So, you’ve decided that you want to create a podcast and you’ve got all the things that you need. All the recording equipment is in place, and you’ve decided what your first few episodes are about. You might even have recorded them?
But what about having a place on the web to put your podcast, isn’t it a good idea to have a website to have as your podcast home?
The short answer is yes, but there are a few things that we need to discuss first.
Podcast hosting and website hosting are not the same thing
Hosting is a term which is used to describe the storage of your files.
With a podcast, this is typically audio files such as .mp3 files which can be played in web browsers and podcast players. Unless you have a place online which will store and distribute your audio files, nobody will listen to your podcast, unless you send them the files directly. This is not a good plan.
A website is slightly more complex. It’s not just audio files that you’re hosting. There will be logos, images, and more technical files (which we won’t go into here) such as HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and more. A website does more than play audio, and so it needs more files to make it work.
So, a podcast host typically has your audio files, and a website host has more varied content to display your website.
A podcast host is all about hosting your audio, a website host can do much more
There are many options that you can choose from to host your podcast audio. In fact there are so many, that the list would consume this entire post. Here are a few that you might like to take a look at:
- Acast
- Podbean
- Spreaker
- Podomatic
- Anchor.fm
- Whooshkaa
- Buzzsprout
- Podcasts.com
- PodcastGarden
- RedCircle
- PineCast
- Soundbran.ch
- Transistor.fm
Each of these hosts has different payment plans based upon several factors. Things like the number of downloads, the amount of files that you upload and so on.
They come with the features that are essential to getting a podcast up and running. They will host your audio, create a feed for your podcast so that podcast players can find it, and display your episodes to your users.
In short, they do what you need and they’re all excellent. But there’s one great big limitation. You’re not in control of your content.
What I mean by this is that you rarely have a great deal of control over how your content is displayed. You will get some customisation options, like the ability to add your logo, and possibly style your podcast page inline with your branding, but it’s going to be limited. These platforms are optimised for delivering your audio, and they do a superb job of that, but they’re not in the business of making you stand out as unique.
Enter WordPress as a great option for a podcast website
If you’ve never heard of WordPress before, it’s a free to use piece of software which enables you to create a website. Free does not mean bad though. At the time of writing, WordPress was powering roughly 40% of the entire web! I know that this seems like a crazy statistic, but it’s true.
With a WordPress website, you can own your own place on the web and make it your own. There are hundreds of free themes you can download to give your site a unique look, and dozens of them are optimised for creating podcast specific websites.
Now, I’m not saying that creating your own WordPress podcast website will be a walk in the park, it won’t. There will be new things that you’ve got to learn, and little bumps in the road that you’re going to have to get over, but it’ll be worth it.
The main reason for wanting your own website is that you control it. You can make it look like your own brand, with colours, logos, fonts etc. which match what your company currently uses. You can add contact forms and as many pages as you like. These pages could be about things that you’re offering through your podcast; perhaps a course that you offer, or a product that you’d like to leverage.
If the podcast hosting company that you’re using goes bust or you just don’t want to use them anymore, no problem. Your website belongs to you and you don’t have to do as much work to get up and running with a new host.
There are thousands of tutorials online about creating WordPress websites, and I would suggest that you do a search and see what pops up.
Add in Castos WordPress podcast hosting
If I’ve not convinced you of why owning your own WordPress website is a good idea, then think about this…
What if you could link up your podcast host with your WordPress website so that you did not have to have a separate website and podcast host? Does that sound appealing?
We’ll there’s a podcast host called Castos, and they’re all about WordPress. They make it trivially easy to create your podcast episodes right inside of the WordPress page editor.
In a traditional setup, if you wanted to use a podcast host and have a website, you’d have to upload your audio file to the podcast host, create a piece of code that will allow you to display the podcast audio player on the website. Go back to the website and create a page / post for that audio player to be inside of and finally publish it.
Now if you do this once or twice, it’s fine. You won’t even think that it’s a time suck or odd. Trust me though, after doing this hundreds of time, and a few times incorrectly pasting in the code, you’re going to be wanting a way to make things easier!
Castos makes that easier. There’s no going back and forth. You just log in to your WordPress website, write the text that you want to go with your podcast episode, upload the audio file and hit publish. Castos will create the audio player for you, host the audio, and display it on your website. They’ll even make an archive for you and provide you with statistics about how your podcast episodes are doing; how many downloads you’ve had over time, etc.
We use Castos for all the podcasts that we create because we know WordPress is a great way to build a website and having the podcast audio connected seamlessly to that website is a really compelling solution.
If you’ve got any thoughts about how WordPress can be used with Castos hosting, please leave a comment below.