Welcome to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, the
VP of customer relations here at Blueberry.
And I'm Dave Clements, and I'm a sales
and support agent here at Blueberry.
So if you're a WordPress user
and you're thinking of moving to another web
platform,
there's some things you should know before you
make the move.
Yeah. Especially if you're using PowerPress.
Yes. And especially when it comes to your
podcast.
Right.
You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike
Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the
Blueberry team,
bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips
and tricks to help you
start, grow, and thrive through podcasting.
With all the support of your team here
at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome. Let's dive in.
So we get calls,
texts,
phones, emails,
panic Facebook posts, and all kinds of things
where, we'll get some
variation of this this sentence.
My web designer moved my website from WordPress
to,
you know, Wix, Squarespace,
Kajabi,
you know, you name it,
whatever web platform, and now my feed doesn't
work. Well, in this episode, we're gonna try
to explain what you need to do before
somebody makes that move and maybe talk you
out of it. Today, I got Dave here,
because Dave and I are the ones that,
have to take those calls, and, maybe this
will help some of you if you get
a web designer or, you you yourself wanna
switch platforms. It's not impossible,
not the worst thing in the world,
but there's a few things you must do
before
the move.
The first thing is,
you have to kinda understand how your RSS
feed works now with PowerPress
and your website,
your website
is your podcast platform. It does dual duty.
So not only is it a website,
but it also helps distribute or does distribute.
It's not really a help, is it, Dave?
No. No. It actually does it. It it
is,
it is the home for your podcast.
Yeah. And it, you know, that feed
that's generated from your
WordPress site with PowerPress helping it along,
that's how Apple, Spotify, all your listeners, all,
you know, all the other places get your
show.
And if you delete that
website
or move it to a platform that does
not support
creating an RSS feed.
And, you know, some some sites do. I
guess Squarespace
does and Kajabi does. They don't do as
good a job as Blueberry.
You know, we have all the extra bits,
you know, like podcast two point o stuff
and
and all that. And, plus,
we keep it up to date. You know?
There are still platforms out there
that don't have all the categories Apple
uses.
Yeah. Or they have the old version of
Apple's categories from, like, seven years ago. So
but, yeah, if you if you if you
kill the website
that your your podcast lives on,
you're killing your podcast. So we're gonna try
and
help you avoid that.
Yeah. We,
we,
Todd calls that the extinction
event.
It's usually not that bad depending on how
you were set up before,
but, you know, until
you,
get that feedback
or get a feedback and get a way
to redirect it, it's not coming back. So,
David, what are the two ways people can
preserve their feed?
The first way is just to keep your
WordPress
site running,
and that's just to keep the feed active.
And then you can just have your new
website that lives on that new platform. And
then the other way is to just move
your feed to a feed host by Blueberry.
That's pretty simple, I think, because we have
a feed that you can use.
You're you're essentially
redirecting your feed. That's what we call it.
A lot of people may not understand what
that means, but basically telling all of the
podcast apps, hey.
Stop looking at yoursite.com,
and now look at this
feed
coming from Blueberry. And that's for people that
are hosting on Blueberry already. If you're
hosting somewhere else,
then you you you need to recreate that
feed somehow, somewhere
prior to
leaving the WordPress site. It's worse when we
get to call it, my website is already
gone and, you know, uh-oh. What do I
do? Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it's just
one of those things, you know, that, web
designers,
they're wonderful at making your website look good
or at least a good one is,
but they're not so good at podcasting. So,
you know, call somebody,
get advice before
you make that move.
Yeah. Another big thing is that you've gotta
figure out what you're gonna do with your
media files. A lot of WordPress users,
initially, I was one of these people,
will host the media files on the same
server as their website.
We don't recommend that because
you can
you can cause issues with your your website
host.
They could force you to
a private server that's way more expensive. And
really, the best situation is just finding a
dedicated
site or, you know, company like Blueberry. We
always recommend Blueberry, of course, to move your
audio files, to store those files,
so that you don't
you don't incur big fees. Or if you're
redirecting your feed, you don't have to move
your files.
Yeah. If you're already hosting on Blueberry, the
feed that we'll create for you at Blueberry
prior to your move from WordPress
will already have all your episodes in it.
And
if you're not hosting with us, we can
import your feed into Blueberry,
and, you know, then you'll get a feed
that has everything your WordPress site had pretty
much.
Like I said, all the features are there.
You know, the only difference is the where
where the actual posts go, would be in
publisher.
So and and this is another thing. Yeah.
