Building the Perfect Podcast Website

Brett Johnson: Welcome to the Circle Sessions featuring the circle of experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications. And Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle270Media Podcast Consultants. Well, each week, one of the Circle of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. I will focus on marketing, social media monetization and website design, and the implementation of all these together. This week. Yasmine is here from the Circle of Experts. Yasmine works alongside clients to design a website that's driven by strategy, looks amazing, and that you can actually use to grow your podcast and then in turn, your business as well. Yasmine, thanks for joining me today.

Yasmine, thanks for joining me for this episode.

Yasmine: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Brett: So we touched upon this in our last episode about looking at that target market, but there are a lot of things to do before you build out a website. And uh, I want to ask you with this episode, are we looking at someone that's not even touched a website or maybe has a website that they need just build out completely differently or is it the same thought process?

Yasmine: It's definitely the same thought process just because if you're a blank slate, you can take these tips and run with them. If you already have a site or a business, you can look at these and think about how your business has shifted. So if you were, for example, a service based business that kind of just took on anyone, let's say you were a bookkeeper, you took on any sort of business and helped them out. And now you are gearing yourself up to really focus on women own businesses to support them. These tips will help you, um, how to pivot your website and make it really align with your new goals.

Brett: Good. So, yeah, let's talk about that. Target market and podcasters do have a difficult time, or it takes time, let's put it that way. But it is difficult to really know who your target market is and who is really listening. You've been podcasting for a year or five years. A lot of times those listeners are just very silent. They don't give you feedback. But you can see that you have a successful podcast because the numbers continue to grow. You know, that probably your content is dead on, so you're kind of basing it on the content. This is who I'm shooting for. So building the website, uh, we can take that information, I guess, but it may be a gut feeling or some parameters. But how can you help them refine how to build that website when you don't really know? Let's put it that way.

Yasmine: Yeah, I would say look at your content, uh, that's going out on the podcast or that will be going out and then think about who would be interested in listening to it and then think about the demographics. So, for example, if you are talking about a specific, let's say small business, uh, you're giving tips for small businesses, and it's mostly service based business owners that might be listening to it because you don't really touch a lot on ecommerce. Then think about where these business owners are when it comes to the website. You got to think about your demographics, which is the facts. Um, these are things that cannot really be changed. And they're not very fuzzy. So they are how much money do they have? Where do they likely live? What sort of family structure do they have, their budget and day to day. This can somewhat be applied to a podcast, I'm assuming, because, for example, family structure, if they are, I listen to some stay at home, uh, schooling podcast. And that is very specific to people who are stay at home parents. And they have children, obviously they're home schooling their children. And so now I can understand the family structure. And then there is usually one parent who's the working parent. And so now I can kind of sift through and really look at the topics that I'm putting onto the podcast and then look at how the website will be structured and what sort of content or copy will go on it. So those are demographics. But after that, you really want to look at the psychographic. So this is the more touchyfeely stuff. This is like, what brands do they love? Do they like going to Walmart or do they like going to Target? Do they like, um, Kate Spade, which is a handbag company that I love? Or do they like something even more luxurious than that? Um, and why do they appeal to either of those brands? Like, why would they choose either of those? What brands do they avoid? So, for example, I will go to Target any day of the week, but I don't think I've set foot in a Walmart in over three years. So that tells you a little bit about the type of businesses I frequent, maybe the type of design that I or style that I prefer. And even though there's a Walmart nearby, I likely will not go to it. I will travel further in order to get to a Target. So what brands do they avoid? What sites do they frequent, even if it's not anything to do with what podcast, uh, genre that you are providing or what business you have? What sites do they really frequent and appeal to them, and what goals do they have? So if they are trying to learn how to home school their kid, what is their real goal? Is it more family time? Are they trying to do road schooling? Are they just trying to do they have some issues at school? So they want to home school? What are their goals and what is their problem, and how do they really state that problem? In terms of emotions and vocabulary. So how did they describe the issue that they're having and how have they tried to solve it? What is that transformation like when, um, they do solve it? Or what transformation do they think they will have when they do solve it? And really, what are their emotions? So if you support them in achieving that transformation, what sort of emotions will they feel? Will they feel relief?

Brett: All this that you're talking about sounds like a heavy lift. And it is, but I guess I encourage the listener not to allow it to be analysis, paralysis. Sometimes it's just going in and jumping in and getting it done and tweaking because you may be right on target. You think you're right on target with who and what in the psychographics and such, but it may end up being you're attracting somebody a little bit differently because of the style that you're presenting your content and the website design that's different than your quote unquote competitor.

