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Host a Successful Podcast With WordPress and Gravity Forms

By Sarah Kirkwold Published February 13, 2025

If you have a successful podcast, or are looking to start one, you know how much work goes into producing high-quality content, engaging with your audience, and growing your brand. You also know how important it is to create seamless interactions with your listeners whether it’s through collecting feedback, building your email list, registering for live events, or even gathering applications for guest appearances.

But, as a podcaster, you probably don’t have a lot of time to waste managing complex tools or juggling multiple platforms. This is where WordPress and Gravity Forms come in. Together, they can help streamline your podcasting workflows, automate tedious tasks, and improve user experience, all while making your job easier and your website more powerful.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through why WordPress and Gravity Forms are a winning combination that will help you grow a successful podcast and following. Even if you’re brand new to WordPress, we’ll explain the basics and show you how to get started with Gravity Forms.

By the end of this post, you’ll understand how these tools can solve your biggest problems and help you focus on what really matters: creating amazing content and connecting with your listeners.

Why WordPress and Gravity Forms Are Perfect for Podcasters

Before we dive into Gravity Forms, let’s take a moment to highlight why WordPress is the best platform for hosting and managing your podcast:

• Full control over your content – WordPress gives you full control over your website and podcast content. Unlike social media platforms, where you’re at the mercy of changing algorithms. With WordPress, you own your website and your content. You get complete freedom to publish episodes, blog posts, and other media on your terms.
• Built-in podcasting tools – WordPress makes it easy to embed and host your podcast episodes. With plugins like PowerPress, Seriously Simple Podcasting, or Simple Podcast Press, you can seamlessly upload and organize your episodes, making it easy for listeners to find and subscribe.
• Customization at your fingertips – WordPress is known for its flexibility and vast array of themes and plugins. You can customize the look and functionality of your site with just a few clicks, ensuring it reflects your unique brand and message.
• SEO & growth potential – With its built-in SEO features and powerful plugins like Yoast SEO, WordPress gives you the tools to help your podcast get found by new listeners. It allows you to optimize your episodes and attract organic traffic to your website.

In short, WordPress is an all-in-one platform that can help you grow your podcast, expand your audience, and manage your content effortlessly.

But to take things a step further, you’ll need a tool that can help you build custom forms for engagement. That’s where Gravity Forms comes in.

What Is Gravity Forms and How Does it Help Podcasters?

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create custom forms for your website. These forms can serve a wide variety of purposes – whether it’s for collecting contact information, conducting surveys, gathering guest submissions, or integrating with other platforms like email marketing tools and CRMs.

For podcasters, Gravity Forms is an essential tool that can solve a number of challenges, from improving listener interaction to simplifying administrative tasks. Here’s a breakdown of how Gravity Forms can make your podcasting journey smoother.

Collect Feedback and Engage Your Listeners

Your audience is one of your biggest assets. Listening to feedback and understanding what your listeners enjoy or want more of can help you tailor your content and build a deeper connection with them. Gravity Forms allows you to easily create feedback forms, episode surveys, and contact forms on your WordPress site.

Example Use Case: After each podcast episode, you can embed a simple feedback form asking listeners what they thought of the episode, what topics they want to hear about next, or even how they discovered your show. This feedback helps you fine-tune your content and create episodes that resonate with your audience.

With Gravity Forms, you can add custom fields like text areas, multiple-choice options, and rating scales, allowing you to gather valuable insights from your listeners.

Build Your Email List with Ease

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to keep your audience engaged and informed about new episodes, promotions, or updates. With Gravity Forms, building and managing your email list is simple. You can create custom email sign-up forms, integrated with email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or Kit (formerly ConverKit) to ensure that every new subscriber is added to your list.

Example Use Case: Let’s say you’re releasing a new podcast episode or hosting a special giveaway for your listeners. With a Gravity Forms sign-up form, you can easily collect email addresses and automatically sync them with your email marketing platform to send out notifications, updates, or newsletters.

Additionally, Gravity Forms allows you to segment your email list based on user preferences, location, or even responses to specific forms, enabling you to target your audience more effectively.

Simplify Guest Submissions and Applications

Many successful podcasters invite guests to join their show. Managing guest submissions and applications can be a logistical nightmare without the right tools. Gravity Forms can automate this entire process by letting you create customized guest submission forms.

Example Use Case: You can create a form that collects potential guests’ names, bios, contact information, preferred topics, and links to their social media or websites. Not only does this simplify the guest booking process, but it also ensures you have all the necessary information organized in one place.

By setting up conditional logic within Gravity Forms, you can also tailor forms to display specific fields based on user selections, making the experience more dynamic for the guest.

Manage Event Registrations and Livestreams

Successful podcasters often host live events, Q&A sessions, webinars, or virtual meetups. Gravity Forms can handle all your event registration needs, allowing listeners to sign up and RSVP directly through your website.

Example Use Case: If you’re hosting a live podcast recording session or an exclusive webinar for your listeners, you can create a registration form using Gravity Forms that collects names, email addresses, and other necessary details. You can even add payment fields if you’re charging for access to the event or offering premium content.

Accept Donations or Payments for Premium Content

Monetization is a key goal for many podcasters. Whether you’re accepting listener donations or selling access to exclusive content (like bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes access, or merchandise), Gravity Forms provides easy-to-use payment integrations with platforms like PayPal and Stripe.

Example Use Case: You can use Gravity Forms to create donation forms where listeners can contribute to your show directly. You can also set up subscription forms for premium content, where users can select a payment plan and access additional episodes or content.

Gravity Forms makes it simple to accept multiple payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and this streamlined process helps you focus on creating great content, rather than dealing with payment logistics.

