Brenden Mulligan: You're already doing the work.
What can I do?
What can Podpage do to make it so you don't do any extra work, but you get this huge benefit of having a really fully featured website.
Neil McPhedran: Welcome to another episode of Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters to learn and get inspired.
I'm Neil McPhedran, founder of Podium Podcast, an agency for higher education podcasters.
Jennifer-Lee: And I'm Jennifer Lee at J Pod Creations, where podcasting is broadcasting.
We want you to know you're not alone.
In fact, there are many of you higher ed podcasters out there, and we can all learn from each other.
Please also join our community@higheredpods.com.
Neil McPhedran: Okay, Jen.
In this episode, we speak with Brenden Mulligan from Podpage.
We're gonna get into websites, podcast websites.
And Podpage is a really cool product that can essentially convert your RSS feed into a podcast, but then there's a ton, and we get into it when we chat with Brenden, about a ton of other features that you can build out for your website.
We've recently rebuilt the Think Fast Talk Smart website using Podpage and we've had a really good experience and we're super impressed with the product.
You can check it out at fastersmarter.io what we've built there with Podpage.
So we thought we'd get Brenden on Continuing Studies to talk about the importance of podcast websites.
We obviously talk a little bit about Podpage, but really what we're getting into is why should we as podcasters have a website as well.
Jennifer-Lee: I'm really excited to talk about this 'cause I think a lot of us podcasters don't really use websites and it's untapped real estate.
But I also love that Brenden goes through the different things that people are missing on their websites too.
Because some people have websites, but there's a lot of things we're not doing like reviews, but we're going to get into that in just a second.
So let's do it.
Neil McPhedran: Welcome Brenden.
Thanks for joining us on Continuing Studies.
Brenden Mulligan: Thank you so much for having me.
Jennifer-Lee: Yeah, thank you for coming on.
Neil McPhedran: Brenden, maybe you could just sort of tell us a little bit about your background and your journey into podcasting.
Because a lot of people we talk about podcasting is a major part of what they do and you've had a really interesting tech journey background.
I'd love to sort of hear a little bit more about that and then how you kind of got into podcasting.
Brenden Mulligan: Yeah, sure.
So it was sort of, I wouldn't say by accident, but not necessarily fully intentional.
I have a lot of experience working with creators before podcasting.
So I, I spent my first years in sort of as a adult was spent in the music industry on the business side of music.
And then there was so much inefficiency and frustration with just sort of data management, data flows.
Like it was back in the age when Myspace and a hundred other websites were coming online.
And And so I actually left the business side of the industry and went into sort of the tech side and started different platforms to help musicians make sense of the digital world that was being created.
And so through that experience, I saw one massive event, which was Myspace.
For people who don't remember, Myspace was sort of the first social network or the first significant social network.
There was also one of the most, first places that it was very easy to put a song online.
Like before Myspace, it was near impossible to get music on the internet as a independent artist.
It was just really hard to do.
And so Myspace comes along and musicians are able to put stuff up online.
And so everyone rushes to Myspace.
So suddenly you have, you start building audiences on Myspace.
Myspace was a social network.
So a lot of people spent lots of money on making friends on Myspace and record labels were spending millions of dollars building out these audiences on this platform.
Then Myspace implodes.
And all of the audiences and the money people had spent completely went to waste and they had to start over somewhere else.
And so, I saw firsthand the very big risk that creators take on when they put all of their eggs into someone else's platform and they trust that that platform is going to be around and serve their needs.
And so, fast forward ten years, I was looking for a friend's podcast online, and he's a pretty well known podcaster, and the first ten links on Google were other people's platforms.
It was Apple, Spotify, you know, all the different, Spreaker.
I was like, why don't you have a website?
And he's like, ah.
It's just hard.
I don't want to, you know, WordPress is hard.
I don't really want to deal with building a website.
And that's really, that's where it started.
Because I was like, okay, here's an entire community of people who are facing the same issue the musicians did, which is just, it's hard to build a website.
It's hard to get stuff on your own.
I'll just deal with the platforms.
That's enough, right?
And I don't think anyone really realizes how actually, you know, you think Apple is this huge company and Spotify is this huge company.
Your website will never be able to show up before theirs on Google because they have such a massive presence, where it's actually the opposite.