Yasmine: Yeah, don't overthink this. This is like back of the napkin. You can do a lot more research if you want. You can go really in depth, but this is like back of the napkin. Take no more than maybe 20 minutes to just write out all this information. Just kind of brainstorm. Don't worry about handwriting, don't worry about anything. And really focus in on who they are. But don't take more than 20 minutes because if you continue to dig deeper, you're never going to get that website up right.

Brett: And I think you're not going to be jumping into this podcast or this business to support the podcast or vice versa, without having a gut feeling of why you're doing it anyway. So if you are a bodybuilder and you're looking to create a podcast or on bodybuilding and such, you know that you're in the gym and you know what everybody's drinking and what they're doing and where they're vacationing because they're talking about it all the time. So there are things that you just kind of all of a sudden have to tune into a little bit more now than you did before. And you realize, oh, it's all around me, the answers. I just have to listen for the next week, maybe two weeks, and all of a sudden these questions are probably answered for you just by living your life.

Yasmine: Yeah, I completely agree. And just like a podcast, if you're creating content or copy for your website, it's about the value. It's not about really all the fancy widgets or anything like that. It's really, what kind of value are you providing? So when you're recording your podcast, what questions are you answering for your target market? That's one of the most important things about podcasting, as well as creating the.

Brett: Content for your website, I can't stress enough. And this next step, what we're going to talk about is knowing your website goals, is understanding that your website is the one thing about your marketing that you actually own? You own your website. You don't own your social media, you don't own anything that you can't put a dollar to. And I think that's important to understand of understanding how that website is going to fit into your marketing strategy. It's one thing that you drive everybody to and you 100% control.

Yasmine: I completely agree. It's like your empire, your castle. You get to brand yourself any way you want on your website and not worry about an algorithm changing on you suddenly and shifting all of your users or you having to pay in order to now stay in front of your core audience. So you really have to understand how the website will fit into your marketing strategy, how does it align and how are people getting to the site, really? So, for example, if you are focusing on, uh, social media and getting people from social media onto your website, what are they going to do on your website and what is their mindset coming in from social media? So, for example, I post reels on Instagram. If somebody is coming in to my site from Instagram, what is their mindset are they looking for just to get to know me? So how am I going to structure the site that way? If you're doing a lot of in person events, what they just met you, what are they thinking about you? Are they trying to just kind of get to know you a little bit more? Are they looking for more content, product information, more service information? So think about how this website will fit into your marketing strategy and how it fits into your podcasting strategy.

Brett: And then also, what do you want them to do when you go to the website too, I think that's a huge thing because you're talking about desktop, but you're also talking about your mobile version. What's the first thing you want them to do? Because, again, we're all time, uh, sensitive that you direct them to do this, but you can't just hide it on page three of your website.

Yasmine: Yeah, especially startups. They will have, let's say, services. And for example, myself, I create websites. Um, but I've seen a lot of people, they have websites, they have courses, they have ebooks, they have all these things, downloadable items, they might have do some wedding photography on the side. And all of this is on their website. And it can be very confusing. So my suggestion is always to have no more than two goals. Have the first goal, and this is your primary goal. This is the number one thing you want people to do when they are on your site. And then have a secondary goal. So if they cannot complete goal number one, they will go to goal number two, and no more goals than that. Um, and this will help you create content and really organize the content puzzle through it. When it comes to laying out a page, just because you do not want to hide a very important goal on a page or a third page. Um, as an example, for uh, example, I want people to come and hop on a call with me, to contact me. If they do not do that, I will ask them on the site to download a free checklist for their website. That is goal number one. Goal number two. Now, it can shift if I launch a course, a membership, all these goals will shift. But I need to decide what will always be goal number one and what will be goal number two. Uh, it just gets very cluttered and very confusing for the user when they see too many things happening at once.

Brett: Yeah, I agree. And coupled with pop ups, coupled with moving the mouse in the wrong place and getting that extra 50% off, it's like, okay, I know you don't want me to leave, but come on, I've done what I want to do sort of thing. But I agree and uh, that makes a lot of sense. Um, because I work with podcasters and I help them dream. I talk about at the very beginning of our process of what are their goals for their podcast. And I'll plant some seeds in their head going, have you ever thought about an ebook of content that you create from them? Especially if their content has some pillars. They ask certain questions all the time of their, uh, guests, or if it's something they're doing on their own. And that's in the back of their mind. And I think you bring up a good point, even though maybe you want to do an ebook from your podcast or from your blogs or whatever. But that doesn't necessarily have to be a goal. Goals can be very simple, is a calendar to contact me, to set up a time to talk with me, or so I can help get you to where I need to be. I think that's a good way of looking at those goals do not have to be a heavy lift. It's very something very simple, but yet understand. It's got to be prominent on the website too. I think we also can take a look at even deeper features that are on the website, like a membership, blog, e commerce. Let's go over those as well.

Yasmine: Yeah, think about what kind of website you're going to be providing to your users. Uh, is it going to have a membership? Is it going to have a blog? Are you going to sell merch? And when you talk about pop ups, ideally, um, you would not have a pop up immediately come into the picture when people just land on your site. Last, uh, year, was trying to purchase a one gallon water bottle and one of my friends, she was an affiliate for a company, so I decided to go to that company. She sent me the link and as soon as I landed, every single page. So I would go from the home page to the product page, back to a different product page. I was trying to decide what color I wanted. Um, and that same pop up followed me everywhere. I ended up filling out the pop up to see if that would get rid of it, and it didn't. It just kept coming back in. So think about the user experience and you don't want to be annoying. You want people to sign up, but you don't want to be annoying. You want to make their experience really fruitful and just provide value to them. And if it is ecommerce, help them get you from point A to point B and to check out. Um, but yeah, think about the features that you want. If you want a membership site, are you offering different tier levels? If you're blogging, is it for SEO purposes or are you just featuring your podcast and you want to get sponsors onto your podcast? If that is your goal, if that is your number one goal, then you want to make sure that page is very prominent, that form is very easy to fill out for them to get a hold of you. And yeah, just avoid crazy pop ups.

Brett: Just as I do with podcasters, and kind of setting up that okay, whatever format you're going to do with the podcast. There are formulas, there are maps to how to put this together, an interview style, or if you're going solo, or if you have a roundtable of people, how is it all set up? Creating a website, the same thing. I'm assuming you're basically a site map on how to put this together to make the best user experience, correct?

Yasmine: Yeah. So after you've brainstormed and done all the great stuff, you know who you're targeting, you want to create a site map. And this is just going to help you build out the site a lot faster. The site map, if you want to think of it as a list, it's just a list of pages. It, uh, can have your home page about frequently asked questions, contact privacy, uh, policies, anything like that. You just want to list them out. Then you want to organize them from the most important to the least important, and then divide them up into groups. So for example, you might have five going on the top navigation. That's the top most area of the page. You might have the rest of them in the footer area. You might have some that are just kind of tertiary. So for example, if I go to the about page and then I click on the person on your team and that takes me to their bio page. That's not necessarily linked anywhere else, but it is a page. It's almost like a tertiary page. And you've organized them, you've put them in these buckets and now you can create a wire frame, and people get really worried about wire frames. It's just a sketch. It's a sketch of what your most important pages will look like. For example, I usually take the back of my kids drawing, and I will scribble all over it and just kind of get an idea of what will go on the homepage. You don't have to be very artistic. You can create little squiggles for text. Boxes can represent images, and you just want to get it out of your brain and organize the content. If you think of it like tetris or a puzzle, you want to organize the content. And keep in mind your goals. So if your number one goal is to get people to contact you, you want to direct them to the contact page. If you have an online calendar, you want to make sure that it is being linked to from the most prominent areas of that page. And look for inspiration. Don't just kind, uh, of struggle through it. Look at websites that might be doing something similar to you, or other podcast websites and, uh, other sorts, like maybe even e commerce websites or some other services. See what they're doing. How have they laid out the page? How have they thought about it? And what can you take as an inspiration for your own site? And just remember, again, provide a call to action and make sure that you keep the number one goal in mind whenever you are creating the site or creating the wire frame.

Brett: Sure. In your experience working with your clients, do they have a tendency to have too much stuff on their website or not enough? You have to pull more from them. We can fill in holes here, or you're just saying way too much. Can I put this here? Can I put this here? What are your experiences with clients?

Yasmine: Usually it's less. Usually we need to pull out more. And they have the content. It's just that sometimes they don't really think about it. For example, if you are a podcaster and you have people leaving you reviews, you can actually use those reviews on your website, copy them, paste them onto your site, and create a little testimonial page. Sprinkle them throughout. That will add some social proof to your page, your intro. That can be a couple of headlines on your site. You might want to reword it a little bit, but you can reuse that. Um, if somebody just mentions what you do, or maybe an about section, you have the content. It's just about putting it in now. You don't want to overdo it. I know that written content can help with SEO, especially with Bots, but sometimes you can really overdo it, and it's just going to look like history homework, right. Uh, we've all sat in history class, so we've been asked to read pages and pages of things that are really boring to us. And you don't want to give the user homework. So you want to break it up. And if it feels like homework to you, it's probably going to feel like homework for the person in order to read through everything. So just make sure it's not overly done. But usually it's that I need to pull more information from people rather than the other way around.

Brett: Interesting. Well, let's talk about that content. Because now you've got everything set up, you know where things are going to be, but you do need to fill it in with content. Like you said, that's an very SEO important for, uh, the right stuff in the right place. So let's um, start talking about that. You've got to have copy on the website somewhere. How should we go about looking at copy for content?

Yasmine: Yeah, I would say keep in mind value and answer questions. We can dive into SEO, but it is a beast. And people make their lives off of just SEO. They don't even make websites. It's like just an SEO agency because it's huge. It's a huge field. Um, but at least provide copy or write copy, I should say. That is all about providing value and answering the users questions. Avoid any meaning. Me copy, which is like, I am a website designer, that I create these amazing websites and you will love me. You do not want to have any copy like that. It's about how can my skill set really provide you the best experience and transformation and provide a solution that you need. So write copy that is about your user, not necessarily just about you. And some people are afraid of adding emotional copy. And again, it depends on your field. But if you are a personal trainer for, let's say, moms who just had a baby, and they're feeling really down about themselves physically, what is the copy that you can place on your website that will really appeal to them and it will appeal to them in terms of where they are at right now and then what transformation they want when it comes to your services or your products. And sprinkle in that social proof testimonials are incredible. If you can get video testimonials, that's the best thing. If not, get those written testimonials or copy the reviews from, uh, Google my business pages or from the podcast reviews that people are leaving you and put those on your site. That is proof that people are listening to you, that people are buying from you, and that they are coming back. And then when it comes to images, if you have the budget, you can get some branded photos. You don't need too many, but you can get some branded photos. Get a photographer to shoot a couple of headshots. And if you're using stock images, you will want to make sure that they are open for commercial use. You do not want to just go on to Google and search for an image and then download it. Um, and don't choose any awkward ones. So you know the ones that people know, the stock images that are very awkward, like the very sexy looking nurse that's very awkwardly standing there who does not look at all like a nurse. Those you might want to avoid. But there are some other sites out there that offer really great images that are open for commercial use, and you just don't need that many. People get overwhelmed and they start downloading these packs of 100 different images. And you don't necessarily need that many. I would say for a very small site, you might need two different images per page and maybe a headshot of you or two, and you can create a really powerful and simplistic looking site with that.

Brett: Yeah, I know we're probably going to dive into a little bit more of SEO as the months progress, because there are pieces to this that you need to know a little bit about. But I guess and this is myself taught of trying to understand what Google does. And I don't know whether Google still does this or not, but I'm sure in the beginning, google was the place that their job was. To answer your query, you typed in a question, and it was supposed to. And I think it still does, for the most part, give you an answer. Um, from what you're saying is that it's the value copy, it's the value content that you're creating. It's not all about me, but about what you can do, because that's what somebody is searching for, is to answer that problem.

Yasmine: Yes. And when you are creating a podcast episode, you are providing that value. You are answering a question. Most likely you are interviewing someone that is bringing something of value, and you kind of want to apply that to your website copy. What sort of value can you provide them? Can you give them a summary of what your podcast typically covers and what solutions your podcast can provide to them? If you're blogging or at least putting the transcript onto your website for SEO purposes, can it provide the value that people need? And if you can say, yes, I'm providing value to those who are visiting my website, you're one step ahead of others who might be researching keywords and doing all this thing, kind of working at it backwards. They're working off of it based on key phrases versus what is the value that I can provide to people. But if you are podcasting, and if you are following Brett and, um, following his methods, you are answering questions and you are really providing great value and just kind of take that and tweak it and apply it to the website.

Brett: Well, hey, thanks for joining me today. Let's take a look at where they can go to find out more about you, uh, your website, and also any kind of information, um, they can download for free. On your website as well, too, to help build that podcast website, whether it's the first one or they're revising what they would need to do.

Yasmine: Yeah, if you want a freebie, you can go to Roblesdesigns.com Checklist, and that, ah, is a downloadable PDF where you can it's just a checklist where you can go in and kind of if you have a site, you can look through your site. If you're trying to build a site, you can use it as a jumping off point, but it's a list, uh, of what your website should need. The very basics. You can always find me at roblesdesigns and you can also find me on Instagram at Robode Design Studio.

Brett: Great. Well, thank you for joining us on The Circle Sessions, Yasmine.

Yasmine: Thank you for having me.