The End of Broken Links: PodPage Podcast Website w/Dave Jackson

The End of Broken Links: PodPage Podcast Website w/Dave Jackson [Ep. 116]

What is the best platform for your podcast? Last week, I talked about a dedicated website

J. Rosemaie Francis: What is the best platform for your podcast? Hi. Last week, I talked about why your podcasts need a dedicated website. In this week's episode, I'm going to talk about the platform I've been using for years for both my podcasts. I also have a surprising guest for you, so stay tuned as we delve into my favorite podcast website. Before I get into it, full disclosure, I'm now an affiliate of PodPage. The topic of today's discussion. PodPage is a dedicated podcast website that helps you streamline the workflow for your podcasting. It also helps you connect with your. With your listeners through reviews and collecting email newsletters and other features. Streamline make your workflow more efficient. This is especially useful for you if you are a, uh, solo podcaster and you do most of your work like I do. So stay tuned for my short interview with Dave Jackson, head of podcasting at PodPage, and see if this platform will work for you as a podcaster. Thank you.

Dave Jackson: Yeah.

Dave Jackson talks about PodPage and how it can help podcasters

J. Rosemaie Francis: My guest today is Dave Jackson, podcasting Coach, Ad Pod page. Do I have that right?

Dave Jackson: That'll work. You can consultant my technical. Yeah, Head of Podcasting, I think is my official title. But, yes, we kind of do it all.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Yeah, yeah, I see that. I see you all over the Internet. Yeah, I appreciate you just coming and spending a couple minutes to talk to me about PodPage. I, uh, know a little bit about it, but it'll be nice to get some expert take on the platform and how it can help podcasters do a better job at podcasting.

Dave Jackson is the Head of Podcasting at podpage

So, first of all, I wanted to want you to tell us, well, who's Dave Jackson? And what does head of Podcasting a potpage means?

Dave Jackson: Yeah, it's, uh. Well, I'm Dave Jackson. I've been podcasting since 2005, when we would, I don't know, chisel podcasts out of granite back in the day. Been, um, doing that, uh, along the way, I've wrote a book called Profit, uh, from your podcast. I am also 20, uh, 18. I got inducted into the Podcast hall of Fame. Uh, I worked at Libsyn for eight years and still love the people over there. But when Brendan said, hey, I've got a position over here called Head of Podcasting, and it's part marketing, it's part making videos. It's working one on one with great people like you. It's organizing the feedback we get to make new features. It's just documentation. So everything I love to do as well as troubleshoot. And he's a great guy. And so it was kind of hard to come up with a title. He's like, oh, we're just going to call it Head of Podcasting, because kind of everything falls under that. And, uh, it's funny because he hired me back in 2020 when PodPage launched and said, hey, I've got this idea for this, this podcast thing. And he goes, uh, you know, do you think anybody would be interested in this? And I said, well, I guess starting out, we're going to need an about page, a contact page, and our episodes. And he came back in a couple of days and was like, like this. And I was like, holy cow, that's amazing. And I'm like, can you get it to integrate with, like, PayPal and maybe Patreon? And he came back in a couple days like this. And I was like, well, it's so over the years, going back to 2020, I was always like, hey, that's pretty cool. Does it do this? Does it do this? And so finally, uh, last year, he's like, hey, I've got this position and you kind of almost work for me already because we're always collaborating on things. And so, uh, I waved goodbye to all my friends at Libsyn and came over to, uh, podpage.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Oh, that is cool. And it's good to have you back again, Dave. Dave Jackson was one of, um, my first few guests, and I was very happy to have you, and we were lucky to have you. So I appreciate you coming back again today, though.

Dave: PodPage is a great platform for podcasting. And the beauty of it is we have

We want, I want to talk about PodPage, the platform, having used it for maybe four years. Um, I'm used to it and I can see the value for podcasters, but we are reluctant to go there. So tell us why we should, um, you know, utilize the POD Page platform as opposed to free WordPress or a host website.

Dave Jackson: Yeah, I mean, there are some websites out there that aren't bad. Like, buzzsprout gives you a really. All the media hosts, Libsyn, Blueberry, they all give you a website. And it's fine if you're like, I don't know, Mrs. Johnson's sixth grade podcasting class, and all you need is a website for somebody to come and listen and maybe follow the show. But the minute you're like, well, I'd also like to have them sign up for my newsletter,

