Sample WordPress Sites for Podcasts

Promote Your Website or Your iTunes Listing?

Is it best to promote your website or your listing in Apple Podcasts? This is a question that sometimes comes up in the various podcast groups. Furthermore, people in the industry can disagree on this. So let’s look at some podcast websites with this question in mind. Do I promote my website or do I promote my listing in iTunes?

Browse Sites

What should be on your podcast website?

Here are some of the things we saw on the websites above.

  • Clear evidence that there is a podcast.
  • A way to listen to your podcast with players on the site.
  • Multiple options for subscribing to your podcast using apps.
  • Show notes – If a podcast is just a blog post with a media file attached to it, the show notes are the content of that post. They’re whatever extra information you want to provide about a podcast episode. They can be as brief or detailed as you like and include pictures and links just like any blog post. If you have show notes, you have a better chance of being discovered by search engines. So even if podcast listeners don’t commonly read the show notes, it could still be worth it to give them some attention.
  • Links to social media
  • E-newsletter subscription options
  • Podcast networks
  • Supplemental blog posts
  • Supporting other endeavors – sometimes the podcast is supporting other endeavors such as a book, movies, service, etc.

Why I Promote my Website instead of Apple Podcasts etc.

It’s easy to find conflicting advice about podcasting best practices. For me, this was an easy one. I promote my website. It’s the thing that I control. It gives people more subscription options as opposed to funneling them into an application that they might not even use (i.e., Apple Podcasts). It just makes sense to me. So why promote Apple Podcasts instead? I think the theory goes that if you get a bump in subscribers within a certain period of time, you could get featured in the directory. Of course this would potentially give you a big boost in downloads and – hopefully – subscribers. However, I would still rather have my own domain name out there in the world as opposed to a link to a listing in just one of many podcast directories.

How do you get featured in Apple Podcasts?

As for getting a boost in Apple Podcasts, industry experts will tell you that their data shows that getting that boost is determined by the number of new subscribers you get within a certain period of time, let’s say a week, but they break it down even further. On the other hand, there is no correlation between a boost and the number of reviews you get. There was a discussion about this in the Podcasters Google+ Group.

While I still see no reason to promote Apple Podcasts instead of my own website, it might be worth experimenting with ways to get that boost in other ways. I can imagine a scenario that’s sort of like a pledge drive week where you promote Apple Podcasts subscriptions. You could work with other podcasters to do some cross promotion around this. What if as a group we could “deliver” 2000 (or name your number, 1000?) real subscribers over two weeks? By real, I mean that subscriptions are developed through personal contacts as opposed to through paid “click farms”. Is this possible with some organization? Is it worth it? I don’t know.

PowerPress SEO

The PowerPress plugin’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features make it easier for search engines to find your podcast. This is yet another reason why I love PowerPress. The developers over at Blubrry stay on top of these things so that I can focus on making a podcast.

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