Easy Integration with Other Tools

Gravity Forms integrates seamlessly with a wide range of third-party tools, making it easy to extend the functionality of your podcast website. Whether you’re integrating with your CRM, automating social media posts, or managing podcast episode metadata, Gravity Forms allows for a smooth workflow.

Example Use Case: If you’re using a CRM system to manage listener relationships, Gravity Forms can automatically add form submissions to your CRM database. Similarly, you can use Zapier to sync form submissions with Google Drive or other productivity tools for better data organization.

Reduce Manual Work with Automation

One of the biggest advantages of using Gravity Forms is the ability to automate many of the repetitive tasks involved in podcasting. By setting up conditional logic, confirmation messages, notifications, and integrations with other platforms, you can automate things like:

• Sending unique confirmation emails when someone subscribes to your podcast.
• Automatically adding new subscribers to your email marketing list.
• Notifying you whenever a guest application is submitted.
• Generating an invoice or receipt for event registrations or payments.

This automation saves you time and ensures your processes run smoothly without manual intervention.

How to Get Started with Gravity Forms on WordPress

Now that you know how Gravity Forms can help you have a successful podcast, let’s look at how you can get started using it on your WordPress site.

Purchase a Gravity Forms License

Gravity Forms offers a few types of licenses, all of which include access to our knowledgeable and friendly support team. You can compare license types here, and pick the one that will suit your needs. It’s worth noting that if you want to accept payments, you’ll need to purchase a Pro or Elite license.

After you’ve made your purchase, you can log in and download Gravity Forms directly from your My Account section. This download should remain a ZIP file, as this is the format in which you’ll upload it to your WordPress site.

Next, you need to install the Gravity Forms plugin on your WordPress site. Here’s how:

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins → Add New Plugin.
2. Click Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the ZIP file you just downloaded, and click Install Now.
4. After the plugin is installed, click Activate.

You’ll now need to follow the instructions in the Setup Wizard, where you’ll be asked to enter your Gravity Forms license key and answer a few questions to help you get started.

Create Your First Form

Once Gravity Forms is installed, creating a form is simple. Here’s how:

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Forms → New Form.

2. Choose a form template from the Gravity Forms template library, or start from scratch by choosing the Blank Form. Then, give your form a title and description and click Create Blank Form.

3. This is the fun part. Drag and drop fields onto your form and arrange them as needed. Edit the field settings to make fields required, modify the appearance, add conditional logic and so on. With Gravity Forms, you have an enormous amount of flexibility when it comes to customization. When you are satisfied, click Save Form.

4. Under Settings, you can further enhance your form by customizing the notifications and confirmations to let your users know their form has been submitted successfully. You can read more about how to do this on our blog.

5. To view the finished product, embed the form on any page or post. In this case, we’ll embed the form on a new page:

From here, you’ll be able to view your form and make further changes via the block editor as needed. Don’t worry, this page starts out in Draft status, so you can still make as many changes as you need to before publishing for the world to see.

Test Your Form

Make sure to test your form by submitting a few test entries. The easiest way to do this is from the page editor, by clicking Preview in new tab.

Fill out the form and click Submit.

This will ensure everything is working as expected and that all submissions are being routed correctly. This is also how you’ll be able to validate your confirmation messages and notifications, if you’ve added any.

To check that your form submission has been received, head to your Forms list and click Entries.

Here you should see the test entry you just submitted, and can confirm everything is working properly.

Set Up Integrations

While you’re already well on your way to creating top-notch web forms, Gravity Forms can integrate with even more tools. You can drastically extend the capabilities and functionality of your forms with everything from email marketing services like Mailchimp and ConvertKit, to CRMs, payment gateways, and automation tools. Everything can be connected to streamline your workflow. Check out our add-on directory to learn more.

Access to add-ons is determined by your license type, which can always be upgraded as your business needs grow.

Control What Happens After the Form Submission

If you really want to streamline your workflow, you can add Gravity Flow into the mix. Gravity Flow can help automate several of your processes, such as:

• Guest management – Automate the process of guest applications, scheduling and rescheduling interviews, and confirmations. With Gravity Flow, you can send reminder emails, and define who can update specific fields of a larger form like bios and headshots.
• Content approval – For podcasts that involve multiple stakeholders (e.g., editors, producers, or co-hosts), Gravity Flow can bring structure to your content approval/editing process. This is helpful for things like episode scripts, episode outlines, or final edits before release.
• Collecting listener feedback – When podcast feedback is submitted, Gravity Flow can direct responses to the appropriate team for review.
• Podcast sponsorship invoicing – Gravity Flow can automate the approval of your sponsorships, generate and deliver invoices, and send reminders for overdue payments.
• Marketing and promotion – Automate email campaigns for episode releases, special offers, or sponsor shout-outs. Gravity Flow can also handle the creation of follow-up tasks for social media posts and newsletter reminders related to new episodes.

Explore the Gravity Flow documentation to see examples of automation in action, or try out a free demo!

Get Started with WordPress and Gravity Forms Today!

Let’s face it. If you want to have a successful podcast, you need to have a successful website. You also need an easy and organized way to collect data. WordPress and Gravity Forms are a powerful combination that can streamline your workflow, engage your audience, and simplify administrative tasks.

Whether you’re collecting feedback, building your email list, accepting guest submissions, or managing event registrations, Gravity Forms can handle it.

The best part? You don’t need to be a tech expert to use WordPress or Gravity Forms. With these no-code tools, you can focus on creating great podcast episodes while automating and optimizing everything behind the scenes.

Discover how easy it is to elevate your podcasting game. Purchase your Gravity Forms license today or use our free demo!