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Dave Jackson: or maybe I want to sell a product on my newsletter or on my newsletter on my website, or maybe I want to do a survey and you just start adding things to it as you become more. Not professional, but you're taking it more seriously. Mhm and so that's when it's like, oh, well, we have built in voicemail, uh, we have a built in blog, we have a contact page. We have all these things that are built into it. And then the other thing we do a really good job of is the hard part of a podcast is getting people to remember your website. And so we have things like a lot of people don't realize. And they'll even say, ah, ah, you don't need a website. I'll just tell people, just find me wherever you find podcasts. And what they don't realize is, number one, why is your podcast lost? Why do I have to go find it? And then number two, when you go to something like Spotify, I have a video on my YouTube channel where I'm typing in the exact name of the show and it doesn't show up. I had to finally turn around and type in the name of the host for the show to come up. So when you say, oh, just find me wherever, you're like, okay. But they, they might not find you. And so there's, there's that problem. And then people like, oh, I'll just use, you know, a link tree. Okay, that's great. But there's zero SEO to that. And you know, people always talk about YouTube being the number two search engine. And that's true. And I'm like, but what's the number one search engine? They go, well, Google. And I'm like, great, what does Google want? Well, it wants really good words. Okay, where do you find really good words on a website? And there's just hardly any SEO to a link tree because it's just a bunch of links that's like, here's, here's me on Apple, here's me on this. And there's. So when you have that website, it's just food for Google to come find you. And then what happens is they, they find you and they're like, oh, there's a player here. So they click on that and you start listening to it and Google goes, that's funny. Every time we send somebody over to Dave's website, they're there for like 15 minutes. Like, that must be really good. So it then starts to move you up the charts on Google to where you're getting found more and more. And the beauty of it is we have kind of set it up, kind of our goal is to make beautiful websites for people that don't want to learn how to code. Because we've all been through the joys of WordPress and the endless updates and the white screen of death and all that stuff. And then you have things like wix, which is, um, you know, not bad. But it's like if you go over and look at all their templates, you, you end up trying to squeeze your podcast into kind of a yoga, um, studio kind of template that doesn't really fit, you know. And so we just made it for podcasters by podcasters. And a lot of the features are built for podcasters. So.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Yeah, yeah, I'm into that. And one of my favorite user experience with PodPage, and this will help our, you know, our listeners to understand how valuable it is. It's in that you can integrate your guest booking tools into PodPage 1 and number 2, so your guests can go and put in their information. And then you have a page listing your guests and you can feature your guests and connect them to your episode, to the episode that they came on. And that's one of my favorite parts about it. My other favorite part is the integration. So with the Google SEO and the schema.

We make birdie websites for people that don't want to learn how code

So tell us about that part.

Dave Jackson: Yeah, it's, um, again, we're going to stay in our lane. We make birdie websites for people that don't want to learn how to code. But we'll pull in your, your YouTube videos. We'll integrate with pretty much whatever kind of email, um, tool you're using, whether that's mailchimp or A Constant Contact or. I mean, there's a ton of those. There's that. And, um, you mentioned the guest thing. The thing I love about that is it's super simple. And again, it's just based on feedback. Somebody said, hey, I need this to do this. And the beauty of it is, you know, they upload their headshot and put in whatever they want. And as you said, we make a page for that guest. So if you're interviewing somebody that maybe doesn't have a, uh, strong website or they don't have any website, when somebody searches for their name, your website's going to come up because they don't have a web presence. And then my other one that I love if you're trying to get a guest, is we make a page. If you go to your website, whatever it is, slash guests, it will show you all the guests that have been on previous episodes. So you could say, look, we've had all the big names. We've had Ernie, we've had Bert, we've had Oscar the Grouch. Everybody here, you know, you should be on my show. And you know, that's another great feature of that. So. And we do the kind of a similar thing with sponsors. If you have sponsors or if you just have affiliate links, you put them in the POD page and then you just tell people, go to my website.com sponsors.

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Dave Jackson: Now, what that's doing both with the guest page and sponsors is it's reinforcing your brand by saying your website. It makes it easy to remember because it's only one or two links. And then if at the beginning of the show I'm, um, like, yes, everything you need about this product is at, you know, my website.com sponsors. And then later in the show I'm, um, like, oh, this second product is at, you guessed it, my website.com sponsors. And if you say one at the end now, um, the listener really has that domain embedded in their head and they may go over because they really like product number one, but they're like, hey, I've never really heard of this product number two. And they click on that one as well. So you're sending more traffic to the sponsors. You're making it easier for the listener because you only have to remember one link. And you know, in the end it's a win, win, win. So, yeah, there's a, a lot of features that are based on feedback from our customers where, um, where everybody now seems to be putting up some sort of AI kind of wall or, you know, you have to go through, you know, Robo the helpful. Like, more like. Nothing against that, but we, we looked at it went, yeah, that seems annoying. At this point, it's not quite there. And so we love to talk to our customers because they come up with great ideas.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Yeah, yeah, it's great. Uh, I love it. Thank you. And from the back end, you talking about LinkedIn, um, Google Analytics. Yeah, like that. You know, we don't want to be bothered with.

Dave Jackson: Oh, there's, there's the analytics and, um, we integrate with Facebook comments. So if you want to have comments on your website, there's all sorts of things you can tie it into, whether it's supercast, if you want to do kind of a Patreon thing and, or you could just use Patreon and it's all sorts of stuff. Because, you know, we've had people say, well, why don't you become like a mailchimp? Because we don't want to. Like, why, why try to compete with mailchimp? They're doing that. Great. Um, and we're not going to be a media host because there's Buzzsprout and Captivating, like, nope, we're not gonna. We make websites for pretty people and then we just integrate with everything else so you can have everything in one place.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Yeah.

Dave Jackson, head of podcasting at Podpage M. thanks for talking to us today

I appreciate it, Dave, and thank you for coming and talking to us today about PodPage. Any parting shots?

Dave Jackson: No, just realize that, uh, one of the things I love about it is because we're kind of designed for people who don't want to get super techy. We have a lot of people like me that have gray hair that in theory. Right. All quote older people, like, oh, we don't like technology. You know, don't turn your back on a boomer. I'm not a boomer, I'm Gen X. But don't turn your back on a boomer because there are people that'll, you know, run circles around you with gray hair that are tearing it up in chat, GPT, things like that. And it just, uh. My favorite is when I travel, the fact that I can schedule my, my episode in my media host, go on the road, and when that gets published, PodPages goes out, grabs that episode and publishes it for me on my website. So it really is kind of a set it and forget it. So, yeah, check it out. Uh, you can go to podpage.com preview and, uh, we have a 14 day trial there if you want to kick the tires on it.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Okay, that's awesome. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you.

Dave Jackson: Thanks for having me.

J. Rosemaie Francis: Dave Jackson, head of podcasting at Podpage M.

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