Podcast Publishing Styles - PCI 342

0:00 What, what's really nice about having your own on your own self-hosted server that you rent from somebody and let you own and control your feet address apart from any company or any third party, which doesn't seem as important as it is. Well, it's basically when, when you own everything, when you own your stack, you're not beholden to anyone, not even blueberry. We could disappear tomorrow and your feed address is still yours. You're listening to Podcast Insider, a weekly podcast bringing insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting. With the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome.

0:43 Let's dive in. Welcome to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry. And this is Todd Cochran, c e o and co-founder of Blueberry. This week is going to be a bit more blueberry specific. We're gonna talk about the various publishing options available at Blueberry and the pros and cons of each. So, Mike, this is a topic that we've been talking about for many, many years, but I'm sure there are many podcasters out there that are really trying to understand, I guess the best way to say it is the several ways that you can publish your podcast at Blueberry and, you know, what's the advantages and disadvantages of both.

1:30 And before we get into that, I wanna really talk about, there's really three ways . One is podcasters can publish on our dashboard@blueberry.com, and the result is they have a landing page on their podcast page that we've provided, blueberry.com. Number two, they can use our freely provided WordPress site, which is powered by Power Press, our podcasting plugin. Basically, that's provided to every hosting customer. And number three is if they already have a website or want to have their own website on their own platform by hosting with GoDaddy or Dream Host or whoever they may pick for their WordPress site, they can use the Blueberry Power Press on a self-hosted WordPress site. And, uh, so really there's three ways.

2:25 So two of those are kind of interchangeable. Yeah, because one of them is the free one we provide, and the other one is the one that they pay for on their own, but use Power Press as well. Yeah, and you know, the, there's some advantages and disadvantages to, uh, each method. Of course, the, the last one you talked about there, uh, using Power Press on your self-hosted WordPress site, we, uh, we kind of dubbed that the blueberry way because that really, if you're, you know, if you're okay with you being in charge of, of making sure your site's working, that's really the best way. And I think today with before it was a little more challenging to do your own because the hosting providers did not provide as much support as they should have. But today, many, many web hosting companies, they managed the website, they back it up, they provide security updates that are really, really proactive on their WordPress package.

3:23 It's much different than it was in the past where we're, you are kind of on your own. I know GoDaddy, which at full disclosure sponsors my personal podcast, but GoDaddy has a WordPress package that I'm really, I really love because they update it, they back it up, they, you know, it, it, you still have to, you know, maintain your plugins and stuff, but you can set those to auto update as well. But it really is to the point now where you really do not have to have any skills whatsoever to run a WordPress site. Yeah, for sure. You know, and, and you know, I, I'm on a pretty, you know, self maintained WordPress, and it's not particularly hard once you kind of get into the, into the gist of it. But, you know, not everybody wants to do that. So again, we have our, our blueberry hosted ones as well, which is a managed WordPress.

4:15 But what what's really nice about having your own, on your own self-hosted server that you rent from somebody and let you own and control your feet address apart from any company or any third party, which doesn't seem as important as it is. Well, it's basically when, when you own everything, when you own your stack, you're not beholden to anyone, not even blueberry. We could disappear tomorrow and your feed address is still yours. You may have to move your, uh, files to a different location, but everything will be there. And it's still, you know, you don't lose contact with your subscribers, followers, your audience.

5:00 I call it an extinction event. You won't have an extinction event because even if blueberry went out of business tomorrow, which is not gonna happen, power Press, the plugin is separate and it will operate without us. Yeah. It's, it's an open source plugin, so somebody could take it over if need be. Uh, we don't want that to happen, and we don't think it will happen ever, but we're trying, you know, it's just another insurance policy for, to keep your podcast online and controlled by you. And I think too, the thing that we really emphasize here is, and I've said this saying for many, many years, you don't, you don't build your castle on rented land.

5:44 So you have the ability to maintain all of your webpages, the template that you want to use. You've got the ability to add plugins for email funnels, you can add e-commerce. There's all kinds of things that you can do if you so choose or interface with sites that have those types of services to better be able to build your brand and really building your brand on your.com as a mainstay of our, our, our mindset over here. And with the addition that, again, we want you to build your brand. We wanna provide tools and services and analytics and all the stuff that you need to be successful.

6:26 But when someone comes to your website and it's powered by Power Press, they don't have to know that blueberry's behind that. Matter of fact, we don't want them to know, we want you to shine, uh, with your content. Build the stuff and just get outta. Your way. That's right. So as long as you have that domain name and the site your podcast lives, that's, that's really the beauty here. And it gives you a place to send listeners for more information and to know where, and know where you'll be no matter what happens on the app. So while we know that listeners will consume on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google, wherever they may consume your show, ultimately you have the ability within your podcast to say, Hey, come back over to, uh, my site.com and, uh, we've got some extra material there.

