How to Promote Your Podcast

After nearly 7 years of building a podcast audience, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how to effectively promote a podcast. During that time I wasted plenty of time and money, yet occasionally got unexpected bursts of popularity.

Fortunately, you can avoid many of the pitfalls I fell for and skip straight to the most effective ways to promote your podcast. Below, I’ll break down those hard-won lessons and demonstrate a formula any podcast can use to promote itself.

Identify your audience

This may sound obvious to the marketers out there, but it’s rarely considered by many podcasters. Knowing who your podcast is for is about much more than estimating its popularity. Every decision you make should be made with that audience in mind (this is where it’s extra helpful to be a member of that audience yourself).

Be ready to re-imagine your audience

All that said, despite the importance of identifying an audience, you also need to be flexible with it. Sticking to your original vision of your show and its audience is a recipe for failure, while getting good data on podcast audiences can be tricky, you need to always keep your eyes open for information on who your content is resonating with.

Take a massively popular podcast like WTF with Marc Maron. Initially, it focused almost exclusively on conversations with fellow comedians. It was essentially a niche show for comedy fans. However as the genius of Maron’s conversational interviews gradually attracted people more interested in human connections than comedy, the show adapted and expanded its scope to great success.

It’s like my approach to many things in life: “make a good plan but be willing to ditch it when the situation changes.”

List the platforms where your audience is

Once you’ve got a good sense of your audience (and again each time your audience changes), sit down and list all the places where they spend time. That means social media platforms, other podcasts they listen to, YouTube channels they subscribe to, any place where you could potentially get in front of them. Now, your goal is to get onto those platforms.

Get yourself in front of your audience on those platforms

The good news is that podcasts have a variety of both free and paid ways to promote themselves, meaning you can adjust your tactics depending on your budget.

Trade intros with other podcasts

For a podcast that’s just getting off the ground, this is about as effective as it gets. If you can find podcasts which you know have a similar audience to yours, contact them to ask about trading intros.

If you’re not familiar, this is when each podcaster records a short introduction for the other which they each play on one episode. One of the best things about this is that the content is evergreen. I’ve traded intros with other podcasts that still bring me new listeners years later as people move through the back catalogue (the one exception would be current events focused podcasts which don’t get many listens to older episodes, so they will be less valuable).

If you can’t find or contact any good podcasts for this, try joining a podcaster forum (there are plenty on Facebook) or contacting a podcast network. This is also a good place to ask other questions you might have.

Be a guest on another podcast

The next step up from trading intros is being a guest. This can be a bit more limiting as not all podcasts have guests, but if it works for your niche then it’s an excellent tactic. In particular, it gives potential listeners time to get to know you and what kind of content they can expect on your podcast.

Like with intro trading, you can try contacting specific podcasts directly, contacting a network, or asking around no forums.

Paid ads

If you can afford it, there’s always paid ads. This can be something like Facebook ads, ads on podcasting apps like Overcast, or ads directly on another podcast. If you’ve got the budget (and in particular if you can’t spare the time needed for the other tactics mentioned here) this is a great option.

Organic content

This is the single promoting tactic every podcast needs to be using. This goes from simple things like posting when a new episode comes out to give the audience you should be building on social media something to share all the way to creating special content just for sharing. The challenge most podcasters have with this promotion tactic is finding quality things to share. That’s where content repurposing and microcontent come in.

Why leading with microcontent makes sense

There’s a reason repurposing content is at the core of what’s made people like GaryVee successful. His model shows why this is the most effective way to take a single podcast episode and turn it into dozens of pieces of smaller content you can then use for paid or organic promotion efforts.

There are a few key benefits to this approach. One is that with the right tools it can be done inexpensively. But beyond the cost, turning one piece of content into many gets you far better ROI than constantly searching for new podcast related content to promote. But beyond simply putting out large amounts of organic content to promote your podcast, this approach gives you tools to study your audience.

This works by treating your microcontent like experiments, building each one around an idea like “shorter videos will perform better” or “my audience on Instagram will respond to charts more than images” and then testing them. Doing this allows you to combine promotion with gathering vital audience data (again, something very hard to do for most podcasts).

Promoting a podcast for your business?

More and more businesses are realizing the potential of podcasts to promote themselves, but the space is also getting more competitive by the day. That’s why you need strategies like content repurposing to outperform the competition while learning about potential customers. But doing this well requires deep knowledge. Fortunately, we’ve got that knowledge as well as specialized tools to make repurposing your content easier than ever.

If you’d like to learn more, let’s have a chat.