Did you know that there were 750,000 active podcasts in 2019 with 32% of Americans reporting that they listened to podcasts at least once a month?
Podcasts are a great way to build relationships with your audience, increase traffic to your website, and provide valuable insight to your customers or clients.
Keep reading to find out more about podcasts, including why you should be podcasting and how to grow your podcast.
What Are Podcasts?
Podcasts are a series of recorded audio files that your audience can access and download at their own convenience. Podcasts are a little bit like radio shows, where each show will discuss a topic that is of interest to your audience. However, a podcast can be downloaded onto your audience’s personal devices and can then be listened to whenever suits them.
If you’re a business who wants to connect with your audience on a more personal level, then you should think about producing a podcast. Podcasts are a great way to provide your audience with insightful information on a particular topic in a more interactive way than simply producing blog posts.
Successful podcasts can also bring in additional revenue streams, which often can act as passive income ventures for businesses. There are a variety of ways you can make money from your podcast. For example, you could charge sponsors to be featured on your podcast or you might choose to promote your own products or services on your podcast.
How to Grow Your Podcast: 5 Simple Tips for Success
Common questions when many businesses start a podcast include how to gain podcast followers and how to promote a podcast. There’s no point in producing a podcast if nobody is going to listen to it. Try implementing these 9 podcasting tips to ensure your podcast is successful:
1. Produce and Publish Regular Content
If you’re wondering how to gain a podcast audience, you need to make sure you’re producing and publishing regular content. Publishing regular episodes helps to boost visibility on podcast directories and also ensures your audience is engaged and comes back for more.
When you’re getting started, it’s advisable to aim for more than one episode a week to help drive visibility to your podcast. If you create hour-long episodes you might find splitting these into two 30 minute podcasts works better to get more attention and people listening to your podcast.
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been podcasting for a while, it’s also important that you stick to publishing your episodes on the same days and at the same time.
2. Network
Promoting your podcast when you’re just getting started is one of the biggest problems businesses experience. When thinking about how to promote your podcast, make sure you don’t underestimate how much networking can help you. Networking is always a vital step in any business venture.
Contact other people in the podcasting community and see if they can help promote you or give you any tips on promotion. Contact people that you’ve previously worked with and see if they’d be interested in listening to your podcast. Tell as many people as possible about your podcast and if the people who listen to it enjoy it, the chances are that they will promote it for you by word of mouth.
You should also reach out to industry experts and see if they’ll join you as a guest on your podcasts. Collaborating with other people is a great way to create more exposure for your podcast, as the guest will probably share the podcast episode with their audience.
3. Use SEO
Creating regular content and networking are two great ways of growing popularity in the podcast world, but when it comes to how to market your podcast, one of the greatest things you can do is use SEO. For those who are unfamiliar with the world of marketing, SEO refers to using keywords that your audience will be searching for.
Make sure your podcast is easy to find. For example, if you produce a business-related podcast, you need to make sure business (or a variation of the term) is in your podcast title, description, and content. This will ensure that anyone who searches for ‘business podcasts’ will come across your podcast episodes.
4. Make it Professional and Credible
Podcasts that are successful are professional and credible. This means that if you want to produce a high-quality podcast you need to think about getting the right equipment, intros and outros, the types of topics you’ll cover, any sound effects you want to include, and interactivity with either experts or your audience.
Some podcasts use voice overs to make their intros and outros sound professional. While other podcasts use expert guest speakers to talk about the topics that their audience finds interesting. You can do whatever you want with your podcast, but make sure it sounds professional and credible.
We recommend you listen to a variety of podcasts to see which features you want to include in your own.
5. Spread Your Podcast Far and Wide
Some people settle for one or two podcast directories when they publish their episodes. However, the more places your audience can listen to your podcast the more likely you are to grow your podcast and reach more listeners.
Common podcast directories include Apple and Spotify, but some of your audience might not be present on these platforms, so don’t be afraid to publish your podcast far and wide. The more accessible your podcast is, the more people you will be able to reach. Remember that podcast directories aren’t the only place you can publish your podcast, you might want to try publishing it on your website too.
Create a Killer Podcast That Your Audience Will Love
Follow our guide on how to grow your podcast and create a killer podcast series that your audience will love. Many people are very keen to start producing content straight away without even researching them. So remember to research as many podcasts as possible to find out what will and won’t work well for your podcast.
Don’t forget to check out some of our other articles to learn more about how to improve your business and podcast.