7:16 We've got merch, we've got the newsletter sign up. It's really gives you the ability to build a powerful brand. And the most important part about this is seo. Mm-hmm. , the SEO piece, and this is not often talked about, there's competitors of us that allow you to build a website with an R s s feed, but in the eyes of Google, those sites are still considered to be syndicated sites. They're not the original point of origin for your show. So when you use the blueberry provided WordPress site, you are the point of origin. And when you use the Blueberry Power Press, WordPress combination with a self-hosted website, you are the point of origin when you have a domain name map to those, to those, to those websites. So Google says, oh, this article, this information originated on this site.

8:14 And you get a bigger, a bigger jump when it comes to episode discovery, because every podcast today, no matter where it's hosted, the the title of the show can be found. And usually that comes up as Apple or one of the other, you know, big platforms. But ultimately what will happen is, is someone's gonna be searching for a topic you covered on your show, and if you have a good written episode title, then what happens is, is they will link directly to your website and they'll say, oh, there's a podcast associated with this. Let me subscribe or follow the show, or just give a listen. So again, it, your own website provides its own lead gen funnel for new listeners.

8:58 And in some cases, you're gonna beat Apple in the search, uh, because it's all originating from your domain, so you get more authority maybe even over Apple. That's true. And a Google search, uh, you know, that happens with some of my shows that, uh, that I've done over the years, you know, that everything's coming from my.com and when I search for it in, in Google, Apple's second . So, you know, Apple's still there, but I don't know what advantage that is, but it's, it's a little bit of an advantage. You're being first in the, in the natural search. So the first two things we've talked about here is Blueberry Power Press on a self-hosted WordPress site, which we call the Blueberry Way. That's the way we, we want the majority of you to be publishing your show.

9:45 The second way is the free WordPress site that we provide you at Blueberry. And really the only differences is that we li well, the, the difference is we limit the number of templates and we limit the number of plugins where they're self-selected already. And, and you cannot add to it. But there are some advantages even beyond using the blueberry publisher, which we'll talk about last, but number one, the feeds are like they're on a rocket ship. Those speeds load very, very quickly. You can use your own domain name if you're on an advanced plan. An advanced plan is $20 or more per month.

10:28 And you have most of the advantages of a self-hosted website. But the big differences, it's managed, it's a managed WordPress site. We back it up. Yeah. We take care of all the updates and uh, and all that stuff. We fix it when it's broke. And. So you got somebody to call. . That's right. So you don't have to even worry. It's, it's like a little bit even one step higher level than many of the WordPress providers like GoDaddy and so forth, because we're a lot more tentative to making sure your site stays online. And, and because we've really been tight on what's allowed to be added to it, and we have the security nailed, I mean, really nailed.

11:11 It's probably from a management standpoint, almost better than some of the other solutions out there on the commercial marketplace today. Yeah. It's, it's definitely, you know, I use it on one of my shows and, and it's, it's awesome. I don't have to think about it. I just go make my content up it goes, and we. Go's key, you know, that's what we wanna focus on is the content, right? Yeah, exactly. And you know, like I said, we wanna make the tech disappear if we can or at least be less of a daunting task. And so that's another option for, you know, what I always say to customers when they ask, well, what's the difference between you hosting it and me hosting it? And they say, well, basically our WordPress sites are for people that wanna use WordPress but don't wanna deal with WordPress.

11:53 Right? That's a good description. Yeah. And then the, the other option, which in large segment of our customers use as well is the, what's called the Blueberry publisher or Dashboard Publishing. You don't get a website for Serb, but you get a landing page and then unique pages for each episode on the blueberry.com directory with all your hyperlinks and, and so forth. But there is no, what you get is what you get for there, there's no managing that landing page. It is what it is. And what we find is oftentimes people are using other types of, they already have maybe have a website on their, their business, and maybe it's with wic or maybe it's a Squarespace site, or maybe it is on an old legacy system, and there's not a lot of flexibility.

12:43 So there's lots of reasons to use the Blueberry publisher, because you can still take the post from the blueberry publisher and take the embed that we provide for the player and put it on another website that's maybe not as podcast integrated as WordPress is. And we provide the RSS speed for you as well@blueberry.com. So you do have some advantages there. If you do have a secondary website someplace, again, maybe it's on an old content management system, or again, it's just, you know, you, you built a, a platform years ago and maybe you don't want, you still want your podcast originate over there, but there's no support for RSS or something to that effect.

