We're excited to announce our revamped Chat Rooms!

Our Chat Room feature gives you a turnkey home for your fans to chat and engage with each other. It's a simple, yet powerful way to build community around your show. There's a high chance your fans want to interact with other fans, so give them a space to chat with you and each other.

We've completely revamped our chat experience. Let's check out what's new!

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Toggle On Your Chat Room

First, to activate a live chat room on your fan page, simply login to your dashboard, click "page settings" on the main menu, and toggle it on. Simple!

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New Chat Tab

You'll first notice that Chat now has its own tab on your fan page.

This new design promotes fan interaction. When your fans visit your fan page...they'll naturally check out your Chat Room as they browse your available tabs.

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Replies

With this new version, your Chat Room now supports reply threads.

Fans can now reply to messages on the main thread and start a side discussion. This is a great way to increase interaction between fans.

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Grow Your Fan List

Chat Room participants automatically join your fan list. This makes a great lead-capture tool to help organically grow your fan list.

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Real-Time Chat

Our Chat Room updates in real time. This means when someone posts a message in your chat room, everyone in your Chat Room sees their new post immediately, no page refresh needed. This encourages fans to have real-time communication on your fan page.

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Paywall for Subscribers Only

You can make your chat room freely available for all fans...or easily setup a paywall and make it exclusive for your paid subscribers.

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Pinned Chat

Now, you can pin any message to draw attention to a specific message thread.

This can be useful for promoting a specific discussion on your fan page.

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Moderate & Suspend

Have an unruly chat room participant? Yea, it happens to the best of us. Fortunately, on Fanlist, you can simply suspend certain fans from posting.

Just find the fan you want to suspend and toggle on "suspend posting" to give them a time-out.

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We hope you enjoy this new feature!

If you're thinking of starting a Slack or Discord to build your community, consider launching your Chat Room on Fanlist. With Fanlist Chat Rooms, it's turnkey, easy to manage, and a lot less hassle.

We're sure your fans will appreciate a space to connect deeper with you and other fans of your show.

As part of a major upgrade to our Perks feature, we are rebranding this feature as Shop!

Now, you can set up a turnkey Shop on your fan page with more flexible options.

Here are some highlights of our recent upgrades...

"Perks" is now "Shop"

We wanted to make it more intuitive for your fans and visitors.

We did some A/B testing of our current feature and saw that 33% more people clicked on "Shop" vs "Perks"...which results in more sales for the creator.

Not a huge surprise. Fans like to shop :)

1-Click Email Announcement

After you publish a new item for sale in your Shop, you can send an announcement to your entire fan list with just 1-click!

This is a super easy way to keep your fans engaged, and drive more sales on your Fanlist Shop!

Custom Checkout Field

With this new feature, you can now request additional information from buyers during checkout.

You can use this custom field in many flexible and creative ways.

For example, if you're selling an "episode shoutout", you can use this custom field to ask the buyer to include a message they'd want to include in their shoutout.

Or, let's say you want to sell a physical product. You can use this custom field to collect a required shipping address.

Now Supporting FREE Products

Sometimes, the best things in life are free.

So now, we let you offer products in your Shop for free!

But why would you want to do that?

Well with this new feature, you can use your Shop as a lead gen tool to collect fan emails.

For example,

• Create a free ebook your fans might enjoy.
• Set the item price to $0 in your Shop.
• Your fans can get that item for free.
• You'll capture that fan's contact info in your fan list!

This is a great strategy for growing your email list.

Support for Multiple Product Images

Now, you can upload up to 6 product images to help sell your items.

People are sometimes more compelled to purchase when there is more product detail. With this new feature, you'll be able to add a lot more visual detail to each item you sell.

Products are Now Sortable

You can now easily control the order of your products on your fan page.

Simply drag-and-drop the Shop items in your dashboard, and the new layout will be updated on your fan page.

We've improved our "Perks" feature, giving our creators a better online shop!

Here are several notable improvements we just released.

Orders Dashboard

With the new 'Orders' tab, you can now quickly view all the orders placed on your fan page.

In this new Orders table, you can easily keep track of all your new orders, who has ordered what, and how much you're earning from your Fanlist shop!

