The Essential Elements You Need for Your Podcast Website with Samantha Mabe
As a podcast strategist, I recommend to all my clients that they have show notes for their podcast and place them on their website. Why? Because your business website is your home on the internet. It’s where visitors will come to check out everything you have to offer. So, you have to make sure your website has the right curb appeal to attract the right visitors who will take the right actions.
In today’s episode, I’m chatting with Samantha Mabe, creative director and website designer at Lemon and the Sea. I’m so excited for this conversation because we’re talking about all things website.
Samantha shares what makes a great website, how often you should be checking your website analytics, and what elements you need on your podcast page (hint, transcripts are important!). Let’s jazz up those websites, friends!
Are you ready to build your podcast strategy, simplify your marketing, and finally make your podcast work for you? Join the Strategic Podcast Academy, my signature group program that’ll support you with monthly training, resources, and an amazing community!
What’s in this episode…
[03:26] Samantha shares what makes a great website, and how to know if your website visitors are taking action
[09:19] How often you should be checking your website analytics and making tweaks
[15:02] Samantha’s best practices for what you need to put on your podcast page for your website, plus why episode transcripts are a must
[25:55] The first step you can take to improve your website
Are you ready to build your podcast strategy, simplify your marketing, and finally make your podcast work for you? Join the Strategic Podcast Academy, my signature group program that’ll support you with monthly training, resources, and an amazing community!
About samantha:
Samantha Mabe, creative director and designer of Lemon and the Sea, helps service providers and coaches who are ready to launch their signature offer and need a website that matches the high-caliber work they're doing. With her signature framework, Samantha has designed and customized websites for all different types of entrepreneurs. When she is not digging into design and strategy, Samantha loves reading (her goal is to read 200 books this year), adventures with her kiddo, and trying to keep up with her Netflix queue.
Connect with samantha:
Visit the Lemon and the Sea Website
Follow Lemon and the Sea on Instagram
FREE Download: 5 Minute Website Updates to Convert More Leads
Listen to the Process to Profitability Podcast
LINKS:
Join the Strategic Podcast Academy!
Check out our services to Launch, Uplevel or Grow your Podcast
Unlock your FREE Podcast Content Kit
Link to podcast tool that when you click, it asks you which app you want to subscribe in [18:39]
The Transcript for Share, Strategize, & Shine:
EP 135: The Essential Elements You Need for Your Podcast Website with Samantha Mabe
[00:00:34] Caroline Hull Hi there and welcome to Share, Strategize and Shine. I'm your host, Caroline Hull, a podcast strategist and CEO of Wild Home Podcasting. I've built my entire career through podcasts by sharing my experience using strategic systems and shining a light on the power of podcasting. If you are looking to cultivate leads for your membership group, program or consulting services, I'm here to help you create a holistic and integrative podcast strategy that will let your business thrive. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to Podcast Your Business. Today we're going to be talking about a piece of business and podcasting that is really important as you start building your funnels and your customer path and that is your website. And I really loved this conversation because I have been having a lot of website woes lately and an identity crisis and do I need a new website, all these questions and we talk about some of that and more on this episode, plus what you need to have on your podcast page and on your show notes pages as well. So today I am talking with Samantha from Lemon and the Sea, and we are diving into all things website. This is such a great episode. I highly recommend taking notes or coming back to it, especially if you need to make some tweaks on your website and be sure to listen all the way through to the end because Samantha has a really great freebie for you. If you're ready to start working on your website like I am. So enjoy. Hi Samantha, Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:02:23] Samantha Mabe Thank you so much for having me, Caroline.
[00:02:24] Caroline Hull I am so excited to chat all things websites with you. We have not talked about websites on the podcast, but I say a lot that you need to have your show notes as blog posts on your website, and so I'm excited to dive into a little bit more having a website, what that looks like, how it can work with your podcast. So thank you so much.
[00:02:50] Samantha Mabe Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. I was just thinking today as I was looking over your questions, I was like, It is so important to remind people that they need to put all of this content on their website because it helps with so much stuff and it just gives people one place to go and find everything.
