Help Me Podcast

Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a podcast designed to help you

launch and grow your own podcast. I'm Gino, your host, and I'm a

podcaster myself. And in this show, I'm gonna help pass down all the

things that I've learned from running my own podcast to

helping my clients with my Business Pleasant Podcasts, so we

as podcasters can grow together.

Hello. Hello. And welcome back to Help Me Podcast. I have another

monthly episode for you, with everything that I've

learned in the past month about podcasting. So this is my new format where

I do one longer podcast episode a month,

but I wrap up all of the things that I have learned within that month.

So I got three things that I wanna talk to you about today.

A podcast website, updating your Spotify for Podcasters

account, and TikTok. So last

month, the month of April, I took the whole month off of

releasing episodes from my podcast Learning Towards a Purpose

with the main goal of trying to get a website

set up for it. I recently came to the decision that I wanted

to have my own podcast website for a couple different reasons.

And I've also been looking to get away from GoDaddy, for a

long time now. And I have my Pleasant podcast website

on GoDaddy, or I did have my Pleasant Podcast website on GoDaddy.

And it's it's just very expensive, and the website

builder that I use through them is very limited.

Unfortunately, because I did use the GoDaddy website builder when I launched

my podcast website, I basically had to rebuild the whole thing,

using WordPress. So, basically, I went into the month of

April knowing that I had 2 websites to build with WordPress,

and I've had a little bit of experience in WordPress before, but not a whole

lot. So it was a big task, but I got both of the

websites done and published. Links in the show notes, so you can check

them out. But I'm here today to talk about my website for my

podcast and some things to think about if you're thinking about

having a podcast website. One of the main reasons that

I wanted to create one is for the possible

future of monetizing my podcast. For me, that's things

like maybe finding potential sponsors in the future.

And a podcast website is a great way for somebody

to learn more about the show and, you know, see what it is, see

all the episodes that I have. To give my show a little bit more credibility,

you know, if there's a full built out website for the podcast, it may

look better for sponsors. And, also, to potential

guests, if maybe you're trying to have some bigger name guests out there, you know,

they look you up and they see that you have your own website, it may

look a little bit more professional than just, like, you know, a podcast that's a

hobby, and you may be able to land bigger guests. And, you know, not

not to build a whole website just to impress somebody, but I think a website

helps to better show off your podcast and show

people what you're doing. So, you know, in the case of

maybe an interested sponsor, you could just send them the link and you don't have

to, you know, try to create this material that describes your show.

Your website will be showing off your podcast for you. But another

reason why I did it was also the ability to put

a ship to print merchandise site on it. And

I didn't quite finish setting that up yet. Probably more on that next

month. But, you know, a website can be a place where you can

sell your own merch for your podcast, t shirts, mugs, sweatshirts,

hats, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the website is a great place

to put your merch store. Another reason why I wanted to have my website

is because I wanted to be able to show up on Google.

Because I noticed that when I was searching my podcast, it was really

difficult for anything to come up. Even when I typed in the title,

Learning Towards Our Purpose, teaching really came up. And I think the

biggest issue is that because with your

podcast host website, it's not really your website. It's, for

example, mine's Transistor. So it's transistor.com/workingtowardsourpurpose. Learning,

therefore, it becomes really difficult to, like, actually show up when you Google it.

So that was kind of an issue that I didn't like. And

then also just thinking about, like, SEO, you know, there's not that many

people that are gonna find that through the keywords of my show and the show

notes. So really thinking about, like, organic

growth on the Internet. The best way for people to to find

my show is, a, to have a website that shows up when you type it

in, but also just to have, like, articles written for each

episode because that puts a lot more keywords out, and it just

it's different ways for people to find you. And, you know, especially the way that

my show is set up, where I'm mostly interviewing other people,

it gives me a chance to highlight them, to put backlinks in.

So that way, it gives more opportunities for people to get to the

site. And kind of just puts the show on the Internet more than it

was before. So with the intentions to grow and, you

know, deciding that I wanted to really put a lot into my podcast this year

and take it seriously, a website was the decision that I

came to. So in building out the website, I think

the the first thing that I figured out was I wanted to make it as

simple as possible. You know, I think you can easily over complicate

a website, which makes it harder to build and then also

harder on the user end. You know, nobody really wants to come to a

website that has a 1,000,000,000 tabs and it's confusing. So I

really wanted to keep it very clean and very simple. And

the main section of my website, the main, like, meat of the website,

is going to be the episodes page. And this is basically kind

of like a blog post, but each different post will be a new

episode. So I have my episodes tab, which highlights all my

guests, and then I have a my story tab, which gives a little bit

more information about what the show is, Then then I have a leave a review

tab because getting reviews is obviously helpful for your podcast and you wanna get

more. And then I also have a button where

you will eventually be able to buy some merch for the podcast,

but it's not completely set up yet. I also have some social media buttons

down at the bottom that don't clutter the header. And then, eventually,

I'm also going to make a contact page to have the

possibility for future guests to reach out to me or for people to, you know,

leave some feedback about the show. That's one of the future things that I'm going

to implement that I haven't gotten to yet. So, you know, a website,

for me, anyways, is always constantly evolving, constantly updating.

