The Essential Guide to Choosing the Right Website Platform for Your Podcast

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 Robles: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to get started.

Brett Johnson: You work with a lot of different types of businesses building their website. And obviously they're all coming from different directions and they may know a little bit, may know a lot about putting a website together. But how do you advise your clients to choosing a website platform? There's a lot of them out there. It can be confusing. If you start doing research on your own, you kind of need somebody that knows what they're doing. But how do you go through that process of choosing that website platform?

Yasmine Robles: Yeah, and it's funny, everybody thinks that I can run through just a couple of different platforms and say, yes, this one's for you, that one's for you. But it really comes down to the goals, what type of support you have and what you want to do with the website, what you want it to do for your business, and how it's going to align with your marketing goals.

Brett Johnson: What features do you want on that website? I guess it's one of those maybe you've got to pull that out of your clients of figuring out where you want to go with it, what do you want to happen and how do you start thinking about that?

Yasmine Robles: So you start with the website goals and the main thing is that you have to understand where the website will fit within your marketing strategy. This means that you will think about the audience. How are they going to find you? Are you going to do a lot of social media or in person events? Are you going to focus on SEO or affiliate marketing? So where are they coming from and what is their expectation when they get to the website? Then from there, you can start jumping into the feature. So this is more of the fun stuff, like do you want a membership site, a blog? Are you ecommerce? Are you selling something? A physical product? Are you selling digital downloads? And what sort of features or things do you want to happen on the page? Do you want cool graphics to pop in or do you want something very minimalistic? Those are a few of the things that you can really start with and just writing down your goals, writing down everything, just brainstorming in the back of a napkin.

Yasmine Robles: And then from there you really want to start thinking about custom development. So if you do want tons of widgets and cool things happening on your site, is it that it doesn't exist yet? So, for example, I've had a client who she is creating an amazing meal prep menu website. But there are certain aspects or features that we do not currently see in the marketplace. It doesn't mean it hasn't been done, but we cannot find anyone who has created that solution that she wants in particular that feature. So this would require some research, a lot of development time, and oftentimes it's just more research than development. So think about those features, those really great fancy stuff that you want your website to do and try to gauge how much time it will take and who you need to pull into the project in order to get it done on your site.

Brett Johnson: What if you aren't ready to do a membership or to sell stuff? Think of the podcaster in mind. It's like, okay, I do want to sell merch down the road to maybe generate some income. Is it hard to develop it after you, you know, let's say you're into it for about six or nine months and you're ready to sell some merch. Do you like to have kind of a placeholder in mind on the website to ready to implement that? At least pull that information out from them, that it's on the game plan down the road? Is that a good way to look at it?

Yasmine Robles: Yeah. So I guess you could think of it as an MVP or Minimum viable product. You can think about where you want to be, I would say in the next three years with your business, with your website and how everything would align together with the marketing, your business goals and how the site fits into it. Then think about what do you need in order to launch? So if you are starting a podcast and you might be blogging along with it and you might be offering services, what do you want your business and the website for your business to do in three years? And that's when you can start thinking about platforms and what will work for you. Now, I've had clients who started off with a very basic template, very basic website, and then they can jump from one platform to another, which we will talk about platforms in a bit. But they knew right off the bat that their minimum viable product would require them to build something that was so custom that they were just going to start with one platform and then save up the money and develop the next phase of the site. So it just comes down to your target audience and what they're expecting of you at that moment and what you want them to expect of you. So if they are knowledgeable about that you're building this out, that you're going to be building out something bigger. You might want to look into the MVP. It's more budget friendly and it's going to give you a lot of insights into what your audience is expecting and the features that they might want. And you get to learn a lot about how they react to the site and then you can pivot from there. Or if you have the budget, you can go all in and customize the heck out of a site and then that would require a different platform.

Brett Johnson: So thinking of that target audience you just mentioned a moment ago for a podcaster, it's not an easy target to think about who their audience is going to be, but it's all based on content so they know that it's going to be this type of person, female, male, younger, older, that sort of thing. How does that affect building a website then?

Yasmine Robles: So it just affects them by understanding where they're at. So if you know that you are focusing in on someone who is in finance, let's say you're focusing in on, supporting or providing services for banks that would require your site to look a specific way, they might even if they have to log in, they might require certain features, security features. If you are for example, the meal prep. My client who's doing the meal prep website, she started off with a square space site, which we will get into, but she is now switching to WordPress in order to offer more to the people on her plan, on her membership. And so just kind of thinking about where those people are and what they're expecting of the site, what features they want and what learnings you want to gain from them and are they people that will be willing to provide feedback in order for you to grow your website and your podcast and continue with the content? Again, in terms of target market, you just have to do your research. It's a lot of figuring out demographics, psychographics. If you have a podcast geared towards small business owners, who exactly are they? Are they women owned? Are they between one and three years of business? What type of business? Is it service based, ecommerce or what are their goals? So if they are small business owners, they could be male or female, but what are their goals in the next three to four years and how can you provide that content and how does your podcast reflect on the website?

Brett Johnson: I don't think a lot of people I guess I never did either thinking about I knew I wanted a specific look for my podcast website as well as my website as a podcast consultant but never really thought about how it could turn someone off. Or you don't look as professionally as you want to. Or it could be as the ease of use depending on you. If you're kind of really basing on some ecommerce to support monetization for your podcast, or it's very content driven, maybe behind a paywall that you have extra blogs, extra content beyond the podcast, how easy it is to get. There and sign up people and your links from outside going to the website so you don't have to go searching forever to find, to buy something or to schedule a time with you.

Yasmine Robles: Yeah, and think of it this way for example, we have a client right now, they are doing senior home living and we have the meal prep menu client. So it's completely different age groups. And so let's say both of them have a podcast. Then how does that content reflect and how does it reflect onto the site? The senior living, their site has to be very user friendly, very high contrast text, larger text for the age group that they're targeting. And their podcast is obviously going to be targeting somebody in that age group. The meal prep menus, it's skewed younger and so they might be looking for more maybe podcast, some video, it's also more feminine. So they might be looking for more acute graphics and mobile friendly. They are probably on their phones all the time. So these are just some things to think about when deciding on the platform, deciding on content and who you're really targeting.

Brett Johnson: I would also think whether you have a website right now or you're revising the website, there's probably a little bit of a learning curve or how much you want to take on as the owner of that website. Now that things are changing, you've contacted you for a reason. Either you don't like the design, you just want hands off or you think I want to take more control but I don't like the platform. You know, what kind of support I mean, I guess what it I guess the question being how do you ask yourself those questions? How do you answer those questions? To work with you to know how much I want Yasmine to help me, you know, to do things and, and, and walk away and know that she's going to take care of this, I take care of this, or I want 100%, just get me going.

Yasmine Robles: So for example, just think about what kind of support you want or time you have. So let's say for example, you have a team, you have a business and you have an assistant. Think about what that assistant where their skill set lies. Are they very creative? Have they had experience with design? Or are they very tech savvy? Can they figure it out? Are they willing to figure it out? So if they just kind of manage your calendar, are they willing to figure out how to build a website for you or edit the website if you don't have a team? Think about how tech savvy you are, how much time you have and if you're willing to go through that learning curve, or if your time is actually better spent creating the content, blogging, creating the podcast, and connecting with people in order to get more business into the door. So think about your budget. Obviously hiring an agency can be a lot faster, things can be done properly and you might not need to invest in your website at a full scale for the next three years. But if your budget is smaller, do you have the willingness to learn the platform and then possibly have to recreate the platform in a year or so once you figure out the kinks?

Brett Johnson: If you're on the Internet at all, I don't care if it's social, you listen to the podcast, whatever. You're hearing all these different platforms that are out there. You're pounded with ads from Squarespace and people have heard of Shopify because they probably have bought something on Shopify and then all of a sudden WordPress. Well, there's a WordPress.com and and all the research you're doing and Doctor Google just isn't giving you the answer. When it comes down to it. Let's go over those options and kind of give a little outline of what each one does and doesn't do.

Yasmine Robles: There are a lot of different platforms, it's just way too many. And if you have one in mind, you should look for a designer who specializes in that because sometimes it takes so much time for the designer to get from one platform to the next and learn it and then create what you need them to create. Keep in mind there's a lot of them out there and a lot of them kind of overlap in what they can do for your business. But we're going to go over a few of the top ones that we work with and hopefully that helps you decide on which one might be better for you. So let's start with squarespace. The Square space is really easy to use, it's easy to set up and what we do is we focus on breaking Squarespace's template. Look, Squarespace is great for do it yourself first because they offer these amazing looking templates. You pick one, you start the site and you can just plug in your information and go. The thing is that it's very obvious that yours is a square space site. Yours might look like just like your competitors and you want to differentiate yourself. So we focus on breaking that template and making sure that you have all these cool features. We've created a lot of different systems for people on Squarespace and it's very user friendly. On the back end, we'll talk about a few other ones, but it's one of the more user friendly ones. When you log in and go into the admin panel, you don't get lost, you don't get overwhelmed and you can easily find what you need. There's no updates needed.

