11 Tips for Sharing URLs in Your Podcast
Description
There comes a point in every podcast when it's necessary to say a URL. If for nothing else, at least your podcast's own home on the Internet. (And you should have a domain for your podcast!)
Beyond your podcast website, you might also want to share affiliate links, resources, episode notes, past episodes, sponsors, and more.
Here are 11 tips for how to share URLs effectively in your podcast.
(As an affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases through some of these following links. But I recommend things I truly believe in, regardless of earnings.)
1. Speak as few URLs as possible (per episode)
Every URL is essentially a call to action. That could be where to follow you on social networks, the episode's webpage, your support page, where to send feedback, and much more.
And calls to action are most effective when there are very few of them, but they are reinforced multiple times. This is why you'll hear most ads give the call to action (like visiting a website) at least 3 times.
That's a good practice for your podcast, too. But with all the URLs you might want to share, you'll start overwhelming your audience and making each URL less memorable.
For this reason, I recommend that you say as few URLs as possible—maybe only one!
But don't make it the same URL across all your episodes! For example, if I kept telling you to get the links for this episode at “TheAudacitytoPodcast.com,” that works best only when this is my latest episode. But the more episodes I publish, the more this episode gets shifted down my website's front page, and eventually pushed off the front page.
Thus, I recommend having a unique URL for each episode that will always take your audience to the correct information—whether they listen immediately or 5 years later. This is easy to do on WordPress with my favorite plugin Pretty Links Pro.
2. Defer to your chapters or episode notes
If you follow tip #1, then your single URL should be your episode webpage. There, you can include all the things you want your audience to get or see: images, videos, links, buttons, and more.
Make sure this stuff—at least the links—appear in your episode notes within the podcast apps, too! Because many publishing tools and podcast apps follow different standards, the best thing to do would be to ask the maker of your publishing tool how to ensure your links show in your top podcast apps, and they can give you the right guidance for your situation. But the most universal case is—unfortunately—that a full, ugly URL, like “https://theaudacitytopodcast.com” will work more often than an HTML hyperlink, like The Audacity to Podcast.
Check out Knick Knack News for a great example of actionable episode notes (it's also a really fun podcast I highly recommend!). Their notes are not effective for SEO, but they are excellent for engagement inside the podcast apps! The hosts of that fun show, Alex and Anthony, often share things you will want to see or read for yourself. And they do that in very simple and actionable ways in their notes. Here's an example from an episode:
Anthony's Stories This Week:
Ice Cream: https://www.mensjournal.com/news/baskin-robbins-thanksgiving-dinner-ice-cream-flavor
Alex's Stories This Week:
Zelda: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/7/23951339/the-legend-of-zelda-movie-live-action-nintendo
“What exactly IS pickle ketchup? Plus, how many chopsticks can you fit in a beard?” Knick Knack News
If you're listening along to their podcast, then these simple notes will make total sense to you and the notes don't get in the way of what you want.
Depending on how you're communicating around the URL(s) you want to share, you might also want to use chapters.
Both legacy chapters embedded in your MP3 files and Podcasting 2.0 chapters in a separate episode metadata file (in JSON format) support adding a single URL link per chapter.
In Knick Knack News, Alex and Anthony spend several minutes on each story, so each story would be perfect as a single chapter. And then they could add the relevant URL to each chapter.
But this gets complicated when you have multiple URLs within a single context. For example, if I share a list of my favorite podcast-hosting providers (currently Captivate, Buzzsprout, and Blubrry), I can't add multiple URLs to the same chapter.
So this is where you would want to defer that list of links to your episode notes.
However, I'm pushing hard for Podcasting 2.0 to turn our current podcast chapters into “super chapters” (a term coined by Dovydas from RSSBlue.com), allowing you to use a single chapter to display rich content, including but not limited to a gallery of images, a block of text, a numbered or unnumbered list, videos, and even multiple links for a single chapter. Then, I could make a chapter simply for “My favorite podcast-hosting providers” and that one chapter can link to the multiple options.
However, I urge you to maintain “backwards compatibility,” and that's where your episode webpage comes in.
If you're worried about your audience getting lost in a long episode webpage, you could actually link your chapters to specific sections of your page by adding an “anchor” or ID to each heading in your notes, and then link each chapter to that anchor in the URL. For example, https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/sharingurls#2 links to this section. In fact, each chapter of this episode links directly to its section in my notes. Try it!
3. Never say “https://” or “www.”
It's not the '90s anymore. It has been literally decades since anyone needed to type “http://” or “https://” in their browser.
Also, most websites don't use “www.” at all in their domain anymore. Or if they do (like YouTube still does), you can usually still get to the correct place without including the “www.” (Which, by the way, has to be the worst abbreviation because saying “W W W” is actually more syllables than what's it's an abbreviation for: “world wide web”!)
But you must test this first! I have run into a couple of badly configured sites that needed the “www.” because they weren't even forwarding their domain without the “www.”!
If I hear you say, “www.theaudacitytopodcast.com,” I won't come after you, but don't be surprised if poetic justice comes after you by making your neighbor mow his yard right when you want to record your podcast!
4. Simplify your URLs
If you do speak a URL in your podcast, make it as simple as possible!
I remember a commercial many years ago from Epson—you know, one of the biggest printer manufacturers who should have known better? The only thing I remember about their commercial was because I—as a teenager—recognized how bad their call to action was. I think the URL they spoke was “www.epson.com/what-if-you-could.” And yes, they actually said “dash” for every one!
Don't do that!
I highly recommend that any URL you speak should reinforce your brand. So make it a “/keyword” URL on your own domain. Consider the speakable URL for this very episode: “theaudacitytopodcast.com/sharingurls.”
This also goes for external resources, too. Instead of sending people to “patreon.com/[your podcast slug],” send them to a “/<a href="https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/patreon" title="Patreon" class="pretty-link-keyword"rel="" targ
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