[00:03:10] Caroline Hull Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yes. High fiving across the interwebs here with you because, you know, that's honestly like one of the mistakes I see a lot with podcasters is that they're not putting that, you know, all that information on their website. But before we get too deep into that, let's back up and start at the beginning a little bit here. Can you tell us what makes a great website? Because I have been staring at mine for weeks thinking to myself, I need an overhaul, but what do I need to be thinking about when I'm like, I need a great website?
[00:03:42] Samantha Mabe I think it's more a strategy question than a design question. So a great website is going to look good, sure, But it has to actually work for your business. So it has to bring in clients or sell your product or get podcast downloads, whatever it is you want people to do when they land on your website. You need to see them actually taking action on that for your website to be of value for your business.
[00:04:13] Caroline Hull How do you know if they're taking action, if it's working?
[00:04:17] Samantha Mabe So when I work with clients, I always ask them, what's the number one thing you want people to do on your website? And then what are like two other things that you want them to do? And that way they have some metrics that they can track. So though for most people, they want people to sign up for a sales call or apply to work with them. We're all trying to make money and sell our services. And so you can see are people actually clicking on that button and submitting an application or scheduling a call that's going to be the data point, or if your goal is to get them to sign up for email, are you actually getting email sign ups? And I always remind people too, you have to look at your website traffic in order to see if things are working because nobody's coming to your website. It doesn't matter how good it looks or how strategic it is because nobody's looking at it to go follow through. So you have to kind of look at both, are people finding your website from whatever place it is that you're doing your marketing? And then once they're on your website, are they then taking some kind of action to stay in your orbit?
[00:05:29] Caroline Hull I feel like you've been listening to my podcast because these are the exact same things that I say about podcasts. And it's so interesting because when we talk about marketing and reaching new audiences and all of these things content, it's so amazing to me the crossover between so much that we do in business. And so I love that you said there needs to be a strategy. You need to know what your goals are for people when they come to your website. This is the same thing I say, about podcasts, right? So I love that because I think that in my brain I'm thinking, Oh, I have to have pages for my services, I have to have a pop up, I have to have a blog, but I haven't really thought about that and said, okay, what's the one thing I want people to do when they come here?
[00:06:19] Samantha Mabe Yeah, that's the easiest first question to start with, because there's really only so many options that people are going to go with. It's I want to sell my service, I want to sell a product, I want to get them on an email list or podcast like some way that they're going to continue to get my content. And then you can choose which pages you need. You can figure out what kind of content you need and what you need to include on all of those pages. Because, you know, if I want people to listen to my podcast, I actually need a place on my website where they know I have a podcast and I need a button where they can subscribe to my podcast and I need a way to get them on my email list if I'm going to send out updates about episodes. So you can kind of back your way into what is the sitemap for my website, so which pages do I need and how do they need to work together based on what you actually want people to do when they get there?
[00:07:20] Caroline Hull Yeah. So we're talking about like user experience and what we think people will need when they get to us. I love that so much. So that kind of brings me to a question I have. When you seem to have a lot of things that you need to put on your website, or maybe you're sitting there and you're thinking, But I have a lot of things that I want people to do when they get to my website. How can all of that live harmoniously without it feeling jumbled?
[00:07:48] Samantha Mabe It goes back to figuring out what is the number one thing you want them to do. And then for those other things, there are places you can put them on your website that people are going to look for them that give them another option for learning more about you, working with you. I like to have on everybody's homepage what I call the Choose Your Own Adventure section, where we lay out three different options. So usually it's hire me for my service and then it's here's some kind of content you can consume, whether that's a blog or a podcast. And then you can also link them to if you have a low ticket offer, if you have an email newsletter like another option that they could take, that takes kind of an in-between effort between reading a blog and signing up for a high ticket service. So you can list those things out and people can then see, okay, in the overall scheme of what it is you do and what you offer and who you work with, these are the three ways that I can move forward with you.
