On this episode I talk about redirects and how you can use them for your podcast. Redirects are nice because they allow you to have a branded easy to remember URL that can take you to any link even for sites you don’t control

Welcome back to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast,

answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. This is actually take two

of this show. I started a little bit ago and got interrupted by a phone call and by some

kids.

So the kids are home, so things don't always go as planned. So I thought I'd start over

and do this as a take two. So this is take two of this show. If you saw a live episode

announcing of this going live, that's because this is the second time that I did it. So

now welcome back, guys. I took the week off with us last week. We took a family trip out

to DC by rail.

I've never actually taken a rail that far before. And so I left from my house and rode

the train, all the Amtrak train, all the way to DC and spent the week in DC. And that was

a lot of fun. Used public transit all throughout the week. And it was just, it was a blast

getting to spend some time with the kids, but I didn't get a chance to do the episode

because I did not take my equipment with me to record well on the road.

So I am back now for this week. And this week we are actually going to be talking about

redirects and what redirects are and when you would use them and things like that. So

a redirect is just that when I send you some place and you get redirected to another place.

So let's think about it when you're on the road and you're going down to your local,

local, local superstation, supermart, and you get to a place where they have the road

closed because they're doing some road work or they want to send you a different way.

They're going to redirect you, right? This in this case, that's called a detour. But

in the world of the internet, this is a redirect. And what a redirect simply is, is you were

going one place and I'm going to turn you and go to another place. So when we do use

these, why would you use these? Well, it's really simple. Actually, we would use them

at when I want to give you a link to my website, but I want to send you somewhere else.

So for instance, in, in podcast answers, you can go to podcast answers.com/buymeacoffee.

And that will redirect you out to our buy me a coffee site out to the place. It's a

separate website from podcast answers, but it allows you to go out there and, and support

our show. So if you've not done that, I would recommend doing that. If you've gotten any

value out of our show, just consider giving some value back. I would really appreciate

it. But the way that I do that, instead of saying, go to buy me a coffee.com/podcast

answers, which you can do.

I send you to a branded link podcast answers.com/buymeacoffee. And you with that branded link can go out to

the other site, get redirected to the other site. And you do that for several different

reasons. Because for one, it's easy to remember, because if I give out a couple of different

links in the show, like, you know, if I want to send you to our, my favorite podcasting

host podcast answers.com/captivate will take you there. So now I've given you two different

links in this podcast episode.

And it can be hard to, it can be hard to know what that's gonna, you know, as you're driving.

I mean, yes, you can put those links in the show notes, and that's good practice, best

practice, put that in the show notes. But if you're driving, you're not going to be

looking at the show notes. And by the time they're to their destination, they're probably

or maybe done with your episode, they may not be able to get back to it because your

podcast app may say, "Hey, you've listened to this now." And they're going to forget

about it because it's not front and center.

And so what you can do is speak those URLs, they're going to be easy to remember, because

they're all branded, they're all podcast answers.com/something. And that will take you, it will allow you to

be able to speak it and they're gonna be more memorable. So in this case, you know, I was

talking about Buy Me a Coffee. Buy Me a Coffee is the place where you can support us. So

podcastanswers.com/buymeacoffee. And so it's going to be a lot easier to remember those

URLs for people who are driving and not around where you're at.

So what you can do, that's one of the good reasons to use branding. And it's best to

use things that are kind of generic. So in this case, I did say podcastanswers.com/buymeacoffee,

because that's the site that I use, which is Buy Me a Coffee. But what if I change?

What if I'm no longer using Buy Me a Coffee? Now, yes, I can go ahead and keep that URL

and just redirect it somewhere else. It won't make a whole lot of sense, but it's best to

use something generic.

So I really should be using podcastanswers.com/support. And that will either take you to a page on

my website that has different support options, or it could take you to anything I want you

to support the show. So I could take you to Buy Me a Coffee. So that's the better case

to do this.

But the nice thing is you can always, like I said, if you have both of them, so I have

support, but I also have Buy Me a Coffee. And now in the future, let's say I don't want

Buy Me a Coffee anymore. But I've spoken that URL so many times, you've heard it in all

of the episodes. It's not only audio baked into my audio episodes, but it's also in the

video that I produced for this show.

Yes, we do a video for the show. And so it's baked in that video also. So what I can do,

let's say I decided to go over to Patreon or send you to a PayPal link or whatever comes

in the future. I can still have that Buy Me a Coffee link on my website, the podcastanswers.com/buy

me a coffee. Hopefully you remember that and get that in your head. Now, Buy Me a Coffee

podcastanswers.com/buy me a coffee.

