One link to the podcast — all platforms under one address

Tuesday morning, fresh episode uploaded, coffee still warm. You sit down to write a post and suddenly you're facing the same wall as always. "Listen on Spotify." And those with an iPhone? "It's also on Apple Podcasts." And that guy who watches everything on YouTube? You add a third link. In Stories, only one will fit anyway. In your Instagram bio, only one too. And you get the feeling that every time you are rewriting the same thing, just slightly differently.

And now count how many of your listeners use an app that you haven't just pasted.

This is exactly the whole point why one link to a podcast makes sense: one address leading to everything at once.

Your episode lives in five places at once

The same episode is available in parallel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Pocket Casts. In addition, there is an RSS feed and a page with a transcript. This is not an error. That is simply how podcast distribution works, and it's good that it works this way.

The stairs begin at the promotion.

• In your Instagram bio, you get one slot. One.
• In a newsletter or on a business card, you can't paste five URLs next to each other, because it looks like a ransom note.
• The guest of the episode wants to share the conversation on their own platform. They will send the link that you gave them. If you gave them five, they will send one, random one.
• And in a month, you'll change your hosting and all the old addresses will go to the grave.

You can buy a "smart link" for this for about 15 dollars per month. The thing is, such a service adds its own branding to every click and, in the process, profiles the people who click. Your people. Why bother, when one short address that belongs to You is enough?

One address, a simple page, the rest under control

The idea is banal. You create a landing page with buttons for each platform and direct one short address to it. Static HTML on your own hosting, a ready-made template, anything. The important thing is that the address is short and branded, for example cutty.dev/podcast.

And here is the catch, the good kind. You set this address once. You plug it in everywhere. Bio, email signature, flyer, website header. And the destination it leads to, you can change whenever you want, without touching anything that has already been released into the world.

cutty.dev/podcast   →   landing z przyciskami:
                        • Spotify
                        • Apple Podcasts
                        • YouTube
                        • RSS / wszystkie inne

If you are promoting a specific episode, give it its own suffix: cutty.dev/ep42 or cutty.dev/wywiad-nowak. The listener immediately knows where they are landing, and you have order instead of a random string of characters after the slash. You type the suffix yourself, so it can be read aloud within the episode itself. "Go to cutty dot dev slash ep forty two." In a podcast, this is worth its weight in gold, because half of your promotion happens through voice, not text.

Replaceable target saves your ass in three moments

It sounds like a trifle that one address leads here once and there another time. In practice, it specifically saves you here:

1. Hosting migration. You are moving your podcast from Anchor elsewhere. All platform URLs change. But your cutty.dev/podcast stays the same; you only change the destination underneath. Business cards distributed a year ago still work.
2. Latest episode. You keep a permanent cutty.dev/nowy, which always points to the freshest material. Once a week you change the destination, and the link in your bio sleeps peacefully.
3. Mistake. You pasted a link directly to Spotify in your newsletter, but you wanted it to go to a redirector. With a short link, you can change the destination even after sending. With a raw URL to the platform, you can't change anything, because it has flown to a thousand inboxes forever.

QR Code, i.e., a bridge from the physical world

You are recording live. You are standing at a booth at a conference. You are setting up a roll-up for an industry meeting. A printed QR code leading to cutty.dev/podcast turns every physical contact into a potential listener. You generate it from the same short link, so when you change the destination, the code still works. You don't have to reprint materials. The same trick will work on a slide closing a presentation or on a laptop sticker.

Numbers yes, spying no

Want to know if the newsletter performs better than Stories. A short link gives you the number of clicks and that's it. It doesn't build a profile of the person who clicked. In my case, IPs are hashed, servers are located in the EU, and you see dry aggregates: how many clicks, roughly from where. This is completely enough to decide where to put your energy, and at the same time, you don't create an account for anyone or trade their data.

A little trick that I use myself. Create a separate endpoint for each promotion channel: cutty.dev/ep42-news, cutty.dev/ep42-ig, all with the same destination. From the click numbers alone, you can immediately see which channel is working, and the recipient is not tracked even by a single pixel. Zero tracking on their side.

Five minutes of work

Specifically, step by step, so there is no doubt:

1. Create a simple landing page with links to platforms. Or use a feed you already have.
2. Shorten the address to a branded suffix, for example cutty.dev/podcast. You can do this on cutty.dev in a moment.
3. Put this one link in your bio, email signature, channel description, and business card.
4. Generate a QR code for printing.
5. With every premiere, you only move the target. The rest stays where it was.

And that is the whole philosophy. One address that you say out loud in an episode, scan from a roll-up, and which won't die when changing hosting. The only question is how many old links you have already distributed to the world before reading this.