[00:08:57] Caroline Hull Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. Choose your own adventure thing, as you were saying. And I was like, Oh, I think I did that kind of correctly. So we're on the right track here, which is a good thing. Can we talk for a second before we dive more into what a podcast page needs? And I definitely want to really dive into that because I have a lot of opinions and I'm sure you do too. Can we talk a little bit more about analytics and how often you should be checking these things and tweaking? I don't know if any of you are like me. I'm a DIY-er and one day I will have a website mapped out and designed professionally because I'm over it. But I tend to like want to tweak all the time and make adjustments. I don't know if it's like boredom or if I think there's some magical thing that I'll do, you know, I'm not sure, but how often should we be looking at our analyst analytics and making tweaks to, say, our homepage or our structure?
[00:09:58] Samantha Mabe I recommend that people put on analytics as soon as possible, so if you don't already have them, install them.
[00:10:05] Caroline Hull Yeah.
[00:10:05] Samantha Mabe And then I look at them every 30 days to see the overall trends. And most software will tell you, like you can compare this month to last month or this year to last year, sometimes that's not super helpful if you've changed a lot of the way that you're marketing your business, but it will tell you how much traffic you're getting, what the most popular pages are, which is really valuable information. And that's where when you start to see those trends come in, you can make changes. And I recommend just doing a couple of things at a time so that you can actually track and see a difference. Yeah, I thought I had a blog post that's really popular. It's about words to describe your brand. I have not done brand design in like five years, so this post gets a lot of traffic, but it doesn't actually bring people into my service because it's not related to what I do. I don't want to take it down because of the SEO. So what I did is I went in there and I like added some links to my portfolio. I added a call to action for my service. I kind of beefed it up, up. And in the first 30 days I noticed there was a drop in traffic. It was no longer the top post that people were coming to. It's. But over time it's gone back up and I can see, okay, now people are getting more of this information. I can see whether they're signing up for my email list from that page because that's a big thing I want people to do for my blog is then sign up for my email list so I can track based on just changing that one post what a difference it has made for my business and for my website.
[00:11:46] Caroline Hull Oh my gosh. We were literally just talking about this in my membership. We did a training on a masterclass on podcast SEO yesterday and I was telling them that I actually have one of these mysterious blog posts as well. It's from like years ago, like in a totally different era of my business, and I believe it's about like a podcast management or something like that. And we noticed it was getting so much traffic. It's actually a pin on Pinterest, like my one pin that's like carrying my whole account. And we did the same thing. We went back and we updated the blog post. I love that you put an email sign up. I'm going to go check and see if mine has that. I know it has links to more current things, but we updated it that way all these people who are still going to it will see updated information and updated links and all that stuff. And so we were actually talking about that and I was telling my class like my membership people like you can go back and change titles, you can go back and change show notes, you can go back and update blog posts like and I shared that story. So I love that you brought that up because I think that's a really missed opportunity. Like when you're not looking at your analytics. And one thing we discovered, well, I think I think my team didn't discover, but I discovered that you can actually see where people have been on your site in your analytics, like when they came in to this page. Then where did they go, then where did they go? And I always find that really fascinating too, because that kind of opened our eyes to the fact that we needed to put something else somewhere else or we needed to make sure we had something available. So I've actually been really loving digging into that information lately because it's been really helpful. And, you know, and another point to what you said, you know, being able to see not only what people are looking at, but where they're coming from, will also help you in your marketing efforts for your business. And tracking like, okay, is all this effort that I'm putting over here making a difference or should I be focusing more on this other thing because we're getting more traffic from there. So I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that.
[00:13:56] Samantha Mabe Yep.