But I can take that and keep that same URL, but change it so that it actually now goes

to whatever the other thing goes to. So that's one of the reasons that you would use that

you would use a redirect because you are going to be able to change it out, go whatever.

It's easy. It's speakable. It's concise because it's branded on yours.

So there are a couple different things to remember when it comes to using a redirect

service. So for me, I host all my websites on WordPress. And WordPress has plugins and

some of the plugins, there's two different plugins I'll talk about today. And some of

the plugins actually allow you to do redirection for WordPress.

And I'll tell you my favorite one and another one that you can use. And but no matter what

plugin you use, or site because there's other sites to like rebrandly or bit.ly.com or bit.ly.

And so there's a couple of things you need to remember one being there's several different

kinds of links that you can do types of links.

So there's 301, 302, 307 and 308. There's more but those are the important ones. So 301 and

308 are both going to be permanent redirects. And what that means is, if I create podcast

answers.com slash buy me a coffee and created as a permanent redirect, and you visit it,

your browser remembers where I sent you to.

And next time you go to that same link, it's not even going to check with my website and

to see if I changed it. So I may have changed it to be Patreon, even though it's still buy

me a coffee. But your your browser is still going to send you to buy me a coffee because

it's a permanent redirect. It's assuming this is permanent. So I don't need to even go out

and check to see that the server is saying something different.

And so that's 301 and 308 302 and 307 are temporary redirects. And what that means is every time

I visit podcast answers.com slash buy me a coffee, it is going to check with my server

and my server is going to say, Yep, go there to buy me a coffee. Or if I change it, it's

going to say, Nope, go over to Patreon now.

And so that's you're always in these in these these marketing URLs, there are times and

places for permanent, permanent redirects. For instance, if you change podcast hosts,

your feed URL is going to change. And so you want your old podcast host to use a 301 or

30301 redirect. So that way it tells everything No, don't look at me anymore. Look at the

new the new website.

But in these cases where you're sending people off to other websites for marketing and branding

and whatever, you're going to use a temporary redirect. So 302 or 307. There are some differences

there, but not not anything that we need to be worried about. So 302 307 are what you're

actually going to be looking for, to make sure that the browsers will get back and change

if you change something.

So I mentioned plugins. And again, I think for me, I like using plugins because it keeps

it all on the same branding. So I use, you know, like I said, WordPress, I use a plugin

called redirection. And redirection is great, because it has a management page, it also

monitors 404 errors. So you can see when somebody has hit your website, and went to a page that

no longer exists, and maybe you actually want to send them somewhere. So maybe you want

to maybe they maybe it was a page that you had created at one point, but it no longer

exists. But it's written out there somewhere on the web. And you say you can see that someone

actually hit that you may not know what's out there, but somebody still hits it. And

so because you can monitor the 404 errors 404 errors means that it's not found. And

so a website when you hit the URL, and it's not there, it gives a 404 error.

So with redirection plugin, you can see that you can see what people have been hitting.

And then if you want to create a redirection for it, you can redirect them to somewhere

else, maybe it's a new page, whatever, you can redirect them. You can also monitor hits.

So you know exactly when someone hit what page they hit, what, what the browser they

were using all of this other things. You can use it on your own domain, which is great.

So the nice thing about about redirection and pretty links are the two WordPress plugins

that I'm talking about today is you're using them on your own site. And so your branding

is always going to be the same. It's going to be podcast answers.com slash something.

It's free redirection is free. It's the great program and our plugin and it's free. It has

an API. So if you want to do some fancy things, like I do every time I publish a new episode,

I have my website automatically going out and updating a redirect.

So podcast answers.com slash latest is always going to be my latest episode, it will always

take you to my latest episode, no matter what. Which is great, because then you can create

a QR code, and it's always going to take you to your latest episode. I love that. And so

as an API, you can do regex things. And so regex is just a way to say, match this portion

of it. And so I did that if you change, let's say, let's say for instance, you have a URL

that is let's say podcast answers.com slash WP slash J dash Jason or something, you change

that whole base of everything that comes after that to be podcast answers.com slash API.

You can say you with regex anything no matter what, as long as it has the podcast answers.com

slash WP Jason, for that onto something different and follow that same structure. It's great.

I'm not going to get into that now. That's really geeky and really, really hard to do.

