Let’s assume you already have your podcast gear such as a name, topic, and microphone ready to go. Your cover art is perfect, and your intro has been professionally done. Your ducks are lined up. That’s a great start.
However, there are two things crucial to the success of your passion project. You will need to pick the best fitting platform, and properly promote your podcast across the internet. Here’s how.
Picking Your Host
A podcast host is where you’ll upload the recorded podcasts, and from there you’ll be able to upload the episodes to places like iTunes, Spotify, and other platforms specific to podcasters. To pick one of the many that are available, look for:
- Price: Choose one that fits your budget. They range from about $12 per month and up.
- Support: What type of tech support is included with the platform.
- Platforms: Will the podcast host get you onto the sites you want to be available on?
- Monetize: Are you able to monetize through the host, if that’s what you’re looking to do.
- Storage: How much storage space is included in each package.
- Analytics: It’s important to know how far of a reach your podcast has, and the only way to know that is through analytics.
Promoting That Podcast of Yours
Once you have your podcast host chosen, and you’ve gone live, you need to reach an audience. Chances are, listeners aren’t going to find your podcast on their own. At least, not at first. You need to actively promote it through social media. Let’s explore your options.
- Submit your podcast to Apple, Google, Spotify, and other large podcast platforms.
- Communities of podcasters are a great place to become active. You can explore Facebook and Linkedin for active groups, as well as entire websites devoted to growing podcaster communities.
- Social media will be helpful when trying to grow your podcast subscribers. Create a Facebook fan page for yours, and post regularly. Boost your posts to get a larger reach.
- SEO is going to be your friend, which means you should have a blog to help those who are looking for the topic you provide to find you.
- Keywords instead of numbers for the titles of your podcasts will help with organic search. For example: How To Start A Podcast – Episode 6 is a better title than, say, Episode 6.
- Headlines should complement the title. Using the above example, How To Start A Podcast, your headline could be Finding the Best Podcast Platform and Promotional Tools to Get Ahead.
- Commit to creating podcasts weekly. It can take a few months for it to build momentum, and consistency is a key ingredient when trying to gain that.
Currently, there are over 700K podcasts available. It sounds like a lot, but it’s far less than the number of blogs across the internet. Now is a good time to start one, but you need to have a plan in place in order to compete with the early adopters whose podcasts have become successful.
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