Podcast Website & Getting Back On Track
January 2017 Back To Work.
Unusually for me it’s taken me some time to get my head back into my work – just shows that I needed the break and that I was successful in ‘not thinking about work’ over the holiday period. And that’s very hard usually for us business owners isn’t it?
Plenty of planning and thinking been going on as I slowly got started, and a key project for this first quarter of 2017 is, of course, my Stitchery Stories podcast development & launch. I have been documenting my progress towards becoming a podcast host. Check out the other blog posts if you want to follow along from the beginning of my journey.
The other thing I would like to say about this is that I am being very honest about what is happening (or not happening). This is somewhat of a side project for me so I fit it around income generation work. And as I have already highlighted, sometimes not much happens. I suppose I could pretend I had done things but what is the point in that. We all face challenges of time and circumstance when running our businesses so I embrace my freedom & flexibility and honestly write about what is happening with this project. You will have similar issues – stuff happens to us all!
The First 10 Weeks In A Nutshell.
They went reasonably OK, and I did something every week to progress the project. However after that, some scheduled interviews were cancelled by guests for a variety of reasons, and Christmas was looming, so I decided to wait until now to get back on track with this project.
So the week number ‘thing’ doesn’t work anymore since there have been several missing weeks, but for the sake of completeness I will continue so that really this post labelled Week 11 now means it is actually the 11th week I have posted a post about this and no longer that it is the 11th successive week since I started the project. Clear as mud?
Well Anyway Here I Am Week 11. Podcast Website Development Major Progress.
The main story is the podcast website development. I am building it using WordPress and in my last post I talked about the theme I had decided to use for it. I had bought the genesis theme ($59.95 From StudioPress) but as luck would have it I hadn’t actually purchased the child theme that I was going to use. I got interrupted as I was doing so and then left it for another day. Then Christmas arrived… Well actually ‘Good News’ arrived on Christmas Eve, that I had won a FREE lifetime subscription to a handy WordPress Plugin called Simple Podcast Press. https://simplepodcastpress.com/
Simple Podcast Press.
It is a great audio player with in built buttons, social media stuff, calls to action and so forth but it has a fantastic automation feature. You set it up so that when you add all your episode information into Libsyn (the industry dominant podcast host), so your podcast can be distributed, then Simple Podcast Press will automatically import the episode information, show notes and artwork etc and automatically create a wordpress blog post and update your site, so you don’t have to do it all again! Sounds very useful doesn’t it?
So that changed my plans somewhat as I had to find out more about what I had won and what use it was going to be. I went back and checked that the Appendipity WordPress themes that I had been considering were compatible with Simple Podcast Press. Yes! They were and what’s more, they had developed a theme specifically to work with Simple Podcast Press. How fortunate that I hadn’t purchased the Maron Pro theme earlier. All of Appendipity’s themes work with the Simple Podcast Press plugin but you can’t use the actual player on the other themes because they are designed around different players. Anyway I decided to use the Automate theme from Appendipity as it has been designed to work with the Simple Podcast Press player that I had won.
So I bought that theme and got to work setting up my podcast website with it. There is the usual fiddling about with settings and colours and so on but I have created a very simple site to feature my podcast. Next job is to install the Simple Podcast Press plugin to set up the player and the automation features but I don’t have a lot left to do, other than a few more tweaks to the wording, adding a contact form, a few more links etc and of course some optimisation work.
This is what it looks like now – it takes the colours from the logo and artwork for the show. http://www.stitcherystories.com
Podcast Launch Plan
And other than that I have updated my podcast launch plan and am in the process of getting the interview recordings re-scheduled so I can build up plenty of episodes to launch with. I love using Trello for my planning & project management. My podcast launch plan is done in Trello – if you want a copy to help your launch then sign up for my Podcast Launch Planning Kit.
Happy New Year – I hope 2017 is a great year for podcasting for me, you & everyone!
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