When Google looks at, you know, Spotify.
com slash.
show XYZ for whatever your show is on there.
And they look at that and then they look at continuingstudies.com, continuingstudiespodcast.com, whatever it might be.
Google actually says well the authority for this thing is the website.
It's not Spotify.
Spotify is a place you can find it.
And so it's actually relatively simple if you have a good website that's, it doesn't even have to be super complicated, but just built well.
Very simple to become the top spot on Google for someone searching for your podcast.
So anyway, I looked at it, I said, I think there's something to build here that'll make it really easy for podcasters to have a website without a lot of effort and we'll give them a chance to own their own brand.
We'll give them a chance to drive their listeners to their website where they can collect their email address or sell them something or whatever.
And that's kind of where it started.
It started as just like a project and I literally started it, I built it for a friend.
I was like, let me build you a website.
And I learned a lot more about how podcasting works and how the data moves around.
And then enough people saw his website and said they wanted one.
And then it just sort of organically, I mean, really it's for the past four years, it's organically grown, just podcasters telling each other about it.
Jennifer-Lee: I love that.
You saw a need for something that a lot of us want, but you wouldn't have known if you didn't do your path before.
And going back to kind of ownership on music, my background is radio.
And right now we're seeing such a shift with radio DJs.
Again, it's like, we're out there on a live platform, but it's not our own because, it's happening in the US, it's happening in Canada.
They're getting axed all the time.
And then they're like, oh, what do I do now?
Because they don't own their show.
And so they're going into podcasting.
And that's how I got into podcasting and helping other businesses kind of showcase, uh, their voice.
So I really like that.
And website is always the tricky one, especially when I talk to people in the university space, because a lot of clients are like, well, we have this massive university website or college website or things like that, but we don't want to put the podcast on the front page because we don't want to ruin the work that we've done on the website.
But I'm like, well, how do you showcase that you have a website?
Do you ever come into problems like that?
Brenden Mulligan: Oh, yeah.
I mean I think one of the the hardest problems for someone deciding if they want to use Podpage or not is that, if they have no existing brand, and they're starting a podcast and they want a website for it, it's a very easy decision.
And almost everyone who tries Podpage out for that use case ends up converting and launching a site on us.
Because it's just so easy.
I mean it's zero to one in three seconds And you can customize it a little bit and then it's automated and you never have to touch it again if you don't want to.
And so for most people it just solves that problem.
Where it gets tricky is when someone who has an existing web presence, could be in a university with a huge, you know, university websites are massive and they involve a lot of departments and a lot of people.
It could be that or it could be a creator that just already has a website, Brenden.com.
And he's like, well, I want to add podcasts to my website, but I don't want, and we don't do that.
You can't embed Podpage on someone else's website.
That's just not how it works.
And so, you know, they might have a WordPress site.
So we end up for them, for creator, the simple side is they just end up creating a subdomain for their website.
So it's podcast dot creatorname dot com.
And then the podcast dot is a Podpage.
And then www dot is their existing site, and they just link to the two.
That's fairly straightforward.
When it's a bigger enterprise, most of the time, the bigger enterprises just still do that.
They still just use a subdomain because they can kind of go to their IT department, they can say, hey, can you just change the DNS to this other place?
And then you don't have to do anything else because it's all managed over there.
They're not creating a task for someone else, you know, a longterm task.
What sometimes will happen, I forget the school, 'cause we actually work with a lot of schools.
We work with schools that have a single podcast that they want to put up there.
We also work with schools that have like a student run station that has lots of shows and they're teaching the students how to do podcasting.
And so they create on Podpage, you can have a podcast network website where you can have lots of shows.
So that's, that's pretty common.
So it'd be like podcasts dot school dot edu.
We have a bunch of them.
I think one's in Cape Cod that we work with a lot.
But then the students can just keep launching sites and they just add them to that one site.
Neil McPhedran: That's great.
Brenden Mulligan: So that does happen.
And then a lot of times, sometimes they'll just be like, you know, we're going to have a whole nother website.
We're going to have a, you know, schoolpodcast dot com and it's just going to be totally separate.
Jennifer-Lee: And with Podpage, are there certain templates?
Are there ways to customize it that even though it directs over there, it kind of looks similar to what you already have for branding?
Brenden Mulligan: You know, it definitely can.
It's hard.
