Are you struggling to create and maintain a professional website for your podcast? If so, this episode with Brenden Mulligan is a must-listen!

Brenden Mulligan is the founder of Podpage, a platform that provides podcasters with an easy way to build, launch, and manage their website. He has a long history of building technology startups and an even longer history of supporting and working with creators.

In this episode of Podcasting Tech, Mathew sits down with Brenden to discuss the ins and outs of podcast website creation and maintenance. Brenden talks about his journey from helping music creators focus more on their craft, to working with podcasters and digital artists giving them the time to focus on strategy and growth just by providing them with an easy-to-use website platform.

We explore how PodPage simplifies website building for podcasters, its time-saving features, and its seamless integration with AI tools for SEO and content optimization. Plus, Brenden emphasizes the importance of user-focused innovations, shares his favorite podcasts, and highlights the necessity of content over technical perfection in podcasting.

This episode is important for anyone considering starting a podcast or seeking to enhance their podcast's online presence. You’ll discover how PodPage can simplify website management and provide a professional online platform for your podcast in just a few clicks.

IN THIS EPISODE WE COVER:

- (02:29) Brenden's interests and journey to creating PodPage: Brenden explains that his career has been dedicated to helping content creators focus more on creating great content rather than dealing with business maintenance. This led him to create a podcast website that hit the number 1 spot on Google in less than two weeks and eventually led him to develop PodPage.

- (05:39) The simplicity of creating a podcast website: Mathew and Brenden discuss the flow and customization of PodPage and how easy it is for a user to choose and even change the design of their podcast page without feeling overwhelmed. 

- (14:02) The AI tools being utilized by PodPage: Brenden elaborates on how PodPage utilizes AI features for various tasks, including transcribing episodes to enhance website context for Google, adding advanced SEO tools, and incorporating better search using AI.

- (26:16) The importance of good and valuable content vs investing in expensive hardware: Mathew and Brenden discuss the benefits of the ATR 2100 microphone but emphasize that creators should focus more on consistency and delivering value to their audience rather than spending lots of money on fancy equipment.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

- Visit the PodPage website and preview your podcast website for free 

- Follow Brenden and PodPage on socials

• https://twitter.com/mulligan
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mulligan/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/podpage/
• https://twitter.com/podpagehq
• https://www.facebook.com/PodpageHQ

- Recommended hardware: ATR-2100x

- "All the Hacks" podcast by Chris Hutchins: An informative podcast for life optimization.

- Brenden’s recommendation:

• Podcasts by Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan
• All In podcast: A podcast known for well-informed conversations on differing opinions, as recommended by Brenden

**As an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases of podcasting gear from Amazon.com. We also participate in affiliate programs with many of the software services mentioned on our website. If you purchase something through the links we provide, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The team at Podcasting Tech only recommends products and services that we would use ourselves and that we believe will provide value to our viewers and readers.**

For additional resources and insights visit podcastingtech.com or follow us on social media:

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• LinkedIn - /mathewpassy
• Threads: @mathewpassy
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PODCASTING TECH IS POWERED BY:

• Podpage - Build a beautiful podcast website in 5 minutes
• Podgagement - Engage your audience and grow your podcast!
• Captivate - Easy, professional podcast hosting to create, grow and make money from your podcasts.
• Riverside.fm - Record Podcasts And Videos From Anywhere
• Castmagic - 10x Audio Content With AI

EQUIPMENT IN USE:

• Rodecaster Pro 1st Gen (No longer available). Consider the Rodecaster Duo or Rodecaster Pro II
• EV RE20 with 309a Shockmount 
• Rode PSA1+
• iPhone continuity camera but previously the Logitech Brio 4k
• DCMEKA In-Ear Monitors
• BusyBox Smart Sign  

When we talk about podcasting technology, we're always looking for something that's going to make

your life easier, but we don't want it to just make your life easier

and be cheap and sloppy and something that you're not gonna be

very proud of. And when the concept of a PodPage

first came along, there were a lot of folks who were concerned, like, yeah, an

automatic podcast website, I don't know. Is that really gonna be worth it?

Is my site gonna look professional? Is it gonna be cool? Is it gonna

work well? How easy is this kind of technology? And

right away, I could tell the 1st time I ever put my eyes

on a pod page, I knew there was some real there there.