13:24 So there's lots of reasons why you use Blueberry Publisher, but probably the biggest one is just, it's easy. Yeah. It's just, uh, you know, you just, like in WordPress or anywhere else, you, you make a, you know, you put your title in, put your show notes in, and, uh, upload your file, hit publish, and you can walk away from that. Uh, then you can share it out, you know, we have a share menu, or you can grab the embed and, you know, go through a couple of other services like Headliner and whatever, but you could also do this with the WordPress stuff. So a lot of the, you know, a lot of the sharing stuff can be done Yeah. In multiple ways. And of course, we also give a quick links page to everybody that wants one.

14:05 It's similar to Link Tree. Yeah. Like Link Tree. So it's kind of a, just a quickie landing page. Uh, I wouldn't use it as your, your sole landing page, but it's something easy to say in the podcast. Like, if you wanna see our Quick Links page, it's. It's podcast show. Slash podcast for us since we built. It. Yeah. Podcast show slash podcast. Mine is podcast.show/geek news for my personal one. So again, it's something easy to talk about in your show, and what you can provide in there is we've made it available so that you can put all your social links. This is, if you're on the Thrive Plan, we can put additional HTML links in it.

14:50 You get Google Analytics if you're on the Thrive Pin. So the Quick Links page is, again, something that's a, a quick and dirty way to share when you're out in public, you know, it's real easy to remember podcast.show/some name. Yeah. And you get to pick that name. That's right. I wasn't already taken. And you can actually change that name too, again, if it's not already taken. So if you're not happy with the name that you have, um, you can change it. But again, you publish everything right on the Blueberry dashboard, everything automatically updates on the Quick Links page or the Blueberry Directory landing page. Um, the thing I like about the Quick Links page for those that are on, uh, publisher, it gives them a few more options to, you.

15:37 Can add a few things. Yeah. Add a few things. There's, you know, like value for value, we can, you can put a boost button there so people can, uh, boost you through, uh, LB integration or any other, I guess, uh, lightning Payments. But of course we've, we've talked that over. But, uh, that, that's also an option on Quick Links, which is kind of cool. And if you aren't familiar with what we're talking about there, just search for Podcasting 2.0 on the blueberry website and we have a full introduction to those terms and some of that new way of, uh, monetizing your show. But again, I think, Mike, if we think about it, um, you know, the confusion is, can be significant for someone new. But again, I think what we wanna make sure is that people understand the three options really are blueberry publisher, again, a simple website landing page, or they can use Quick Links.

16:31 Now if you're using Blueberry Power Press on a self-hosted WordPress or Blueberry Power Press on a blueberry hosted WordPress site, you can still use Quick Links that's available to you. But, uh, really it's ultimately two combinations, the WordPress Power Press and the Blueberry publisher. Yeah. One thing nice about publisher is it, it is a tad quicker to get started. True. And we also pride ourselves in the ability to change you over to the other FIT system. So if you start on publisher, then you say, oh, I wanna try WordPress. So you, you spin up a blueberry hosted WordPress, you like that, but you wanna add some plugins so then you can graduate up to, uh, having your own WordPress site.

17:16 And all of those are easily moved back and forth. Just give us a call, put in a ticket, whatever. We'll give you the instructions on how to do that. It's, uh, it's pretty straightforward, so you have lots of options and sometimes that's a bad thing. Sometimes that's a good thing. But, you know, breaking it down to the most basic part though, Mike, we have to remind folks that what if you've already got everything you need and you just need hosting for your immediate files? Well, you can just, again, use us for hosting the media files and use some other way to create your r s s speed, um, or website support. You, you know, we can just host the media and provide that very simple media link to that file. It's not used too much, but blueberry would only be hosting files and collecting your stats, which wouldn't be such a bad thing because then you, you do have the i b certified stats.

18:07 Yeah. Yeah. The, the problem with that is also, you know, you miss out on some of the other features we have in our feed generation and, and you know, our system. But, uh, you know, that is an option. We have some customers that, uh, have a Squarespace site and Squarespace minimally handles rss. So they host their files with us, then they publish through their Squarespace. And I think there's a couple other type of web companies that do that, but they don't really do a good job of statistics. So a lot of the times when someone does that is they want our statistics and the best statistics is when they're hosting with us.

