Creating Better Podcast Episode Navigation: List Category Plugin
The PodCraft Podcast: Series 3, Episode 10
In this episode we’re finishing up the week with a quick and easy one; a plugin called List Category Posts. This plugin allows us to create lists of our podcast episodes really easily by category or tag. This means you can guide the user around your podcasting content really quickly, grouping together all episodes by topic. By helping a new listener find your best stuff on the topic they really love you stand a much better chance of converting them into a long term fan. Let’s have a look.
Resources Mentioned in this Show
Andy Brown – Triple Your Clients
This episode is almost wholly thanks to a friend of mine, Andy Brown, from Triple Your Clients. He mentioned this plugin to me a while back and I’ve been busily putting it into action ever since. Previous to that I was hard coding links to groups of episodes, so this has saved me a tonne of time.
List Category Posts
Here’s the plugin itself: List category posts, and I’m linking to the WordPress store as normal since it’s not possible to link to the install page itself within WordPress. To install it quickly and easily, just search for ‘List category posts’ within the WordPress plugin directory and you should find it there.
Check out the Website Course for a full guide to installing plugins and working with WordPress in general.
Today’s Tasks
- Install List Category Posts
- Create a page for one of your main topics
- Include the shortcode for that category so all related episodes are listed
- Post a comment below. Send me a link, I’d love to see what you’ve come up with in terms of topic pages.
Let Me Know What You Think
What do you think about List Category Posts? And also, since we’re tying up the week, tell me what your favourite plugin or tool is so far. Which of all the ones we’ve covered do you think will be most useful to you?
Finally, if you’re enjoying the series, I’d really appreciate it if you’d give me a review on iTunes. It really helps to get the show out to more people and grow the PodCraft community. Just pop over to PodCraft on the iTunes website to do that.
Thanks again for listening!
Transcription
Hey folks! I’m Colin Gray and this is PodCraft.
Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Series 3 of PodCraft, the series on creating a peerless podcasting website that means we’re creating a great home for your podcast on the web which will hopefully give a great first impression and turn your visitors into long term listeners. So that’s us, reached the end of second week, this is us up to episode ten and I’ve got simple, easy on to finish up this week’s worth of podcast. And that is something that enhances a navigation, something that’s really going to help us to guide people around our website and make sure they can find the best content here. Now, I did talk about navigation on episode five so we have talked about how to create good navigation bars, create navigation menus but I think there’s a good thing you can do in terms of creating pages which help navigation, which utilises this podcast, sorry, this plugin that I’m about to tell you about.
Now, this is a plugin that I actually only found quite recently. Thanks to one of my good friends, Andy Brown, who is from tripleyourclients.com, by all means pop-over, check out his podcast. But he put me on to this, he’s been using that a fair bit recently so I’ve just been trying this out and I think it’s really useful which is why I want to stick it into this series and it’s called List Category Posts. Now, I’ll link to the WordPress plugin page for it because it’s a little bit of a generic name, might be slightly hard to find so just pop on to the show notes at podcraft.net/310 and you’ll find a link to the plugin there. But you can just install it if you go to your plugin store within your WordPress site, type in List Category Posts, it should be the first one that shows up. Now, all this plugin does is it allows you to use a short code to create a list of posts which you based around a category or a tag. And that’s all it is. It’s really simple, really easy and all it does is create that list to links, list to links to every single post that you have on your website in a certain category. So, in a podcasting context that means that if your show is around a particular topic, for example, take this one for example, PodCraft is around podcasting equipment, it’s around podcasting promotion, it’s around podcasting advertising, podcasting monetisation, so these are all categories. Equipment is a classic one, so podcasting equipment is one category. I can have one short code in a post that says short code list category posts, category podcasting equipment and it’ll list every single episode I have published on that category, so every single episode that I published around podcasting equipment. Now, I think that is really really useful, really really essential for creating good topic pages which guide people through your resources. So, let’s just walkthrough how that would work, so I think initially what you want to do is create a post or a page and that outlines the broad topic that you talk about, so let’s take the podcasting equipment again. I might want to go and create a page on my site so podcraft.net/podcastingequipment for example and on that this is the kind of guide to that topic within my overall niche. So, within my overall topic this is the sub-topic, this is podcasting equipment within the overall subject of podcasting. This is how I would create the page, this is your topic guide so for my example podcasting equipment, I would create a page that essentially talks about podcasting equipment in general, very generally, and then list all posts in that. So, you can outline what does podcasting equipment mean to me, what am I talking about in these podcasting equipment podcasts. So, you ‘re going to write three, four hundred words, you’re going to write a good bit of content that outlines that and then you’re going to put in the short code and it’s going to list all the episodes.