Product Detail Page

As podcasters use our Perks feature to sell more complex products, we knew we needed a product detail page to let creators describe their perks in richer detail.

Well, this improvement is finally here. Each perk now has a dedicated detail page!

With this new product detail page, you can now include a rich text description to add greater detail to your items for sale.

For fans who bought your perk, they'll be able to see their unlocked perk right on the product detail page.

Also, since each perk has a unique URL, you can now link directly to a perk. This lets you promote and link to specific products in your Fanlist shop.

More Improvements Coming...

Here's a sneak peek at what's coming soon as part of our Perks 2.0 effort...

Free Perks

• This lets you create a Free Perk as a lead-capture tool.

Custom Checkout Field

• Use this if you need some extra fan info as part of the sale.

Multiple Product Images

• Display up to 6 images to help promote your products.

Send Announcements

• Use the 1-click send tool to notify your entire fan list of your new item for sale.

Your fans can't always remember all the great sponsors and products you mention on your show.

Do you have a place for fans to see all your sponsors?

Now, you can showcase all your sponsors on your fan page!

Our Sponsors tab lets you easily create an interactive directory of all your sponsors. 

We say "interactive", because our Sponsor "ad-units" supports audio files.

Simply create a new sponsor, add some sponsor details, upload your audio ad-read for that sponsor, click publish...and presto, you've created an interactive Sponsor ad unit on your fan page!

Fans can conveniently see a list of all your sponsors/recommendations and simply click play to hear your unique take on them.

Cool right? 

Oh...did we mention potential sponsors love this?!

It's a great asset to show off when pitching your next sponsor!

With our latest update, you can now customize the order of the tabs on your fan page.

As a reminder, we have tabs for all our core features, including: inbox, tips, perks, and members.

So, let’s say you want to prioritize receiving tips on your fan page. You can now have your tips tab appear as the first tab on your fan page.

You can even turn off all the other features and only use your fan page to receive tips.

Before this update, we required you to use our “inbox”…but now, you can even turn off your inbox if it's not relevant to you and your show.

This gives you much more flexibility to decide how to best engage your fans!

So, to customize your fan page tabs…

1.     Login to your Fanlist dashboard
2. Click “page settings” on the main menu
3. Here, simply drag and drop the various features to your desired order

Any feature that’s toggled on will appear on your fan page.

That’s it.

Just a simple update to help you customize Fanlist to fit your needs.

With our newest release, we've updated our "page settings" to make it easier and more intuitive to customize your fan page.

The main thing we did was reorganize all the many features toggles that used to appear on the "features" tab. As our features grew, this page became a complex collection of too many features toggles.

Now, it's a lot simpler!

Looking at the "features" tab in page settings, you now only see our core features. Here you can toggle on and off the corresponding core feature on your fan page.

A related new update here is you can now turn off your Inbox. For users who don't want fans to leave messages, you can now turn off the Inbox tab on your fan page entirely. This is a good option for users who only need Fanlist's monetization features, like tips, perks, and subscriptions.

Finally, for all those other features toggles and settings that used to appear in the "features" tab. We've relocated those toggles within the corresponding core feature.

For example, the "inboxes" you used to manage here under page settings...you can now manage them in the "settings" tab under the "Inbox" section.

Now, Fanlist lets you easily create and sell a paid podcast!

With our new "memberships" feature, you can now easily sell your paid podcast episodes. Fans can subscribe to your paid content right on your fan page.

It's super easy to set up. We host your paid podcast feed and manage your podcast subscriptions...you focus on creating paid content and earning money! 

To get started, just login to your Fanlist account and...

1. Setup Your Membership

Customize your subscription price. We support monthly, yearly, and one-time price options!

2. Customize Your Paid Podcast

We recommend creating a slightly different podcast name for your paid podcast. Consider adding "Plus" to differentiate from your free podcast, like..."True Crime Plus". 

3. Upload Your Bonus Episodes

Not sure what makes good "bonus" content? Check out our 10 Bonus Episode Ideas. Remember, your superfans want more of your content and want to support your show. 

