Introducing Series 3: 20 Steps to a Peerless Podcasting Website | PodCraft S3E00

Welcome to the start of Series 3! In this episode I give an introduction to the series, and talk about what we’re going to cover over the coming 20 episodes. The series will be delivered every weekday of November, covering 20 Steps to creating a Peerless Podcasting Website.

By the end of this month you’ll be running a super-effective home for your Podcast: a website optimised to deliver your content, capture listeners and boost your success.

Who This Series is Aimed At

If you’re in any of the following groups, then this series should have plenty to offer you:

• Podcasting beginners looking to create a web home for their Podcast in the best way possible
• Existing Podcasters who are looking at moving to a self-hosted Podcasting website
• Podcasters who are already self-hosting with WordPress, but want to really enhance their site

Learning Objectives

Here’s what we’ll be looking at on the series, in detail:

• Week 1
  • Hosting and domains setup
  • WordPress installation
  • Basic setup for Podcasting
• Week 2
  • Enhancement of the basic Podcasting functions
  • Plugins and tools to improve the user experience and satisfy listeners
• Week 3
  • Monetization tools and methods
  • Plugins to enable the growth of your audience
• Week 4
  • The secret sauce: plugins, tools and secrets to really make you stand out.

Let Me Know What You Think!

Please drop me a comment below to let me know what you think and to ask any further questions.

Also, if you could leave me a review on iTunes I’d be so grateful – it really helps to get my podcast out there to more people.

Thanks again for listening and I’ll talk to you on the next episode!

Episode Transcription

Hey Folks and welcome to the first full episode of Podcraft Series 3. Really excited about this! This is my brand new project. Trying something a bit new which is the daily format. So, I’ll try to release an episode every single day for the next month. I say every single day but actually I’m wussing out very slightly, I’m only doing it every single week day because, well, simply I don’t quite want to work on weekends. So, I’m just doing Monday to Friday. So you’ll be getting a bit content every single day for the next 20 working days, the full November Month. The format, the content, will be twenty steps to setting up a perfect Podcasting website. So, I’m going to take you through 20 different things that you can do, step by step, in a full course format on how to setup a perfect Podcasting website. If you’ve been listening to the show for long, you’ll know that my first series was very similar. The first Series was a ten step guide to getting out your first episode. So, from a complete standing start and it went from last standing start to getting your first episode out on the air and to the public. And it’s really just a daily format so it’s a short episode, maybe around five to ten minutes, whereby I give a bit of information, a bit of context, a few instructions and a task for you. Every single day there is something for you to do. And really that’s what the idea behind this series as well. Every weekday of November there is going to be something for you to learn and something for you to do, which will help you to setup your Podcasting website and to make it work great, to grow customers, to grow Podcasting listeners I should say and really get your Podcast off the ground or enhanced.

So this really suits two types of people, it suits total beginners, so if you don’t have a podcasting website currently, so if you’re not self hosting at all then this is for you. This is to help you get started. So I know a lot of people out there, Podcasters, you have been Podcasting for a while but actually you use a hosted service. So you have your Podcast somewhere else. You can either have it on say live site 02:06 website or another service and therefore it’s kind of offsite so you don’t really own the place where your Podcast lives which is always a bit of a disadvantage. As good as many of these services out there are, you’ll never know how long they are going to be around. And really, even if they are going to be around forever, you want to own the place where your business is located or where your passion is located. Whether you’re running a passion or a business or a hobby Podcast you really want it to be somewhere that you own. So that you’re not, what the term, sharecropping. So you’re not helping somebody else build their platform, you’re building your own platform and making it build-up for your future really. So if you’re an existing Podcaster and you want to get into self hosting then this is as huge for you. From episode one, we’re going to look at how to setup your hosting domains right through to having a perfectly great Podcasting website by the last episode.

The other type of person that suits is the existing Podcaster that is already self hosting. So if you already got a WordPress website setup but actually you want to find out how to just make it work a little bit better, how to make it attract more listeners, how to make it really work great for your listeners, give them the best user experience possible then this is for you too. I’m going to cover loads of things that will help you attract more listeners, help you grow your audience, help you make things easier for your listeners so they can access the materials you talk about more easily. Just all that kind of stuffs that just make your website much more effective in growing your audience, in nurturing that audience and really turning your Podcast into a success. So that’s another thing we’re going to cover, how to turn an existing self hosted Podcasting website into the best possible website it can be. And the final crowd it could be for our total beginners, so if you’re not a Podcaster at all if you haven’t start in this latest then I would encourage you to start off entirely new with a self hosted WordPress website. So, really start off the best way possible. Setup your Podcasting website the way I’m going to show you over the next twenty days and really get off to the best start so that you’re not having to, you know, spend some effort in building one platform and then suddenly discover it’s not really the best way to do it so I’m going to go back and change what I’m doing. You don’t really want to be repeating that effort, you want to get off to the best possible start and really know you’re doing it the right way the first time around. So all of that gives you an idea of whether this series is for you.