Yasmine Robles: So we're going to talk about WordPress, but that's one of the ones that you need to go in there every so often and make sure things are updated. Make sure that your hosting is backing things up and that things are running smoothly on the back end. And so this can be frustrating for a solopreneur who has to be the finance person. They're the marketing person. They're also doing whatever it is that they are supposed to be doing, their podcasting, and then they have to go in and update a website. It's a little frustrating having to do that and add it to your calendar. But it's much needed on WordPress versus Squarespace where you don't really necessarily have to think about it. There's a lot of features that are constantly being added to Squarespace. They've added member areas. So now you have the option of adding certain memberships. It's still lagging a little bit in features, but you can add some kind of course and stuff to your Squarespace site. But it's growing. So they're doing really great things in partnering with really cool companies in order to provide the features that you might want. When it comes to WordPress, WordPress is my first love. That was the first website I ever built was on WordPress and I've come a long way since that.

Yasmine Robles: I've broken many, many WordPress sites and fixed many, I fixed all of them. But WordPress is interesting because I've seen places like large colleges using the WordPress platform and very small businesses like one person bookkeeper businesses, and they are all using WordPress. WordPress, it has the biggest chunk in the market. And the reason for that is that a lot of people it's open source. So you just need a hosting company like Site Ground and you install it and you can get started with a free template. Now you should purchase a template and we can talk about that in a bit. But even the free templates, if you're just starting a blog, that can be sufficient for you. And because it's so well used, there's more many people using it, that there are a lot more developers that can work on your site. So let's say, for example, I build your site on WordPress and something happens to me and I'm unavailable. Let's say I'm in an accident, God forbid, and I'm unavailable. You can find someone else who is knowledgeable about WordPress that can come in and support you. Where there is that gap. You can also focus on SEO a little bit more. The square space and shopify they are working on getting really they're catching up. But WordPress is one of the better ones for SEO purposes.

Yasmine Robles: It also gives a lot of marketing departments ease in implementing a lot of features that they want. When it comes to back end things like SEO, one of the cons is that it's a bit daunting for a lot of my clients. And because of that, when they log into the admin and they're like, oh, there's all these alerts, they have stopped backing up or they have stopped updating their website. And it's happened enough times. When enough clients have done that and they're locked out of the platform or their website on the front end will look beautiful and snazzy just as it was before. But when they log in they can't even update a page or their address or phone number. So you need to make sure that you stay on top of all of the updates. And I would suggest weekly, that's what I do for clients who are recurring clients, but at least monthly, at least oh man, even quarterly, you should be going in there making sure that things are being backed up, plugins are updated, the core is updated, theme, PHP, all this stuff that it is being updated. And I also suggest not doing auto update just because I've had it happen enough times where something the hosting company will auto update something a plug in and that plug in now breaks everything else because nothing else has implemented that new update yet to work together in a friendly manner. So I recommend getting someone, maybe just a VA or somebody to just hit back up and update things one by one or at least marketing it on your calendar. And then for templates or WordPress calls and themes I recommend getting one that has support. So there's great ones like Divvy avatar and they offer support and depending on what level cost you are looking at what your budget is. But they offer support for at least a certain amount of time and you can get a lot of help that way when setting up your theme. And then you can also auto, they'll send you patches and updates for the theme so it doesn't get bogged down and cause security issues later on. When it comes to ecommerce, the one that I love the best is Shopify.

Yasmine Robles: Although Squarespace and WordPress can do ecommerce, that's not their jam. Their jam is kind of being like an everything sort of platform for everyone. Shopify, they are ecommerce through and through. You can build other sites on it if you really want to but they are ecommerce. This can be digital as well as product based and it's really easy to get started. Their free templates are actually not that bad but you can also get templates that are paid and will have the same benefits as those that I mentioned for WordPress. But yeah, Shopify is great when it comes to ecommerce. For all of these have to think about, especially WordPress and Shopify, you have to think about add ons and these are sometimes called plugins, they're called add ons or extensions and they can range from being free to about 20 plus dollars per month. And usually WordPress and Shopify sites have these where for example, if you want to have on WordPress a membership site, just that would be a plug in that you would have to pay for either yearly, monthly. For example, on Shopify, if you wanted something like a subscription service that would also require it to have an add on and you would have to pay for that monthly. So just kind of keep these costs in mind when thinking about your website and what the minimum viable product you want is. The con of all this is that you can't transfer platforms. So if I build your WordPress site, you can transfer to another hosting company. So from Site Gap ground to bluehost. But you can't get a shopify site.