So it's not something that I really want to get into on the podcast. But if you want to

to figure out how to do that, definitely contact me, I can help you do that. And you can contact

me at podcast answers.com slash contact. And so that's, that's redirection. That's the

plugin I use. And I really enjoy it because it's, it's full featured in it's free. What

better, right? So pretty links is another, another plugin that you can use. And pretty

links is also a WordPress plugin. They have a free and a paid tier. The paid version allows

you to easily create redirections from your post, which is nice because for instance,

if you have your post named in one way, but you want to like something really long, that's,

that's URL friendly or SEO friendly.

So let's say it's, I, you can get to my episode at a podcast. Answers.com slash Andy dash

interviews dash doc.rock dash from dash E cam. Like that's great for you for Google,

right? Because it's going to know what I'm talking about because it's this whole URL,

but that's not easy to speak. That's really not easy to speak. And so you want to create

a redirection from podcast answers.com slash doc rock to that long one.

And you can with, with pretty links, you can do that right from the post. So as you're

creating the post, you can create the shorter, more friendly, speakable URL. And so then,

so then also you have another good thing about this is, is you have your own domain again.

So with pretty links or redirection, you use your own domain podcast answers.com, the same

domain that you're already using.

Now the next two services, and there are definitely more services out there that do this whole

redirection type thing, but I'm just going to talk about a few of them. So I've talked

about two WordPress plugins, and now I'm going to talk about two websites that allow you

to do the same thing. So rebrandly that's hosted somewhere else. So the nice thing about

that is if you're, if you want to say your website is down or whatever, you can still

have your short links ready to go, your redirections ready to go.

So it's hosted somewhere else, which is, it's just nice, but, and they have a free slash

paid plan to the free gets 10 links a month. Pay paid paying gets a whole lot more depending

on how much you pay paid also gets a custard brand, custom branded domain. Easy for me

to say. And so what that allows you to do is again, have another domain, have a domain

that's custom to you. So you could use podcast answers.com there.

But since I'm already using that for my website, I wouldn't want to do that. So I could do

something with a sub domain. So I could say go.podcastanswers.com or jump.podcastanswers.com

or what I've also seen other people do is use something a shorter version of their website

for their rebranded URLs. So you could do like P O D A N S R or P P D A N S R or something

like that.com. You can use a different domain or a sub domain of the domain that you own,

but you can't use the same domain you're using for a website.

Like so for podcast answers, that's my website. That's where you can go to get all of my blogs

and the episodes and things like that. But you can't have it also being used for your

short domain when you do that. So what you can do is use a different, a different domain

or a sub domain. So that's rebrandly. It's great. It works.

Bitly. B I T dot L Y is the same thing. They have free and paid hosts, free and paid plans.

The free gets 10 links a month, just like rebrandly. And they have some more things

like that too. And so you, as you can see, there's using redirects are super helpful

because again, it's just an easy way for people to remember you because it's branded as you,

whether you're using a WordPress plugin and using your same domain that you use, WordPress.com

or podcastanswers.com/whatever for your redirection, or you can use something like rebrandly or

Bitly and those will both get you as separate site, a separate domain, a separate or sub

domain from your thing.

So there's many of different ways to do it, but I hope that you see, I hope that you see

the value in having these rebranded links. Because again, it's just easy for people to

remember when they're driving in their car or repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

So if you're talking and talking and talking about podcastanswers.com/whatever, they're

more likely to remember that domain.

And then just remember, "Oh yeah, he was talking about support." Or he was talking about "Buy

me a coffee" or "Captivate" or "Ecam" or whatever he was talking about. But the domain is always

the same. So it's going to be easy to remember when you're driving, as opposed to sending

them out to something other.

Or let's say you do have an affiliate link like my Captivate and Buy Me a Coffee links

are. Those are all going to be your affiliate links. And for me, I don't want to send them

out to ecam.com/trackinglinks/blahblahblahblahblah. I want it to be branded for me. So podcastanswers.com/ecam

will get you to that.

So guys, I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions for me, I would

love to answer them. You can reach me at podcastanswers.com/contact. I can answer your podcast questions on this show.

Or if you want some one-on-one consulting, I also do one-on-one podcast consulting as

well as Ecam consulting. So if you want to start a video podcast or a video show, podcastanswers.com/contact,

I can do one-on-one contact with you guys. Hopefully, you have a great week and keep

podcasting. Keep live streaming. Have a good week, guys.

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