Right? You enter in your RSS feed, you tell it the name of your show,

And within 5 minutes literally, within 5 minutes, I had helped folks

create a functional, beautiful, You

know, really powerful podcasting website.

And that was several years ago, and it's only

gotten Much better, much stronger. And it's definitely something

that if you are not savvy enough, if you don't wanna go down the

wormhole of WordPress, if you, You know, don't know what

you don't know when it comes to building the right podcasting website?

Then you definitely want to check out a pod page. And

today, we are super excited to have Brenden Mulligan, the PodPage

founder, also just a serial entrepreneur with some other cool stuff that

he's done in his past. Brenden, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Thank you for having me. It's good to talk to you again. So we we

spoke about this, I think, many, many years ago when this first developed,

but, You know, pretend that that episode never existed. Tell us, how did you

get to creating and thinking of the idea

of the PodPage service? So I have

spent my career helping creators. I started in the music industry.

I moved into helping app developers And then,

working with podcasters and digital artists and the theme throughout all of them

has been the same, which is all of these creators, They

do what they do because they have some talent, in that

medium. And so podcasters, like, they're amazing because they Find people to

interview or they come up with great stories or great topics. They they create

great content. And so in all of my time as an entrepreneur, I've and

working with I've always tried to find the things that they're they

shouldn't really be focusing on because it's just they should be focusing on

their craft as opposed to sort of the maintenance of their business.

And there's some areas that they need to be focused on strategy, but there's other

areas that they shouldn't. And in almost every one of the cases and groups,

The building your own website has been one of these things that it should be

easier than it is. And so back in in my music industry days,

after watching Myspace fall apart, what we all realized was These musicians

have been focused too much on being on these platforms and not enough about owning

their own piece of the Internet, and so we help them create websites,

Really, really easily using the content they'd already put on the Internet, and when I

saw what podcasters are doing, I saw almost the exact same thing. I would search

for really good Podcasts, and the Top hits on Google were

Apple Podcasts. I think at the time of it have been Itunes. I can't remember.

You know, Spotify. It's it was platforms, and a lot of them didn't have their

own website and I started reaching out to podcasters asking why and they're like, it's

a pain. I don't really wanna learn about WordPress. I tried. I paid a

designer, but it didn't work. Like, all of these excuses were basically, it's too hard.

And so when I dug in a little bit more, I realized that the

RSS feed, The same RSS feed that's that's read by Google and

Spotify and Apple has all the content to basically be able to

create a website instantaneously. I mean, We say 5 minutes

to get to a website that you're like really happy with and you can just

leave alone forever, but it takes like 10 or 15 seconds to actually generate the

thing. And so, It

honestly started as a weekend project for a friend that had a pretty popular podcast,

but didn't have a website. I was like,

yeah. Let's let's just try it. So at the end of the weekend, I was

like, here's a website I built for you. It's totally self supported, powers itself, it

updates itself. It doesn't, you know it not only pulls in your episodes, but it

pulls in reviews from Apple, so the

content stays fresh, all the stuff. And so then we're like, alright, well, is it

worth it? So we threw it on a subdomain of his.

And a week and a half later, it was the number one hit on Google,

after changing his link and his RSS feed to that. And so it was

like, oh, so basically with no effort, You're able to tap the

number 1 spot on Google when someone searches your your podcast

name. And at that point, it was like, Okay. This is clearly worth

it for a podcaster to do. Now, like, can I make it easy and

accessible for them to do it? And so then That was when I started DM

ing podcasters a link to a page that I built for them and I said,

Hey, here's a website I built for you. Would you be interested in just giving

me feedback on what you hate about And and it sort of start that's where

it kinda came from. It was just talking to more and more podcasters and seeing

their reaction and then seeing how openly they were to switch to it or

adopt it once they realized how easy it was. And yeah. I mean, one of

the things that was so great about creating a pod page for the 1st time

and then helping clients create a pod page was that

simplicity of it. You know, something that comes up often when people are

trying to build a website or, honestly, with any creative endeavor, are

Choices. Too many choices. And what I loved about it

was you put you like I said, you pop in your feed, you can have

a website in minutes or seconds even. But You

have some, you know, design palettes, let's say.

Right? Like basic templates that people can use. And You you

have just enough where it's like you can find what you're looking

for, but you don't have to feel overwhelmed by all those choices to the point

where you can't move forward with it. And on top of that, it's so easy

that once you maybe get tired with your one design, you're like, yeah, let's try

something else. You can go ahead and just, boom, click that. Now the whole website

kinda changes, Keeps into account, right, some of the customization

that you've made, but, right, you can update the look and feel without having to

go through and reprogram your entire website once again.