[00:13:57] Caroline Hull Did you know that your podcast can be so much more than a hobby? It can be a way for you to attract your ideal client and establish yourself as an authority in your field. But you need a strategy. And that's why we've created the Strategic Podcast Academy, a monthly membership designed to help you build a strategy for your podcast so you can grow your business and get off the content creation hamster wheel. With support from myself and a community of like minded podcasters, you will create a strategic plan for your podcast and start implementing impactful changes. During our time in the monthly membership, we're going to cover topics such as customer path planning, content planning for sales, podcast SEO, creating connection with your listeners, email marketing for your podcast, and so much more. So if you are an online business owner, coach, consultant or service provider, and you're ready to have a podcast that supports your business, then the Strategic Podcast Academy is for you. Head to wildhomepodcasting.com/membership to join today. Okay, I know you're all dying to hear. Let's talk about a podcast page and I would love to hear your thoughts on like best practices for having your podcast on your website, especially as a business owner with a ton of other pages. What do you recommend for making sure that, well, not only are people coming to your podcast page, but that it looks good and what do people need on it?
[00:15:33] Samantha Mabe Okay, so first of all, I think your podcast needs to be in the main menu of your website as long as it's related to your business, because that is a way that more and more people are consuming content. A lot of people would rather listen to a podcast than read a blog post, so we want to direct people to that place that we are creating all this content, we're showcasing our expertise, we're really building out the value we offer them. And so I like to have it in the main menu that just says podcast. It doesn't need to be the name because you'll get that when you dive into the page itself. And then once they get on that page, I like to have the name of the podcast, keep it consistent with whatever your the overall design, but also like the graphics you're using for the podcast. So yes, there are podcast graphics on there. And then I always like to layout that first. So in most platforms, the way it's going to work is you're going to have like your first kind of podcast landing page. That's going to be a list of all your recent episodes, and then they will go into one of the episodes to actually get the show notes. So on that podcast landing page, you want the title of the show. If you have like a tagline or the types of things that you talk about, you want that on there. I like to have categories, so common topics that you cover either as like a list if you tagged your show notes that way. Or you can have actual buttons that go to show notes that are tagged with that specific topic. And that's a really easy way for people to see what you talk about most and then find stuff that's actually relevant for them.
[00:17:26] Caroline Hull I love that.
[00:17:27] Samantha Mabe Yeah. I also really love to include a search bar because people are going to want if you've got a lot of episodes like many of us do, they're going to want to search for something specific. So a specific topic or a specific guest, and they're not going to want to scroll back like 200 episodes into your catalog. Give them a search bar. And most website platforms, like you just put it on there, it's already going to start. You don't have to do a lot of complicated stuff. It's going to search for you. Then it would go into the list of your recent episodes. I like to put no more than 12 of those on that first page where they have to like click to the older or newer, and then at the bottom you're going to want to have a way to remind them to subscribe. So get them like kind of a call to action section where they can subscribe to the podcast. Depending on the way you set it up, you can either have buttons for each of the big podcast players or I think there's something that you can do that like they click it and it asks them which one it wants to open it in so that they can do it that way.
[00:18:39] Caroline Hull Yeah, there's a couple of really great tools that have come out recently. I'll link one in the show notes for sure. I would have to look it up, but what it will basically do is you click a link and then it takes you and they can decide which app they want to subscribe in which I love that because I think listenership is really changing. And so I think that's a really great option if you don't want to have like the individual places. And that's how I have it on my website, like I have a link to Apple, a link to Google and a link to Spotify, because to me those are the three most important. But yeah, I love that idea too.
[00:19:15] Samantha Mabe Yeah. And then if you take guests for your podcast, that podcast landing page is a great place to just put a little blurb on there. Like if you want to be a guest, here's the process. Whether that's an application they need to fill out or if you want them to email you because people are going to be looking for that. And personally, I don't like to get like contact forms, fill that out with people who want to be a guest. Yeah, actually fill out my application directly.
[00:19:42] Caroline Hull That's a really good idea too. I'm literally looking at your podcast page while you were talking because you have a podcast as well and seeing how this is all laid out, it just makes so much sense. I really love the categories. I had not thought about that because I think in my brain categories are for blog posts that hello, they basically are blog posts. So I love that so much. I'm definitely going to do that.