18:48 So I think the main point here is don't get too wrapped around the axle about what we have available. I think use cases for most podcasters, again, if you're brand new and just want to get up and get running real quick, the blueberry dashboard is the fastest way, the next fastest way, if you're brand new and are starting from scratch, you wanna go a little bit more, uh, involved is the blueberry Power press on a blueberry hosted WordPress site. And then really that third level is, and really the option for those that already have a.com specific land WordPress, you just add power press to it, set it up, and you're ready to rock and roll, or you set up something from scratch and add power press to it. And again, that's probably the, the third way, and it really depends on the angle someone's coming in.

19:34 If they're brand new and have nothing, they might be a little daunting to do the blueberry Power press and a self-hosted WordPress site. That sounds scary almost to some people. Yeah. Another use case, uh, with Power Press is it's hosting US agnostic. So you could have your media files anywhere and use Power Press for free. Yeah. You don't all the cool features, but. . And we do, we do encourage those that are, you know, using the, the power press without hosting with us to consider hosting with Blueberry. Because what we really do is we speed up your hosting. I mean, not your hosting your publishing. Because if you're in your dashboard, and for those that are not familiar, when you add a new post to WordPress, it gives you a title box, you write the title, and then the body, you, you write the body of the post. So basically the information about the podcast, and if you're integrated with us an a k a hosting with us, the third really step is, is a little further down on the page. There's a, an uploader, basically, you click it, the uploader opens up, you drag and drop your media into the uploader, it uploads to blueberry.

20:41 We verify the media file is good. And really without even any additional steps you can hit, publish in, in your good. It makes it so that you basically, you make a blog post and you do your media and you hit publish and you're done. You don't have to go here, cut and paste and upload over here and double post and all that stuff. So it's, it definitely streamlines things. I I know, you know, people that podcast Daily that say it saves them an hour a week or an hour and a half a week or whatever over other systems they've used. And, and, and one thing You'all have to remember is this company was built by podcasters. So we were all, you know, raising families and had, uh, you know, things going on in our life.

21:28 So we were looking for efficiencies, Hey. Pay jobs. , and, and if we could save, uh, 10 or 15 minutes per episode, you compound that over a lifetime of a show. And plus the other benefits, the benefits of s e o being the point of origin for your show, a place to send your listeners, you know, there's lead generation funnels, e-commerce over the life of a podcast, the value and doing the extra steps to set up the self-hosted WordPress site with the Power Press plugin is why we call it the Blueberry way that really Dr. Drills it kind of down, because we want you to be successful.

22:12 We want you to be part of a family for a long time. We want you to be engaged with your audiences. And, um, this is why we've shaped the company and the service the way it is. We're unlike any other podcast hosting company because you have to go over to their website, publish your media on their platform, they become the origin point for your show, and then you have to copy stuff into your third party site, even if you choose to do so. And that, in our opinion, is not the best way to grow an audience and build your brand because you are essentially renting land or renting a spot on your hosting provider's site to build your empire.

22:59 And w why do we wanna build someone else's empire? We wanna build our own. And that's why each of us that are podcasters here at Blueberry, that's why we have our own websites. We have our own dot coms, we have our own brands that we build, and it's very, very important to us. So that's a bit of the mindset. And if you're on one of the systems that we have, and you wanna try out another one, again, get ahold of us, uh, we'll definitely, uh, help you graduate to, you know, any of these levels. Uh, you know, there are some people that beyond their control, they have to, uh, get off a WordPress, uh, you know, say a company and they're deciding to redo their site.

23:41 So sometimes we have to move people back to dashboard, but it's an option. It's, you know, we, we have these options. There's no major disadvantages or advantages, uh, you know, between the two other than what we ex you know, what we told you. But, uh, you know, we still encourage everybody own your own stuff. We'll, we'll help you build the tools, get outta your way, and you're, uh, you're off and running. I think that, uh, probably sums it up in a, in a nutshell, Mike. Yeah. And if anybody has questions, you know, the team is here to talk to you. I'm available to consult with our hosting customers, Mike and, and the support team, uh, are there to, uh, make sure everything's working and tech checkups and all those things. So, uh, we, we, we thank you for being part of our family.

24:30 And if you're not part of our family here, uh, lots of resources, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, so wherever you hang your social hat, we're there to engage with you and the community. And, uh, we wanna help build your vision and build your show and, uh, be there to help you succeed. So thank you for consideration and if you're on a competing, competing platform already, Mike is the foremost expert in migrating you to Blueberry podcast. Thanks for joining us. Let's meet up next week. And in the meantime, for more information to subscribe, share or follow, check out the show notes@podcastinsider.com to check out our latest suite of services and help Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast.

25:12 Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease.