Speaker 1: Hey, Lane Sebring here. If you are looking at starting a podcast and you're searching for where to host it, this video is for you. I've been on Buzzsprout as my host for about three and a half months with a brand new podcast. I've done 15 episodes and a few bonus episodes, so I feel like I've learned this hosting platform quite a bit. I wanna take you inside of it, show you around, and maybe this will help you decide if Buzzsprout is right for your podcast. If you do decide to go with Buzzsprout as your host, you can use my link below. That's an affiliate link, which means it helps support this channel. But also, there's something in it for you. When you choose a paid plan on Buzzsprout, you get a $20 Amazon gift card as a way to say thank you from me and Buzzsprout for using my link. So again, that's down below. And so with that, let's dive in and I wanna show you around. So the podcast, like I said, has been out since November 5th. I did a little trailer on October 8th, and then I released it on November 5th. And you can see that it's not like getting tons of downloads yet. It is also on YouTube, and so some of the views, some of the downloads, I guess, come from YouTube, but that's not recorded here. This is just the audio that's downloaded. So the way that this works is I have the three-hour plan, which means I can upload up to three hours of content per month, and that's $12 a week. And what I find is that works for me pretty well because my podcast episodes, you can see they're 45, 45, 40, 57, 48, but it's enough for me to get what I need in there, and once it resets, it just resets. When I need to upload a new episode, I just go here. It's super simple. Click Choose a File to Upload, and I can drop an MP3 in there, and it's super simple to do. They also have these podcast players, which I can add to my website. I can just embed this little cookie, and I can just embed the code, and it will just drop into my website, and that's super easy as well. They also provide a website if you want it. I refer people to this if I want to just give a quick, easy, direct link to the podcast. This is the one that I send just because it's just easy to do, and it takes them straight to Buzzsprout, and then from there, they can easily listen on Apple, Spotify, Google, and other places like that. You can also put social media links, the website URL. You can hide it from search engines, which I don't know why you would do that. That's probably not a good idea if you want people to actually find your podcast. The directories, this is where you get listed on the different directories. I did Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcast. The 95% of podcast downloads are gonna come from these three. They are the big players, with Apple still being number one. I went ahead and did Amazon Music, and I went ahead and did Pocket Cast. I requested a few of these others, but sometimes they just take a while. That has nothing to do with Buzzsprout. It's just you submit to iHeartRadio, for example. They check out your podcast. They get back with you, and then you're approved to be listed. But that just takes as long as it takes, and that's kind of out of my hands. But the ones that are the most responsive and the ones that matter the most are these top three. They even have a section here where you can keep track of sponsors. My podcast doesn't have an official sponsor. I may or may not ever do that. My business model's a little bit different. What I want is for people to listen to the episode and download my free lead magnet straight from my website, which then dumps them into my welcome sequence, which provides value and offers them to buy my course. So I don't really need a sponsor. The only way that I would do this is if the podcast audience just got so large that it would make a lot of sense to monetize it. But you can find sponsors here with Podcorn, and it's pretty easy just to kind of go in here and take the steps. What I love about Buzzsprout is it's such a easy, simple interface that you can see here where it just walks you through just step-by-step, very clean, very easy, do this, then do this, then do this, boom, you've got it. There's an affiliate marketplace where you can just kind of get the affiliate relationships that you want. For example, I'm an affiliate with Buzzsprout, and like I said, if you sign up using my link and you go to a paid account, you get the $20 Amazon card, and I get a $25 commission. So it's a win-win both for you and for me. You can also add a support the show link like Patreon or Podfan or Cash App where people can support you directly. Podcast settings are super easy. You just put in the info, the artwork, and you're good to go on that. And then of course, they've got really good stats. So all time, I've had 1,920 downloads in the last three months, and then I can look at like 30 days, I can look at the last seven days, and of course, like I said, all time. And then I can look at each episode. It even has a predictor where it will kind of forecast what my next episode should get. And I like this, it lets me know who's coming from where. So 48% of my listens are coming from Apple, another 10% from my Buzzsprout site, you can see, and it goes on from there. So overall, I really like it. The only thing that has ever been kind of an issue is that I have the three-hour-a-month plan. And when I first started, I recorded a lot of episodes before I ever even started. So I had a lot of episodes on Backlog, and I wanted to upload all of them, but I couldn't. And I had plenty of time to do it because I only release a show once a week. What I had to do was just kind of hold off on those later episodes until it cycled to another month and I could upload them. But I never missed an upload every single Thursday. It never was an actual issue. It just bothered me that I couldn't just do it. I could always have upgraded the plan, but I didn't want to pay more than what I was already paying. So I would highly recommend Buzzsprout. Like I said on my other video, I used to use Libsyn for my last podcast, which is a really popular podcast hosting platform. And it was kind of the industry standard for a long time, but it is clunky and confusing. And the website is so dated compared to this. Like this is just simple. It's like, this is the way podcast hosting should be. It's easy. It makes it very simple for you. So you can focus on creating episodes, uploading them, and then moving on with your life, like doing the things that you want to do to grow your show or work on your YouTube channel or do the other things that you want to do besides messing around with making your podcast episodes tagged correctly and all this kind of stuff. It does so many things automatically that I felt like Libsyn made you kind of recreate the will every time you were going in to make an episode. So I highly recommend Buzzsprout. If you want more information on the gear that I use to podcast, like this mic and this arm and things like that, you can check out this video right here, which is my complete setup guide. And again, if you want to see how to set up Buzzsprout, check out this video right here, and I'll see you in the next video.