Google It: The Secret Sauce for Podcast Ideas!

Dave Jackson00:00:00

On today's show, using Google to get ideas for your show and your website embedding items. In PodPage, I found a great free resource, especially if you're looking for an email list in the customer success department.We're bringing in Mark King and categories can now be put on the front page of your pod page. And last but not least, a free resource to make QR codes that point at your website.

AI Announcer00:00:26

Welcome to Podcast Website Tips, the 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, back from the road.

Dave Jackson00:01:01

I attended Podcast Movement and then I attended the Content Creator Expo in Cleveland, Ohio. Really great event. Both of those are great. And I heard this particular tip come up a few times and I was like, I need to go try this. So what?This is because we all want our websites to rank higher. We all want to make content for people that are looking for it.And so if you go to Google and we all know this, I realize you might be thinking, duh, but I went to Google, I typed in the word website. That's it. And before I press enter, I see website builder, website checker, website design, websites to watch movies for free. That's interesting.Website maker, free website hosting, website builder, free website, like 1, 2, 3, movies, website domain. And so these are things that are people are looking for.And so for instance, the phrase website builder or website checker, you know, these are things I might want to work into a blog post.Now when I press enter on just searching for website, then what you want to do is, is once you get past it, because it is Google, the, you know, 10 different kind of things that you know will be advertised on and the AI and all that at the very bottom of the page. Why they've added a ton of stuff here. You will see people also ask, and so as I look at this, I see what is a website?Have a website for free, which website to earn money.Which is interesting because I start to think that some of these questions, English wasn't the first language, and then which is the best website to make a website? And then again followed by, you guessed it, more ads. And the idea though is that these are things that are people are looking for.And then if you keep Scrolling down, you will see people also search for, so in this case, website, free website design, website maker, website, Google website create and website example. And so obviously some of these are not great. And some of these especially the people also ask for, make that like, which website to earn money.Maybe that's not the one I'm going to use. But you know, what is a website? And again, you kind of go, well, doesn't everybody know what a website is?These are things that you might want to put into. Maybe that's a heading for your, you know, whatever blog you're writing or things like that. But these are things that.It's an easy way to get an idea of what people are looking for.And as I scroll up the page here and I realize you can't see this, this is an audio podcast, but they now have a things to know section, which is how to create a website. What are some examples of websites, what types of websites, Builders, et cetera, et cetera.So if I go back, I'm going to do this again and I'm going to replace the word finance or the word website with finance. And here again, if I just type in the word without pressing enter, I see Google Finance, Yahoo. Finance, Finance open now, finance department.You get the idea. So to give you some things of what are people randomly typing in around this word?Then when I press enter, and again it's way down the page, people also search for Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, nothing really here. Jumping out Finance in Hindi. There you go. And it might be something that you know, things to know. What are the type of different finances?So maybe if you type in your keyword or what your show is about, you can use these to get a hint of what people are searching for. And if you put in what they're searching for, you have a much better chance of being found from the help desk.The one thing I love about podpages, we do not rope you into, like, well, if we can't do it, you can't do it. That's no fun.And so I will occasionally have somebody that wants to embed a form of some sort into podpage, rather than linking to it, they want it right there on the website. And you can do this on a custom page, you can do this on an episode.And what you're looking for is you'll go into the page or the episode and the button has what I call the left carrot.Now if you look at your keyboard, this is three doors to the left from the shift key on a keyboard and then the right carrot which is two doors to the left from the shift key on your keyboard. If you're looking at it, this would be the shift key on your right hand. And when you see those sometimes called the source code button.But you can basically click on that and you can then take. And this could be anything. It could be. I use Tidy Cow for my calendar, for scheduling and things like that.I could embed an entire scheduling page there. I could take a playlist from Spotify.So maybe you want to make a page about your media kit and so you make a playlist of all the appearances you've been on podcasts. But you can now in Spotify, make that a playlist. You can grab the embed code and put it there. You can embed so many different things.I just wanted to make sure you knew how to do it and where it is. And it's either on a page or an episode.Look for the left Caret, right Caret button again, sometimes called the source code or the HTML view, depending on what tool you're using. And you can embed anything, a YouTube video into your page or an episode.I was on a Mastermind this week with a bunch of entrepreneurs and somebody was talking about Go High Level. If you haven't heard about this, this is kind of an all in one kind of plan that does.Well, it's one of those things where basically it does everything but your laundry. And they're probably working on that. It's a really, really powerful tool. When I look at it, I see where their cheapest plan is $97.And somebody said, oh, wait, wait, if you're using Go High Level, you need to check out system. It's this cool again. It's the easiest all in one marketing platform. And I was like, oh, interesting. And then I saw they had a free plan.Now normally I'm not a fan of free stuff because especially if that's your only business plan because you tend to go out of business. But they have a plan starting at $17. If you want to do Evergreen webinars, that's $47 a month. These are the monthly pricing.If I go annual, it's even less than that. You basically get two months free. And then their most expensive plan, their most expensive plan is $97. And that's where Go High Level starts.And I just got a demo of them.And much like all these all in one kind of features, it like for example, on their email service, which is amazing, they don't do an RSS to email conversion. Now, that's Not a big deal. Most people don't use that feature. But if you ever want to notify your audience when an episode is out, you could do that.Now, you can do it in system, but you would have to do it via Zapier or something like that. But I just wanted to tune that in.So if you're looking for an email system, because I even asked him, I go, okay, but on the free version, if I sell a course, if I create a community, like, what percentage are you taking? And they're like, yeah, we never take a percentage. And I go, even on the free stuff. And they're like, nope. And I go, what's the limitation?And they're like, the only limitation is if you want to do Evergreen webinars, you have to be on the webinar plan, which starts at $47. And I'm like, I personally think Evergreen webinars are kind of a douche move.They're just like, especially if you're making it look like it's live, but it's not. I think that's insincere. It's, again, it's just not a great thing. And so obviously there are some limitations.For instance, on the free version, you can have 2,000 contacts. That's a lot of contacts. So it's interesting. Definitely a tool I'm going to be playing with.But I wanted to pass that along because many podpage users are looking for something for email. And not only will this do your email, but a whole lot more. And you can start with a free plan in just a second.We've got an old feature with a new spin, but first, we're going to start doing customer spotlights. Today we're starting with Mark King. Mark does the Impact Investing Roadshow podcast.You can find it at, you guessed it, impact investingroadshow.com Mark, thanks for coming on the show, Dave.

