Promoting Your Podcast
According to Nieman Lab, 70% of all podcast listening happens on iTunes. Or the Apple podcast apps. This means you want your podcast to do good on iTunes and get noticed! SoundCloud, YouTube, even Spotify are other venues but—as the above statistic says, the biggest listener of podcasts are Apple users.
But don’t be discouraged if you want to host your podcast somewhere else; there’s 30% of podcast listeners who don’t use iTunes, and that’s a large number when you take into account the people who have Android versus who have Apple, and even those who simply use a preferred app such as Spotify on their computer or television.
Though we’re here to discuss steps on promoting your podcast! Let’s get on it.
Leverage Your Guest’s Audience
Don’t be shy that you have a guest speaker! You want their audience to tune into your podcast to listen to them talk with you. You also want your guest speaker to be able to share snippets, quote images, and talk about topics that inspire them or they’re passionate about. The bigger the audience that your guest speaker has, the more you get to promote your podcast in a chance of upping your listener count.
You want your guest to share and promote your podcast and their guest slot, so you may provide pull quotes, images, links, pre-written tweets and status updates. This takes the work out of it, they just have to hit share.
Promote on Social Media
When promoting on social media, it can be tempting to write lengthy posts or only post images or links. But the thing is, not everyone is going to read a long post, or look at images, or click into links. The more you post in a different way—the more views you’re likely to get. There’s something out there for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that “something” is the same thing for every single person.
You want to pin your episode tweet, Facebook post, perhaps these pins feature links to where your next live podcast can be heard. You should create images in an image-software, sharing them as standalone social updates with a link to the live podcast. You could even share 15-second soundbites from the podcast, if it’s pre-recorded or has a script you’ll be following.
And of course, when it comes to the 24-hours right before you go live, you want to tease the episode. Reshare old episodes a few times to encourage listeners to listen to it again and prepare for the next episode. You should also talk about the behind-the-scenes stuff! The funnier, the better.
Release 3 Episodes Minimum At Launch
Research has found that releasing less than three episodes at minimum on the very first day of your podcast can cost you viewers. This is because people are excited—they listen to the first podcast, only to learn… it’s the only one. Therefore, when you first launch a podcast, release a few episodes at once so your new listeners have something to listen too until the next episode.