System Made Simple saved over 5+ hours a week on their weekly episode workflow!

Before Podpage

Before Podpage, our weekly episode workflow was in a word, TIME-CONSUMING. Not only did we have to create, record, edit, and publish each episode, we also had to write and manually optimize every single set of episode show notes, show descriptions, page titles, and transcripts for SEO. But wait, we're not done! Then we had to create a new blog page on Squarespace for every episode (!!), upload the episode information, add the optimized copy, embed the player link for the audio, create and add images, make sure everything was linked properly, add header tags and optimize the back-end blog page settings, hit publish... and cross our fingers that everything would render properly and we wouldn't have to go back and make edits. (Don't ask us how we managed for so long -- it was pretty brutal). Then there was always the human-error factor working against us; if we updated something on our podcast host (Buzzsprout) and forgot to update it on our website (Squarespace), it was nothing short of disaster.

We pride ourselves on attention to detail here within our company, but man — our OG podcast workflow was intense and easily took us 10+ hours every week to execute top to bottom (and yes, we even lost employees because the workload was "too detailed" and "too much" for the average person). We knew our SEO efforts would pay off, and that maintaining a podcast blog on our site was a great way to drive traffic (in fact, our domain authority increased by roughly 15+ points during the year we had our podcast blog hosted on our Squarespace site) but progress still felt slow and many days we scratched our heads and wondered, "is this all more trouble than it's worth?"

Then, thanks to a tip from one of our podcast students inside our podcasting program, the skies parted, angels sang, and we discovered Podpage: the solution to all the podcasting problems that kept us awake at night (no, seriously).

At first, we were skeptical: could something that automated and simplified our workflow the way Podpage claimed they would REALLY be the solution? It felt too good to be true... but pinch me, because it is.

Podpage is nothing short of a miracle worker in the realm of podcasting.

The first thing we did was choose one of the sharp-looking templates (which, to our surprise, we found out, were SO EASY to customize and make it our own! #doublewin) Next, we added our RSS feed and clicked "add podcast." We held our breath... would it really pull over our entire RSS feed and populate it into episode pages with one click? The spinning gear bar kept us in suspense, but only for a minute — VOILA, our entire year's worth of podcast episodes (and all that time, energy, effort, and sweat equity we'd spent manually creating this before on Squarespace) and there it was, right before our very eyes. Looking just as sharp as we'd expected, no less (and way more professional-looking than what we had before on Squarespace!)

I personally had my doubts as to whether Podpage would provide me the same depth and detail I was looking for in terms of SEO - after all, we'd worked hard to improve our google rankings and I didn't want to lose what we'd built. But after a quick email to Podpage support, Podpage founder Brenden himself messaged me back with a detailed response — on a holiday weekend no less! — to help achieve what I was looking to do in terms of SEO.

Flashback to that old episode workflow — all it is now thanks to Podpage is a quick weekly check to make sure the episode imported properly and a custom link-tweak to optimize our episode slugs for SEO. Hit save, and done!

This was all back at the end of 2020, when we first became Podpage users. The endless user improvements, updates, enhancements, and high-touch customer support has only continued surprising and delighting us ever since!