100 Episodes WASTED! Fix These 4 Simple Podcast Blunders in Minutes

 Imagine being 100 episodes into your podcast and finding out that if you had made a few small changes from the very beginning, your current results could be drastically different. Maybe your audience would be bigger. Maybe you could have done tens of thousands of dollars in additional sales, but you missed out.

How would that make you feel? I saw this exact situation recently, and I want to tell you about it because if you are making any of these mistakes, I don’t want you to make them anymore.

 This is profits through podcasting, where we help health focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting. I’m your host, Joel Oliver. So it takes on average a hundred episodes or a couple of years of podcasting to achieve success.

But 93 percent don’t make it that far. Okay. These are some numbers from a pod match industry report that I love to cite because they’re shocking. Of course, the numbers aren’t guaranteed. Just because you do a hundred episodes doesn’t mean for sure that you’re going to achieve success, whatever that means for you.

But for sure, if you overlook important parts of your podcast or make major mistakes, then we can almost guarantee that just doing 100 episodes is not enough. Obviously, it’s more to it than just doing the episodes. But that said, this is why I get sad really when I see multiple mistakes being made over a long period of time because a podcaster has invested so much into it.

. They kept with it, which is huge because as we’re saying here, the numbers show that most people don’t. So for somebody to actually stay with it and commit and do a high number of episodes, that’s fantastic. But then to see that they had been making mistakes the entire time that prevented them from getting results.

I don’t like to see that.

I come across these situations all the time when I’m doing podcast audits. I find mistakes like I’m going to tell you about today. Now, these things that I’ll discuss, it’s not all about these things, we’re just trying to optimize our results. Sure, podcasters can have great success and have these mistakes being made.

I see that all the time too, and that’s totally fine. But for most of us, it’s not. We’re out here making content. We want the absolute best results possible. Every subscriber counts. Any listener could be our next client. So obviously we’re doing the podcast. We’re putting in the effort. We want to maximize the results that we’re getting.

All this said, I was quite shocked recently when I came across to get another of these situations. This was a doctor’s podcast, actually, who’d been doing this for a while. Over a hundred episodes. So she’s very dedicated, but because of some things that were overlooked, I believe her results were stifled and they’re very important yet very easy to fix.

The first one is that her website didn’t have the show notes embedded on it. So she has a podcast, has a health and wellness coaching business. So that has a website and the podcast has a page on there, but the show notes from the podcast were not properly embedded on the site.

So what does that mean? Nearly a hundred episodes in there’s zero SEO benefit. Okay. SEO. Sure. You’ve heard this term search engine optimization, the more quality content that you have on a website, and there are other factors as well, but it helps it rank higher on Google. So when people are searching for information, yours is more likely to rank higher if you have more quality content on your website, at least that’s one of the factors that goes into it.

So if you’re doing podcast episodes, you’re doing a lot of them, you’ve done a hundred, you’re writing a description with each of those episodes, you’re writing show notes. And that is text that is text that Google can see. Cause still at this point, Google doesn’t really index audio. It can’t hear the audio.

But the text it sees and attributes that to your website. If you don’t embed your episodes of your podcast onto your website in a certain way, Google virtually cannot see it. It’s like you published a blog for two years, but it wasn’t actually published. There’s just zero effect.

And since SEO is a nice benefit of podcasting, we want that benefit, right? We’re putting in all this effort. We’re trying to get the highest ROI. So of course we would want to set up our website in a way that lets those show notes be indexed by Google and help you rise up in the search engine rankings.

Now there are multiple ways to do this, but as I’m saying, there’s a right way and a wrong way. And some people end up doing it the wrong way where the show notes just mean nothing to Google. Okay. So we don’t want to have that situation. Also a big factor here. And most people have this done is having a website that you own.

So you don’t want like my website. squarespace. com. You want a domain name that you own, because then you’ve always got it. All the work that you do to build up the SEO and backlinks and that sort of thing, you always have it. But if you have a subdomain because you’re not paying for a proper professional website or you’re using a website on your podcast host, that’s not good.

Because if you ever decide to migrate from there, you lose all those backlinks and the status and the authority that you’ve built up with search engines. So having a website that you own, is key. And then you definitely want to have the show notes embedded on there properly to get the SEO benefit. This one did not have that.

And that was the first of four giant mistakes that I saw with this podcast that I believe was holding this podcaster back from really getting the results that she should be. Mistake number two that I found the website had no link to subscribe on Apple podcasts. Again, wasted opportunities. So. We’re very fortunate if someone comes onto our website.

How did they find it? Maybe they clicked from your Instagram bio. Maybe they found your link on a guest appearance on some other podcast. Whatever the case, they landed on your website. This is fantastic. What are we going to do with them? Can we convert them into a lead, into a customer, perhaps a podcast subscriber?

Any of those things would be great. But you need to have a subscribe link to the podcast. And this person did not have that from her website. I mean this for real. I could not find anything to click to subscribe to the podcast now, technically I could go search it up in Apple or whatever podcast app I choose. I could do that. Maybe some people will do that, but many won’t. We’re trying to make this as easy as possible. So you can’t just expect to not have a surplus. I don’t even need to justify why it’s a good idea to have a subscribe link and why it’s bad not to.

You need to have this. This is the basics like podcasting one on one. You have a subscribe link on your website yet. Here they were a hundred episodes in didn’t have a subscribe link. So think of all the potential listeners that came across that and didn’t subscribe because they couldn’t see how, and how many of those could have turned into customers and sales.