It is that whole flow and, and

basically the, the theme of, I want it to be easy for people

Without having to do a ton of work. I want it to look good without

being overwhelming. I want them to be able to change it

without screwing things up That it is so hard. And I would

say it's gotten harder over time as we've made the pages more complex, but a

big part of Q1 for me, It's literally the biggest

project that we've worked on for a while and what I'm working on right now

is adding a ton of themes and functionality, as far as

cut design customization without making it more complicated. So if

you were to log in to PodPage with my account, there's this crazy amount of

new new stuff to change because I'm trying to figure out how to make it

still feel accessible and easy, But we're about to roll out like a new we've

haven't updated our templates for a while, but we're about to roll out a a

a new set of templates that are in I mean, obviously, I'm biased, but They're

really, really nice. I honestly I mean, this is just on me. Like, I feel

like we've fallen behind a little bit over the last couple of years because we

haven't done a lot of template work. We've done a lot of, like, Adding the

ability for people to tweak things on their website and make it look better, but

as far as just a one click, like, I want my website to look like

that, we haven't it hasn't been as, high on

the priority list. So that's what the beginning of this year is, and so I'm

excited about it. And so I I appreciate what you said, but it's I'm I'm

embarrassed by it. I think it could be way better, and hopefully, it will be

in couple weeks. I mean, everything can always have room for improvement.

But again, for for folks who can't build a website or don't wanna go

through the whole rigmarole, it's nice to have Nice but, you

know, simple choices to work with. Talking about some of the

Tech stacks, talking about some of the features, you've added a lot since the very

beginning. What are some of the features you are most proud of with

PodPage? Let's say one that you

particularly like, Maybe the community is like, yeah. Whatever.

And then what's that one of the communities like, oh my god. This is amazing.

You're like, really? I don't even think that was gonna be that important to you.

For me, things that I like, you know, it's funny when you build

something that one of the pitches of it is it's automated. It takes care

of itself. It's a set it and forget it type product.

If you want to tell people how powerful it is, but you don't want to

confuse them by being like, We do all of these things and you don't even

know it. Right. And so, so I love all the

features that sort of happen in the background. And

those features are things like, You know, the way that we actually,

this is just rolling out. We haven't even announced yet, but it is live. We're

starting to pull in chapters, so if you put chapters in your RSS

feed you'll start seeing them show up on your website if you want.

We're gonna start For, for the elite plan,

you can put in your, if you have a YouTube channel

and you have a, You have a

playlist that all you put all your podcast episodes on, we're gonna start actually

trying to match your YouTube channel Podcast episodes

with the episode that we import. And so when we import the

episode from your feed, it'll automatically put the video

for that episode on the episode page. So when people come to your website

to to look at the episode you they can actually just watch it as opposed

to have to listen to it on the web. So It's all of

that stuff is the part the stuff that really gets me excited because it's it

makes things so easy. We're using a ton of AI tools to To do small

things, we're gonna start transcribing episodes. If you don't have them transcribed, so your

your website has more text for Google to understand the context of the website or

the the webpage. So I love all that stuff. A

lot of times users don't even notice that's happening because it's

just happening. The for the from a user standpoint, by far the best feature

that we've launched

since probably since The 1st year, has

been sort of our guest workflow and, a lot of

podcasts have guests. We built basically a profile where they

can a very simple thing where they could go in and they could just type

like, here's a guest name, here's their bio, here's a headshot, here's

their social links, and And then they could say they were

on episode 54, and then when you look at episode 54, there'd be a little

guest bio at the bottom. You click the name. It has a whole page on

their website for the guest. That was

the feature. And so I thought it was kind of clever and nice, it seemed

to fit the medium, and so I've released it

and, The the initial feedback we got from our Facebook community was, this

is amazing but God it's just another thing for me to have to fill out.