There's not really templates because everyone's site looks different.
Everyone's existing site looks different.
But with some time put into it, you can make it feel pretty similar.
One of the hardest things, or one of the biggest things to do is the navigation bar.
Because generally, a user's not going to be like, oh, am I going on a totally different, if you can make it look kind of the same, they're just like, oh, I'm a different page of the website.
But if the navigation bar is totally different, there's no way to get back.
So what we end up saying is, because on Podpage, you can add navigation links to whatever you want.
It's kind of like scrap all of the functionality.
I mean, Podpage does so much beyond just importing episodes.
You know, you can create contact page, about page, obviously, but you can have a course catalog.
Like courses, like online courses, you can have an online store, you can have pages for people to join membership programs, you can do a blog, you can import videos, you can import reviews, I mean, it's just most people's navigation bars on Podpage are too long in general, because there's just too much stuff in there.
But when you want to mirror two different sites, we basically say remove almost everything the Podpage has except episodes, and then add the rest of the links that you would have on your other site.
And they actually just open the pages on the other site.
So there's ways to do it.
It's not super intuitive.
We should do a better job in it, but it's not a big need.
Neil McPhedran: What are some common, you mentioned navigation there, but an off the top, you were talking about SEO and just not having a website generally.
But what are some common issues that you see with podcast websites or maybe the other way around is like what are some things that are just big misses?
Brenden Mulligan: I think the biggest one is sometimes I'll go to someone's site and they will have created a page on their website for a podcast.
So they have a WordPress site and you go to slash podcast and it's like oh the, you know, I launched this new podcast.
And they'll put a player on that page that they get from their media host or whoever, that has all the episodes in it.
It's just like sort of an all in one player.
And right off the bat that's a big miss because you really want Google to be able to index every single episode for your website.
So when people are searching for specific episodes, when someone searches for this episode, Continuing Studies Brenden, or whatever, you still want to draw them from Apple and all the other places to your website.
So you want a page on your website for the episode.
And if you put like a media host's big player, like a playlist player on your website, you're just not going to have that.
You just have the slash podcast.
And that, again, this, it depends on what level you are, because at a certain level, you might not need all of these things because you're so popular that it's not something you necessarily need to be worried about anymore.
But generally, you want Google to be able to index all of your content.
They're not going to index content that's embedded in a different player.
And so that's, I think, one of the big miss.
Another big miss is just, on people's main sites, they say, listen to my podcast, you click podcast, and just takes you to Apple.
Because what if the person's on an Android phone?
I think that's a big miss, not putting ways to get to the different players.
Big miss, I think, is putting out on Twitter or Facebook links to just Apple, right?
I think at least put a link to Apple and Spotify and whatever YouTube music is now.
But ideally, you don't need to do that.
You just put a link to your website, and when somebody gets to the website, they can choose whatever player they want to play it on.
I think those are some big misses.
I think it's a miss to not put social proof that people like your podcast on your website.
So that's why we, without even asking you, when you're setting up a site, we say, oh, we'll find you on Apple, and then we'll start pulling in your reviews, because you should be telling people like, oh, there are human beings that listen to this show and like it.
Like, that's, you know, generally helpful to get people to, to make their decision on whether or not they're going to listen to it.
And then I think the last one that comes to mind right away is, if you have a podcast that's had a lot of content, let's say you have fifty episodes, a hundred episodes, it's likely that your most recent episode is not your best episode.
And if I'm a brand new listener and I'm coming in and I've never listened to the show, your job as a podcaster is to get me to subscribe and like listen to lots of episodes.
And so a lot of people will just have a website where they'll just list all their episodes.
you know, in reverse order.
And so you go to their podcast website and it just tells you whatever their most recent episode is.
You should have gone back and figured out which of the episodes convert people from new listeners to ongoing listeners.
And you should put that at the top, right?
So we do that.
There's just like a new listener section that you can add that says pick your best episodes.
Because you should be telling people what's the best content that you've ever created, not just what's the most recent.
So I think those are some of the misses.
Jennifer-Lee: You just hit on one of my pet peeves, because I was just doing a judging contest for podcasts.
And so many people, because podcasts are unique to the way that you listen and there's a ton of apps out there, right?
And not everyone listens the same way, but a lot of the people that I were judging, I would go to their website and they would only have Apple on there.
