Six New Features in Podpage You Can Use Now!

Dave Jackson00:00:00

Podpage recently held a town hall, and today we're going to talk about some new features that are available now.

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Welcome to Podcast Website Tips, the ultimate guide for podcasters who want to level up their online presence with no coding required. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, this show gives you practical, actionable advice to build and optimize your podcast website.We cover everything from design and content to SEO and monetization. Get ready to attract more listeners and take your website from good to great. Here's your host, Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson00:00:40

Yeah. So PodPage had a town hall, this is open to everyone, where we showcase some new features.And I was joined by the founder, lead developer and CEO of PodPage, Brennan Mulligan. And I'm just gonna let him explain. The first thing we did was this.

Brenden Mulligan00:00:57

First thing we did was, was we added built in gdpr. And so for anyone who doesn't know what GDPR is, your experience with it is.Is probably something that has frustrated you, which is every website you go to, you have to click the dumb cookie banner. It's something that the European government put in place to help people with privacy.At the end of the day now everyone just hits the button and it's not really helping much, but it is important to have it. So for years, this is only this. We've offered a way you can add this through a your own cookie bot or Termly account. It's on.It's been on the Pro plan. Earlier this year we did two things.One, we launched our own version of this and two, we made it available for all plans because this is a legal thing, shouldn't be gated by a more expensive plan. So if you're in the Basic, Pro or Elite, anyone can have access to this now.

Dave Jackson00:01:43

And I'll have a link in the show notes for a video where you can watch me using that feature.

Brenden Mulligan00:01:48

Next up, second one probably doesn't affect a lot of you is WordPress migration. So should have built this years ago. It's kind of a nightmare because WordPress is kind of a nightmare.Our goal is to make it easy to migrate someone who has a WordPress page that they've had for a long time, but they really are annoyed by onto a platform that they're excited about. So we actually used Dave's school of podcasting as the demo for this.One of the reasons was because obviously it's easy to work with Dave, but the second is it was a mess. Yeah, easier for you to say than me to say. It was. It was. It's it was a mess and it was enormous, right? We're not talking about like a new podcast.We're talking about podcasts with over a thousand episodes. We're talking about someone who has had a thousand affiliate links over the years. Custom pages.You have 50 different custom pages doing different things. It was, it was a nightmare. But it was a good stress test to try to migrate the content. And so we released that earlier.If you have someone you know who's who, who's been wanting to move to PodPage because they like your website, but they've got a WordPress site that they don't want to leave, it's really amazing. So it pulls over all your blog posts and makes them blog posts. It pulls over the blog, the blog posts on WordPress that are actually episodes.And it'll compare them with the episodes from your feed. It will set up a redirect from your old episode URL to your new episode URL.So, like, for Dave, I think you had, you know, 1200 posts posts, but when we pulled them over, we only imported like 150 posts because they were actual blog posts. The rest we were like, oh, these are episodes. So we'll just forward them over there.We import your custom pages, we import your pretty links and we basically make it so when you move over, there's no dead links, there's no lost SEO and your content all comes over and you don't have to do anything. So for anyone who's been on the fence with us around WordPress or if you know anyone, this is really great.We're doing it as a white glove service at this point. You work with Dave and I to move your site over. So it's great.And like I said, we did this with Dave and the other thing we did is we automatically categorized episodes depending on his top topics. Like, all this came over. We have. I'll talk about in a minute. We track the 404s which are the dead links, and there just. There really aren't any.The migration works really, really well. So that's our WordPress migration.

Dave Jackson00:04:10

And for anyone who wanted sub menus

Brenden Mulligan00:04:12

on your navigation bar, navigation nesting this. This sounds like a teeny little feature, but I think it's the number one feature request over the last couple years.The way that OnPage has always worked is you can add links to your navigation and your, your navigation bar becomes massive. If you want to add a lot of links or if you have a page that has a long title and for the most part you had they've all just been single links.And so earlier this year we added a way to. Now you can take any link up here and you can embed it underneath another link. So here you can see here.This is the about page on day on the school podcasting. But this is the About Dave Jackson page. And then this is the contact page. These are. This seems dumb, but you could never do this before.And it was a huge nightmare to write this code. But it makes this so nice because you can have just a section for free resources and you can add a lot of custom pages.This is his blog that is under the free resource page. These are custom pages. This is a system page. It's really great to.Because it's going to make websites look better because you won't have this massive long navigation bar.

Dave Jackson00:05:15

And again, we'll have a video of this webinar we did, so you can watch Brennan doing that. But basically you just drag and drop the navigation items on top of each other to make the sub menus.

Brenden Mulligan00:05:27

I wouldn't have thought that was as big of a deal without talking to so many users and having Dave say to me every month, well, the navigation bar is still a top feature request. We're excited to roll that up. While we're in there, we added a little convenience feature. If you have. It is. It might have been.If it hasn't been a while since you built your site, which you probably experienced when you went to design the site, is you came in, you said, I want to edit the homepage. And then you edited that and then you had to go back and go to the Episodes page. Then you had to click Page Edit and you went, okay, now I'm edit.It was. It was a lot of clicks to just edit your site.Now whenever you're in the Page Editor ui, you can just tap the top here and you can choose a different page to edit.So right now I'm editing just the colors, but if I want to say, oh, I want to go edit the about page, I can just click the about page and it pops me over there.

