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You Ask, I Answer: Podcast Landing Page Best Practices?

Lindsay asks, “What are your suggestions/best practices for a podcast landing page?”

Podcast landing pages need to do three things. First, explain why someone should give you any of their time, even a minute. What’s in it for them? Second, it should present an option for listening that the listener can use. Third, you should have analytics tracking clicks to your podcasting services.

You Ask, I Answer: Podcast Landing Page Best Practices?

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In today’s episode, Lindsay asks, What are your suggestions or best practices for a podcast landing page? podcast, podcast landing pages are really simple and really straightforward.

They require a lot less maintenance and thought than, say, a regular landing page where you have to figure out is somebody going to, you know, not fill out all the form or scroll far enough to read all the exciting copy.

podcasts landing pages are much simpler.

So, you need two things.

Well, three things really.

First, and by far the most important.

Your podcast landing page has to explain in clear, short, unambiguous text, why someone should give you the time of day.

We are in a world where there are still 24 hours a day but Everybody’s got one of these things, has literally millions of choices.

There’s millions of podcasts out there.

There are millions of YouTube channels, there are millions of apps in the app store.

You are competing for time with every single thing on here, right? Which means that you have to explain to somebody Why in the world, they listened to your podcast for even a minute, compared to all the other options they have available to them.

So why the number one mistake I see for podcasts landing pages is that the podcasters spend a whole lot of time talking about them, hey, here’s who I am.

Here’s what I do.

And here’s how awesome I am.

And here’s how many awards I’ve won and how many people listen to my show.

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

One bit they, your audience wants to know, what are you going to do for them? so short, upfront, here’s why you listen to the show.

Show, example the In-Ear Insights podcast that I do with Katy robear.

Less than 30 minutes, you’ll get a deep dive on some type particular type of marketing and analytics related thing or marketing and strategy.

If you want to hear a balanced perspective of human and technology, you listen to that show.

Marketing over coffee, the show I do with John Wall in 25 minutes or less.

catch up on the latest marketing news by two grumpy old guys who just grabbed at the world at the silliness that some marketers do.

Those are make very clear what you’re going to get.

So make sure that’s the case for your podcast.

Think of this, your podcast is functionally a product right? So the same effort you would put into Product Marketing, the four P’s right product price, price, place promotion.

There’s no price obviously, for the most part.

So what is it that is unique and worthwhile listening to your show that somebody can get from your show? They’re not going to get anywhere else.

Okay, so that’s number one.

Number two, present listening options.

One of the things that I have seen done most wrong and I’ve done it myself, I’ve done it myself is not to put all the major options for listing on a page.

So in fact, let’s bring up the In-Ear Insights one here.

You can see we’ve got a bunch of different options here.

And they’re really really blatantly clear, right? There’s no doubt giant text here.

What it is that somebody can do, where you can find the show, Google podcasts, Apple podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube.

Don’t forget about YouTube.

YouTube is a huge listening platform as well as video platform.

A lot of people forget that YouTube exists and can be a good distribution channel for yourself.

Comcast, because people listen to things.

And if you are super clever, you will get your podcast transcribed and closed captions so that you can put that text into YouTube and then YouTube search engine will do a better job of helping people find your show.

These listening options should encompass every major podcasting channel based on where you’re the services that you use for your podcasting service distribute to so I use libsyn, for example.

And they can distribute to all these different platforms pretty easily or their RSS feed.

You are only limited by what channels you choose to publish your podcast on.

So that’s number two, number three on the landing page, and I think this is an optional one, but I think it’s still important.

You’ll notice that on the landing page, all these links go to someplace you don’t control.

Not a single one is on your site.

So you have no analytics on this.

What you can do Do with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics is set up a goal to track outbound clicks from these links, and record them as essentially podcast clicks to say, Okay, I did enough to convince somebody to go to this page and click on one of these things.

And in doing so, they may or may not have subscribed, they probably will subscribe because the mechanisms are all pretty straightforward, right? And I can count that as a goal completion now.

Is that a valuable goal? Is it as good as someone subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form to download a white paper or webinar? Probably not.

But at least you want to know the activity you want to know is anybody clicking on these things? if nobody’s clicking on our podcast links, sad sauce, right? We’ve we’ve not done a good job.

So those would be the three major best practices that I would focus on with your podcast landing page make it obvious as to why somebody cares about you.

Make it easy for them to subscribe, and then track your messaging.

Bonus.

If you set up a podcast listening goal in Google Analytics, and you use Tag Manager to track it, you can then use software like Google Optimize to do a B testing on the landing page to see if you can do something to increase the click through rates on it and changing copy changing images, things like that.

Remember that a podcast is a product.

It is a product and it will do as well as any product would with the appropriate amount of product marketing effort.

Which means that if you just kind of slap something up, which again, I’m guilty of it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it more than I care to count.

You will get results commensurate with your lack of effort if you invest the time.

If you focus on making things easy, if you focus on the customer, your podcast landing page will do better.

A will function better for you.

The other thing thing with, it’s not about the landing page itself.

But make sure that in all of your other communications, you are cross promoting your podcast.

If you’re going to put the time and effort into it, make sure that there’s a link in your newsletter.

Right make sure there’s links in the navigation on the rest of your website, make sure that you are mentioning it in the episode itself, especially if you put it on like YouTube where there is no feed, put the you know, link to the subscription page in your YouTube comments and the description on your video and mention it in the show that hey, I’ve got a podcast please listen to it.

Right.

I always say at the end of these videos, please subscribe to the YouTube channel in the newsletter.

Because I want you to go find those things if you’re listening to this.

So this you may want to have a custom domain redirected domain for your podcasts, easy to remember.

That’s probably the the simplest way for people to hear so if you’re doing a promo for another podcast, You could say to somebody go to marketing over coffee.com if that was not your URL and redirect that, so, your podcast here.com whatever the case may be, give those things a try.

If you have follow up questions, please leave in the comments box below.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel on the newsletter, I’ll talk to you soon.

Take care.

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