons to follow your show on popular platforms.
Lastly, importing your existing podcast reviews and allowing your audience to post new reviews is highly recommended so you can have a good amount of social proof on the site.
3. Engaging content, widgets, and social sharing
Displaying a blog on your site can help bring even more SEO “juice”, and an easy way to provide more in-depth content to your audience.
You’ll probably also want to include social-sharing widgets or buttons directly on your episode pages or all pages of your site to make sharing episodes possible with a click of a button.
If you’re looking for a feature-rich podcast website builder, check out Podcastpage. Podcastpage provides high-quality audio players and a wide range of beautiful pre-designed templates to help you create a site with minimal effort.
Some podcast website examples using Podcastpage include:
Conclusion
Building a dedicated podcast website can go a long way for your show. It’ll help you find new listeners, interact with your existing audience, and offer more types of content. In the longer run, you’ll have an easier way to share, promote, and monetize the podcast.
Whether you’re looking to build the most simple “set-it-and-forget-it” website or a full podcast website with dozens of pages and unique layouts, Podcastpage.io is the right platform for the task.
It’ll help you create the podcast website you’ve been looking for, without a hefty price and without taking too much of your time. Creating a website should be one of your top priorities for growing and marketing your podcast, so go ahead and start building today!
Danielle Desir Corbett is a podcast marketing coach, founder of WOC Podcasters, and host of The Thought Card, an award-winning, 4x grant-funded personal finance, and travel podcast empowering financially savvy travelers to travel more and build wealth. Go here to learn Danielle’s incredible story — how following her creative passion led to her becoming a six-figure creative entrepreneur. If you want to reach out to Danielle, contact: info (at) danielledesir (dot) com.
