21 Nov How to Promote Your New Podcast

There is no denying the rise of podcasts. In fact, in 2018, 48 million people listen to podcasts weekly. But with over 550,000 podcasts for listeners to consume, how can newbies cut though the clutter?

Before you get too overwhelmed by the numbers, just know that podcasts are still a relatively new medium. Listeners are exploring regularly for the next Serial, Joe Rogan Experience, or Pardon My Take. Here are a few small things that you can and should do to start gathering listeners.

Distribute Everywhere

Everyone knows that iTunes is quite possibly the biggest player when it comes to podcast consumption, but there are literally hundreds of other platforms that people utilize to find and listen to their favorite shows. By doing a little leg work and submitting your podcast’s RSS feed to platforms like Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and TuneIn, you’re automatically increasing the distribution. This will make your podcast more accessible to audiences worldwide.

Define a Cadence. Stick to it.

If you are going to call your podcast a show, you should treat it like one. You first need to define how often you are going to upload. Will you publish once a week, twice a month, every other month? Whatever you decide to do, stick to it. You want your listeners to become accustomed to tuning in on a fairly regular basis. Yes – podcasts are meant to be consumed on their time, but like my wife on Tuesday nights with This is us, she very seldom misses a week. On the flip side, you really don’t want listeners visiting your show page on iTunes and seeing that you haven’t added any new content in a few months. It’s a quick way for people to unsubscribe and move on. As I said in the beginning, there are too many other options out there.

The Power of Guests

You’ve probably heard the saying it’s not what you know but who you know. Well, the same holds true to podcasting. By having people on your show, and going on other shows, you’re immediately tapping into the power of their network. It might seem hard to get big name guests when you’re starting out, however, it never hurts to ask. A simple DM or tweet can go a long way.

Leverage Every Part of Your Content

If you’re taking the time to sit down in front of a microphone and record yourself on a regular basis, you can get a lot more than just audio out of it. Stay active on things like Instagram stories to let listeners know when you’re recording and what the next topic might be. Teasing your next episode is a great way to build suspense, much like the nightly news does.

Turn some of your best segments into small clips and turn them into audiograms. Those are the posts on social media that have an image with the audio playing in the background and  waveforms being displayed over the image.  These can be customized in things like Adobe Premiere, but there are also platforms out there like this one that will do it for you.

Lastly, don’t hesitate to transcribe your podcasts. By uploading the transcription to a blog post, you’ll increase the chances of each episode coming up via search. Temi is a great platform for transcription that will only run you .10/minute.

 Get Exclusive

Posting your podcast to social media is an obvious thing to do, however, by creating a “private group” on Facebook or Linkedin, where people can discuss the latest episode and get one-on-one time with the hosts. This might seem like a tough thing to do right from the start, but as you start to build a following, this is a great way to turn casual listeners into engaged fans.

Ask

It might seem pretty self explanatory but really only a handful of people do it – ask. At the end of every episode, on your blog posts, at your son’s soccer game, ask people to listen and subscribe. If you’ve put all this work to create something that you’re hopefully proud of, why not ask people to listen?

You can read the original post I wrote here.