And I am not an Apple user.
I'm okay to say that I'll probably get hate from that, but that's okay.
But it's like, okay, now it's up to me to go find your podcast somewhere else.
And sometimes they're not even on players like Apple, like Spotify, they're on something else.
So I think having something on your website that's way easier for you to connect, to find out where you can listen, because if not, I'll just give up if it's too hard.
Brenden Mulligan: Well, and actually, I mean, every piece of electronic I'm looking at is made by Apple, I think, except maybe my Google Home.
I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem, and I have been for a long time.
I don't use Apple Podcasts.
I use Spotify.
Because Spotify is cro, it's just, it's easier.
I think it's, I actually like it just better.
So an Apple link is always a pain for me too.
And I'm an Apple user, right?
Like, I don't want to open up Apple Podcasts.
I want to open up Spotify.
So.
I agree with you.
I think it's just, it's a little bit, you just lose a lot of people.
And people are not particularly great at doing work in general.
And so giving them an Apple link that they have to like, I guess it would open the Apple podcast website, and then they have to type into Spotify.
People don't want to do that.
They just want to click and listen.
So.
Neil McPhedran: It's a huge challenge, I think, for podcasters sharing their show in social media to have a link to go to all those apps.
And so having that homepage or those individual episode pages with links to all of those players, all those apps is just brilliant.
I don't know how many times I see a post in LinkedIn or something, and it's like the Apple link, the Spotify link to your point, the YouTube link, and then, and that's it.
And you're kind of on your own versus this one link is such an incredible feature.
I think the other one you mentioned, um, which really strikes me as important is the individual pages for each episode.
You make a really good point about the SEO functionality of that with, you know, Google indexing the whole page and you could put all that content on there.
But also, I think for higher ed podcasters, the vast majority, it's evergreen content.
And as we can think about this robust catalog, and so it's really great to have a page for each episode, you can put a transcript in there.
There's so much you can put in there as higher ed podcasters.
And I really like your idea about the introduction for new listeners.
And again, having individual pages for each episode and leading someone down the garden path of here's the best episodes.
Here's where to start.
I, I think it's just such a great way to introduce a podcast to a new listener.
We kind of get into this mindset that people drop in to our most recent episode, but that's not necessarily how we consume podcasts or how we discover a podcast for sure.
Brenden Mulligan: So, well, even if you do, I mean, in addition to just hear the best, it's like even, you know, on Podpage you can set categories for them and then category pages are created and you can see all the podcast episodes that are part of a category.
Like let's say you get lucky and your most recent podcast is something that resonates with someone, but you might cover sports, business, and finance or something like that, right?
I don't know.
And like the most recent one's sports, but that person hates business and finance.
They go to episode two, it's about business, and they're like, well, this isn't for me.
Being able to say, well, no, like if you love this one, you'll probably like these, right?
So, and you know, on Podpage, if on an episode page, if you've tagged it sports on the right hand pane, it'll say, here's a bunch of other sports episodes that we've done, right?
Trying to lead the person to keep going.
And it's just making it easy for them.
Like people are lazy.
It's really hard.
Podcasting is interesting because it really does feel like, I've got some, podcasts that I really like and even I have, it doesn't necessarily, you know, I get in the car and I pull up the episodes that are in queue to listen to and if I've gotten through them all, for some reason my first instinct isn't, I should go back to a show that I love that I just started listening to but it's been on for three years.
And I should go search for something I might like that they talked about before.
It feels like work.
And I think across all businesses you could, if, you have to spoon feed customers with what they want, what they're looking for, try to like sense what they might like and then say, oh, if you like that, here's something you should try.
As opposed to making them figure it out.
It's just generally you're going to be better off converting them to longer term listeners.
Jennifer-Lee: Podcasting is just so young still and it's changing all the time and I think that's the hard part, is like Neil and I've had a discussion of what makes it a podcast.
Because yes you're on Spotify, you're on Apple, but other people are just purely on YouTube and they consider it a podcast.
Or they're purely on Twitch or they're on other things that you're like, I would never think that's quote unquote, a podcast platform.
So I think as we're evolving, it's like, what is a podcast?
Where do they live?
And how do we make it easier for the listeners to A, find it, but then go back and listen to other episodes.
