How to build a profitable podcast.
Want to know strategies to promote your podcast? This post shares 8 strategies that will blow up your show...
Let's welcome our guest writer Nico Prins!
Podcast promotion is the best method to allow people to discover you. After you have recorded your first set of episodes, all you can think about is to tell people about them. Every author wants their work to be popular and successful. Without the show promotion, it is unlikely that your podcast will grow.
If you have something valuable to offer to your listeners, it’s crucial that you learn key things about podcast promotion and how to use it to grow your podcast.
Here are eight podcast promotion tactics that will blow up your show:
In an ideal world, you’d be creating a podcast that everyone would listen to. Unfortunately, that’s not a realistic goal. Instead of trying to get to all listeners, focus on those who would benefit the most from listening to your podcasts.
In order to start creating the right content that sells, you need to think about who your listener persona is. Here are some interesting stats showing demographic groups listening to podcasts:
A listener persona is directly linked with the buyer persona term used in marketing. A buyer persona represents the ideal customer, defining their age, interests, hobbies, buying habits, etc. which is stored in a centralized CRM software. Similarly, a listener persona is supposed to represent your audience, as in your case, you're more interested in who's listening than buying.
How to define your listener persona? Think about your target audience and imagine a single person from the group.
Ask the following basic questions:
If your podcast is about parenting tips, for example, your listener persona could be a young mom with a career who loves looking after her family and home.
Next, it’s time for questions related to your podcast:
Once you’ve got an image of your listener persona, you can develop a strategy of creating the right content for your listeners. Promoting it to the right target group will depend on it as well. You should craft every email, post, or tweet you release with your listener persona in mind.
Creating a document listing all the information about your listener persona that you learn over time will be useful. You will find it especially useful when writing your promotional emails.
Crafting promotional emails is time-consuming, but the message for your target audience has to be right to grab their attention. Many businesses use tools that send recurring emails rather than sending them manually.
To promote a product successfully, it has to be of good quality and relevant to its target audience.
Let’s focus on what makes a good product. A good podcast would be:
Creating good quality content is the core of a good promotion strategy. Making it relevant to the target listeners will ensure a satisfying number of fans sticking for longer than one episode. You want to create value through long-term relationships and quality content.
A podcast aggregator, also called a podcatcher, is an app that plays podcasts.
If you want to be visible to the world, you need to distribute your podcast to all the places where your audience is looking.
Here’s a list of the most favorite devices for listening to podcasts:
As you can see, the most popular device used for playing podcasts is an iPhone. Apple Podcasts, which comes with iOS, has been the most popular podcatcher app. Apart from Apple’s app, there are other places where people search and listen to podcasts, including:
It’s critical to have your podcast placed in as many places as possible, especially since they are all free.
You might have heard about an RSS feed term in the past. It plays a crucial part in podcast promotion. RSS feed can be described as a map for your podcast. Podcast hosting software that hosts your files makes this map for you. You can submit your RSS feed to every podcast aggregator separately or have it done automatically for all accounts with bCast. Once you publish an episode, your RSS feed will be updated and pushed to all directories.
Placing your podcasts on the podcast aggregators and using your RSS feed will expose you to the people out there looking for new content to listen to. It’s the most effective podcast marketing strategy.
You should be consistently publishing podcasts once you launch. The more, the better. It is also critical to publish on certain days and times. Notice the charts below for days and times to avoid.
If you're a beginner in podcasting, look at similar podcasts for their publishing times. Even better, if you notice a trend, there’s probably a reason for it. Follow that trend until you can read from your data. Once you have enough podcast episodes released to create statistics, you can decide on your best publishing times and trends.
An average podcast episode lasts less than 40 minutes, just enough to fill a lunch break. If your recording is longer, consider shortening it at the editing stage.
Spend time creating a publishing schedule and researching topics to cover. You’ll need a good organizational structure to run the project effectively and make your podcast a success.
Joining a podcasters network can bring you many benefits. You will stay informed, support each other and discuss any news related to the industry. Putting your energy towards a network will be your best ally.
The best places to look for a podcasters network are:
There will be other podcasters with similar niches to yours, for sure. You should be engaging with those the most. Apart from getting plenty of advice from more experienced colleagues, you can expect that they will be up for some cross-promotion. You can mention each other in your shows, for example. The best thing to do at the start is to find podcasters with similar audiences and sizes to yours as they will be most happy to join your promotional ideas.
Another great tactic for self-promotion is to become a guest and invite guests to your shows. Listeners love guests. There’s nothing better than bringing new, fresh energy to the episode. Putting yourself as one is a great way of promoting your podcast to a quality audience.
Once you get confident in what you do, start helping others. Join Facebook Groups or visit Quora to engage with other authors. Mention your episodes if you think they can bring answers to people’s problems.
Uploading your podcast episodes to YouTube enables a great potential for new audiences. In 2021, YouTube scored 1.86 billion openings, and the number has been growing for the last few years. You want your podcast (one of 2.7 million) out there!
Here’s a quick explanation of how to do it: Convert the MP3 audio file into an MP4 file. You don’t have to record any videos at this stage, just set your branded image to appear during the episode. Add some copy to the description field describing your episode, along with a link to your website, and your social media.
Once you get more confident producing your episodes, you can record a video while recording audio. You will need to think about the right equipment and the location of your recording.
Social media platforms are great places to connect with your audience and promote your podcast to new listeners. Most podcasters use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn.
Here are some examples of social media publications from different podcasters:
When creating accounts, make sure you use their potential fully. That means filling in all the fields available, like features, bios, adding your website, description, choosing a profile image, etc. People love to check out those pieces of information to learn a bit more about the page they follow. Social media also uses these fields to categorize the profiles so the right audience can see them.
Some podcasters create images relevant to their brand or the episode. Then share them on their social media platforms with a link to iTunes.
Twitter allows you to upload and play audio. Think of recording a short intro to your podcast and sharing it with your followers. Creating short audiograms is a popular way to share intriguing bits from your episodes.
Whenever you're about to post a link to a new episode, make an announcement a day or two before the launch. You will make people feel excited and look forward to it.
Make sure to use the power of hashtags on social, especially on Instagram and Twitter. Hashtags let people find the content they are looking for. Here are some of the most commonly searched hashtags related to podcasting:
Don’t be shy to share your posts many times. Most Facebook or Instagram users won’t see all your updates anyway. You can also leverage Threads to share updates on your podcast. It's a great way to grow your presence and get followers on Threads.
A podcast website is a great promotion tactic to drive more listeners to your shows. If you also run a blog alongside your podcast, use guest posting to attract more traffic.
Every episode should have a standalone landing page that you can create with sales funnel software. A landing page has one purpose - to get the visitors to listen to your podcast.
To encourage readers to listen to your podcast, a landing page should include:
You should optimize your website for SEO so people can find you.
Here’s an example of a landing page:
Christy Harrison is an anti-diet registered dietitian and a successful podcast called “Food Psych”. Every episode of her podcast has a dedicated landing page with information about the clip.
Great podcast promotion means making your recordings available in more places. Marketing a podcast can bring results only if the content is unique and brings value to the listeners.
Podcasting is about making connections. Make sure you use the above tactics if you want to achieve growth. It will take dedication, strategy, and time to host a successful podcast.
Use the potential of social media. Start with sharing an update about when an episode first goes live. Then, keep sharing it!