Pod page is great because all this stuff is automated is there any way you

can automate this? Now obviously we can't automate generating a guest

profile, But their suggestion was can I just have my guest do the work for

me? And so we ended up building a a guest facing version of

that profile builder Where now the podcast just sends a link

to a guest. They fill out a form that form saves them in

the backend of their pod page. And then the the podcaster can go in

and say, okay, like, Brenden was on

Podcasting Tech, I'd already filled out the profile so that was, I could just click

my name and say he was on he's gonna be on episode 54, and then

when episode 54 is imported we can attach

The Brenden episode Brenden's profile to the episode and also

email the guest, Hey, the episodes released here are

links. That whole workflow has been like transformative for our users

and totally not something that we thought we'd be doing when we set out to

build the website service. But, But really is really it's really helpful for them because

a lot of people wait to email their guests because they don't have the

website link yet. And so, Anyway so that's that's been

a big a big win for for our

users. And I'm assuming that If, like, one of the questions is like, you know,

where can I find more information about you? Right? Let's say, you know, I'm using

this form with you, and you'd say, obviously, podpage.com. Now

aren't I automatically creating some link backs, which is really powerful for SEO

in general? Yep. Yep. You you know, you can The person can can plug in

their website, their podcast link, their, you know, Instagram account,

whatever they want, And they they have they have control

over what the pro the bio is, and so, and the profile looks like.

So, yeah, it's been a it's been a big hit for both. I mean, If

anything, I think at this point, the scale that we're working at, I think

one of the most inefficient parts of the whole thing is that a guest Isn't

creating, like, a pod page profile that then they could send a lot of Podcasting.

They're creating a profile for each podcast, and we've gotten some feedback now. They're, like,

I feel like I'm filling out A pod page profile form for

so many shows that I'm on so often, it'd be nice if you could just

I could just kinda, like, give permission for the new ones to access it.

So good problems to have, but, but it's, you

know, it's been helpful on both sides. Maybe, we'll chat with you in a year,

and you'll say, yep. We figured it out. We got it filled, and here it

is, folks. You'll, you'll you'll have your own guest profile on PodPage.

Yeah. I also love that you have your own guest release built into it. So

that's great. So you can basically turn on that. There's a a

show guest release form, with, you know, copy

courtesy of Passy Legal for Podcasting. Obviously, you can upload your own. But,

like, Again, just 1 more place that podcasters may not be

thinking about what it is that they need and you're already

providing Like, hey. Here's a heads up on something that you need. And by the

way, we've already done the work for you, to make that super

easy. What are some other Future

features, or what are some other places where PodPage is

looking to go in the future if you can share any of that with us?

Well, I think, you know, at the beginning of 2024, if you're talking about the

future, you can't can't talk about the future without thinking about AI. I think there's

a lot of stuff that we can do to be helpful there. There's,

you know, SEO is a hard thing for most people, including myself.

And knowing not only like, you know, PodPage does all the work to structure

your page to make it as attractive to Google as possible. And, you know, when

you put a transcript Not only do we post on your page, but we tag

it in the HTML. So when Google looks at it they know this is a

transcript, and so when they're trying to structure that data on Google search

results They don't have to figure out where the transcript is, we tell them. So

there's a lot of spoon feeding we do to Google, but you still have to

have the right content on there. And so,

We're trying to help podcasters

make sure that they are doing, as well as

possible with the content they wanna do. So we've last year, we added a bunch

of sort of advanced, SEO tools. If you've ever used WordPress

and Yoast SEO, We basically took a lot of inspiration from that and now

make it easy to say, okay, I just released an episode, and we say what's

the focus key phrase that you want to be coming up on Google for, and

then we'll analyze the the the episode and the page to tell you whether

or not you've set it up for success, because there's only so much PodPage

can do. And this has been really helpful because a lot of people would come

to me and say, hey, I was hoping to rank for, you know, business

podcast, and then We help them realize, like, not only is that

gonna be incredibly competitive, but your your site actually is more

about, like, small business, small businesses

in Akron, Ohio or something. Right? And it's like then they once they

start targeting their key phrase towards that, they have a lot more success ranking for

those kind of things on Google. So we added sort of the the

analysis tools, but I think we're still there's still an opportunity to help

not only, with the analysis, but also with just helping people understand.

Like, we can look at a podcast, and we do this for elite users if

they wanna we can look at their episode when you say, like, the key phrase

you're probably should be targeting is this, you know, and it may be the guest

name, or it might be, you know, something in the in the topic. But we

look at the show notes, we look at the summary, we look at the title,

like, You know, our guess is that this is what you're gonna wanna rank for

because this is seems to be what it's all about. So using tools

like that, A little thing we're gonna release, which is just, inspired

by Amazon. I don't know if you've seen the Amazon AI tools for their reviews,

but instead of reading the 5,000 reviews, you can just now at the top it

says, People like this because and it sort of summarizes everyone's

review. We've that that's actually already built. We just haven't turned it on yet.

