Are you making it easy for podcast listeners to find your podcast on their favorite podcast app? In today's episode, I'm walking you through my new strategy on how to make sure that one, you're on every podcast app but two, you're making it easy and accessible for listeners to find you. All right, let's dive in. Hey, y'all welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for podcasters, entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world while building their own personal brand in the podcasting industry. I'm your host. Haylee Gaffin, owner of Gaffin creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs, if you're a podcaster or even just dreaming about launching your own podcast someday, this show was built to help you merge your love of conversation education and business. You can find resources, show notes and more for the clocking in podcast@gaffincreative.com Today's episode is brought to you by Mike check society, a community that was built for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great scale. Your podcasts, improve your processes and connect with your listeners through our educational trainings, our private members only community and our monthly calls. If you're ready to join us, you can head over to Mike checksociety.com and enroll today, and you can get $10 off per month with the code podcast. Now let's clock in and get to work. We often default to talking about Apple and Spotify like they are the only two podcast players on the market, but they are not. Not everyone has an iPhone or Spotify, so we need to make it easy for people to find your podcast, and that is why I have started recommending that people make a podcast links page on their website for their show. So this is specifically for people who actually have a self hosted website or a website you can customize that allows for you to add images, links, all the things. How do we do that? There are tools on the market that already help in this process, and one of those is called pod link, which I will actually recommend that you use in this exercise that I walk you through, because it has all of the links that you will need for linking to your show. So let me first walk through a couple of active podcast players, Apple podcast Spotify, overcast podcast addict, Pocket Cast, cast box, so many casts over here. Pod bean, I Heart Radio. Player, FM, podcast, Republic and radio public. And then you also will have your own RSS feed website that will have it to where they could go and play within that space. This is also where, like if you're pulling a player, it comes from that website as well. Now, what I would love to see instead of using that pod link page that I talked about. So if you just go to pod dot link, you will be able to type in your podcast and it pulls all of your players instead of using that link. What I recommend for anyone who has a website, especially if you're trying to optimize it for search engines, I recommend that you actually build one of these pod link pages on your own website. So I want to see you create that that highlights all of the players that are on pod link but why on your website? So the first thing is, it does help with brand authority, like, if you have a really nice brand and you're like, oh, but I'm linking out to this other website. It's not a big deal, especially if it's convenient. Convenience is key here. Like I get it. I didn't build this for a very long time, despite the fact that I knew I wanted one. I just never built it. But recently, I started realizing that there is, there is a benefit to it, so it does help with that brand authority. But two, it's a great opportunity for you to drive traffic to your website and link to your own website across blogs and pages. So how many times have you been at an event and someone's like, oh, what's your podcast? And one, you either have them search it and type in your full podcast name in order to find it. Or two you've got a QR code or something that either goes to a pod links page or go straight to Apple or wherever. What if, every time you did that, say you're at 1000 person conference and you're talking to 4050 people, what if you sent them to your website, like, consider that all that traffic that you're driving to someone else's website. What if you send it to your own? Because traffic on a website does tell Google that this website is valuable and valid, but beyond that, like think of it this way, if you have your podcast links, linking out from every single blog post you. Which I don't necessarily not recommend, like, it's not a big deal if you're doing this, because I've done it for 131 episodes. But instead of doing that, what if you link them to another page on your website, and from there, that's where they could see all the options. So I actually recently did this. I instead of linking to a handful of players, I decide to start linking out from my blog posts above the players, or maybe it's below. I can't remember the exact order right now, but linking from that blog post to my pod links page, and from there, they can go find me on their favorite player. And the reason I did this was one of my clients had actually said, Hey, you should really start, you should really link out to the podcast players so that I can find them. And I was like, Well, I have been but only to Apple and Spotify, not to all the others. So that's why I ended up doing that. So why did I switch to a landing page for my players, rather than linking to them? The number one reason, I will tell you, is because the podcast landscape is ever changing. I mean, we have lost players, like popular players, in the last couple of years. So Google podcast is gone, Stitcher is gone, and these were two of the biggest podcast players out there, alongside apple