Now
I I don't know how important this is
in the in the big scheme of things,
but it is somewhat important to maintain your
SEO and backlinks. And, you know, that goes
for the website part. Really not as bad
for the podcast part because those lengths will
change when the feed changes,
and it'll point to the right place.
But, you know, you have to think about
that a little bit. So
if you're on Wix,
you know, you're not gonna have all the
same pages and posts that you have on
your WordPress site.
Mhmm. You know, they're not gonna be the
same addresses.
And so, you know, think think about that
a bit. And one of the big things
is the embeddable players.
You're gonna have to go you know, if
especially if you've got a 100 episodes,
you're gonna have to get an embeddable player
for each of those 100 episodes on your
new site
because you don't have PowerPress to add them
automatically.
That's always a huge
problem when people move from PowerPress
because,
you know, they they've moved to Wix or
Squarespace
or something like that. And,
you know, like Mike said, like, you're bringing
those you wanna have a a page dedicated
to every single episode or a post, I
guess. Yeah.
It is a pain to
copy and paste because unless you got a
magic way of doing it, there's not an
easy way to do it. It's gonna take
you a long time. And, again, that's another
benefit of if you're already using PowerPress
and moving to a Blueberry feed or even
the other way around,
we kind of make that easier for you.
Yeah. You know, the and the thing is
is,
you know, with these other kind of sites,
a lot of it's a lot more manual.
So, you know, if you want
to, say, have a post on your website
for a podcast episode, then you come to
Blueberry or wherever else you're gonna publish it,
publish it, and then grab an embed player
and go back to your website, that's that's
double publishing.
You know, you're publishing a post on whatever
podcast host you're on, and you're publishing another
web page post. Yep. We do have easier
option. It's not as slick, but there is
an easier option,
where you have a playlist
player that you can embed on a single
page on your website at Blueberry Power.
It'll show up to the last 50 episodes,
but it's not robust. It's not good for
SEO
for your website.
Yeah. So that's important. It's definitely something to
think about. But there are a lot of
people that I've I've helped move from PowerPress,
and that's what I always suggest. I was
like,
it's just it's easier and, you know, it
may affect your SEO, but in the meantime,
that's a good a good way to do
it so that people can access
a bunch of episodes
right on a right on your website with
a player. Yeah. I've had people where they
they move to Wix seems to be the
big one people like to move to here
lately.
That but, you know, I've had people where,
you know, alright. We'll we'll we'll just skip
all the old ones.
So let's say they have 50 episodes or
40 episodes, whatever. We'll put the embed player
on a page
for the archives.
Yep. You know? And just leave it at
that. And then going forward, if they wanna
have individual posts for each episode, again, double
posting.
So if you're paying someone to publish your
stuff, you're gonna be paying them double.
So Yeah. It's it's just not,
it's just not
ideal, I guess, is the right way to
put it.
Yeah. You know?
Again, PowerPress
is very powerful in that way, hence the
word power press. Yeah.
You know? And I've also seen people where
they have a really custom front page.
In fact, if you go to blueberry.com,
that's a WordPress site. But that front page
is not a WordPress site.
It's a static page.
And so if, you know, if you just
want your landing page to look different, leave
your WordPress in place,
but build a static page that looks the
way you want it, and that works as
well. I mean, you know, there's a lot
of options, but staying with PowerPress, if that's
what you're doing already, is really the best
bet. A lot of this also goes we
get these other calls where, I wanna change
my domain name. You know? Say they change
the name of their podcast, and the domain
name they're using doesn't really jive with the
new name of the podcast, so they get
another domain name. A lot of times, what
I tell them is to map the new
domain to the old website if you're not
changing the whole website. Just say you're just
changing the the domain Yeah. On a WordPress
site. Just map the second domain to that
same website.
Mhmm. And slowly over time, you can go
to Apple and change the feed to the
new domain. You can change you know, and
and rather than doing a redirect and all
that,
and leave both domains on the site.
So people that have old links will get
there with the old domain, and people with
the with the new links will come to
the regular domain. You know? It doesn't hurt
anything to do that.
I've done that a few times. In fact,
podcast insider, we've done that
with this one.
You know, when this was a standalone website,
now it's part of the Blueberry website.
As we said, it's WordPress.
You know, we had podcastinsider.com.
Before that, we had your podcast.com,
and we just simply mapped the domain, you
know, the new domain, podcastinsider.com,
to
that new site. Then we ordered the whole
thing over to Blueberry, but but preplanning, I
guess, is the big thing. This next thing
confuses a lot of people.
You don't have to
go everywhere to change the
the,
feed address
with a lot of these places.
