How To Create A Website For Your Podcast (Ep19)

Watch The Video Tutorial -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Listen To The Audio Version

To run a podcast you almost always need a website for that podcast. Here is a complete tutorial or how to create a website for your podcast.

How to create a website for your podcast?

I’m going to meticulously, step-by-step, through how to you can create a website for your podcast. This lesson is going to get a little bit technical, but stick with me because this is a really important step and we need a website if we’re going to start our podcast. And I’m going to make it really easy for you, so don’t worry.

The cost of getting your website off the ground, getting it up and running in this episode is going to be $5.60 upfront and $7 per month or it’s going to be $76.80 for 2 years. Which works out to about $3.60 per month, and that’s exactly what I did. Now, I’ve already got our domain name, which cost us $10. And this cost is for our hosting, which is where our website is actually going to be hosted.

So, what is hosting? Well, what happens when you actually visit a website is your computer actually downloads that website from a server, which is a sort of computer. And so, with hosting, you need to have your website on a server so people all over the world can download your website and view it on their computer. Now, you can have a server in your own house. However, you do need to manage that server; manage the Internet, make sure that you’re not hacked and all of that sort of stuff. It’s much cheaper and much easier to just outsource this and to just use a server company. And as we looked at the price, you know, it’s going to be $7 per month or if you paid 2 years upfront, $3.60 per month, which is really, really cheap.

The hosting company that I use and will be using in all of these tutorials and the one that I recommend is called Arvixe. And you can find them at podcastfast.com/hosting and if you use the coupon code, PODCASTFAST, then you’re going to get 20% off your first invoice. I just wanted to let you know that this is the company that I’m using because throughout this tutorial, I’m going to be going into their backend, showing you exactly how to do everything step by step. So if you’re going to be using a different web hosting company, then your backend may look different and you might not be able to follow this tutorial as easily. So this tutorial is going to be specifically for Arvixe. You can check them out at podcastfast.com/hosting.

I also have a companion guide to this tutorial, which is in pdf format so you can download it, view it on your computer or print it, which also has the step by step guide and a checklist to help you setup your website. If you want that absolutely free, go to podcastfast.com/setup. We also have Done For You Services. So if you don’t want to setup your website yourself, you can pay us – the experts – to do it for you. Go to podcastfast.com and click the Done For You Services tab.

Okay, now on to the tutorial.

Okay, so we go on to our web browser and we type podcastfast.com/hosting. That’s my affiliate link and this will take you to the Arvixe homepage. We can see Superior Web Hosting and there’s As Low As $4 per month and we can click View Plans. I’m actually going to give you a coupon code so it’ll actually be less than $4 per month. But for now, this big green button just click, View Plans.

Okay. We’re now in a section called, Linux Hosting, which is what we want and we can see here, Personal Class and we can see a little penguin and that’s exactly what we want. We can see the 2 different options here, there’s Personal Class and Personal Class Pro. Now, Personal Class just has a limit of 6 websites that you can host on here, whereas Personal Class Pro has unlimited. So I suggest that you just start with Personal Class and if you end up having more than 6 websites, well, then you can move up to Personal Class Pro.

So you simply click the Order Now button. That will bring you to the checkout page. Now, you can fill in all of your customer details here, choose a username and a password and accept the terms and conditions. Up here, up the top on the right-hand side, you can see what you’ve ordered which is Personal Class which is $4 per month for 2 years which works out to $96. But, in this promo coupon code section, if you write “podcastfast”, all in lowercase, all one word and click Use, then you’re actually going to get 20% off your first order. You can see here that you’re saving $19.20 and it comes to $76.80. So make sure you use that coupon code, “podcastfast”.

Now, if you don’t want the 2 years and you just want to do 1 month, you can actually edit the time period. Just hover over the $4 for 2 years that you can see there and click the Edit button that comes up. You can change that to 1 year, 6 months or 1 month. So if we change that to 1 month, then we can see that it is now going to be $7 minus the $1.40. So, $5.60 for your first month and then $7 per month after that.

