How to "Park" your Podcast with Free Hosting

Cancel your paid hosting and “park” your podcast with a free service. Your show stays online forever, for free, so new people can keep discovering it - just without the monthly cost.

Transcript:

This video could save you hundreds of dollars a year on podcast hosting

Here at Papa Podcasting, we're big fans of Simple Cast. For podcast hosting

It connects easily with all the major podcasting platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And it works well with teams where you might wanna give different users different levels of access.

and with plans starting at US $15 a month,

we think it's well worth the price.

What about once you've stopped producing new episodes?

you produced a series of 10 or 20 episodes and you're ready to move on to other things,

But the show is still being discovered by new people.

And you can see by your analytics that say 500 people are finding it and listening each month.

if you stop paying your monthly hosting fees,

you'll lose that audience.

But a year of hosting adds up

and how long should you keep paying for it

to keep the show online? Five years, 10 years?

this is where podcast parking comes in.

Cancel your paid hosting and park your show with a free service.

Your show stays online forever for free, so new people can keep discovering it just without the monthly cost.

So what's the catch? And why not start podcasting with a free host? Right?

Well, paid hosting companies like Simple Cast offer a lot of perks that free hosts can't match.

I can't cover all the differences here, but here are the top three trade offs when switching to a free hosting plan.

Free hosting is paid through advertising,

so ads may be played before, after, or during your content.

there won't be any access levels for different team members. On free hosting,

you'll get a single login and you'll have to share the password to give access to others.

The analytics free hosting companies provide may be less complete than those provided by paid plans.

You'll still know roughly the size of your audience, but you may lose out on some of the finer details about them.

It's because of these trade offs that we always recommend paid hosting to our podcasting clients.

once your show's no longer being actively produced, these sacrifices may be worth it to stop paying the monthly fees.

So how does podcast parking work?

The details will vary a little bit depending on the hosting company you're leaving and which one you choose to park your show with.

But these basics are the same.

First, you'll sign up with the new free hosting company and provide the show's RSS feed url.

This allows them to download all your episodes, your artwork, title, description, everything about your old show.

Next we'll log into our old hosting company and provide the new hosts ours feed URL to redirect our old audience to the new host.

now you'll wanna hang on to your old hosting plan for about 30 days to make sure your audience is properly redirected.

Finally, you can cancel your old hosting service, potentially saving hundreds of dollars.

The two free hosting services we recommend are Anchor and Red Circle

anchor is owned by Spotify. So they're the heavy hitter here.

But Red Circle comes highly recommended and it's been around for years.

You really can't go wrong either way.

Let's take a look at a quick example of migrating a podcast from Simple Cast to red Circle.

Okay. So let's look at this quick example of bringing our podcast from our paid service provider, simple cast to a new, uh, free hosting provider. Red circle.

So first we're gonna log into our dashboard for simple cast here. and the first thing we wanna do is download our analytics. So the number of people who have listened to our podcast, where they're from, distribution, by episodes, all that stuff are things that are not gonna be migrated from our old hosting provider to our new one.

So if we want that historical data, we need to grab it. because we're gonna close this simple cast account and then we'll no longer have access to those, uh data. So we'll go into view analytics and this may vary depending on your, hosting provider, but in simple cast, you can go to the different types of reports and there's a download button.

one thing to keep in mind is that we want to always. Choose the maximum date range. So I'm gonna switch that from the last week to all time. And once that data populates, you can press the download button and it's gonna send an email to my registered email with that report information. So we can download also our top episodes list and the number of downloads.

They got the different listening methods breakdown. Time of day that people listen downloads by location. This one you can change to all time and see the map of where people are listening and press the download button. And then finally, our top countries press the download button there too. We wanna have all that information saved because we're closing this account and we won't be able to access it again in the future after we've done.

We're gonna go into our podcast settings distribution, and then this RSS feed URL is the main thing we need to complete the import over to red circle. So we'll go copy that, that copies it into our clipboard.

So once we've got that copied, we're gonna head over to red circle.com and sign up for their free plan. We're gonna go to I'm a podcaster not sure get started with our free core plan. That's the free plan that we want. I'll put in my details here. And we will pick a password. and we'll create our account. Now it says welcome to red circle, starting a new podcast. No, we're importing our existing podcasts. So we'll click, uh, import your show. and actually we can get all the information we want to bring in from our old RSS feed. So, even not sure about your podcast name, enter RSS feed.

So we'll start with the RSS feed. We'll paste that in. I certify that I own the rights to this podcast and we'll click import. So just that simple cast feed URL, we've brought it in. looks like it's found our artwork. It's found our description, and our podcast title. So that's great. And we can see it's, uh importing and processing those episodes so now it says your import was successful. To complete the switch, redirect your podcast. So we'll click here and it actually gives you great instructions here. So select your hosting service. It actually already detected that I was on simple cast and it selected that. So here are the instructions log into your simple cast dashboards, show distribution, advanced settings, RSS feed, redirect, and then paste in your new RSS feed URL from red circle.

and this is it. So I'm gonna copy that into the clipboard. head back to simple cast. We're already in distribution. We'll go to advanced settings RSS feed redirect. And so you can see this is a permanent redirect, that we can use, if we want to delete our podcast from simple cast, so we'll paste in the redirect URL.

and from there we can press save.

Okay. We'll head back to red circle now, and we want to verify that it worked.

So this might not work at first, but if we give it a few minutes, we can click verify redirect, and we'll see successfully redirected popup podcasting. Okay. So the final few steps that you need to do to migrate your podcast from your paid host to your free host in this case, red circle, uh, is to confirm all the distribution settings. So you can go into distribution here in red circle. if you're already in apple podcasts and Stitcher and ALO music and all of these.

Go through the steps listed under each one to say, either I'm already on Stitcher or set up a new, hosting on Stitcher, but these are all the main podcast distribution channels. So we wanna make sure we're in those, for this podcast, we were listed in, in all of these to begin with. So, we can just go through and, and provide our link.

There are some. Slightly more involved, uh, instructions for Spotify. So make sure that you're, looking into those. Ensuring that your podcast migrates over properly, now we have our podcast on a free platform. We can add new episodes here in red circle, and they'll go to all of our existing subscribers on all of the platforms that we're already hosted on.

 When our existing subscribers go to. If there are new episodes, that simple cast, redirect that we put in they'll head to simple cast first, they'll hit the re redirect and be redirected over to red circle. And we want to keep our simple cast account open for a little bit, just to allow time for those people to check the old feed and be redirected to the new feed. it's recommended you keep your simple cast account open for 30 days, So I'd recommend just setting your calendar a 30 day reminder to say, go back and cancel my old paid service. Now that 30 days have passed since I've successfully, uh, imported my podcast to the new free provider. And that's how you park your podcast on a free provider.

and like I said, you can still update with new episodes when the time comes, you just do so through your new provider.

That's all there is to it. Follow these steps and you'll have switched from your paid podcast host to a free one.

And if you ever wanna switch again, just follow these basic steps. Again,

Thanks for watching, like, and subscribe for more tips like these from popup podcasting.