Because it does, it feels like there's too many choices and I'm lazy, I don't want to have to do a lot of work, but then I think that's where podcasting has the edge too, because I do think your audience is more dedicated than a YouTube, than a radio because you are doing more work to listen.
So if you have forty people doing the work doesn't seem like a lot of listeners but if they're doing the work to find you that's forty people doing the work to find you.
Brenden Mulligan: Well I also think you just meet listeners where they are.
I've actually helped a handful of podcasts, or a couple things.
I helped someone was doing a Twitter space on a weekly basis and I said well this is great but everyone who's not online when you're doing it kind of misses out.
Why don't we just, so I helped them download their audio, convert it, and then they launched a podcast.
And they didn't have to do any extra work.
I mean, they hired an editor.
But outside of that, they just had to upload it to a new spot.
And suddenly it was evergreen and around on a different platform.
And then the same with some people who were doing, they were doing a live stream YouTube.
The first thirty minutes of their live stream was a conversation between some really smart people.
The second thirty minutes was Q& A.
So it was like, well, let's just take the first thirty minutes.
And it wasn't even like make a podcast out of it.
It was just also distribute it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
And podcasters are kind of going the other way.
It's harder to go the other way when you don't have video content.
I know you all said that this was an audio only show, right?
But we are recording video, like it wouldn't be that much harder at some point to be like, all right, well, let's just release a video too.
This is actually going back to your question about podcast website misses.
I'm starting to see this more and more over the past year where people are saying, all right, well, before it was just like, if you're a Buzzsprout user, we'll import your stuff from your feed.
We know that it's Buzzsprout.
So then we automatically create the official Buzzsprout media player and insert that on the episode page.
I would prefer to use the host media player when we can.
We don't get in the way of the play button or we don't do any tracking or anything.
So, but a lot of people are like, well, I actually don't really want it to be that I want it to be the YouTube version of my show.
Because if someone's going to go to my website with their eyes and look at the screen, it's more likely that they would be more pulled in by watching something than by listening.
And so that's kind of a big, we just, I haven't really announced it, but we're, we've starting moving towards like a lot more visual, even though it's a podcast, a lot more visual on the website because a website is a more visual thing, right?
So it's like, you know, just have to figure out where that user is coming in and what they might be looking for, what will keep them and keep them engaged.
And sometimes it ends up being not necessarily what you set out to start with.
So.
You don't have flexibility with Spotify or Apple.
The page is going to look like whatever they think in the new iOS release the page should look like.
You have no control.
The algorithm is going to change.
Like with a website, you have so much control over how you present yourself and you can test it.
You can be like, all right, well for two months we're going to test putting a video up front.
For the next two months, we're going to test for audio.
Let's see which one works better, right?
You have the opportunity to sort of play.
Neil McPhedran: That's great.
Jennifer-Lee: And Neil and I are missing a big opportunity because we are pretty cute, so I feel like we would drive more listeners.
Brenden Mulligan: Exactly.
Neil McPhedran: That's a really good point.
I want to circle back on the categories, which I think is really interesting because I think that's hard for podcasters, but is key for a lot of higher education podcasters because really it's about cerebral content.
A lot of them, it's about learning, so on and so forth.
So categories and themes is really important and super challenging to do that.
And we've just gone through this using Podpage for Think Fast Talk Smart, and been incredibly easy to build out those categories based on core themes of the show.
And then now we have these pages, which are roll ups basically of those categories.
And so that has just been such an amazing thing to now have.
And then back to, well, how do we get people listening to more of our content?
How do we get people from a discovery perspective?
I feel like suddenly we've got this mechanism now with the show where we've got great discovery content.
So someone who's public speaker is about to do some public speaking and they're a nervous public speaker.
Well, here's four episodes on that.
Or for those who are listeners, it's like diving into another, oh, I like that theme.
I can dive into more episodes around it.
So it's been a great unlock for us.
I just kind of wanted to circle back on that category thing.
'Cause I think it's really a key thing for higher education podcasters.
Brenden Mulligan: We're trying to figure out right now, you know, we have categories for episodes.
We have categories for blogs.
Every time we add something new, someone's like, oh, can we have categories for that.
I think before we go down that road, we're starting to solicit feedback from the community of like, well, should the categories be different, right?
Like should your website have a core set of categories that could be associated episodes with it, or blog posts, or videos, or whatever, right?