So it was important to me to, like, get, you know, 80% of the website

up there and to not be delayed by the details and the

little nice to have things. So I think that that was a big

lesson that I also learned in part in creating this website was, like,

you don't have to make it perfect. Just get, like, 80% of the way there,

you know, use the 80 20 rule and, don't let

perfectionism stop you from putting it out there. So there was a lot of things

that I needed for the website. There was graphics and pictures and,

you know, I made some stuff on Canva. I was getting pictures

from my guests. That was something that I needed to go ahead and do.

Some of the episodes that some of the earlier episodes that I had. I didn't

really have any, headshots or or pictures of my guests, so I

needed to do some research to find those. And then, you know, the bulk of

the work was just creating the articles for each episode.

So like I mentioned, each episode has a blog style

article where I have my embed player, from

Transistor that I linked with a little bit of code, and

people can listen to every episode in the

episode specific page. But, more importantly, it also has kind

of a summary that I've created. And I kinda came up with this

template. It took me a little bit for each episode, but I have a template

of what each page looks like. And it's basically,

you know, just a summary. So, you know, there's a

handful of paragraphs being the summary of the episode and talking about,

like, what we discussed on the episode. And then I have under that,

like, the the best quote that I found in the episode, just a short

quote that I can put in bold text, and it kind of catches the

eye of somebody who doesn't want to read the entire write up. And then

below that, I have the cover art for the specific episode and

then a list of bullet point topics to again, if somebody doesn't

want to read the whole episode description, they can kind of glance at those

topics and be like, Okay. That's maybe something that's interesting to me. Maybe

I'll read this further or maybe I'll listen to the episode. And then at the

bottom, I have a bio of my guest along with their links.

So I think I've intentionally tried to set it up because not everybody's

gonna read the entire teaching. But I think, like, giving somebody

something to grab on to to see if it's interesting to them, you know, if

they stumbled on the page. You don't wanna, like, bore them with, you know, just

a ton of writing. So I've tried to make it really simple and visual.

You can go to the link in the show notes to check my website out.

Go to the episodes tab, and you can even, you know, steal my

template for my episode podcast for your own podcast

website and, you know, make it your own and add some more stuff

too. So all that being said, the biggest tool,

and I wouldn't have been able to do it without this, is my podcast

AI platform, Cast Magic, that I use. And if you

haven't heard of Cast Magic, it's a great platform. And basically what it allows you

to do is just upload an MP 3 file and then it

creates all this content and copywriting for you.

So what I did was, for each episode, I uploaded it to Cast Magic.