Search a bet, a much better search using AI. Like there's a lot of that

kind of stuff that we just want it to be the page to be a

lot smarter. Again, our It's sort of like our goal is

just to continually make it less and less of something you think about.

Right? Like, it's just doing what it needs to do, and it's just working and

helping you. Some people like writing blog posts

alongside their, alongside their episodes,

and there's a strategy for that, and we can help Use AI to help

inform the strategy around writing a blog post that that

helps promote the episode versus competes with it, stuff like that. So,

We're doing a lot more high touch SEO stuff this year. We did a a

big SEO seminar yesterday. We're gonna be doing one of those monthly. We're gonna have

SEO, consulting and, like, high touch SEO,

1 on 1 consulting for people who want it, you

know, so there's just we wanna do a lot more. Now that we spent so

many years making these amazing websites, now we wanna make sure that they've they're all

found for the people who wanna put in the work to do it.

Amazing. And some of those new AI features that you're talking about, those are only

gonna be for, elite plans, or is that also gonna

be in the pro? It'll there it'll depend on the feature.

Okay. I I need to look at it, but and it it might

start with elite, and go to pro in the same way a lot of stuff

with pro, went to basic. You know, Elite gives us an opportunity to beta

test it with people who are a little bit more invested in their

in the website because they're paying more and they want more high you know, advanced

features, and so it lets us kind of give it to them. They can they

can use it, and we can get it right, and then a lot of stuff

can move down into pro or parts of it can move down into pro. Things

like like AI transcriptions, You know, a lot of people transcribe

their audio with their host or someone else, but if it gets to us and

it's not transcribed, we wanna transcribe it for you because there's so much we can

do once we have a transcription. Transcriptions are actually really

expensive, and so that's one of those things, like, the cost is high

enough where we wanna make sure that we can afford to do it for everyone.

So that will be something that would be an elite. But some of the smaller

AI stuff will will be in pro. Well, one of the

things you mentioned was that, you know, So often, you get

people who you want this product to be something that they don't have to think

about. And I'll be honest, when I was using this for, one of

my shows, I never thought about it. Like, I honestly I I

can't even remember how rarely I would visit the website

for my show just because I knew it was already taken care of. Everything was

automatic. The episodes are being pulled in. It was always working. Right? I never

had to go in and, like, purge cash on my on my WordPress site,

make sure all my plug ins are updated, make sure the most compatibility issues, you

know, were were working. It just always worked, and it was just one less thing

as a podcaster that I had to think about. So For anybody listening,

if you haven't, put together a website for your podcast, if you're thinking about how

am I gonna display my content, cannot cannot

stress enough how Great. A pod page would will be,

obviously, podpage.com. There'll be a link to it here in the show notes below. Brenden,

before we let you go, we just wanna ask you a other questions about podcasting

in general, just to see kinda where you're at in the world. So one of

the first things we wanna know from everybody is, is there a favorite Podcast

that you are listening to right now or, maybe 1 or 2 that

you would recommend, to folks? You

know, it's so funny because I spend so much of my day writing code. I

I used to be able to listen to podcasts and work and now that I

just I don't I can't do that anymore, and I work from home, so there's

no commute. So I feel like the number of podcasts I listen to has gone

down a lot.

The. I'm really enjoying, there's one that's a friend

of mine, named Chris Hutchins. He has a podcast called All

the Hacks, And he's also, like, one of my beta Tech or, like, he's the

he's one of my pod page users that Tech me and says, hey, can you

add this crazy feature? I'm, like, no no one is gonna want that. A week

later, I'm like, no. I'll build it anyway, because it kinda sounds

fun. And so he's he's it's great. It's a great podcast. I try to

try to listen to as many episodes as I can, And it's

all about optimizing your life, and he takes the approach of, like, oh, if you're

interested in optimizing how you do travel, credit cards, or maybe it's money, or

maybe it's preschools or maybe it's your cell phone plan, like, it it he finds

people who have gone deep on everything and then interviews them. So I that

I love. I've always loved, like, Tim Paris and Joe Rogan's shows. They're just so

long, so I I usually catch clips of those,

and then, I've been I've been really enjoying the All In podcast, which I know

has been getting a lot more popular. It's I come from the tech world and

it's a bunch of tech world people, but I feel like it's a really it's

an it's a refreshing Podcast to listen to because I feel like it's people who

generally have differing opinions, having conversations about their

differing opinions, and They're fairly well informed people,

and it's just like I feel like it's the exact opposite of what you get

when you read, you know, mainstream media. You get where you're getting

such a one-sided approach to things, like it's actually a

conversation. And so they'll have on, you know, they've had on Tucker Carlson or Jared

