Whose House Are You Building

00:00 Welcome back to How To Get Discovered. I'm Maya. And I'm Tom. This is episode 2. Last week, I argued that most podcasts are close to invisible. A lovely back room with no front door. This week is about where you put the door. Which sounds like a riddle. Slightly. It's called Whose House Are You Building? And it's about the address your episode pages and transcripts live at, your own website or somebody else's platform, and why that choice matters more than most podcasters think. It's also the one where I have an opinion about a C-name, which you promised on my behalf last week, on air while I wasn't looking.

00:41 You'll enjoy it. I won't. Two podcasters, Podcaster A and Podcaster B. It's always hypothetical people with you. Last week it was one beekeeper, so I'm branching out. Both have made the same show for five years. Same quality, same size audience. Podcaster A has a website, theirshow.co.uk, with an about page, a player, and a page for every episode, all on that one domain. Fairly standard. Podcaster B also bought a domain years ago, and it just redirects to their Spotify page.

01:19 Everything else lives on Apple, on Spotify, and on their host's default page, something like theirshow.somehostingplatform.com. That's more standard, honestly. That's most people I know. Including some shows you'd have heard of. So, five years from now, which one is harder to knock over? Uh. Why? Because if Spotify decides podcasts are boring again, or Apple changes the rules, or B's host gets bought and rebranded and quietly switches the old pages off, B loses the home for everything they've ever made. A still has the website. The audio's portable. The address isn't.

02:00 So you agree with me, and we can all go home. Nice try. What gets me is that everybody already knows this. Ask any podcaster whether they'd rather own their audience or rent it, and they'll say own it, obviously. Then look at where they actually send people. Meaning what exactly? Where do your show notes live? Your transcripts, if you've got them? When a listener wants more than the audio, what link do you give them? For most people, it's the host's default page. A Spotify link, an Apple link, possibly a link tree. Guilty. I know. I've seen it. Every time you send someone to an address that isn't yours, you're building on somebody else's land.

02:44 It's like renting a house and spending five years doing up the garden. Gorgeous garden. The landlord keeps it. Fine. But the listener doesn't care whose address it is. They want the episode. The plumbing's invisible to them. True. Google cares, though. So do the AI assistants. And so will you, in about four years, when your host changes its mind about something. What's a chatbot got to do with it? Because they mostly read the same web Google does, and they lean on sites that look established. We'll do a whole episode on that. But it's the same principle. Fine. But a page is a page, surely. Search engines build up a sense of how far to trust a website.

03:28 The SEO crowd used to call it domain authority. Google never used the phrase, and it's gone a bit out of fashion, but the idea hasn't. A site that's been around a while, that other decent sites link to, that publishes useful things consistently, builds up weight. New pages on that site start with some of it. So, it's credit. More or less. Now put your episode pages on your host's default subdomain. Whatever credit they earn mostly props up the host and you're one show among thousands there. Then in three years you move hosts. You take your audio with you. You don't take the links or the rankings or the address people bookmarked.

04:09 Which is the bit nobody thinks about when they pick a host. No. Whereas if the page lives at theirshow.co.uk slash episode 47, every link and every share is credit for an address you own. Change hosts, change networks, change the name of the show if you must. The domain's still yours. Right. This is where I push. You're describing a project. Build a website, get transcripts onto it, structure them, keep them in step with the feed. Most podcasters make their show on a Tuesday night after the kids have gone to bed. You've just handed them a second job. Ten years ago, I'd have agreed with you. That was a developer and a few months of your life.

07:00 That's most of it, to be fair. DNS is the internet's address book. When someone types a web address, DNS is what tells their browser where to actually go. A CNAME is one kind of entry in that book. It says, this name is really an alias for that one over there. In English? You log into wherever you bought your domain and you add one line. It says, archive.yourshow.co.uk is an alias for the service's address. Someone types archive.yourshow.co.uk, the request quietly goes off to the service's servers, the page comes back, but the address in their browser and the address Google sees is still yours.

07:44 So it's like putting your own nameplate on a flat in someone else's building. That's not bad, actually. And it's your nameplate. If you ever leave, you change that one line and point it somewhere else. The domain people have been linking to for years stays yours. That's the part I actually care about. The links don't die with the landlord. Exactly. From Growthheard up, PodHerd puts your archive on a subdomain of your own site, like search.yoursite.com, and a CNAME record pointing that subdomain at domains.podherd.com is how you connect it. What if I don't want the search dot at the front? What if I want it on my main address?

08:26 LeadTheHerd adds yoursite.com/slash archive, plus a full custom domain and your own branding. Is there a real difference between those two? Subdomain or folder? Honestly, SEO people argue about it endlessly. Some say Google treats a subdomain a bit like a separate site. Some say it barely matters now. The folder is the tidiest version. But both sit on your domain, and the bit nobody argues about is that the address is yours to keep. Huh. What? I've got an opinion about a CNAME. Told you. It's a small opinion. It's that you should own your line in the address book.