Dave Jackson00:06:13

And this is in the upper left hand corner and you'll see it when you're in PodPage. And it's kind of interesting. It's just a little thing, but it really does speed things up.Another popular request, which is why it's now live and ready to go, is putting PodPage into a different language site language.

Brenden Mulligan00:06:32

This has been a big one and I have a sense that this is more. This is a very targeted feature, obviously, but you can now Convert your site into another language.So there we have a lot of podcasts that are French podcasts, Italian podcasts, Hungarian, Polish.I forget some of our beta testers for this, but you can now just go in and if you want it to be in a different language, you just click in whatever language you want.

Dave Jackson00:06:52

And those languages are English, Spanish, German, French, Hungarian and Polish.

Brenden Mulligan00:06:58

Automatically, we'll just convert all of the POD page strings.So things that say like recent episodes that will become whatever that is in another language, we don't touch your content, we touch the hard coded language that is already on PodPage.

Dave Jackson00:07:11

And the next feature is a great time saver in the world of SEO auto linking.

Brenden Mulligan00:07:16

So we announced this probably in January, maybe February, and this is a more advanced feature in the Elite set. But if you're on the Elite plan, we do a lot of SEO analysis and SEO work for you.And one of the things we do is you can assign if in order for us to analyze a page and know if it's going to do what you want it to do. From an SEO standpoint, we have to know what you want it to do.And when you release an episode or create a custom page or whatever blog post, it's good. And this is a Yoast SEO thing back from the WordPress days. We need to know kind of what your target keywords are.Because if you have a specific set of keywords, we need to know that. If you have a generic set of keywords, we need to know that.And then what we do is we look at the content on the page that you have set the keywords for. When we say, is this page have what it needs to have for Google to know that these are the keywords that you're targeting.So, for example, if you do an interview, if Dave does an interview with me and he wants the keywords to be my name?Well, we're going to look at the URL, we're going to look at the page title, we're going to look at the page content, we're going to look at the first paragraph of the page, we're going to look throughout the whole page and know. Is Dave telling Google that Brendan Mulligan are the keywords that he wants as opposed to POD Page Founder? Right.Like, and you, you kind of have to, you kind of have to fit, you have to. Basically you have to pick because you can't just be everything to Google. Right? You're always targeting certain keywords.And so it is a practice that again, Yoast SEO, which is a great plugin for you for WordPress. This focus key phrase of like what are you going after?And so what we added earlier this year is once you set those phrase, once you set that key phrase you can turn on the ability for that key phrase to be linked all over the rest of your website. So here an example would be let's say you're doing you're fishing podcast and you wrote about like fishing in Colorado.Last year you did an episode and in the episode you said oh I love fishing on the Colorado river. That's one of my favorite places.And then this year you release a new episode specifically about the Colorado river and you say the focus key phrase for this page is the Colorado river is going to be the key phrase. Well, we will automatically link Colorado river on every page on your site that you've ever mentioned it.So that old blog post will automatically have a link to the one year ago will automatically have a link to the new blog blog post. You don't have to do anything.And so it essentially this allows that web of internal linking across your website to like automatically turn on and if you do want to go and add links to an old, old blog post, you don't even have to go and add a link. You can just go add the key phrase, just go pepper it in wherever you want and it'll automatically link for you.So this is one, it's a really good best practice for SEO and we've made it really, really easy to do across your website. Maybe I'll pause here Dave, and if there are any specific questions about what

Dave Jackson00:10:03

we've, we've done so far. Yeah, somebody asked basically this auto link, is that a pro feature or an elite feature?

Brenden Mulligan00:10:13

Yeah, so the auto link is a elite feature. We basically the elite plan is, tends to be there's going to be a lot more heavy handed SEO for sort of like advanced tooling in the elite plan.Sort of like if you're on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin, the, you know the premium one is a, is a paid add on. It's kind of like the same theory here.

Dave Jackson00:10:36

And then we had a question about the WordPress migration. My biggest worry is my pretty links but I'm really interested.

Brenden Mulligan00:10:44

So the WordPress migration, I mean what we. So in PodPage there's a feature called short links which is the same. You basically set up small links that will you can link to anywhere else.And so we take your pretty links and we just convert them to short links and in it depends on the pretty links plugin you have categories, we allow categories so you can have some categorization. So we pull in all of the same, same content. So you're basically you. All of it's still linked over. And Dave is an example.Like all of his pretty links just are short links on his POD page. No.

Dave Jackson00:11:17

Yeah.

Brenden Mulligan00:11:17

If that doesn't answer the question, let me know. Yeah.

Dave Jackson00:11:20

So you basically export your pretty links, you give it to us and then we import them and you're good to go.And keep in mind with the migration, we're bringing over your data, not so much your design, but as you've seen in PodPage, it's super easy just to tweak the whole site with colors. And now with the new navigation, it's really cool to get it looking the way you want it to.So I'll have links to some tutorials as well as the entire webinar and a link if you want to migrate from WordPress.There's a quick form you fill out as well as everything else we mentioned out in the show notes out@podcast websitetips.com thanks so much for listening. In next week's episode, we're going to talk about what's coming in The Future to PodPage.

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