It wrote speaker bios for me. It helped me with the bullet point

topics. It helped me grab a quote. It also helped me write the entire

article for me. Cast Magic is cool, where, like, you can pick what

you want it to spit out for you, but then you can also, chat

GBT style, have a prompt to where you can ask it

anything. So, basically, what I did was for each episode, I would go and ask

the prompt and say, hey. Can you write a blog article

for this website? And it just spit out, you know, 4 or

5 paragraphs depending on which episode. And, you know, what it

wasn't perfect, but it got me again like 80% of the way there

to where it was very easy for me to copy it, paste it into my

website, and then read it through and edit the way that I wanted it to

sound. So it still had my voice and my flavor, but, you know,

all the heavy lifting was done for me. And without that, it would have taken

me way longer to build my podcast website. So probably

couldn't have done it without Cast Magic, And using that platform is also

gonna help me keep releasing these blog articles for my podcast

episodes because it's not gonna be a ton of time invested

since AI is doing 80% of the work for me. So, yeah, I'll have a

link for Cast Magic in this episode also because, you know, it's a tool

that I think is really helpful for me. But I know that there's other tools

out there too. Alright. Now that brings me to the second

topic that I wanna talk about today, and that is some

updates that the Spotify for Podcasters is

doing. So Spotify for Podcasters, we

used to be called Anchor, is Spotify's free

podcast hosting platform. A lot I know a lot of people

that use it. I have a lot of clients that use it and I don't

use it personally. But the reason I know about this change is because one of

my clients sent me or forwarded me the email

And basically, by the by May 11th, which

is next Saturday, they want you to

basically change your password. There's a link that I'll have in

the show notes. But, basically, I think what they're doing is combining

their different account types. Because I know that it was, like, super confusing

to have a Spotify for Podcast log in and then a

Spotify account log in. So it seems that they're making their

login process a little bit easier. You basically just have to go to the link

and update your password real quick. It shouldn't take you very long. But one

of the cool things that they're adding with this is they're now allowing

you to have multiple podcasts under one account,

which used to be one thing that, like, really hindered that

posting platform. Right? You you used to have to have a special

Spotify account for every podcast that you had. So now they're

kinda opening it up to having more than 1 podcast. And, you

know, like, the paid podcast host that I use, Transistor, allows me to

do this. So it's cool now that this free platform is now giving you

this option that you didn't have in the past. So really, I think what Spotify

is trying to do is be competitive with the podcast hosting platforms that

are out there. And, this kind of helps get one step

closer. So just a reminder that, you gotta go change your

password before May 11th. And, that was kind

of a quicker topic that I had. And the last topic that I want to

talk about is TikTok. And, you know,

TikTok is something that is been a

struggle for me, I guess. I'm I'm not a social media person. I don't like

interacting on social media for the most part. I think a lot of it is

a time waste for me, and I don't have the self discipline to

just go on there and use the, beneficial parts of

it, if you will. So it's been something I stayed away

from for a long time. But since in my last episode when I talked about

Opus clips, I'm creating all these clips now

that I went back and got from all the old episodes

that I've done, and I'm, like, man, this would really be a good time to

start a TikTok so I could just podcast, like I probably have almost close to

a 100 clips now because I have, like, 2 to 3 per episode. I got

about 30 episodes. So, like, I could just keep posting them on TikTok and see

if it does anything and not really have to put too much work into

it. That being said, it's a new thing. Never used it before.

So, you know, there's definitely a little bit of a learning curve. But I

did make an account, and what I did learn was TikTok has a

desktop based app that you can use, and you can actually

schedule posts out for, like, up to or a little bit over a

week, which has been really helpful because I've had

my account for maybe 2 weeks now. And, basically, I just go in once a

week and upload, like, 7 to 10 clips

and then don't have to go in again. Because I think what first happened

when I made my account is I was, you know, podcasting, and then I was

like, okay. Well, now I gotta get followers, so now I have to go interact

and maybe I should go find like accounts and similar accounts and, like,

start commenting and, like, engaging. But what I

found out is that that's just a huge waste of time for me, personally.

Some people may like that, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But, for

me, I didn't find it helpful. For me, I just wanted to get my clips

posted and then get out of there as soon as I could. So it was

working good for a little bit. I didn't really have any

ridiculous, like, numbers or nothing going viral or anything like that.

Like, you know, tens of views we're teaching. Not not

a lot, but but it was something. And I also

created my podcast website to have, like, an embed

for a TikTok video. So the idea was to get the videos on

TikTok and then be able to embed them on the web page. So it's another

little trickle of information that somebody can read from your website or watch from

your website to engage them into listening to the whole episode.

So there was kind of a purpose behind the whole thing. And everything was going

good up until a couple days ago when I went to sign in to upload

some more, videos, and I found out that my

account has been suspended. And I didn't know why, and I never

got notified. So I looked it up, and it's possible for my

account to be suspended for up to 15 days. And,

basically, you're never gonna know the reason why, and there's never

any rationale. So I looked into it a little bit.

Not sure what I did to get suspended. I guess, now that I'm

talking about out loud, perhaps, it's because I don't spend any time on

the platform, but I'm posting every day. Maybe they don't like that. I I

don't know. But, I guess, we'll have to keep you updated on what

happens with that. Kind of a bummer because it was a easy way for

me to get my clips onto my website. So if that doesn't work

out, I guess I'll have to find a different way to do that, which I'm

not looking forward to. But, you know, we'll see what happens

with the TikTok. I'm I'm kinda bummed because I I found, like,

a workflow that works for me and a way to get my videos out there

without having to kill a bunch of time. And then I got suspended, which

was, you know, obviously disappointing. So, that's been my

experience with TikTok. More to come on it, hopefully. Hopefully, I'll get unsuspended.

But, yeah, those those are the 3 things that, I kinda learned this month, the

3 major teaching, starting a website for your podcast, making

sure you get your Spotify for Podcasters account updated,

and my introduction to TikTok. So hopefully some of this was helpful.

Thank you so much for learning, and stay tuned for my episode next

month. That will be filled with everything that I learned in the month of

May. So I'll see you then and happy podcasting. This show

was produced by Pleasant Podcast. And if you need help launching

your own podcast, go to pleasant podcast where you can check out

my offerings and some of my freebies to help you launch and grow your

own podcasting And if you haven't signed up for the help me podcast

newsletter, you can also do that with the link in the show notes. Thank you

for listening and I'll catch you on an episode real soon.