How to Link to a Podcast: Summary

Avoid confusing potential listeners. Send them to ONE place when sharing your podcast.

Optimally, this means your own website, as you have the most control over their journey and experience.

But there are some other great tools for linking to and sharing your podcast, too, from Podnews and Rephonic to Podgagement and pod.link.

Read on to find out more…

It’s never been as easy to share a podcast. Ask anyone who started in the 00s. I still wake up in a cold sweat, images of stand-alone mp3 players and a “failed to synchronise” warning flashing in my head! Imagine trying to explain to someone in 2024 why you had to plug it in, delete old episodes, and copy over new ones. It was a monstrosity!

The trouble is, though, it’s still not easy enough. Thanks to the head-spinning range of listening options, there’s no ONE place to link to your podcast. In fact, if you plough through ten podcasts, you’ll find ten hosts sending their listeners to 100 different places to listen! Follow! Subscribe! Review!

So, how do we link to our podcast? How do we take Auntie Gertrude from “You make a Pod-what?!” over to “Sonny boy, that episode you did on prawn cocktail crisps was sick!” Well, we put the subscribe/follow links in a place people understand and give them an easy guide on how to listen to a podcast – that’s how.

Let’s look at the first half of that right here—where we put the podcast online and what we include there. 

Step 1: Linking to a Place to Listen to Your Podcast

Create Your Mothership

For me, it still all comes back to your website. That’s the mothership. We can talk about smart speakers and fancy new apps til the vegan version of cows come home, but some of your potential audience might still have no clue what you’re talking about.

Even if they do understand those concepts, the next problem is that your Uncle has a Google Home, and your Gran has Alexa. We’re a long long way from standardization, which makes for a slew of “if….then” in your instructions. 

So, when looking at how to share a podcast, we need to take it back a couple of decades: What does everyone understand? A web address—the humble URL—and a nice, clear web page on the other end. 

Create a website for your show, and slap a nice custom domain name on it. It’s not hard, honest – check out our podcast website guide to learn how. Then, drop a podcast player right there on the front page. That’s it – you’ve made it easy to listen. 

The standard form of a Podcraft episode, including player and follow/subscribe links

Even more simply, just use the website your host provides and slap the domain name on there instead. Every good podcast hosting provider (e.g. Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor, Alitu) offers this. You’ll lose a bit of control and customisation this way, but it couldn’t be easier to set up. Captivate actually has a nice “one-click subscription” feature as part of their hosting tools, so that’s a great start if you publish your show over there (or plan to!).

Speaking of easy, a brilliant middle ground between setting up a website from scratch and using the default site of your hosting provider is Podpage. Podpage is a brilliant service that generates a superb, highly customisable, shareable, and feature-packed podcast website for you in minutes. And yes, you can point your domain name to that, too!

Now, when someone asks, and especially when they don’t, send them to mybrilliantpodcast.com on your platform of choice.

So there you go – that’s how to share a podcast! Get it in your ears, captive listener.

The Extra Benefits of a Website Home Base

If you’re anything like me, the main purpose of your show is to get listeners onto your website anyway. That’s where you can offer even more value, ask them to subscribe to email, support your Patreon, take a look at your products, your services… 

So, if we can encourage an easy listen AND offer up a really nice eBook in exchange for an email signup, then huzzah! Double-dipping.

Remember, podcast apps are great for encouraging regular, habitual listening, but they’re someone else’s platform. You don’t control them, and it’s hard to incite action. So, use your own site well and get listeners there first, if you get the chance. 

Step 2: Linking to a Place to Subscribe or Follow Your Podcast

Stick to the Basics: Apple and Spotify

Next, whatever you do, forget about the apps. If you’re saying to Uncle Bert: “Well, if you’re on Pocketcasts, then click this, then…..” you’ve already wandered down the wrong path. 