So once we fill out all our details, we then click the Next button. That will bring us to step 3 of 4 and can see, again, we can change the time period up to 6 months to a year or 2 years and that will affect your price. And we can see here that we can register a new domain, we can transfer a domain or we can do neither. So we actually want to select Neither because we have bought our domain on godaddy.com and so we’re going to be using that. So we don’t want to register a domain and we don’t want to transfer one. So now we type in what our domain is. So for me, that’s podcastfast.com. You can then leave Auto-renew on, which I recommend or you can turn it off. It just means that they won’t re-charge you. You can then choose your server region. So, depending on where you think most of your traffic is going to come from, you can choose the closest server. So I think most of my traffic will be from the United States so I’m going to leave it as United States. If I was doing an Australian website, I’d probably choose Hong Kong, because that’s closer to Australia and if I was doing somewhere in Europe, then I would obviously choose Europe. So, I’m going to say United States for that. Leave the Automatic Software Installation un-ticked. Don’t bother buying any of these upgrades at the moment, either. So just skip over all of that and then click Next.

Okay, so we’ll now come to this confirmation page and it basically just says, “Please review your order on the right side.” So we can just click, Place this Order. And then we’ll be redirected to the Make A Payment page. So we can choose our Paypal options. If we want, we can click Pay with Credit Card, which will take us to this credit card form. Or we can click Checkout with Paypal, and that’s going to take us to this form where we can continue to Pay with Paypal. We can then login and complete our payment with Paypal. You also have a bunch of other options down here; Google Wallet, Skrill, Amazon Payments, Paysafe, Bitcoin and basically just click these little arrows if you want to pay via these methods and then you can click the Pay with Amazon or whatever it may be.

Okay, so once you’ve finished checkout, you’ll then going to get an email. So you should receive an email like this one. Now, please, please, please keep this email. Don’t lose it. It’s going to be very important. Mostly we’re going to need this Domain Name Information for the next step and then we’re going to need the Control Panel Information to go ahead and setup your website.

Okay, so the next step we need to take has to do with this Domain Name Information. So we want to go back to godaddy.com. You then want to login to your account and then on the summary page, where it says Domains, you want to click launch. Now, I have a lot of different domains. Chances are, you’re only going to have 1. But where your domain is, just to the right of your domain, you can see this little down arrow. So we want to click on that and then we want to click Set Nameservers. That is what we want to click, Set Nameservers. Okay, so that will bring up this little pop-up menu. We want to click on the Custom option and then we want to click Enter customer nameservers. Now, going back to our email, we can see these first 2 domain servers, ns1.uria.arvixe.com.

Yours may be something different, but basically, we want to copy that and then we want to paste that one in as the first one and then we go back to our email and we’ll copy the second domain name server. And then we’ll paste that in as the second option. And we’re then going to click OK. We’re now going to click the Save button and that will now save our domain name servers.

Okay, so what is a name server? A name server is actually GoDaddy saying, “When someone types in podcastfast.com or yourdomain.com, actually send them to Arvixe. To the website that is hosted there.” So we’re actually telling them where our website is by setting those name servers. Otherwise, no website is going to come up. Now, for these name servers to change, we just change them but for them to actually change in the system, that can take up to 24 to 48 hours. So it can take up to 24 to 48 hours for your website to go live.

So the next step is to login to Arvixe and actually setup our website. So we scroll down in the email that we got from them to this Control Panel Information section and we want to find this Alternate Address and so we click on this Alternate Address. We then login using the username we chose as well as the password that we chose. Okay, so we’re now in the backend of our hosting. We’re going to get this little pop-up thing and we’re just going to click Don’t show this again. No thanks. I’m fine. You can go through and watch the tutorial if you want but I don’t recommend it so just click No, I’m fine. Thank you.

Okay, now we want to setup our website. And the good thing about Arvixe – and a lot of other hosts as well – is that they have software that actually can do it for you. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to scroll down and we’re going to look for this Softaculous Apps Installer. And we can see here Scripts and we can see WordPress. So, we want to click on WordPress.

WordPress is the backend of what we’re going to setup your site with. So, now we are at this WordPress section. What we need to click, is we need to click the Install button. Now we’re going to get a bunch of settings. The first thing we want to check is the Choose Your Domain. We want to make sure that we choose the right domain. For you, chances are, you’re probably only going to have the one domain. So it’s going to be easy. But for me, I have a few so I just make sure I choose podcastfast.com. And where it says In Directory, you want to clear this. So that way, it’ll appear directly on podcastfast.com, not podcastfast.com/wp or something like that. When it comes to Database Name, I recommend that you name it something like the name of your domain. I just think it’s easier if you just name it exactly the same as your domain without the “.com”, so “podcastfast”. That way, if you’re ever changing hosts of if ever need this database for any reason, then you know exactly which one it is. Table prefix, you can leave.