Kushner, but they've also had on RFK Jr. Or, you know, people

on, like, the far liberal side. And so I feel like it's a nice balance

of, like, oh, is this just, like, informative and interesting. So I feel like I'm

being drawn more to that content now, where before I think I was more

drawn to, like, Startup content. So I was listening to My First 1,000,000,

and, more like businessy side stuff. I've sort of gotten to the point where,

like, alright. I've I've listened to that for long enough. Now I'm sort of interested

in other stuff. Is there gonna be a PodPage

podcast anytime soon? You know, I try to stay in

my lane, And do and do what I'm good at,

and I've I've tried a few times to think, like, oh, could I do a

podcast around podcast websites, or could I do And I feel like there's a lot

of great podcast content out there about podcast tech,

about how to podcast and all that, and It's just not necessarily I

think an area that I'm great, so I'm gonna leave that to people who

are. I think doing a podcast is so hard. I mean, it's so much

work, And I've such respect for all the people out there doing it that

I think that I would rather spend all my time trying to make PodPage better

and not Not trying to do a podcast. So I'm always making myself

available to podcasts, but I haven't I don't think I wanna do my own. I

I think, you know, honestly, I think I think I sit down and I think,

Do I have 52 pieces of content a year to share with the

world? And I just don't think I do, at this

point. So Or if I do, it would be a lot of work to fig

to organize that and figure it out. So it's just not where I wanna focus.

Alright. Outside of Podcasting websites, because obviously, that's your

lane and and, you know, you're working on that solution anyway. Is

there another place in podcasting in general that you can

Do you would like to see improvement or see something

change? I think that the openness of podcasting is such a

core central part of it that is so incredibly important. And it's hard to

watch Spotify. I feel like they actually innovate pretty well. Like, I think

their podcasting listening experience is really good. I I use it The majority of the

time, I like that it's cross platform, but I hate that it's this

walled garden. So I would love to

see The consumption experience diversified a little

bit, although it's just really hard to see that happening. But,

but, you know, we we face a lot of issues with Our users where they

write in, they're saying like, oh, this isn't working, or this isn't showing up here,

and it's because they're on Spotify for Podcasters and they've, like, by

default Gated their content to just a few places or

so I would I would love to see more innovation across the

board on the consumption experience, but I'd, Like I said, I don't I don't know

if that's gonna happen. I do think that this video is gonna be a bigger

component to it, and so we'll see what

you or what YouTube does this year, when they do their full launch

and stuff, but, I think that I think Tech consumption experience is

still more to be desired. I think on

the podcasting sort of like the Inside Baseball tool side, I think the hosts are

all doing a really great job. I think the podcasting 2 point o

tags and And all the stuff that could be in the podcasting feed,

it'll be great when that's all supported because it makes people like me, like, makes

my job so easy when there's already a transcript, when there's already chapters when

there's already guest names. Like, my life would be way

easier if all the content that we, that was already being published other places was

just stuck into the feed. And so what the podcast 2.0 initiative is doing,

I think is awesome. And hopefully those tags are adopted by more

people and the feeds have more than a minute because I think it'll just make

all the places you can go to learn about podcasting way better. Like, I wish

there was a video link in the feed. So when I get an episode, I

already know what the YouTube link is, and I can I can put that on

the website? So I think it's all coming, but, I'm I'm excited

for that to develop. And then I think there's there's sort of this mad rush

not just in podcasting, but in tech in general for, like, a 1000000 people

doing AI tools, and we've sort of held back. I mean, like, well, everyone's Everyone's