Let’s have a quick look at what’s actually going to be in this series. So let’s have a look at the learning objectives of the series. I will be a formal educator, going back to my educational background. So learning objective, this is basically, translate it that just means what we’re going to learn over the next little while, what we’re going to cover. First five episodes, so I’m going to go week by week, I’ve split it into groups of five, so week one, week two, week three, week four. So first week is going to be the basics of setting up the website itself. So that’s going to be covering hosting and domains, it’s going to cover setting up the website itself, installing WordPress, getting the basic setup so that you have a working website that can host your Podcast. So that’s just the simplest, most basic level even if you just follow week one, that means you’re going to have a working Podcasting website that you can then submit the RSS feeds to whoever service you like whether it’s iTunes, Stitcher and the like. So that’s us getting started. So, if you don’t currently have a self hosted website, then listen to see the week one ofcourse. If you do already have a self hosted WordPress Podcasting website setup then you could miss out week one. You don’t really need that. Although I do cover a few things in week one which will talk about the best ways to go about setting up so maybe there are different ways that you can think about doing it that makes the site run a bit smoothly, a bit more nicely, a bit more quick, so maybe worth listening. As I’ve said the episodes are going to be short, I’m going to keep them focused, sharp, really just what you want to need. No waffling here, no off topic. So if you don’t want to listen, it’s not going to waste too much of your time if it’s covering stuffs you already know. But hopefully I’ll cover quite a few things you don’t know so even if you are in that already hosting position, then by all means  get on week one and let me know what you think of that.

Now week two is on to enhancements, so week two is enhancement week.  That’s where we’re going to take your basic Podcasting website, the kind of website that most Podcasters are currently running from. So, just the basic level, just really delivering the RSS feed maybe a few buttons to try and get some subscribes, that type of thing. I’m going to take that and I’m going to turn that into an exceptional listener capture, listener helping website. So then we’re going to have five tasks in week two that’ll show you different plugins, different tools, different types that you can do to turn your basic website into a really good Podcasting website.

Week three we’re going to move on to the beta, I hope you’re interested in especially if you’re in business but quite a lot hobby people too and that is monetization and growth. So then we’re going to look, week three, that means we’re going to look at a few different Plugins you can use to monetize your Podcast, Plugins we can use to grow our audience expediential rate so that we can monetize turn it in our business in a faster rate. And we’re going to look at tools that can help us get our Podcast out there in to the world as well. So that’s about sharing about getting out there. So that’s really growth monetization and getting your Podcast growing and paying for itself in week three.

And then to week four, the last five days are going to be the extra special secret sauce. So these are the plugins, tools and tips that just add that extra something. So we already got a great website, we already got a Podcasting website that delivers, that gives a great customer experience, great listener experience both  come and visit. Then we’ve monetized it, we’ve setup so it’s going to grow grab new listeners. The last week is going to be those super secret things that I think not many people are doing. Those tools that just add that extra something to your website that will push you beyond everyone else in the niche. And hopefully let you just have that extra step up and get ahead of everyone else, really make your Podcast successful. So that will be a mix of different things. That will be five days of stuff that I think are just a great addition to any Podcasting website. Stuff that I use myself, stuff that I found works really well. So that’s what I got for week four.

So I hope that sounds good, I hope that sounds interesting. I hope you like the sound of the format. I realised this isn’t your average Podcast, certainly not an average Podcast series by the way it’s setup. So I found it really works well though, that’s kind of daily tasks. Obviously, you don’t have to listen every day, you can queue up and you can come back to it, you can work through a task every couple of days, every few days, up to yourself entirely.

But just to finish of this first kind of introductory episode, really like to say, all the way along, I really want to get some feedbacks, I really love to hear what you think of this series. I really like to think, sorry,  hear about your additions to it as well. So things that you’re using that do the same kind of things as I’m talking about. So if I’m talking about a tool, a tip or whatever and you think “Ah I know something, I use something very similar, an alternative to that”, then please do send and you can contact me at any point during the series in a couple of ways, either leave a comment on the episode show notes. So just go to the episode that you’re listening to at the time, drop a comment in the show notes and it ensure I’ll drop a URL end so you can always get to the show notes, for example, the URL for this episode is podcraft.net/300 and I’ll follow that format as well so each episode will have a forward slash three zero something. In fact you know forward slash three zero something because it’s a three for the series and then zero one for episode one, zero two episode two for example. So you can always find the show notes that way, podcraft.net/301, 302 and so on. So you can always get to the show notes that way, drop a comment in the show notes or of course, you can drop me a tweet on Twitter, so I’m @thepodcasthost. And if it’s something a bit more private, something you don’t want to put out on Twitter, you want to send through to me personally, then you can always email me as well, I’m happy to take an email, just go to [email protected]. So really excited for this, really looking forward to the coming series, looking forward to getting some feedback from you guys as well seeing how this goes. So thanks very much for joining me and I’ll talk to you for the rest of the series.