When you’re looking to launch a podcast, marketing and finding a home for it can be one of the most difficult aspects.
Finding an audience and getting your podcast out there isn’t easy but one of the ways you can establish your brand and grow an audience is by having a dedicated website for your podcast.
Hosting a podcast on a webpage isn’t as straightforward as maintaining a blog or some other types of websites. You may choose to host the audio on the website or be looking for a way to interact with your audience.
Thankfully, there are many services out there that can make building a website for your podcast an easier task. One of these services is Podpage.
In this article, we will take an in-depth look at Podpage and will review the surface.
What Is Podpage?
Podpage is a website builder that specializes in building websites for podcasts. It allows you to have a dedicated website for your podcast that you can use to promote your shows to both new and current listeners.
Podpage takes a simple approach to building websites and aims to make the process as easy as possible. The homepage boasts that you can build a website in five minutes and that you don’t need any coding or technical knowledge at all.
Why Do I Need A Podcast Website?
You might be wondering if you even need a website for your podcast at all. After all, you’re probably posting your podcast to services such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts, shouldn’t that be enough?
For many podcasters, it might be. However, the information you can display on podcast apps is limited, as are the ways you can directly interact with your audience.
Having a podcast website allows you to give more information about the podcast, the hosts, and individual episodes and can also open up avenues to directly interact with your listeners.
You can also use a standalone website to sell products or goods relating to your podcast. It can help you promote your podcast and make it more visible to more people.
What Are The Features Of Podpage?
Let’s break down the features of Podpage. We’ll go through some of the best features of the service as this should help you decide whether Podpage is for you or not.
Templates
Podpage boasts that you don’t need any design or programming skills to make your website and this is completely correct. The service offers around a dozen templates that you can choose from and these are all applied with only a few clicks.
Although a dozen templates doesn’t sound like many, especially when compared to the number offered by sites such as WordPress, there are only so many layouts that will work with podcasts so a dozen is more than enough.
All of these templates will link to your podcast’s RSS feed, and this is the case for all levels of Podpage’s service, including the Free tier.
This not only makes it so much easier to set up your webpage and have all your episodes present without the need to do it manually, but it means you can also preview the templates with all of your information there.
The templates are all optimized for cell phones as well, so you can be sure that your website will look just as good on a mobile browser as it will on a desktop browser.
Engagement And Growth Tools
One of the main benefits that podcast websites offer is engagement and interaction with listeners. Some of the tools Podpage offers include comments from listeners on each individual episode and even a service to allow listeners to leave you a voicemail.
This is a direct kind of feedback that Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other services can’t give you.
You can also grow your podcast by integrating several ways to make money. We’ll talk a little more about one aspect of this later, but you can also add links and redirects for sponsors and any affiliate deals you have.
Domain Names
With the Free tier of Podpage, you don’t get your own domain name, but do get a simple enough podpage.com/podcast name URL instead.
With the Basic and Pro tiers, however, you have the option of using a dedicated domain name to direct listeners to your site.
A domain name is very useful when it comes to branding and advertising your podcast. For brand-new podcasters who are just trying out Podpage and podcasting, you might find that the Free tier URLs will suffice.
SEO Tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of getting your podcast brand out there to more listeners. Strong SEO will get your podcast ranking on Google and will show it in the search results.
Podpage has some great SEO tools to help your podcast’s website get noticed. The pages automatically have the meta tags, schema, and structured data that Google loves to read and you can tweak this with only a few easy clicks in your dashboard.
Payment Integration
If you want to try and make some money from your podcast, then Podpage has several options that you can choose from. There are eight integrations available that allow you to add PayPal, Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and several other options.
As your podcast grows you might want to start selling some merchandise to your loyal listeners. Podpage allows you to integrate some storefronts as well so your listeners can get your goods right from your website.
Be aware, however, that these features are only available on the Pro plan.
How Much Is Podpage?
Podpage offers a variety of pricing options with each tier of membership giving you different features. Regardless of which tier you choose, for the first seven days of your membership, you will get the full Pro experience.
After the seven days have elapsed, your website will revert to either the Free or Basic tier, depending on your subscription.
Free
The Free tier of Podpage might be suitable for anyone that wants to give podcasting and having a dedicated site a trial run.
You get the most basic features that you need and will be able to host your podcast. Podcast feeds will update automatically and you have access to Podpage’s templates.
Basic
The Basic tier costs $12 a month or $108 when billed annually. The annual rate works out to the equivalent of $9 a month.
As well as all of the features in the Free tier, the Basic tier also gives you a custom domain name and will create separate pages for every podcast episode. You will also get some limited SEO features.
Pro
The Basic tier costs $20 a month or $180 when billed annually. The annual rate works out to the equivalent of $15 a month.
The Pro tier gives you everything featured in the lower tiers. It also includes a number of integrations so that you can add more features and functionality to your site.
You can add all of the listener engagement tools as well, such as mailing lists, rating tools, and the ability to set up donation pages. Pro also gives you the full SEO tools offered by Podpage.
What Are The Cons Of Podpage?
So far, we’ve many looked at the positive features of Podpage but unfortunately, the service isn’t completely without its faults. We’ll address these in turn so you can see whether you think Podpage is the right service for your podcast.
Lack Of Integrations
There aren’t many integrations and plug-ins available for Podpage, unfortunately. We’ve covered some of the payment integrations available and these are great but other than these and some regarding tracking traffic, it is sorely lacking.
Lack Of Customization
The templates offered by Podpage are great and will help you set up your website very quickly. However, there aren’t many ways to customize these templates.
The customization options available, such as custom footers and CSS editing, are only available if you are a Pro subscriber.
Minimal Support
If you need customer support, Podpage doesn’t make this easy to come by. There is a live chat, but the response times from customer service are very slow and the information given isn’t always that detailed.
Responses from the general information email address are quicker but are often no more detailed. Unfortunately, there are no user forums for additional help either.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we took an in-depth look at Podpage and reviewed the service. We looked at what the service does and what its main features are.
We also considered the price of Podpage and the ways in which the service fails to impress.
Overall, we found Podpage to be a great service for podcast creators that are either new to podcast making or just want an easy website. Check out Podpage VS Podcastpage for a comparison of how the two service stack up against each other.
If you want a highly customizable podcast hosting website then Podpage might not be for you, however.
Hopefully, the details in this review will help you decide whether Podpage is for you or not.