Mark King00:10:52

It's great to be here. It's a real privilege. Excited, excited to talk about Pond Pitch.

Dave Jackson00:10:57

I liked Mark's name of his show because it has investing and impact. Those sound great Roadshow. So I asked Mark, what is Impact Investing Roadshow about?

Mark King00:11:07

Well, you're right, it's about investing. And impact investing is kind of socially responsible investing. So investing in community things, real estate, new sources of energy.So there's a lot of funds out there that do this type of investing, and they're often out raising capital because they have to raise capital before they can make the investments in whatever they're doing. And that's in the business referred to as A roadshow.And they basically, literally, in the old days, used to hit the road flying from city to city doing their presentations to raise capital from big institutional investors. So the idea is really to give them a venue to explain what they're doing.And to do that, we take a kind of different approach in that we talk about a specific investment and really try to highlight their craft by looking at how they crafted a particular deal and diving deep on a specific investment they made. That illustrates their investment thesis and how they go about the work that they do.And then they can, other people can learn from the way they do their business and they hopefully can use it as a way to raise more capital for the good things they're investing in.

Dave Jackson00:12:15

And that is a great tip. When you can use the verbiage from your community, in this case roadshow, and then work it into your name, that's, that's just gold.And so one of the things we always like to talk about is what was your life like before podpage?

Mark King00:12:30

Well, this is actually my third rodeo in terms of podcasting. There's probably a couple little side projects in there that I don't count, but third, third real podcast.And so back in Gosh, it's probably 2014, 2015, like a lot of people, I was using WordPress and a collection of plugins and that honestly was one of the things that made it unsustainable. You really can't focus as much on the qual quality of the content and your guests when you're worried about updating plugins.And I had a security breach at one point and you know how disruptive that is. I mean, it's just like three days in Dante's hell trying to figure out what's going on with the website.And it adds no real value to the quality of the content that I'm trying to provide the audience or for the guests either. And then, you know, that was probably 10 years ago. And then five years ago I thought, oh, things have gotten better.There's some really nice templates, right? I'm like, oh, podcasting templates, this will solve my problem.And not really, I mean, really only the templates really only help with the design component. It doesn't help with the workflow. And again, it just, it's a lot of non value added work related to WordPress.Even if you get a really slick podcasting template. My favorite again is just when, when your security plugin goes rogue and you can't even log in, it can be a real pain.It's really powerful but it can be a real pain.

Dave Jackson00:13:56

And now that you've switched to PodPage, well, what's your life like now?

