Why Every Podcast Should Use JumpLinks

By Michael Peloquin

Aug. 17, 2021

Introduction

Over the last 2 years, I have been producing a podcast with a friend of mine called Tell Me What You Know. Like 99% of you, our audience is small. But that doesn’t mean we enjoy it any less or that our group of listeners isn’t as engaged. But, in my time podcasting, a unique problem emerged that I haven’t heard many podcasters discuss: external links.

The topics we cover span the spectrum of people’s interests and often lead to interesting (hopefully) conversations. But these conversations usually include one of us asking, “have you seen this?”, “do you remember this video”, or “I recently read an article”. As a listener, we know this isn’t the most interesting conversation and creates a desire to go find this for themselves.

The common call to action is either: “Google X” or “we’ll put a link in the episode notes”. Now, I think either of these solutions are perfectly fine. They CAN help listeners find URLs. But they feel like empty gestures or something I say to move on to my point. I admit, I often forget (I’m lazy) to do robust episode notes. These links are sorta like citations. And everyone always hated having to do citations. It was always the worst part of a research paper.

But I realize that these links are VALUABLE. This is my chance to engage with my audience when they are engaging with the episode. Someone is listening and they are so interested that they take action to look something up and learn more.

That’s why I wanted to create JumpLink. A fun way for us to create easy to remember keywords that our listeners can use to navigate to what we want them to see. And it creates an opportunity for us to create a relationship with our listeners, something I have found difficult to do with such a passive medium.

Make it Easier

Sharing URLs, or anything, should be easy on your podcast. But URLs, unless they are really simple, are not meant for humans. They are meant for machines. Just giving people a URL can make your audience feel overwhelmed especially if your age demographic is over 40. And over the last several years, people have branched out from “.com” to use many variations. This is fine because people usually rely on Google to search for something and then navigate to it.

JumpLinks are easy to remember keywords or phrases. They don’t have to be one word. They don’t need to be unique (they need to be unique to your podcast, though). In our early uses, we try and make them sorta funny or similar to what you would Google.

Being able to drop a JumpLink became a part of our show. It was fun to be creative and give people a simple keyword or phrase that enticed people to go find it. This felt like a big upgrade over the usual “we’ll leave a link in the notes” or “just Google...X”. And we heard from our listeners that this was a more seamless way to tell them to go to a specific website.

Engagement

One of the difficult things about podcasting for creators is that podcasts by their nature are passive mediums. People can listen to them when they want and they can decide to reach out or not. JumpLinks offer a way to see what content people are engaging with to learn more about. You can track the number of jumps so you can see which ones are your most popular.

When people use a jumplink, it gives you a perfect time to create a call to action to subscribe, leave a rating or review, follow you on social media, or join your newsletter. Timing these calls to action can be difficult but with JumpLinks it gives you an obvious time to ask for your audiences engagement.

Monetization

JumpLinks help you monetize your podcast by giving you an easy to track metric that let’s you charge based on performance. If an advertiser is hesitant to proceed with you because your audience seems small or isn’t sure about the CPM rate, a cost-per-click model can be just what they need to see to judge their return on investment. The influence podcasters have on their audiences is extremely strong and effective. JumpLinks let you show your advertise that their dollars are driving traffic to where it needs to go. This allows you to negotiate for a better rate or a revenue share of marginal sales based on your success.

As a company, we are actively trying to find advertisers who will pay for JumpLinks. We help advertisers reach out to podcasters to start campaigns with JumpLinks. So, if you join, we offer your audience and influence in our pitches to advertisers. We charge between $.50-$50 per click depending on the podcast, advertisers, and the niche. Even small audiences have the potential to generate good revenue based on conversions.

Conclusion

We’re just getting started at JumpLink. We launched in July 2021 and we are constantly improving and innovating on the product to make it more useful, a better experience, and something podcasters can use to monetize their podcasts. We want to hear from you about what you like or what you want to see improved.