I’ve recently migrated from Anchor to Podbean for my podcast, Never Mind The Bar Charts. Here are some tips that I’ve learnt along the way.

1. Create your new Podbean account.
2. As an aside, if you are going to use your own domain name, as I do with www.NeverMindTheBarCharts.com, then configure that in Podbean early on. That way, you can avoid having to double-back on other configuration and content later on. From your podcast dashboard, go to Settings and then Own domain to do this.
3. Get the feed (RSS) address for your Anchor podcast. If you don’t already know it, login to Anchor, and from the Dashboard, click View public site. Under Where to listen on your site is a set of icons for different platforms. The last one, an orange square with curved white lines, is for your feed. Click on it and this will copy your feed address.
4. Go back to Podbean and from your podcast dashboard, go to Settings and then Switch to Podbean. Enter the feed address here and, if you wish – which you probably will, tick the box to import your episodes.
5. Go to Anchor and Settings, Distribution. Under Redirect URL enter the new Podbean feed address (which you will have been given in the previous step).
6. That’s it! At least according to Podbean’s instructions, it is. Except that I found some wrinkles. So don’t stop here… Most obviously, don’t forget to check and updates links to your podcast. If you’ve got direct links, e.g. in a Twitter profile, to the old Anchor web address they will need updating.
7. The episode numbers were messed up when I imported my podcast. Within each season, the numbers were reversed with the last episode being number one, the penultimate number two, and so on. So once the import is done, from the podcast dashboard go to Publish and Episodes. You can use the update button (the one with the pencil icon) to check the numbering of each episode. After you click this button, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on More Episode Settings to find the numbering.
8. One other thing that was (sort of) messed up is the number of podcast subscribers reported in some podcast apps. That’s because once you’ve done the switch you have two feed addresses, even though they both end up in the same place. One is your old Anchor one, now redirect to Podbean, and the other is the new direct Podbean one. Some podcast subscriber stats may, therefore, under-report how many subscribers you have as they don’t aggregate the total across the two feeds. Podbean’s statistics, however, combine everything into one set of numbers.

If you make a similar move, I hope it goes well – and happy podcasting!