and Spotify. So the reason I did this was I don't want to have to go in and update my podcast blog pages in the future, because while Stitcher, I think Pandora bought them out, so it just redirects to your Pandora page. Not a big deal, but Google podcasts didn't so, like, there's nowhere that your podcast went, they are moving to YouTube as their podcast player. So those are just broken links. Now, instead of that happening, I would much rather just update it in one place. Now there are ways around this, like if you have a module that is a global module that you can drop into your blog post, that works great, too. I just know I wanted to be able to link to all of them, and it's really messy to put all of the podcast players on one page. So that's one of the reasons that I did it. The second is it's easy to update. It's one time of an update, not 510, 15 pages of an update. And then it also looks really professional like if you go to Gaffin creative.com/pod links all one word, you will see what mine looks like. And I've created it to be really pretty and easy to navigate. The benefit of doing all of this, there is a second benefit, is it helps you to explore what podcast players are out there, and if you're actually active on them. Because during the process of updating this, I realized there were two places that I was not active on and I needed to go and submit my podcast, and it's because they were players I had never heard of. And so I was like, Oh, what if I have potential listeners that are not listening because I'm not on their preferred platform. So just keep that in mind as you're going through this like, if you're like, Oh, no one's listening, there they could be through this process, I actually went to my podcast on one of the players that I had never heard of, and saw that I had three listeners there. And I was like, Oh, well, that's interesting. Like, this is such a small player, but there are people listening there, so keep that in mind. Now. How am I personally using this? So when you get to my podcast homepage, if you go to clockingin podcast.com you'll see right under my podcast title, it says show notes, which will take you to the recent blog post. And then it also says, says podcast players, and that's where you click from podcast players, and it takes you to my Gaffin creative.com/pod
links, where you can go and find my podcast on all the platforms. The second place I'm using it again is in those podcasts, Episode blog posts. I actually have a link above my player that says, find on your favorite podcast player, and you can click on it, and it takes you to that page. And then the last place I mentioned earlier is promotion. So like, if you are at an event and you're trying to promote your podcast, make it super simple, have them scan a QR code that has your podcast player links readily available for them to go and explore, especially especially if you were at a podcast conference. Because at podcast conferences, people are looking for a few things. They're looking for other podcasts to listen to. They're also looking for podcasts to pitch. They're looking for podcasters to connect with, and when you make it that easy for them to go in and explore, because these are avid podcasters at these events, they are not necessarily listening on the most popular podcast players. They might. Have a preference because they spend so much time in podcasting, so consider it for promotions as well. You might be thinking, Oh, but I don't want to put all those players on my site. There's so many different options out there, and they have all different branding. Well, that is why I created a free resource to customize your podcast player icons. I needed this for myself. I created it, and I have put it inside a free template. It's a free Canva template just for you. Inside this template, you will find the instructions on how to use it and fully customize your podcast players to match your unique brand, you can get access to these stunning designs that will elevate your podcast experience and make you look more professional in today's show notes. So head over there. You'll get access. Plus, I would love to see what you end up building on your website based on today's episode and how you're actually using these icons and how you created them to match your brand. One final tip is, I suggest that on this page that you create of all of your icons link back to your show notes, like these people that are coming to your podcast players to find you on other platforms, they may still be interested in exploring your full website, because on our podcast home pages, we have a lot of details. We have, who we are, what our podcast is about, what types of content, maybe you have categories, maybe you even have an application for your pitches. So just consider that like put that as an easy way for them to get back to your podcast homepage so that they can explore all of the content you've created beyond the players. All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and don't forget to get access to the free customizable podcast player icons inside of the show notes of today's episode, and we will see you all next week in a new episode. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to clocking in with Haylee Gaffin for resources mentioned in today's episode. Head to gaffincreative.com if you're a podcaster looking for community that will help you improve your podcast, make sure you check out MIC CHECK society, our community for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great, enroll today at Mike checksociety.com and use code podcast for $10 off per month. If you love this episode, I'd be honored if you'd leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I'm your host, Haylee Gaffin clocking out. You
