What’s the best URL you can send someone to subscribe to a podcast?

The best one URL, that is.

That’s tricky.

For ShopTalk Show, I could give you an Apple Podcasts link, that’s a pretty popular choice:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shoptalk/id493890455

But not everybody uses Apple Podcasts. You’ve got your Pocket Casts people, your Overcast people, your Spotify people…

https://pca.st/shoptalk

https://overcast.fm/itunes493890455

https://open.spotify.com/show/2PUoQB330ft0sTzSNoCPrH

… and a lonnnnggg taiillllll of others. Most of which have their own URL they’d love for you to use. That leads to the pile-o-buttons approach:

That’s not terrible, but that’s a decent amount of onus on every individual podcast to maintain the everchanging pile.

I’m gonna say the right answer here is Plink.

I’ve seen some other options, but they are provided by companies that have some clear skin in getting you to use their own podcasting hosting or analytics or whatnot. What I like about Plink is that it’s indie software that just has this one job to do. Your satisfaction as a podcast maker is their incentive.

So you sign up for a podcast and get a page like this:

So that’s one URL you can send people to. Nice.

But one step cooler, you get a “smart link”. Here’s ShopTalk:

https://plinkhq.com/i/493890455

That works some kinda magic on mobile devices that automatically opens the podcast in whatever podcast app they have installed (and perhaps prefer? not sure where the magic stops). Double nice.