[00:20:10] Samantha Mabe Yeah. And then once you get into the actual shownotes for each episode, that is your blog post. So you're going to set it up like you would a blog post. You're going to have a graphic, an introduction. I like to embed a podcast player in there so they can listen to it directly. Then you're going to have your show notes. However you do them. Right now, I'm doing them as actual transcripts of the episode, so just everything is in there and then you should always have again those subscribe section button at the bottom.
[00:20:41] Caroline Hull Yeah, I love that. It was so funny that you said that even before I could ask you, because I love having the transcript on the blog post and that's something that we do for our clients and for ourselves. And so I was actually going to ask you if you recommend having that in there.
[00:20:57] Samantha Mabe Yes. So I didn't used to do that for a long time. I just had like a paragraph introduction. I had all the links kind of here are the topics we talked about and with all of the accessibility concerns that people have really been talking about out there, like we'll just put the transcript on the page, which helps people who don't want to listen or they can't listen, they want to read it. But it also helps your SEO because every one of those words then is counted on your website, right? And if you're talking about topics related to your business, you're probably saying podcasting, podcast management podcast editing over and over again. And it's going to be really relevant content for people who find you through search.
[00:21:44] Caroline Hull I definitely saw. So we started implementing transcript years ago, but I was probably one of the last people to do that just because. What's that saying? The cobbler's children never have any shoes. So we were doing it for clients, but I wasn't doing it for myself and our clients loved it. And then when I started doing it for myself, we actually saw an increase in our search rankings kind of across the board. And so I definitely like I also want to really emphasize how great it is for accessibility and being able to say in your show notes on your feed, if you want a transcript, go here. I think is really cool and important, especially because the apps do not provide transcripts yet or captions for audio podcasts. I do think it's coming down the pipeline soon, but who knows how accurate it will be. But anyways, so I think it's a really great thing to do not only for yourself but for others. So there's a lot of really great transcript services out there that are low cost, AI of course. And so definitely looking into it, I think that's a really good thing to add if you're thinking about beefing up your show notes.
[00:22:49] Samantha Mabe Yeah, I think the reason at least I avoided putting them on there is because when it's a transcript, it's not like a clean, here's the action here is clean sentences. It's run on sentences, and ums and ahs, and that's all in here. And so it felt like, oh, this feels unprofessional. But that's just it is what it is. And that if somebody actually really wants to be able to read it as a transcript, that's what's going to look like. Now, I do try to go in there and make sure that it actually kind of makes sense and the commas are in the right place and like things are sentences.
[00:23:27] Caroline Hull Right?
[00:23:28] Samantha Mabe But I have just kind of let go of it feeling like a perfect essay blog post and letting it be. This is what we actually had a conversation about and this is what we sound like.
[00:23:39] Caroline Hull Yeah. Oh, I love that. That's such great advice because it's better to have it there and be unperfect than to not have it at all. So I love that. The other thing you said that I am a huge fan of being a podcast strategist is making sure that you are embedding a player or a way for people to listen to the episode directly into the blog post. Because when we talk about podcast strategy, we're constantly referring our people back to our website. That's where we want people to go is to the website. If they want more of anything that we're talking about, they go to the website and you can actually see in your analytics, who's going to your website and listening just through the feed, right? As opposed to like going to Apple or as opposed to going to Spotify. And I get listens on my website all the time, every day, there are people going to my website and pressing play, so make sure you have that available for people. And it's really easy. It should be in your RSS feed hosts. There should be a way to grab an embed code and put that in there. So definitely that's a big thing. I just want to like drive home is make sure you have that on there.
[00:24:46] Samantha Mabe Yes, that is really important. And if you have like a video podcast where you post it to YouTube embed the YouTube video. That's going to help with views and you just never know how people are going to consume your content. So the more ways you can have it on your website, the better it's going to help those other platforms because they record it and then it's going to help people who actually use your website to find what they need so that they can listen and learn from you.
[00:25:15] Caroline Hull And I love giving people options too, because not everybody is an audio person. Not everybody is a blog post reader and not everybody is a video watcher. But if you give them the options, then I feel like they would come back time and time again because they know that they can get your content and receive it in a way that is aligned for them. So I really love that.