Mark King00:14:00

Yeah, well, there's kind of two things I would say that are different. One is when I was thinking about coming back and taking another run at a third show, part of it is just the time equation.It's like, oh, do I really have time to do this?And I think the being able to just configure podpage as opposed to fully customize it really lowered the bar in terms of kind of the initial time investment. Because again, with a guest show, a lot of people, in fact I was most people check out the website before they agree to come onto the show.So having that kind of up and running before we even recorded episode one. And this is one of the things people don't talk about, guest recruiting.When you're a new show, you really have to have something that gives you enough credibility that people are going to say, yes, I'm willing to invest a couple hours and come on your show because again, I'm interviewing investors that are pretty busy people and the ability to have that quickly configurable and not have to go down the rabbit hole of customization. Because again, the Nice thing about WordPress is you can customize anything. The bad thing about WordPress is you can customize ANYTHING.And what, what PodPage really has done, and this is where the design has just obviously been done by podcasters. The ability to set that up really, really quickly, frankly, was one of the key things in kind of convincing me to take another run at the show.The other thing about doing an interview show is again, I'm dealing with maybe somebody out there has a show where they're interviewing people that aren't busy and have very full calendars.And the other thing is a lot of the people I deal with have assistants that are helping with their calendar or uploading social media materials, all of that kind of stuff. So the big value add for me from an ongoing workflow standpoint really is around guest management, the intake form, the profile.Because again, I'm able to give them a single spot, they can come back to it if they have one thing at work or another thing at home, or they have to just tell an assistant here, go to this link and get this person this information. That has been a real game changer from a workflow standpoint. All the other stuff again is super streamlined from a workflow standpoint.But for me specifically, the guest management piece has just been awesome.

Dave Jackson00:16:28

And of course you can see all of the people that have been on his show by going to impact. Investingroadshow.com Mark, thanks for coming on the show.

Mark King00:16:38

Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.

Dave Jackson00:16:43

Many, many moons ago I used to teach Microsoft Office. The software was Access, it was their database program and it was awful. What does this have to do with PodPage?Well, it's not always how much information you have in your database, but how easy is it to get the information out. And so PodPage has had the ability to add categories to your episode since pretty much day one. And it's great.You can see them in the menu if you turn that on. But now you have the ability to put them on the front page. You can have them show up right above your recent episodes.So for example, this show occasionally will have a replay of our monthly meetup. And so that's one of the categories. And when you click on that, you will see the monthly meetups. It's kind of like a filter.And, and so you can now add this to your homepage. So when you go into Pages and edit your homepage, you will see an option there that you can turn categories on the front page.It's actually pretty cool, especially if you've used categories in the past. If you haven't, go to Pages Episodes and you'll see an option there for categories, you can easily add them there.When you go to the episode list, you'll see a button there for add a category. So again, it's not always about putting all the information in, but how easy is it to pull it out?And the great thing about this is when you click on a category, if you look at the top of the screen where your URL is, you can copy that and put it in your show notes. So you could say, hey, today we talked about topic A. If you want more of this, click here to see more episodes about topic A.And that link can link to your website with the category filter on. You can put this in your show notes. Now, why is this a big deal?Because now when people go to your website, they're going to stay longer because you found something they like. They don't just want one episode, they might find more.And when people go to your website and they stay there for 20 minutes, Google might go, wow, that must be really good information because every time I send somebody over to Dave's site, they stay there for 20 minutes. I'll have a video in the show notes where you can see this in action. But yeah, categories are now available to be put on the front page.One little Baby tip. This comes in handy, especially if you're doing any kind of promotion.If you're using Google Chrome, go to your website and anywhere on your website that's not a button. Etc, etc. If you right click your mouse, you'll see an option that says create QR code for this page.And when you click on that, you'll end up with this QR code. For whatever reason, it has a dinosaur in the middle of it, but you can put the actual domain right there.You can copy that QR code and paste it into something, or if you want a more permanent version, you can download that. So if you're looking for a freeway to make QR codes for your website, that's one.Now, if you want something with a little more control, one of my favorite tools is Switchy. Switchy is a tool that it's a link shortener, a little bit like bit ly, but it also does link in bio pages. It gives you all sorts of stats.It's an amazing tool and it's been on appsumo for a very long time. You can buy it for one low payment and I swear by it, I use it all the time. And this is one of the things you can do.And you can actually make a QR code with your logo in the middle of the QR code, rather than this cute little dinosaur that's going to do it for this episode. And if you haven't already, go over to podpage.com preview. We don't need a credit card.If you've never tried Podpage, this is a way for you to try for 14 days, absolutely free. If you like it, sign up for a subscription, point your domain at it, and that domain can be from anybody.So GoDaddy, Namecheap, cooler websites, whoever, and start harnessing the power and the flexibility of PodPage. We'll see you again real soon with another episode of Podcast Website Tips.

AI Announcer00:21:07

Podcast Website Tips is part of the Power of Podcasting Network. Find this and all of Dave's shows@powerofpodcasting.com.