And then the category page represents like, oh, you're a business finance brand, and here's the episodes about it.
Here's the blog posts about it.
Here's the videos about it versus having these sort of siloed category pages.
And so every time I go down and say, all right, well, this, that seems like the right direction.
Then someone comes up with a great counter example of like, well, for me, it really makes sense to have these things separate.
So we're starting to solicit feedback.
I think that was the first weekend that I built Podpage.
It had categories.
It's a feature that was there from the beginning.
I don't think we have done a very good job in exposing it and helping people use it well.
Neil McPhedran: Over the last few episodes, we've introduced and have been chatting about Podcasting 2.0, and I know that with Podpage, you've embraced some of the tags and the features and whatnot.
But curious, just off the top, before we dive into a little bit more, what's your thoughts on, as someone who's building deep into the infrastructure, if you will, uh, and tack of podcasting, what, what's your initial opinions on Podcasting 2.0 to start with?
And I'd love to sort of dig into a couple of specifics.
Brenden Mulligan: Well, okay, so I think the Podcasting 2.0, first of all, overall, I think it is a absolutely worthwhile and phenomenal initiative, sort of my black and white view of it.
When you dig into the details of it, I think there's a few core things that, I think that it is poorly branded, uh, at the moment because it's unclear really what specifically it is, this is just my opinion, right?
If you search Podcasting 2.0 on Google, you go to the podcastindex.com.
It's unclear if the index is part of Podcasting 2.0 or it's just a resource that supports it.
So I think that there's some stuff around in general.
Like if you, if someone were to say, hey, where do I go to find out about Podcasting 2.0?
I actually don't have a great place to point them.
And I think that's a problem.
That said, so then I break it down.
Okay, maybe Podcasting 2.0 is the podcast index a little bit.
So that's great to have like a sort of this canonical place to get information.
Absolutely necessary.
Absolutely amazing.
Very worthwhile.
Then I see outside of that, I see it in these two camps of one is sort of, how do we reward podcasters monetarily for their contributions and for what they're doing?
So there's the whole value for value, um,
initiative, which I kind of feel like is such a big deal that it's its own thing.
And then there's just how do we get more tags and more information into the podcast feed that are more generalized?
Okay, so, the tags, I think, is the obvious I mean, of course we should be having a better standard for podcasting.
If you think about Podpage, like, we take the basic information and we let you add a lot of stuff onto it.
But like, so what do we let you add on?
We let you say, okay, in this episode, here's what the YouTube link is.
That should be in the feed.
That should be in everyone's feed.
Every platform should be able to link back to the videos.
Here are the guests.
That should be in the feed.
That should be in everyone's feed.
Like there's so many items that should be in just the feed.
So Podpage, I mean, it would actually competitively make things worse for me because then suddenly like these things would just be used everywhere.
And so the websites would be less unique, but whatever.
I mean, I've thought about making Podpage a feed provider where I take the host feed, I add a bunch of stuff to it, and then people can use their Podpage RSS because it's just going to be better.
Anyway, so I think that the feed should have tons of more stuff into it.
That's an awesome thing, and I think like, yeah, we should definitely be pushing that forward.
The value for value, I think it is a worthwhile initiative to figure out a way to make it easy for people to give tips or money or donations to a show, regardless of what platform they're on.
And whether you're on Spotify, Apple, a brand new one, everything funnels the same way.
You don't have, like, podcasters don't have little accounts across all these places.
They've got to go scoop up the money, and people aren't having to put five cents on their credit card.
So, the concept of micropayments, good.
The concept of like centralized account for the micropayments to go to, good.
As someone who very much is an advocate for crypto, I've done a lot in crypto, so I just think that it's still really hard for people to get over the step of like understanding what Satoshis are, getting a crypto wallet set up, and I don't see Apple or Spotify or any of these platforms really embracing that as the means of, so I feel like crypto as a transactional mechanism is good because it's efficient.
It's an efficient way of sending a tiny bit of money.
But on the consumer side I don't see like my wife ever being like I got to set up my crypto wallet so I can send some SATS over to this podcast I love.
I just don't.
So I think it's going to be, there's going to be a layer built on top of it that everyone else can use.
I think Venmo would be unsuccessful if it was forcing people to set up crypto wallets, but like Venmo is just digital currency platform.
It's just, it's not decentralized.
It's not, you know, all the things that crypto is Venmo isn't, but Venmo works because people like, oh, I put five bucks in and then I can send it back and forth.
And I think it's got to be as easy as Venmo, but it's a valid thing.
Jennifer-Lee: Then we already have things that aren't crypto.
I know a lot of podcasters use, let's say, Buy Me a Coffee, which is very popular.
And I think it's easier to grasp.
I think what 2.0 is doing, especially with some of the features is amazing.
And the way that they're trying to get more podcasters know.
And, but to your point, I was just having a call of a client and they're like, what is 2.0?
A lot of people don't know.
And we're always still trying to wrap our head around it.
So it's like, how does it be easier and implement as something that everybody does, opposed to it just being, okay, these nerdy podcasters know what 2.0 is.
But that's it.
Brenden Mulligan: Yeah.
I think that, I mean.
I think that's fair.
I think that the Buy Me a Coffee and all those different services are awesome solutions for giving people tips and donations and stuff.
And I say decentralized, not meaning crypto decentralized, but I think the sort of, I guess, independent, sort of like a non platform based way of moving funds around is probably necessary to avoid Apple having their own tipping system and Spotify having their own tipping system and YouTube having.
Like, it would be nice if there's a way that, because, because the feed is so open source, if the way of getting money to podcasters was also open source in a way, which is why I think crypto is, is a good choice, but it's just hard unless you add the on ramp that isn't, I need to create a crypto wallet, right?
And that even goes for podcasters.
Like, I think having a site that you went on and you were just like, all right, I'm Brenden's podcast.
I want to create an account, button.
I don't need to know what's happening in the backend.
It just creates an account with zero dollars in it.
And then that number goes up as people send money to it.
Anyway, we could go deeper on this.
We absolutely should be doing it.
It's just the mechanics still need to be worked out, I think, in a way that works for the marketplace.
Neil McPhedran: Yeah, we've, in our Podcasting 2.0 conversations, steered away from the value for value side of it, because it makes it, I think, just per everything you've laid out so eloquently, it's messy, it's difficult to get your head around.
And it's almost muddied the water of so much of the great stuff about Podcasting 2.0 and the features and enriching the RSS feed.
And there's so many people, like when we first started talking about this about four or five months ago with Jen, she was like, it's some libertarian, free street, free speech crypto thing.
And I just think that there's so much of the podcast ecosystem that that's kind of their takeaway of what it is, but it's this iceberg with a lot of really cool stuff underneath, but what's floating on top of the water is just that's some crypto libertarian free speech thing, right?
Jennifer-Lee: I think I tapped out when they said the Pod Father.
I think that's really where I tapped out.
Brenden Mulligan: Well, I mean that's what's so cool about it, is that the person who's credited with, you know, being a co inventor of the whole platform eighteen years ago or whenever it was, is still here trying to push the platform forward.
That's awesome.
Now, yes, the word Pod Father can be a turn off to some people, but like, just the fact that it's being led by that person is awesome.
And that person, you know, I think to go very back to the beginning of this conversation, where it was like, why did you start Podpage?
When I was, I created a website platform for musicians fifteen years ago, ten, fifteen years ago.
It was the hardest thing about creating most platforms like that, is that the first user, the first user experience is, hey, welcome to the thing.
Spend a few days entering a bunch of information in here that you already have other places.
It's the worst.
It's like for musicians like, cool, welcome.
I built a really beautiful way to, to list your albums, but please enter your track list, your album, your album artwork.
And people wouldn't do it.
It was really hard to get people over the hump.
Now, once they did it, they were stuck because they were excited that they put all the time and effort into it.
But with podcasting, it's all there.
It literally blew my mind.
That's the reason I was able to build the core of Podpage in like about a day and a half was because all I had to do was take the information that was already being fed through the podcast feed and just put it up.
And I think setting out at the beginning of podcasting to be like, this is an open standard and the fact that that's still there and Google and Apple and Spotify are all reading from the same open source feed is really like something that's phenomenal.
So some of the libertarian uh, maybe criticism is probably that same mentality was what it started out with.
Like, no, this needs to be open, this can't be like a closed system that Apple can own.
So I think that's cool.
I mean, I think it's like, it's a double-edged sword.
But a hundred percent on board with, I think that the Podcasting 2.0 stuff could be more powerful if it was maybe rebranded a little bit, or not even rebranded, just sort of explain in a more concise way.
Neil McPhedran: So yeah.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
I just want to circle back on the point you were making there, which is, I think for so many podcasters, especially in the higher education space, because there's accessibility regulations in a lot of institutions, we're putting a lot of work into show notes, transcripts, creating chapters, so on and so forth, already for our show.
And that then automatically proliferates into a page for the episode.
So that I think is just an incredible opportunity that we see is a huge miss for a lot of higher ed podcast clients that we start working with that don't have that.
They're already creating all this content and then it just automatically creates a page for it.
It's just incredible.
Brenden Mulligan: That's kind of the whole point is like you're doing the work.
You might as well have a place on the internet that you own, that you control, that you have, that's yours and that Google respects as the source.
And you shouldn't have to do a lot of work to get there, right?
You're already doing the work.
What can I do?
What can Podpages do to make it so you don't do any extra work, but you get this huge benefit of having a really fully featured website.
And the good news is, and not to like sell against myself, but a lot of podcasters when they're getting started, they put their stuff on a podcast host.
The host usually creates a very rudimentary website for them.
And sometimes the host lets them put the custom domain to that website.
And for a lot of podcasters that come to me and say, I really want to use Podpage, but I don't have any money.
I usually say, just as long as you can put a domain name on your host website, that might be enough for you.
You probably won't have any way of contacting your customers or your listeners.
You might not be able to do a bunch of the stuff that Podpage does, but that's probably fine.
Just get started with something that's yours and just get a domain on your Buzzsprout website, and Buzzsprout just released a bunch of great websites, a new website upgrade and Transistor has great ones, Captivate has great ones.
Like a lot of these have good, a really good enough for now, at the beginning, website.
So you don't even have to necessarily spend extra money.
You just get something that's yours at the top of Google.
Neil McPhedran: I think that's incredible advice.
I think the other thing is like a lot of podcasters, will add their own unique URL, but don't realize that there's still the, host version out there.
So like, for example, Simplecast automatically creates the Simplecast version, and that tends to rank higher in Google, for example.
So I think that that's a great first step.
So, but, um, this was a great conversation.
Thank you for, joining us today, Brenden.
I think just covered off a lot here in podcast websites and the importance of it.
And thanks for joining us.
And as I said, we've been using Podpage and we found it just a wonderful product to use.
Brenden Mulligan: Thank you.
Please keep sending feedback.
That's how it gets better.
Neil McPhedran: Well, that was fun, Jen.
We didn't talk about a specific podcast, but we talked about a really, I think super important and overlooked thing as podcasters, but especially higher ed podcasters, as we put so much effort into our content and show notes and so on and so forth.
So having that robust website to go along with it just feels like such a incredible opportunity, and I think for a lot of higher ed podcasters, a big miss.
Jennifer-Lee: It's part of the package.
It's something that more and more people are really going to have to start doing if we are taking podcasting seriously.
Podcasting, again, not to say this on every episode, is so young.
But these things are going to become just all part of it.
And it's going to be second nature once we grow and there is a return on it eventually.
And really too, it's not always just about getting listeners.
If you're wanting to get your brand out there and stuff, it's just being on the ecosystem of searchability on Google.
So really it's important.
Neil McPhedran: Yeah, I really appreciated the, conversation and Brenden's, transparency, around sort of how he came to it and why he's built the product he's built.
and I just, you know, we see it, in building Higher Ed Pods, glaringly, like looking at literally hundreds and hundreds of higher ed podcasts, the lack of attention to the website.
And as Brenden was saying off the top there, even just the visibility on Google and owning your visibility on Google as the first couple of results.
Versus it being Apple or YouTube or Spotify or so on.
Just that, that SEO component of it is super key and I would encourage everyone out there listening to really think about your website and start with the basics, if you haven't done anything yet.
Like as Brenden was saying, just even with your hosting platform, what's some of the website functionality there.
and then maybe take this, you know, next step into using something like Podpage, but huge opportunity for us as higher education podcasters.
Jennifer-Lee: And he pointed out a huge opportunity for us to put our faces and video on our website.
So we're going to have to do that because we're not practicing what we're preaching.
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