[00:25:37] Samantha Mabe Yeah.
[00:25:38] Caroline Hull So these are all really amazing tips. I've been taking notes, I've got things I want to do. So if you're looking at your website after this episode and you're thinking to yourself, I need to do some things to make this a better user experience, I want to improve my podcast page. What do you recommend as a first step to somebody who wants to improve their website?
[00:26:03] Samantha Mabe I always tell people the best first step is to go visit your website or on your phone. Especially for podcasts, people are listening to podcasts on their mobile devices, so you want to see what they are seeing when they click on those links. And that will give you a really good idea of are there places that I need to make improvements? Sometimes we just forget our mobile design and so things get really funky. They get overlapped or things are missing or they're out of order. So that's a really good first place to start. Okay. And then if everything looks good there, I would just go in and make sure that you have your podcast listed in your main menu and it's really easy for people to then subscribe to it in whatever way they want to listen.
[00:26:52] Caroline Hull Yeah, I love that my eyes are literally watering because we've been working on our sales pages and our home page and things like that. And my office manager pulled up the mobile site yesterday because we were like, We're getting so much traffic, but nobody's buying or clicking or signing up for the thing. We're like, What's happening? We pull up the mobile site and it's a hot mess. And so anybody that saw any of our content, you know, on Facebook or Instagram and then clicked over on their mobile device, saw, just like you said, overlapping. Oh my gosh. I literally, like wanted to cry last night because I was just like, I you know, I had forgotten all about it. When we designed our website. I totally forgot to go in and check that. And I was misusing banners and images and things. I learned a lot about Squarespace yesterday. Anyways, so we spent this morning fixing it all. And so now when you go to our mobile, our mobile pages, they look really lovely and there's no overlapping images and text that you can't read. And so I loved that you said that was a first step because that is definitely something that I forgot. So I just wanted to share my little story for everybody because even when I've had websites for ten plus years and I still forgot to look at it. So I love that piece of advice so much.
[00:28:16] Samantha Mabe Yeah, and a lot of platforms now. So I know at least Squarespace and Show It. You have to go in and design the mobile version separately from the desktop version now, it didn't used to be like Squarespace, but now you know you can, which gives you a lot more control. But it means that if you don't take the time to do it, you have no idea what it's going to look like.
[00:28:40] Caroline Hull Yeah, I mean, I knew there was like a place to pick the stylistic things, which I'm going to be honest I think I probably ignored a little bit, but I just didn't even think about like how it resizes everything for mobile. So now we know, things we learn.
[00:28:57] Samantha Mabe Yeah.
[00:28:58] Caroline Hull Well, this has been such an amazing conversation and I'm just, I'm so glad that you came on and shared all of your wisdom with us. If somebody wanted to jump into your world and learn more about websites or get help with their website, how do you recommend they do that?
[00:29:13] Samantha Mabe So my website is lemonandthesea.com and all of my social media is also lemonandthesea. It's not a common business name, so I have all of the usernames and I really like to just have conversations and answer questions. And then I do have a quick download for five minute updates for higher website conversion. So it just goes through some of the common things that I see on websites that you can change in 30 minutes or less to really see more conversions through your website. And that's at lemonandthesea.com/5updates.
[00:29:50] Caroline Hull And then you also have a podcast. Don't forget to share your podcast.
[00:29:55] Samantha Mabe I do. It's Process to Profitability. It's on all the podcast players and I am actually in the middle of my I think it's the sixth season officially named the 60 then amazing. Yeah it's I just hit recorded my 200th episode so there is a lot in there about design and I had a lot of amazing guests on there as well.
[00:30:17] Caroline Hull That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I'm so glad we got to meet and chat websites.
[00:30:22] Samantha Mabe Thank you so much.
[00:30:24] Caroline Hull Thank you so much for listening to Share, Strategize and Shine. To give your own podcast some shine, download my free podcast content kit by heading to the link in the show notes. Be sure to leave a review and connect with me on Instagram for more podcast strategy insights. Until next week.