Yasmine Robles: So if you have a square space site and now you want Shopify, you can't transfer it. They will not transfer between each other. There's also Wix, Weebly, all those they will not transfer between each other since they are competitors. Just as, I guess, a summary of everything that we've talked about. Keep in mind that things that are free sometimes end up being more expensive later on. So if you're thinking about starting a WordPress site but you do not want to pay for a theme, you don't want to pay for any plugins. You can find free ones, but sometimes that is the detriment of your business. And I suggest, even if you have to DIY it, paying for a theme, paying for a template and making sure that it looks amazing, that you're getting the support you need from the creators of that template because it might end up causing issues later on. If it's free, the creators might not necessarily be supporting updates, it might break, it might have security holes in it, and you just want to make sure that the experience that your users are getting when they come to your site, listen to your podcast and buy from you is the best that it can be.

Brett Johnson: Everybody has that shock of investing in themselves initially. But in the long run, if you're serious about it and if you're looking at, to me, podcasting for two or three years, if you're serious about it, it will pay for itself in that first year to have a website designer, to have the the people behind it to help you get where you need to go.

Yasmine Robles: And with the podcast, let's say you're creating this podcast, you're putting all of your effort into it and you want to get sponsors, right? You want to get some money out of it. When a sponsor, if I'm going to be purchasing some kind of sponsor position, I go back and look at their website, I look at their social media and if it doesn't look professional or cohesive or their website does not look like it looks like they built it like their cousins, kid, whatever uncle built it. Just because they had knowledge about how to use a computer, then I feel like it's not as important for me to give you my dollars as a potential sponsor. Or if you're running an affiliate program, then I don't know if I really want to entrust you to be affiliated with my brand. So think about what sort of money you're willing to put into this and what can you get out of it. So if you have that MVP, that minimum viable product, what is the most minimum thing that you can do? Yes, definitely invest in your podcast. Maybe invest a little bit on a couple of pages, a very small site of your business, and really showcase that podcast on it in order for it to grow, get sponsors, get affiliates, get all the money in the world and famous people onto your podcast. They want to be there when you look professional across the board.

Brett Johnson: Well, two things I learned from you. The top one is asking that question of that agency you're going to work with, do you work with this platform? Plus the auto updates. That's interesting that you mentioned that, because I know I've got some on Auto Update and I get a notification of it and I was thinking, hey, that's a great trigger for me to go in and look and make sure everything is updated. But your comment about not letting it auto update is interesting that it can actually break things down.

Yasmine Robles: I've only seen it be a detriment a couple of times when, for example, plug in A updates. But plug in B has yet to push out their update. They're still working on it. That's when it's causing an issue. But at least check your site, go on the front end, go through your site every so often and make sure that it's still active. And then as long as you have a backup, you don't have to worry. Just revert to the latest backup that you have and everything's good. You can then fix it later on. As long as you have a backup, that's like any type of site, as long as you have a backup, you are okay.

Brett Johnson: A lot of information here for the listener. Most of this is going to be in our podcast Show Notes. But how else can they get a hold of you? And what can they get by going to your website? Or we'll put a link on the website, or I should say the podcast Show Notes to get from this podcast.

Yasmine Robles: Everyone can find me at roblesdesigns.com. You can find me making a full of myself on IG reels at @Robledesignstudio on Instagram, and you can download a free checklist at roblesdesigns.com/checklist. It's basically a rundown of what you need to have on your website, whether it is metadescriptions or for SEO purposes, or if it is just have you connected your domain? It comes of run, helps you. It's a checklist, right? You can check off what you have on your website and what you still need to do.

Brett Johnson: All right, that sounds great. Well, again, Yasmine. Thanks for joining me on this episode. We'll be talking again as the year progresses, obviously, as part of the Circle of Experts. But again, thank you, listener, for joining us on The Circle Sessions.