You can now put in some details. So you can put in your Site Name. So, for me, that’s podcastfast. Oh, here we go, “The database cannot be greater than 7 letters. Please choose a shorter name.” So I’m just going to make it “podcast”. We can then choose a description, so I’ll put, “The Faster Way to Podcast.” And now, down in this Admin section, we can choose a username and a password. We do not want to have “admin” as our username because that just opens you up to easier hacks, so just make sure you change it to either your name or something else. You then enter your password. And you can choose your Admin Email. So we’re going to setup the email in the next step but choose what you want it to be already. So, for me, it’s “ryan@podcastfast.com”. I’m going to show you how to set that up in the next step. We’re then going to scroll down, we can leave our language as English or you can change it if you want.

Where it says Select Plugins, we’ll skip that. Where it says Advanced Options, we’re going to dropdown on that and just click this Auto Upgrade there. So this will just auto upgrade you to the latest version of WordPress when it’s available. I don’t suggest using this Auto Upgrade WordPress Plugins or the Auto Upgrade Themes. Because if you ever edit any plugins or themes, this will auto upgrade them and then it’s going to stuff up your edits. So don’t do that. So that’s all we need for Advanced Options.

We can then select a theme, but I suggest we pass over this because I’m going to show you how to add themes in a later video. We then click Install and we can even put in our email address if we want to get details of our installation instructions, which I suggest you do. Send this to an email address that already exists, not the new one that you want to create. So for me, that’s “ryan@ryanmclean.net” and we click Install.

It’s now installing. As you can see, it’s says it may take a couple of minutes. Okay, so we can see that the installation has now been completed successfully. It says it’s been installed at podcastfast.com and your login url is “podcastfast/wp-admin”. Now, if I click on “podcastfast”, we can see that, well, actually, my website’s not there. And if we click on “podcastfast/wp-admin”, we can see that the page wasn’t even found. So, in this circumstance, what’s happened is my name servers haven’t changed over yet. As I said, they can take 24 to 48 hours.

Okay, so it took about 12 hours for my website to go live. Again, it can take up to 24 to 48 hours. When your website goes live, chances are you’re going to get this Status Alert: Domain Change Notification email from GoDaddy. And I’m just going to read it to you, it says:

Dear Ryan McLean,

This notification is generated automatically as a service to you. We have received a request that the name servers be changed for the following domain:

PODCASTFAST.COM

Basically, what this means is that your name servers have changed and they now point to Arvixe, to your web host, to your website. So it means your website should be live. So let’s give it a test. If we go podcastfast.com and click enter, there we go. We can see that my website is now live.

Now, it doesn’t look like much because in lesson number 7, I’m going to talk you through how you can make your website look awesome. And how you can edit your website and things like that. And as we go further on in the series, I’m going to talk through my entire podcasting workflow and how you can publish podcast inside your website and how you can set it up and everything like that.

But for now, I’ll just quickly show you inside the backend. So, to login to your backend, you go to yourdomain.com. For me, it’s “podcastfast.com” and then you do, “/wp-admin”. And that will bring you to the login page and that will bring you to this login page where you can enter your details and log in. We can see this W here, that stands for WordPress because we are using WordPress to create our website. It’s a free platform, it’s really powerful and I’m going to show you more how to use it in future episodes. So don’t be overwhelmed at the moment. This is what the inside looks like. After you login, we add new posts; we can add new pages and things like that. And we can go into the Appearance and Themes and make our website look awesome. But I’m not going to into it now, I just want to quickly show you this and in lesson number 7, we’ll go into this in some more detail.

Again, if you want the step-by-step instructions in pdf format that you can print or have on your computer, then go to podcastfast.com/setup in order to download those.

So that finishes “How to create a website for your podcast”. I hope that that was straightforward and easy for you to follow. I hope that you’ve got your website setup or your about to have your website setup. Don’t just podcast, podcastfast.

And if you’re enjoying this series, please help us out by giving us a 5-star review in iTunes. It really helps us get to the front of iTunes and get seen by more people. We would really appreciate it. Go to podcastfast.com/love, L-O-V-E, to see how to do that or to share the Start a Podcast series on your social media channels. Thank you so much to everyone who has left reviews. We really appreciate it; we couldn’t be doing this without you guys. Love you so much and until next time, don’t just podcast, podcastfast. Okay, my singing is terrible, but you know what I mean. Go out there, do it, smash it, podcastfast.

2 Comments

  1. Hi Ryan,
    I stumbled across your podcast and decided to give a listen. It was very informative and helpful. I was fearful about trying to set up my own podcast website but your video helped me through it and I did it! I will be watching the next video on how to set up and an awesome website so I can launch the first episode of my podcast. I’m excited! Thank you!

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