Podcast Promotion Ideas: How to Get Your Podcast in Front of the Audience

Creating and publishing a podcast is just half of the work. As a podcaster, you still must get the podcasts in places where it will get noticed by your audience. This article gives you ideas on doing just that — podcast promotion.

Just because you created one, people would not just come out of nowhere. Superb quality of content and products have become the “standard” on almost any industry as more people compete, so they are no longer the key to getting noticed. Sure, it may help somewhat.

But… you still must promote.

If you are getting in front of a crowd which is interested in the topic you are podcasting about, they will be more likely to subscribe and listen.

You may think it is obvious but it isn’t always so. Perhaps, people are just lazy. They may have been sabotaging themselves when it comes to anything that is related to the word “promotion,” especially self-promotion.

No matter how great a technology is and will be, it will not just work unless we make it work for us and our business.

Podcast promotion is equally critical to the success of the podcast. What can you do to promote your podcast? Here are some ideas to help you get started:

1. Deliver it in your elevator speech

Elevator speech, audio logo, or whatever you call it is a great way to deliver your message to your audience.

You may want to mention your podcast as part of your unique selling proposition or as a soft-sell offer for people to learn more about you and your business.

Create a powerful elevator pitch that promotes your podcast and test it at the next networking event.

2. Business cards

Just because it is online doesn’t mean that traditional offline marketing methods won’t work anymore.

Print business cards with the URL to your podcast. Hand the cards whenever you can. If you have a strong offer or benefits in your podcast — and don’t forget the call-to-action, people are going to respond.

3. Think of it in every offline marketing you do

Rather than listing them one by one, I suggest that you keep your podcast in mind when doing any marketing and promotion.

Some of the ideas include flyers, brochures, speaking at seminars, holding a workshop, and so on.

These activities are endless. They work. You should not overlook them.

4. Podcast directories

People use directories to find podcasts, especially popular ones. They are not just an ordinary list of podcasts sorted by popularity or alphabetically.

Podcast directories usually have online players, description page of information specific to a podcast, ratings, and other useful features. Because people can have some kind of interaction, and the fact that they can listen to the whole podcast to sample before subscribing, they find the directories very valuable.

These directories also rank high in search engine listings. Having an inbound link from such a directory is very valuable to your search engine link popularity.

As you can see, there are multiple benefits for including your podcast in directories.

5. FeedBurner

Besides providing great stats for your podcast, there are many tools inside FeedBurner that can help you promote your podcast.

You can use the headline animator function as a signature in discussion boards or forums, for example.

If you’re not using FeedBurner yet, I suggest giving it a try. It is free and if you set it right, you can still maintain the same feed URL and revoke it if you think it is not for you.

6. Use a blog to publish podcast

There are many advantages of using a blog to publish your own podcast. It will make the whole process a lot easier.

Blogs are much loved by search engines. They also automatically publish podcast-compatible RSS feed for you. When it comes to site management, they also will do the work of archiving and managing the whole content and look and feel of the whole site.

Have I mentioned that it makes podcast and episode notes publishing much easier? If you want to learn how to get your podcast up with an accompanying blog, read the page about podcast hosting.

7. Basic search engine optimization

If you are publishing your podcast using a blog, you already have an advantage over those who are publishing traditional web publishing methods.

To get the most out of the blog to get traffic from search engines, you need to know some basic search engine optimization best practices though.

As search engines can mostly crawl textual content now, you need to provide at least some text to feed the search robots. The easiest to do this is by writing a few paragraphs of episode notes or posting the transcript of the podcast online on the episode page.

At the minimum, you should learn how to research keywords, which locations are ideal to put primary keywords, how to link to any other pages inside or outside of your own sites, get inbound links, etc.

8. Episode notes and transcripts

What is the point of interest of your podcast? How does it convert strangers to loyal audience?

People are getting to your podcast site through many different ways. If they get into the site by search engines, chances are they are ready to read first before listening or taking any other actions.

If your episode notes or transcripts contain something that ignite their interest, who knows if they are going to subscribe and become customers later.

These are just two ideas about how you can actually re-purpose your existing content for your benefit.

9. Discussion boards

Public discussion boards usually allow a few lines of signature that is attached to the end of every post. You can use this to promote your podcasts.

As with podcast directories, links from these forums can mean something to your site search engine rankings.

Don’t just post or respond for the sake of responding. Quality post will help build your expert status and prepare their openness to more information before visiting your podcast site.

10. Press releases

Perhaps you don’t have the budget to advertise your podcast on newspapers. Fortunately, there is another way to get you the same publicity, even better.

People are turned off by advertisements. Press release, in the format of news is very powerful to attract more readership.

You can write what’s new and interesting about your podcast and send press releases to newspaper editors or post it online.

Beside extra exposure from publications, you get other benefits like being listed number one for your keywords because press release sites are seen as being authority sites for many topics. Of course, you also get more inbound links that contribute to stronger link popularity and search engine rankings.

11. Writing articles

Writing an article for industry publications or online is one of the fastest way to establish your expertise in the niche. Create a powerful resource box so other publishers who use your article mean more exposure to you and your business.

If you mention your podcast as part of the article or in the resource box, you are getting free publicity. People are going to respond because what you offer is very low key. Instead of selling them right on their face, you offer more content besides the article they have just read. This method is very effective in today’s world where people are skeptical to sales pitches. It just makes sense because content helps them understand their problem and/or provides solution.

I hope you get the idea about how you can promote your podcast. There are virtually no limit to how you can do it. Probably the best advice I can give is that you should think of ways you can include your podcast as part of any marketing activities. At this level, podcast marketing should become natural part of your communication.