Spotify
is one of them that you should
if you directly submitted to Spotify.
Mhmm.
Or you can just tell us if you
submitted through Blueberry, and we'll fix it. Ain't
no big deal.
Yeah.
I just had this conversation with a customer
literally right before we started recording. They were
they were moving websites, but they were moving
from SoundCloud.
And so Oh, yeah. She's kind of confused
on, well, do I have to go in
and manually change
to the
new blueberry feed? And I was like, no.
Got this magic thing called a 301 redirect.
Here's how you do it. And she's like,
oh, that's really cool. Yep.
And
so yeah. And a lot of times that
works. Like, it works for, like, 99.9%
of the places out there. Yep. But,
Spotify, they're goofy. I've seen it work sometimes,
and then other times it doesn't. So I
always I'm like, give it about a a
day or two after you've implemented it. And
if you see it on Apple and everywhere
else, you should be good, but just double
check Spotify if you submitted directly to them.
Or if, like Mike said, through us, we'll
change it for you.
And on Apple, you
you have to put in the new feed
URL, but it's, it's just a checkbox that,
you know, Dave Dave and I can do
on the Blueberry feed
to, turn on that for Apple.
Apple will continue to follow the redirect as
long as the redirect
is in place, but with SoundCloud, who knows,
how long they keep those redirects in place.
And, really, just thirty to sixty days is,
is all you really need. Actually, a couple
weeks, for most people. But,
yeah, you just
you gotta preplan this stuff.
You know, a lot lot of times, you
know,
people just don't know, and and why should
they?
And that's what we're here for.
Yeah. And so, like, that's that's a huge
piece of advice. Like, if that's just something
that you've considered
at all,
start building out that plan
so that,
you're not calling us and going, hey. This
has to be changed by tomorrow
because we got this huge launch or this
huge change coming. And we've we've had phone
calls like that or tickets, and
we're like, well,
it's quick, but it's not that quick. You
know? Like, we can implement those changes. We
can help you do that today, but it
may take
a couple of days before all platforms
pick up all of those changes.
So don't hurt yourself in the process. Plan
ahead. Yeah. That's that's the the big thing
because so many times, you know, people get
way ahead of themselves when they do stuff
like that. We're not judging. If you wanna
move off of WordPress and to some other
platform, great.
You know, that's there's no rules in podcasting,
but there are best practices.
Yeah. It goes a lot smoother
if Yeah. You preplan this stuff.
Mhmm. I wanna add to the plan part.
Make sure that you get the new feed
in place and tested and working
because,
what happens is the new feed
has to be completely and utterly ready to
go. Nobody's gonna see that new feed
until you do the three zero one redirect.
And once that happens, it's and this is
one of the few things in podcasting that's
instant.
Instantly, everybody's gonna be looking at that new
one.
Yep.
And that and that's, you know, the beauty
of the three zero one redirect. And that's
a a simple web process. So, you know,
pretty much, like, what we've had to do
after somebody's moved and didn't think about it
is we have to figure out how to
implement a three zero one redirect on that
domain. So don't get rid of your domain
no matter what because we can always spin
up a website, throw a domain on it,
do the three zero one redirect, and it
works the same whether it's on Wix or
wherever. Mhmm. You know? We can make that
happen. But most people that move platforms keep
the domain on those platforms. And inside those
platforms, there are ways of doing three zero
one redirects. Might not be easy, but it's
doable.
Anyway, I think, unless you got anything else,
I think this wraps it up. Yeah. Sometimes
this this stuff feels really complicated even to
me, and I do it every day. Just
take your time. Take your time. Call us,
get in touch, and do some research before
you jump in headlong just because you got
a designer guy that's like, I prefer to
work in this platform
because we don't want you to break anything.
Just remember, your podcast feed is what connects
you to your subscribers. Changing your website is
fine. Make sure you have a clear plan.
Keep the feed working and
redirect it correctly so you don't lose your
audience.
Yeah. Thanks for listening and staying subscribed if
you are or following. I guess they did
change that jargon a couple years ago. If
you do want more information about the show
and the things that are going on at
Blueberry, go over to podcastinsider.com.
Maybe even jump over to the YouTube channel
because I've got videos over there. Yeah. Dave's
the the new YouTube star. Catch you next
week.
Thanks for joining us. Come back next week.
And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com
for more information, to subscribe, share, and read
our show notes. To
check out our latest suite of services and
learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your
podcast, visit blueberry.com.
That's Blueberry without the e's.
We couldn't afford the e's.