Turn Your Site into a Podcast Player with Elfsight
As indie podcasters, we dream of getting lots of downloads from the big podcast players like Spotify and Apple. Other podcast players like Castro or Pocket Casts would also be more than welcome.
But what if I told you that you can be one of your biggest sources of downloads. That’s right, YOU!
If you have a website, you have a potential podcast player. I’m not just talking about an episode page or an embeded player on a page. The whole site!
We’ve accomplished this for “The 80s and 90s Uncensored” podcast on our site, the80sand90s.com. We’ve turned all page views for our site into potential listens.
Here’s how.
We use the Podcast Player tool from Elfsight.
The Elfsight Podcast Player has multiple website players to choose from, with examples of how they look on a page each customizable to become a seamless and engaging part of your website.
Once you’ve customized your Elfsight Podcast Player, its easy to install on your whole site, or individual pages (if you are able to inject code on your site or individual page headers). For example, our podcast player is installed on all pages of the80sand90s.com. Yet, its only installed on one page, the Podasts page, for milodenison.com.
How Do You Know It Works?
How much a web player will increase your downloads depends a lot on how much traffic your website gets. Most of our traffic for the80sand90s.com is driven from Google for searches on our blog articles. We work hard to get written content out there for the search engines. However, each reader becomes a potential listener, at least one time for our current episode.
In addition to seeing how many downloads you have on the Elfisght dashboard, here’s more proof from our own experience that this can work for sites with fair traffic.
Our Download Stats
Here are our top platforms for downloads for the 80s and 90s Uncensored for the last year:
Web Browsers - 38%
Podbean - 31%
iHeartRadio - 13%
Apple Podcasts - 5%
Spotify - 4%
An aggregation of browsers (Chrome 21%, Safari 10%. Firefox 4% and Edge 3%) make up our biggest player as a total of 38%. While not all of that may come from our player, we believe most does. Here’s a specific example as proof of why this is true:
Our most downloaded podcast episode of all time is called, “Disposable Cameras Retrospective”. That’s right, a filler episode all about disposable cameras beats out everything else to date. But there’s a story behind this.
The disposable cameras episode was published the week of April 10, 2023. During that week, someone posted a link to our short article about the Etch A Sketch Animator in an animation geeks forum on Hacker News and caused a huge spike in web traffic to that article. Because our player was up on any page, we also got a spike in the number of listens!
the80sand90s.com page views trend for first half of 2023. Notice the pageview spike in April when “Disposable Cameras Retrospective” podcast was published.
So, an article published in April 2021 about a toy, posted in an animator’s forum two years later in April 2023, made such that our podcast episode about disposable cameras became our highest-volume episode to date. And while many of those animation geeks might not be repeat listeners, maybe some are, and that’s a win.
The point here is that any efforts you have for getting pageviews to your site translates directly to viable downloads of potential long-time listeners! So, if you have access to adding code snippets to your site our page headers, why not take control of your podcasting destiny and make your own site or page a player itself? You can start free, so there’s nothing to lose! Some further things to consider:
The free version of the Elfsight allows for up to 200 downloads a month and has Elfight branding. If you need more traffic, the basic is only $4 when paid annually and gives you 5000 views and up to three different widgets. Its worth it if you have the traffic! See pricing.
I suggest not having the player play automatically on page load. These are ultimately “fake” listens and can be pretty annoying. Allow the page view to play on their own so you can count it as a “real” play.
Choose a player that you like for your site and customize it to fit your site’s design and branding.
If you want a walkthrough of the Elfsight Podcast Player, or need some help customizing and installing it on your website, get with us!