09:07 That's it. That's the entire idea. And it's correct. I resent how sensible it is. And it goes further. Once your episode pages sit on your own domain, they can become the backbone of the website itself. Transcripts are text, and text is the thing search engines actually understand. A show site built on 50 transcribed episodes is a far stronger site than one built on an about page and a contact form. Which describes most podcast websites I've ever seen, including mine. I wasn't going to say. Go on then. What else does owning it get me?

09:46 Google Search Console. It's Google's free tool for website owners. It shows you which searches your pages turned up for, how often they appeared. appeared, and how often someone actually clicked. Page by page, so episode by episode. And I can't just have that anyway? Not for an address you don't own. Google makes you prove you control a domain before it'll show you anything. You can't verify podherd.com or spotify.com. On a rented address, the numbers exist, they're just not yours to look at. That's quite galling, actually. From Grow the Herd Up, PodHerd has a Google Search Console integration that shows the clicks and impressions for your episode pages.

10:28 For the actual searches behind them, you open Search Console itself. Right. Now that is interesting. Is it? Say you've got a running show. You might find an episode you thought was about marathon training turning up week after week for why do my knees hurt going downhill because you spent four minutes on it in the middle. So you'd know what the episode's really about. To strangers, anyway. And maybe that's what you call the next one. But you didn't blink at the authority stuff. Because that's all slow and theoretical. Credit builds, links compound, trust me, come back in five years.

11:06 This is different. It tells me roughly what people typed before they landed on an episode, and whether anyone's finding the show through search at all. That's what would tell me if the rest of it is worth bothering with. Tom, are you conceding? No, I'm saying one specific thing is more interesting than I expected. That's what conceding sounds like. Curious isn't converted. Fine, I'll take it. And I'd want to see what it actually says before I believed anything else you've told me today. Which is the right instinct. For a lot of shows, early on it'll say not much yet. That's still worth knowing. All of that's the long game, though. Domains take years.

11:51 What can someone do this afternoon? Now we're talking titles. Go on. Most episode titles are in-jokes. Some clever phrase that meant something in the edit and tells a stranger absolutely nothing. What was your freelance episode called? The one you told me about last week? Show me the money. Tom. It was a good title at the time. I'll stick up for cute titles a bit, though. They reward the regulars. They sound like the show. For people already listening, sure. For a stranger scrolling search results, the title is the whole pitch. Show me the money could be about anything.

12:31 Football, tax, a heist. Whereas? How to raise your rates without losing clients. It's dull, but it's what someone would actually type. Or both. Show me the money. How to raise your rates without losing clients. Your regulars get the joke, and the stranger gets the point. I'll allow it. Generous. The bigger one, though, and it's going to sound boring, is writing your feed episode descriptions properly. As opposed to show notes? No, that's a fight for another week. And believe me, I've got plenty to say.

13:08 I mean the description field that goes out in your RSS feed. The one you fill in once, in your host's editor, at 11 at night, and never look at again. This week, we chat to Brian. Exactly that. And that field is what Apple shows, what Spotify shows, what every directory and app pulls in. It's probably doing more work for your show than any other bit of text you write. And on most shows, it's one sentence or nothing at all. So what should go in it? What the episode's actually about, in plain words. Who's on it, and why a stranger should care. A couple of short paragraphs. Write it as if someone's deciding whether to press play based on nothing else.

13:51 Because quite often they are. And it costs nothing. No new tools, no domain, nothing to set up. 20 minutes an episode. Less, once you've done a few. Do it for your 10 best old episodes, too. The description isn't frozen once it's published. You can go back and fix it. I hadn't thought of that. I've got about 40 that just say part two. Of what? I genuinely couldn't tell you. One more, and it's the cheapest of the lot. Stop sending people to the Spotify link. That's what everyone sends.

14:27 That's my point. When you post an episode, when a guest shares it, when it goes in your email signature, send people to a page on your own site. Even a plain one with a player and a decent description. Every one of those links is a small vote for an address you own. And the people who only listen on Spotify? Give them a button on the page. They're wonderful. tap away. You've just made the tap happen on your land instead of theirs. Hmm. That's the house thing again, really. Everything is, this week. That's the episode. We agree on this entire section, you realise. It's unsettling. Deeply. Let me fix that. I still think the domain stuff is overblown for most people.

15:12 Better titles and proper feed descriptions get you 90% of the benefit for 5% of the work. No, 60, maybe? The easy wins help each episode on its own. Owning the address is what makes the whole back catalogue worth more every year, and that's the 40% you can't catch up on later. Says who? Because every year your pages sit on someone else's address is a year of credit you've handed to them. You can move house later, you can't move the years. Hmm, we're not settling that today. Give it eight more episodes. Next week. The AI one.

15:52 When ChatGPT recommends your show. More and more people don't type beekeeping podcast into a search box anymore. They ask ChatGPT what they should listen to. So what does it actually recommend? And how does it decide? And I'll be arguing that whatever we call AI search today will look quaint in three years. I'll agree with that, then disagree with what you think follows from it. Sounds like a fight I'll enjoy. Thanks for listening to How To Get Discovered. See you next week. Bye.