The launch of the site has been going really well. So far, over 1,000 votes have been cast! It’s gotten a great reception over at /r/podcasts and support from many podcasters with great ideas. I’ve also picked the first Podcast of the Month. Click here to checkout that announcement. On this post, I’d like to share some tips and upcoming features I’m working on.

Tips:

  • Category ranking – The home page shows an overall ranking but each category shows individual rankings just for that category. You can still get great exposure by ranking high for a category even if you don’t have enough votes to rank high on the home page.
  • Create a redirect for your fans – Create a redirect on your website to your Podcast Land page so it’s easier for your listeners to find your page on Podcast Land and vote. For instance, let’s say your website is example.com You can ask your fans to visit example.com/podcastland or example.com/vote That URL will be a redirect you create on your site to send people to your page on Podcast Land. That should be easier than telling them to visit PodcastLand.com and then searching for your show.

Upcoming features:

  • Highlight previous top podcasts on category pages – Right now, only the Podcast of the Month is highlighted throughout the site. I’d like to also highlight the previous month’s top podcast on the individual category pages.
  • Feature Random Podcasts – I know that not everyone can get enough votes to break the Top 5 and the whole point of this site is to help smaller podcasts get attention. So, I’d like to feature more podcasts throughout the site, beyond the Podcast of the Month. The idea is to have a section of the site feature a random podcast which has received at least 5 votes. I figure, anyone who’s participating should be able to get at least 5 votes and that helps narrow down the number of podcasts to feature from over 200,000 to just a few hundred. It’ll keep the list of podcasts featured relevant and interesting.
  • More subscription options – Right now, listeners have the option to subscribe via iTunes or use the RSS feed. I’d like to add more links that’ll make it easy for listeners to subscribe through other podcast players like Short Orange.
  • Top podcasts of the year – Podcasters have asked me to keep an overall vote count for top podcasts so I’m going to create a Podcast of the Year page for 2013 and then later for 2014 and so on. Those pages will rank podcasts based on total votes received each month.
  • Better breakdown of categories – I’d like to include keywords & tags for each podcast so categories will have more sub-categories and genres. This feature is a tough one to implement and will probably take a while to code but it’s something that would improve podcast discovery.

Many of these and other ideas came from the launch announcement of Podcast Land on the reddit.com/r/podcasts post. If you’re on reddit, I suggest you subscribe to that sub and join the conversation with me and other podcasters and fans.

Thanks to all the podcast hosts and listeners who participated so far. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me but I’m excited to get started knowing there’s a great group of people who enjoy the site!