Stop! Don’t Upload That Picture to Your Media Host!

Picture this.

You release a new podcast episode, but instead of drawing your audience in with dynamic visuals, all the formatting distortions leave your show notes looking like a digital minefield.

What if there was a way to captivate and engage your audience without risking the chaos?

Today, I unveil the myth of images and show notes and explore why moving them to your website might just be the secret to a beautifully polished podcast experience.

Welcome to your podcast consultant, small lessons with big value.

With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this hall of fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author, and mentor to thousands.

Now, he wants to work with you.

He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, and that is true, and there's a place for them.

And I want to start off by reminding you in case you're new.

I worked in podcasting tech support at Libsyn, the oldest podcast media host, for eight years.

I've been in podcasting for 20, and I've seen people make mistakes over and over and over.

And so today, I'm going to talk about putting images into your show notes.

Now, what I mean by that is because this is one of those words that's a little blurry.

I'm talking about you're going into your media host, whoever that might be, Libsyn, you know, Buzzsprout, Blueberry, Captivate, Red Circle, whoever, and you're putting in images into your episode notes.

Now, that information is syndicated to all of the apps.

Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartrad, and some of those know what to do with images.

And many of them kind of get a little confused.

There is a post.

I'll put a link to it in the show notes.

About 17 different apps, and they all display things differently.

Yeah, it's frustrating.

If you really want it to look consistent across everywhere, it's almost impossible.

So with that in mind, I recommend people stick to formatting.

That's as creative as you get in the show notes.

Now, I'm not talking about what appears on your website.

I'm talking about what you start with.

And so these are things like headings and bullets and numbered lists and italics and bold formatting things left, right and center.

And even that gets a little squirrely.

Stick to formatting things.

That way you'll have a much better chance of your episode description, show notes looking consistent when it goes to the apps.

So with that in mind, just sticking with formatting and saying.

And that may not be entirely consistent.

Now throw on top of that.

Okay, I'm going to Insert some images into my episode description, and then it goes to all the apps.

That's just where I go.

It's not gonna break anything except the way it looks in some cases.

And I'm just running into a whole bunch of people that are doing this, and I'm like, wait, I need to, like, get the word out that I do not.

This is not what I would call a podcasting best practice.

And I get it.

You're a travel show, you're a cooking show.

You're a show that talks about dogs or whatever it is, and you're like, hey, I need to show that this is what it looked like after we did this thing.

Totally get that.

The best place for it is on your website.

And what I think some people are missing is this is a great piece of bait to put in front of people, because somebody's listening.

Let's just say you do a travel show and you're talking about your trip to Italy, and you're talking about being on a gondola and going through all the.

Going through Venice and all these amazing pictures and sunsets that you saw.

Well, you can kind of describe those, but you're really kicking in the theater of the mind.

And the people that are like, man, I wish I was there when you say, oh, you can go to my website and see these images.

The people that really want to see this, the people that you've really sucked in, the people that you've hooked in, are going to want to see those pictures.

And most of the time, we want people to go to our website because that's where all the really good calls to action are.

Join my newsletter contact, leave me a voicemail, buy my stuff, donate, join Patreon.

That's easier to do on the website.

And then they might actually share it.

When they're on the website, they're like, oh, my friend Carol would love this.

And they share it.

That boosts your SEO.

So you're missing the boat by trying to put the images into your media host and have them syndicated.

Put them where you want people to end up, which is on your website.

Because when you talk about these images, let's do one.

Over the weekend, I lost power, and a tree branch fell very close to landing on my car.

And if you want to see a picture of that along with my special license plate, now, I'm not going to tell you what that is.

That's called a brain gap.

And there's some people like, wait, I got to know what Dave's license plate is.

Because he said it was special.

Well, you're going to go to the website.

Now, if you're using something like PodPage, or if you're using some sort of system that allows you to do this, this is episode number 202.

So go to podcastconsultant.com and you can see that image.

And you always want to be putting that link into your media host when it asks you, you know, where do you want to send people?

Put the link to this episode.

Now, I know because I'm using PodPage, and because I know this is episode 202, that PodPage is automatically going to make that link for me.

Podcastconsultant.com 202 pretty handy.

Have fun looking at my license plate.

Now, you might be going, ah, but Dave, I use PodPage.

I can't plan my episodes ahead of time.

I can't put this together.

Okay, you're right.

Here's another way, and it's actually even better.

Stick with the formatting, the bullet list, the numbers, the bold, the italics.

Put that into your show notes and write a blog on your website.

The blog is just a.

Mmm.

Google goes, oh, look, good words.

I love.

I don't know why Google is Italian.

I love the good words.

I guess because we're talking about Venice.

Look at all of the good words.

And then you can add your images there.

And when you do that, be sure to add alt text to it so that your friends who are sight impaired know that that's a picture of the gondola in Venice.

Right?

And that's also better for SEO.

Now, you can schedule that blog post to come out on the same day as your episode.

And because you know the URL, right, the address of the episode.

So in this case, it's podcastconsultant.com 202.

I can put a link to that ahead of time in the blog post.

And because you wrote the blog post ahead of time, you can get the URL to that and put it in the show notes so that you've got the episode pointing at the blog post that has the images.

You've got the blog post pointing at the episode.

You've got your show notes, like your actual media host, pointing at the show notes.

They all point at each other.

You've got people on your website, when they go there to look at the images, they're like, wow, look at those.

Those are beautiful.

They might actually share them with someone again, which will boost your SEO.

It will also keep people on your website longer, which will boost your SEO.

And when you don't have images in your media host show notes.

That's what I'm going to call those.

You have less likely chances of just horking.

That's the technical term.

You just horked it your formatting in your show notes.

So for me, that's how I handle it.

I've just seen people really again, they don't completely break.

It just looks really bad when you add images to your media host show notes.

And these are the kind of things that trip up podcasters because they just don't know what they don't know.

And those are the things I can help you eliminate and avoid.

Think all the headaches I'm going to help you avoid.

If you want unlimited consulting, join me over@schoolofpodcasting.com join use the coupon code listnr when you sign up and get access to unlimited consulting.

That's one on one by the way with me, not a team member, as well as all my courses and my amazing community.

I'm Dave Jackson.

I help podcasters.

It's what I do.

Been doing it for 20 years and I can't wait to see what we're going to do together.

It.