Yesterday, I unveiled a new website. It showcases the design talents of graphic designer Nik Gill and hired UX designer Steve Yong. But a lot of credit goes to Juergen Berkessel and an idea/template he now calls the Conversion Optimized Podcast Homepage. 

My first ham-fisted attempt to follow his guidelines is preserved for eternity via Intenet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Not long after, I made another not-very-pretty attempt at building it better, and it worked. Really, really well, as you’ll soon see. 

Most podcast hosting companies will create an automatically-generated website, using the contents of the RSS feed to create a web presence for the show. And if not, various 3rd-party services will take a bit more info from you and crank out a website using nothing but your RSS feed.

None of these auto-generation solutions are good enough, because the information they have to work with—fields inside a podcast’s RSS feed—isn’t detailed enough. Because a podcast’s RSS feed wasn’t made to populate a website. It was made to update podcast directories and apps. That’s it.

Strangely, most people who consume my content aren’t listening to my content. Instead, 57% of the Podcast Pontifications content I produced in February 2021 was consumed by people reading the text. Only 41% listened to the audio files. That clearly shows a bias toward reading.

I remind you that my show, Podcast Pontifications, is only ever about podcasting. Every word I speak or write is only of interest to podcasters. And podcasters, generally speaking, like to listen to content. 

Apparently, my audience is made up of podcasters who also like to read.

Also, thanks to my website before the prettying-up, I was seeing 72% of my website's traffic coming from organic search. And that’s with less than 3% searches for “podcast pontifications”. Nearly three out of four visitors have no idea who the hell I am or even knew I have things to say about podcasting. That’s net-new audience right there.

So yeah, your podcast needs a website.

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A written-to-be-read article and a full transcript of the audio of this episode can be found at https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/finally-a-podcast-website-that-doesnt-suck

Follow @EvoTerra on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

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Evo Terra produces Podcast Pontifications four times a week to provide ideas and ask questions every working podcaster should be thinking...