If Bert has downloaded a 3rd party podcasting app all by himself, that means he knows the medium. He knows how to search for your show, all on his lonesome. Instead, we’re catering to the folks who don’t know what a podcasting app is, least of all the fact that there’s one on their phone already! 

So, the basics. Cater to the two most popular platforms for brand new listeners, and them alone. Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get yourself a button for each, and place it as close to the aforementioned big play button as is humanly possible.

Then, when Auntie ‘casual listener’ Gertrude graduates from ‘web listener’ school, she picks up her phone, clicks the right button (we hope…) and is taken right into one of those popular apps. Maybe she’ll one day end up dropping Boostagrams for Adam Curry on TrueFans, but for now, we’ve helped onboard her as a brand-new podcast listener with minimal friction, fuss, and confusion.

How to Share a Podcast: Listening App Hubs

While I’d argue it’s worth sending people to your website, there may be valid reasons why you don’t run one or care to do so. So, if you just want to get potential listeners to hit play in a listening app right away, you’re in luck. There are no shortage of handy resources:

Podnews

How to use the Podnews Podcast magic link tool

Podnews isn’t just an essential daily newsletter, it also has an excellent feature for sharing your podcast. Go to Podnews.net, type your show’s name into the search box, top right, and find it in the listings below. Then, on the show page, scroll down, and you’ll find a plethora of buttons for apps you didn’t even know existed. Here is the Podcraft page. Scan the QR code on your phone and see what happens (and give us a follow whilst you’re at it, eh )

Pod.Link

Another convenient service is pod.link. Again, same idea, and it’ll show potential listeners a list of your latest episodes, too. Here’s the Pocket-Sized Podcast page on pod.link.

Rephonic

Famed for its cool 3D “find similar podcasts” graph, Rephonic is also a way to link to and share your podcast. Not only do you get a bunch of buttons to your show in multiple listening apps, you can also see all your reviews on these various platforms, too, from Apple Podcasts to Podchaser and beyond. Here’s Podcraft on Rephonic.

Podgagement

Formerly “My Podcast Reviews,” this service started as a way to collect, share, and encourage—funnily enough—your podcast reviews. Of course, it’s still a brilliant tool for doing that, but the button-packed “follow the podcast” feature is particularly relevant for linking to and sharing your show. As you might expect from the name, there are a lot of other growth and engagement features in Podgagement, too. Heads up that our link here is an affiliate, so we’d earn a wee commission if you signed up through it, though never at any extra cost to you!

Creating a “How to Listen to a Podcast” Guide

In some cases, I think creating a ‘how to listen’ page on your site is a good idea. Many folks will figure it out pretty quickly, using the two-platform approach above. But others need a bit more coaxing. That’s when it’s time to hold them by the nose… or the hand, and lead them through it, step by step. 

Creating a simple guide to finding and following your podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is a great starting point. But if you’d rather spend time working on your actual content, you can always just direct people towards our How to Listen to a Podcast guide. It’ll walk your listeners through every step. 

How to Link to a Podcast? Keep it Simple

There are a few handy platform-agnostic tools out there that let you link to and share your podcast. That said, I still, more often than not, guide people towards my website as the first stop. I control exactly what people see there, and I can really tailor and optimise their experience, too.

Remember, if you want to know exactly how to set up a website for your podcast, we have our pillar podcast websites guide with a full range of options – though we tend to recommend Podpage to most podcasters, these days, as it’s such a simple yet potent and customisable website builder.

The bottom line is that having any type of website makes it easier to link to and share a podcast. And even if you don’t have one, you’ll find a ready-to-go landing page full of listening options on Podgagement, Rephonic, pod.link, or Podnews!

Now that you can easily link to and share your podcast, why not take it to the next level by creating content so good that your listeners feel compelled to share it as well? Our courses in the Podcraft Academy can help you do just that, and you’ll get access to our downloadable resources and weekly live Q&A sessions, too!

Originally posted on August 21, 2024 @ 2:26 am