innovating on AI right now, but I feel like at the end of this year,

a lot of that will shake out, and there'll be probably a few really, really

good people. I honestly think the hosts are gonna win there,

Because a lot of the AI tools are best used pre

feed. I think of, like, podcasting workflow is like pre feed and post feed. Pre

feed is like, need to write your show notes. You need to come up with

a title. You need to come up with all this stuff. You need to do

all that before you put it in your podcast host and before it goes in

the feed. So I don't like to mess with any of that on the PodPage

side. The post feed stuff is I think where we live, which is, like, cool,

you've you put it in your feed, now we can put it on your website,

now we can help you Put it on Twitter and X

and, Facebook and everywhere else. Now we can help, you know, get it into

Google SEO, all all that, you know, email it to your guests, Potentially

email to users. All that marketing stuff is, like, post feed. I think there's a

lot of cool stuff that we'll see in the pre feed side. Okay. And

then, of course, the last question is, what technology are

you using for podcasting? I know, like I said, you don't host your own podcast,

but you do appear on on many. So What's the equipment there in your tech

stack? You know, it depends on the day. Today

I'm using the, just like a basic ATR

2100 microphone that I think I got 4 years ago

because someone said this is a good bit, maybe Tim Ferris recommended it, And I

was, like, here's a good basic mic, and I've used that, with the same

stand I think it came with. Like, it there's not there's not a lot of

tech here, and then I've got an AirPod in. Still a great microphone, that ATR

2100. That that's I've been recommending that for years, and, yeah, I would still

recommend it today. Yeah. It's great. It did sit on my shelf for years

Because I think I did I was on someone, maybe it was with Dave Jackson,

and he they said that the AirPods sounded better

Then the mic. So I was doing AirPods for a while and then for a

while it was just, just like my computer mic. I

think that all of the post-processing, like echo cancellation, audio

cleanup tools have gotten so good that,

that I think 4 years ago podcasters were very specific about,

like, please use specific microphones, you know, come on for

pre Pre interview sound checks all and I feel like over the last

year or so that's kinda gone away, at least in my experience, where it seems

like The, these tools are able to make great

audio using kind of whatever the input is to a point. Yeah. That, you know,

when you think about that, that's a really good point that now there are so

many great AI enhancement tools and

plugins and software that even Not

great audio could be made to sound decent, and decent audio could be

made to sound highly impressive. So really sticking to

something as simple as a 2100. Just that just something that brings a mic

closer to your mouth as opposed to, you know, the built in microphone on your

computer or even I find sometimes with AirPods, the the microphone

being behind your mouth, you know, there's a lot of room

that has to be absorbed before I can hear your voice. So,

but, yeah, I I like the I like your point that you don't have to

get too crazy these days because the technology is there to improve

Whatever your sound is, you know, it's take it up a few notches. I I

also think that maybe it could have been COVID when, I mean, everyone got

into podcasting or People couldn't go to their studios or

people just sort of had to make do with whatever they had. And,

and I feel like that kind of It was a good shock to the system

where it was like, you don't need to, before you're at 1st episode, you don't

need to spend 1,000 of dollars on gear. You can just.

Throw some AirPods in because ultimately what's important. What's really important. Long term is

that you are care about this topic enough or care about this podcast enough

to keep doing it every week. It doesn't actually matter what you sound

like. Eventually you want to make sure you sound good, but you're way better off,

like using your mental cycles to Love the craft and get into the

craft and make it a habit than you are to like build the perfect podcast

studio, or at least that's been my perspective and observation.

You know what? I don't think I could have said it better myself. That is

the exact kind of advice that we would give everyone which is You've never

heard a person say, you know, that podcast

meant nothing to me, but, man, it sounded good, so I kept listening. Whereas

Yeah. People will come to a podcast with

solid content even if the quality isn't as

pristine as they would like. So focus on good content. Focus

on your audience. Focus on delivering value. And everything

else, you can fix in post or, frankly, you can improve Later

as you find, more success with what it is that you are doing.

Well, we've been chatting with Brenden Mulligan, the founder of PodPage.

And, you know, without Exaggerating truly the best

way for a podcaster to build, launch, and not

have to maintain a website because It does all the work for you. And on

top of that, it just comes with amazing other features that are

beneficial to podcasters that You would be spending more money

on, you know, signing up for this, signing up for this, signing up for this.

And,

Brenden and the team at PodPage just bring it all together in one easy place.

So Cannot recommend it enough. We have a link to pod page here in the

show notes. But if you're thinking about a website or if you're tired of the

struggles of your website, can't stress enough that you should definitely

go check it out. Brenden Mulligan, thank you so much for joining us here today.