That's it! Your fans can immediately start subscribing to your paid show!

We’re excited to announce that ALL our Pro features are now FREE!

Yes, you heard that right. Our FREE Fanlist accounts now include ALL our Pro Features. And now, we've eliminated our paid plans!

This was not an easy decision for us, as this means we're giving up all our subscription revenue for our existing paid plans.

Why Did We Do This?

Well, this decision began with a simple thought: we wanted ALL our users to experience the FULL benefits of our most powerful features. It just didn't seem right to hide our best features behind a paywall. 

For example, one of our most loved Pro features is letting creators view their "fan list". With this feature, your fan page essentially becomes an organic lead capture tool. With another Pro feature, you can one-click connect your Mailchimp account to automatically sync your fan list to Mailchimp.

Now, everyone enjoys these features, and more, for free!

So Then...How Does Fanlist Make Money?

Now, we ONLY earn money when you earn money using Fanlist. This fully aligns us with your success, and we're pretty excited about that!

So, if you use our monetization features, like accepting tips, selling perks, and selling subscriptions to your premium podcast...then we take a modest 7% transaction fee on your fan payments.

We looked across the industry of similar tools, and we determined that 7% is lower than 90% of comparable tools and enough to keep our services sustainable.

We Love This! How Do We Support You?

We appreciate you using Fanlist! We know fan engagement is a long-term strategy, which is why we wanted to give away our best features for free!

To best support us...keep engaging your fans on your Fanlist fan page and leverage our monetization features 😀. We're confident that when you succeed as a creator, we'll succeed with you!

Also, now that Fanlist is free...tell a fellow creator about it! Every creator needs a fan page, and the more creators we can get to use Fanlist, the better we can make the platform for everyone!

We’re excited to announce our new brand name: Fanlist.

And…our new URL is fanlist.com.

At the heart of our new name are the “fans“, and our new brand reflects our commitment to help creators and podcasters connect with their fans.

When we first launched PodInbox, it was a pretty simple idea. To make it easy for podcasters to receive audio messages from fans. But since our launch, we’ve expanded our features to do much more than being a simple “inbox” for podcasters.

Today, we provide a robust fan page for creators, letting creators receive messages, sell perks, receive tips, host a chat room, sell subscriptions to their premium content, and more. And, at the heart of all our features…is our commitment to help creators connect with their fans and to grow their fan list.

Having a vibrant, growing fan list is at the core of every creator’s goal, so we wanted “Fanlist” to be at the core of our name and brand.

What Will I Need to Do?

We recommend you start promoting your new fan page URL and update any old links.

So, if your fan page was:

podinbox.com/mypodcast

Your new fan page URL is now:

fanlist.com/mypodcast

That said, even if you don’t update your old links, we will automatically redirect any traffic to your old fan page URL at podinbox.com…to your new fan page at fanlist.com.

So, there’s nothing to worry about, even if you don’t update your old links!

Do you work with sponsors?

If so, you can now feature your sponsors on your fan page!

Here’s how our new “Sponsors Widget” looks on your fan page…

Bundle This With Your Sponsors Package

One common tactic podcasters use to sell more sponsorships is to “bundle” their various audience channels.

For example, don’t just sell your podcast audience…bundle in your newsletter, social media, and PodInbox fan page to entice your dream sponsor. Sponsors want to get in front of your audience...everywhere your fans engage with you.

A Versatile Sponsor Widget

Our Sponsors Widget can also support audio. Just drop an ad-read into your Sponsor Widget, and quickly create an audio-rich ad unit.

Have multiple sponsors. No problem. Add as many Sponsors as you need, and simply toggle them on or off when you want to feature them.

We also let you choose whether to display multiple sponsors inside a carousel...or displayed as a stacked list right on your fan page.

Useful for Fans

Make it easy for fans to find the brands you promote by featuring them on your fan page.

As your fans engage with you on your fan page, use it as the perfect opportunity to highlight your sponsors. Also, be sure to include your referral links to get credit for any click-throughs.

We hope you enjoy this new little feature!

It’s yet another way we’re making our fan pages a bit more useful for our community of podcast creators.