Website Buyer's Remorse

Fuzz Martin 0:00

Good Morning Podcasters! I had buyer's remorse about my website. So I changed it. Let's talk about it.

Fuzz Martin 0:11

I feel like a curmudgeon when it comes to the phrase, happy Friday, but it brings some people joy. So Happy Friday. I need to go take a shower. My name is Fuzz Martin. And this is Good Morning Podcasters, a podcast dedicated to helping podcasters like you learn about marketing, advertising, PR and social media. So promoting your show becomes easier for you. I'm a partner at an advertising agency. I've been there for 12 years before that I was in radio. I was a morning show host and program director. I did that for 15 years. And before that, I was a pre farm student who decided to try out for the university's radio program and lunch one day. And that's how I got here. Back in the early 2000s. While I was working in radio, the station did not have a website. I actually remember our general manager who reminded me a lot of Michael Scott. And he said, we have a radio station, what do we need a website for?

Fuzz Martin 1:17

So I took it upon myself to learn how to make a website. It was hard back then I ended up buying a copy of Microsoft front page on my own and put together a site for my show. At the time it was fuzz martin.com. And I learned how to make websites. I enjoyed the challenge a lot. I kept updating it. Then I moved from the front page to Dreamweaver.

Fuzz Martin 1:42

And then in 2002, I found WordPress, and I learned how to install WordPress. But that also required that I learned some PHP and MySQL skills. So I learned that and then eventually I created the radio stations first website for free, because radio stations are offensively cheap, that I started creating other people's and their businesses websites on the side. That skill along with another side project, which was photography actually helped keep my bills paid through the Great Recession because my radio station had put me on furlough one week a month, even though they had to pay somebody to come in and do my show. They just thought it'd be symbolically good if I was also laid off for a week each month. Great times. Suffice it to say I'm no longer in radio. And now I'm an owner at a full service advertising agency that has a full team of in house web designers and developers and SEO people, and writers and graphic designers, all sorts of things. All of that is a long way of saying I know my way around a website.

Fuzz Martin 2:47

My first instinct whenever I need a website is to go right to WordPress. But as a husband, a dad, a business owner, I also care about optimizing my time. And while I love podcasting, I truly love and enjoy podcasting. I cannot spend all my time doing podcasts, things on the side. All the things that I would do if I didn't have other obligations, but I do have obligations. And you likely due to all of this is leading to a point when I started. Good Morning Podcasters. I told myself I wouldn't spend time building a WordPress site even though that's typically what I would do. Instead, I looked at the templates on Squarespace and said, hey, those are kind of great looking. I found a podcaster that had a promo code. And I bought a year's worth of a Squarespace site. Hopefully that podcaster has gotten paid and and helped them out. I had goodmorningpod.com up and running in about a day. And it looked good. However, after about 20 episodes, I found it was a real drag to try to get the site updated for every single episode on top of recording and editing the episode, writing the show notes, transcribing, creating an episode graphic, all the social media stuff all of that I hated having to simultaneously flip between scheduling my show on my hosts platform, and then writing and scheduling a blog post to accommodate it on my website. And another podcast that I have, which is a hyperlocal podcast called Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz. I had been using podcastpage.io I had actually learned about it from one of Tanner Campbell's episodes of his show sometime around August of 2021. So even though I had already spent $240 for a year's worth of Squarespace so I could get the biggest discount that was available to me. I decided to change directions and move goodmorningpod.com over to podcastpage.io I did this to save time. And because really that's the level of website that this podcast needs.

Fuzz Martin 4:55

So once I got my account set up the new account for Good morning pod. It pulled will lead every episode into the system in a few minutes via my RSS feed. And then maybe it took two hours of sitting on the couch, customizing the pages and templates. Customization is really simple. They've got a number of different templates that you can choose from. They also have a really nice drag and drop editor for the non episode pages. I created a contact page with a form, it automatically pulls in my shows reviews and I created a reviews page, which I was able to customize the layout for. It has all of the search optimization tools that you need for a podcast website, including the ability to change your open graph and search results image, which I've talked about on a recent episode. There's also a full blog, I may implement that soon, but I don't have it up and running right now because again, I'm focusing on reducing my work time, you can import your YouTube channel. I'm not currently using that feature only because my YouTube channel is admittedly extremely mailed in at this point. I am directly feeding YouTube through a headliner app connection, and I put zero time into it. It is automated. I pay headliner like $30 a month and they automatically upload that to YouTube for me every single episode thanks headliner, but sorry to my one subscriber on YouTube. I hope you are okay knowing that cold hard truth, this video that you're watching right now, I put no time into the biggest reason I love this change over to podcast page.io is that it is so easy. After I record and edit this episode, I will upload it to my hosts which is Captivate and I will also simultaneously upload it to otter.ai to get the transcription process rolling. Then I will write my show description and a more thought out way that feels like a blog post. Once the transcription is done, I'll add that into Captivate. And I will schedule the episode.

Fuzz Martin 6:58

When the episode goes live podcast page.io will automatically pull in the new episode from the RSS feed. It'll turn it into a new page on the website. And we're up and running. Then in the morning, I will go to podcast page. I'll go to the new episode page and I'll add in my episode graphic my social sharing episode graphic again to the people who run RSS links put OpenGraph into the RSS feed. Also, by the way, I do a different social graphic than I do for the show graphic. I like to keep the episode graphic as the main album cover art for Good Morning Podcasters because I think the logo stands out more by itself in a podcast player. But on social media, then it looks different every time. It's just a matter of branding and tastes. You know, if you're looking to save some time without sacrificing pretty much anything in terms of customization, branding, or content creation, I highly recommend podcast page.io Glad I switched from my previous hosting platform. It's helping prevent pod fade for me frankly, if you're struggling with your time or the ability to create a good looking website without needing to know code or design, you'll enjoy it too. It's podcastpage.io.

Fuzz Martin 8:20

Thank you again for listening to Good Morning Podcasters you can find each and every one of these episodes at goodmorningpod.com Of course, hit the Follow button in your podcast player in order to get these delivered to your inbox whenever they come out, which is three times a week. The next episode of Good Morning Podcasters launches on Monday. We might even have a surprise podcast that sucks on Saturday. We'll see. Have a great weekend and I will talk to you either tomorrow or Monday. Right here on Good Morning podcasters