And what could have been done with that money? I just, I don’t even like to think about it. It’s, it’s, it’s not a good feeling. Okay. But this is again, why I’m passing it on to you. So subscribe links on your website, please. To Apple, Spotify, you can do YouTube as well. You should be on there

you don’t need to get into all the other smaller ones. You’re most likely on a whole bunch of apps thanks to just being an Apple and Spotify. A lot of these other apps, they pick up their data from the bigger platforms or listen notes or things like that. So you don’t need a whole bunch of subscribe links, but you want those main ones.

Mistake number three that I found that was stifling the growth of this podcast. The show notes did not contain any links to this person’s social media profiles or. Her website. So why is this a problem? Well, imagine you are listening to an episode of this podcast on Apple. Maybe you subscribe to it. You found it somewhere, whatever.

You’re playing the episode and you think, Hey, I want to work with this person. Or I want to follow them or check out their website. Check out their offering. Something. You go to the show notes. That’s what we often do. That’s the whole point of them. See. Why do I click here? How do I access their, their website or their social media?

No links. So now from the podcast app, there’s no way back to their social media or their website. How do I follow and connect with this person or further our relationship, which is the goal. If you have a podcast, you’re hoping someone comes and wants to do business with you, or at least take that next step.

Maybe follow you on Instagram first and eventually do business with you. You need to have something in your show notes.

At the very least, a website link in, hopefully, Instagram or something. I mean, if you What do you even What is your call to action? What do you want people to do if you didn’t consider putting it in the show notes saying, this is the thing I mentioned in the episode. Come check it out. Come get our free PDF.

Do this quiz, follow us, whatever. This is a major oversight the fourth thing, giant mistake that I found with this podcast that I don’t want you to be making as well is this kind of goes hand in hand with the last one.

Actually, the default links for each episode that show up in the podcast apps were just directing to her podcast hosting page. Libsyn rather than her own website. So again, a dead end. Let me explain this a bit if it wasn’t quite clear when you’re looking at an episode or a podcast in an app like Apple podcasts, it will typically have a link somewhere at the bottom and built into the app, not in the show notes, but built into the app and it’ll say something like podcast website or episode website.

And those links can be altered to point wherever you want. So if you have. done things properly and you have each episode on your actual website. You want the episode website link in the app. When a person clicks it, you want it to go to your website because that’s the most optimal place for them to go, right?

You’ve got all the resources there. Maybe your lead magnet sign up whatever you’re selling. You want them to be on your website. And this mistake unfortunately happens a lot. So the default, if you upload in Libsyn, for example, is just the, the Libsyn episode link. So when people are in the app and they maybe find that link, you didn’t have any, any in the show notes, they find this other link, they click that.

It goes to just a Libsyn default page. So the episode on Libsyn, which again, is a just complete dead end. Cause it doesn’t go to her social media. It doesn’t go back to her website. There’s nothing there on that page to go back to the website. And if this happened to get linked anywhere on the internet, she doesn’t own that.

She’s not getting any benefit from it. Cause it’s just going to a Libsyn page. She switches hosts. She’s All of that’s all those backlinks are gone. Okay. So no good, just dead ends everywhere. Can’t get to the podcast. Can’t get from it back to her site. the sad thing is they just don’t know any better. Okay. They’re going to keep doing this either because they set it up on their own. And they weren’t aware or they did hire someone, but that person either doesn’t know or is lazy, whatever the case, again, leaving the podcaster unaware. And, you know, I mentioned the idea that they set it up on their own and I’m not knocking that we’re, we’re entrepreneurs.

Lots of times we have to do things on our own and try to just figure it out. We don’t always have the money to go hire a professional. And then I, like I said, maybe a professional doesn’t do a proper job and you’re still responsible for figuring it out anyway, but. It’s possible where you just think I’ve got this all set up.

I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I followed some instructions. My podcast is on my website. I see it. Everything’s good. But you come to find some day, Oh, I’ve been doing this wrong the whole time, ?

That whole premise of you don’t know what you don’t know. It looked set up, but there were a whole bunch of things that you didn’t realize were now not done properly. And two years in, you could have been a lot further ahead. But unfortunately now you’re not, when I’m working with clients and I do podcast audits, when we onboard people, I’m looking at all this stuff and I’m making sure that it’s all in order because people that we work with, I want them to get the best results.

And this is how it’s done. So I’m trying to detect these things and it’s heartbreaking for me, caring so much about the industry and the people in it, you know, especially in health and wellness here, people who we work with, I come across these people and see that they could have had way better results from podcasting and because of issues like this, they haven’t.

So the big question you’re probably wondering now is how do I avoid this? What do I do? How can I fix these things? How do I even know if I have these issues?

Well, Like I said, research, professional help if you can. What it comes down to, I guess my conclusion from all this is you don’t know necessarily, because a professional might have done it wrong. Maybe you did it wrong. I don’t know what to tell you, except that because of, because of this episode, I will extend a free, no strings attached, podcast audit.

To you for listening to this. Okay. Cause I don’t want you to go any longer, perhaps having some of these mistakes happening and losing, losing out on money, losing out on leads.

No matter if it’s a big difference or a small difference, you’re putting all this work in your podcast. You want it to be performing at top shape. You want basics in place, like people being able to subscribe. Okay. If you DM me on Instagram, I will do a free podcast audit for you. Okay. I’ll go through a checklist that I have. I’ll check a whole bunch of things and I’ll let you know if anything is out of place, anything is not working properly. And then I’ll indicate to you how to fix it. 

On Instagram, EC podcast studio gives a follow semi a DM mentioned that you heard about the podcast audit in this episode, and I will happily do that for you.