Now, the benefits of this are a few fold. So, firstly, it gives a great page that guides your users through the topic, so it tells them what this topic is about, tells them why this topic is important to them and then it gives them a full list of the every episode that talks about that topic. So, you don’t have to search through the podcast archive themselves to find everything about that topic. So, the podcasting equipment one for example, they wouldn’t have to go back and find all of the episodes in which I have talked about that, they can just have it all listed right there. The next benefit is it’s a huge SEO advantage I think. So, you’ve got this one page that is overall about that topic and then it links out to all of the pages within that. This is a particular technique within SEO which essentially passes relevance so if you have one page that is about the general topic e.g. podcasting equipment that talks about podcasting equipment in general but then you have links on that page to the sub-topics of that, for example, podcasting microphones, podcasting mixers, podcasting digital recorders then it helps to pass the relevance around. So that when people search for podcasting equipment, you become more known for that because you have a range of articles around that. People search for microphones then maybe search for podcasting equipment microphones, I’m not sure what the term would be there but it basically lends you more credence because you’ve got your podcasting equipment posts all linked together, they’re all set together in a big mesh, they’re all linked in a way that puts them together so Google knows that you have a section of your website about podcasting equipment and this is where you find it, this is where they can find all of the relevant posts around that. So, as I said, it doesn’t only help your listener, it helps you as well, helps your listener really navigate around all the content and find more great stuff from you. For me it actually works really well because I broke a record in a series format so I can actually list my series really easily. So, I can have series one, series two, series three, have a page for each one. List them very easily, which is one of the reasons that I came across in the first place.
So, that gives you another great tool to put on to your podcasting website. I hope you find this one handy, I certainly have. Nice short one to finish out the week. As I’ve said in all the episodes so far, you can find a guide to installing plugins at podcraft.net/websitecourse and that let you register on the courses that I’ve created on LearnDen which will help you with working with WordPress, with installing plugins, all that kind of stuff. You can either register there or go straight to the courses if you’ve already registered. You can also look out for other links and training resources which will help you with today’s detail, find that at the show notes at podcraft.net/310.
So, that just leaves us with the tasks for today. So, first one, quick and easy, install the List Category Posts plugin. Just get on there, get that into your website. Then, create your page for one of your main topics, so pick something that you talk about on your podcast on a regular basis and stick the short code into that page so that all of your episodes are listed and then write a little description of that topic above it so that you’ve got a nicely optimised page which will really help your listeners, really guide your listeners through one part of your topic and also help you by hopefully guiding Googler on your side, showing what you’re relevant for and maybe helping your search results in the future.
Finally, I’d love it if you came and post a comment on podcraft.net/310 which is the show notes for this episode. Tell me, send me a link to that page, I’d love to see what you come up with in terms of topic pages. So, send me a link, put that in your comment and also since we’re tying up the week, tell me what your favourite plugin of tool the week was. Tell me which one of the last five episodes gave you the best tool, which one you think would be most useful to you. Okay. That’s it. Tying up for this week, that’s us on episode ten. Next week we’re on to something else entirely. I’m going to keep it as a surprise. So, thank you for listening. So far, we’re halfway through the series and I hope you join me for the rest of the series for the second half. Talk to you then!
