Many thanks to the people and brands who have been generous to share their podcasting tips online. Some of the best advice I found dated all the way back to 2012, which shows just how long some folks have been excelling in the podcast game. I’ll link to some favorite resources at the end of this article as well.
Here’s the big list of podcast promotion strategies we’re keen to try.
1. Leverage your guest’s audience
Make it easy for guests to share by creating snippets and quote images
We’re fortunate that our podcast has an interview format, where we get to talk to amazing people like Rand Fishkin of Moz and Meghan Keaney Anderson of HubSpot.
These people have big audiences.
Rand has over 335,000 Twitter followers.
HubSpot has over 1 million Facebook fans.
What we’d love to do is make it easy for our guests to share and promote their podcast episode. One idea is to send them a note on the day their podcast goes live and include a series of shareable media:
- Pullquotes
- Images
- Links
- Prewritten tweets and status updates
Here’s an example of one of the images we made for Meghan’s episode:
Here is the email we sent for Rand’s first episode (feel free to copy it if you’d like):
From this thread on Growth Hackers, there’s some interesting advice to treat podcast promotion like you would content promotion, an area in which we have a bit more experience. Here are the specifics from the Growth Hackers thread:
- Quality > Quantity
- Solve a problem
- Provide actionable insight
- Hustle just as hard to distribute as you did to create
- Leverage your guest’s audience
^^ It’s this last one that we’re excited to experiment with in some fun ways.
2. Promote on social media … in a dozen different ways
Share rich media, soundbites, video, images, teasers, evergreen — anything you can think of
We’re so lucky to have the amazing social networks that we do. There’s just so much creativity and fun to be had with promoting a podcast on social media.
For starters, share an update when the episode first goes live.
Then, keep sharing.
Here are some ideas:
> Pin your episode tweet or Facebook post, featuring the iTunes URL.
> Create quote images in Canva or Pablo. Share these as standalone social updates with a link to iTunes.
Here’s the Canva template that we’re using.
> Create 15-second soundbite clips. Upload to Soundcloud. Then share on Twitter.
Twitter has a really neat implementation of Soundcloud audio specifically. People can play the audio right from their Twitter stream.
> Tease the next episode 24 hours ahead of time.
> Reshare the podcast episode multiple times.
We do 3x to Twitter the first day, 2x to Facebook the first week.
> Talk about the behind-the-scenes stuff in an Instagram story.
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3. Release at least 3 episodes on launch day
“I actually received negative reviews from people who had listened to the first episode and were upset that there was only one.”
The above quote is from Pat Flynn, the founder of Smart Passive Income. His advice about launch quantity is right in line with the best tips from others, too.
Publish 3 to 5 episodes when you first launch.
From our research, the very minimum number of episodes to have at launch is three. In general, the more the merrier. We had seven interviews complete before we launched our podcast, with three episodes planned for launch day and two apiece for the following two weeks.
This multi-launch strategy is a key part to Jason Zook’s plan for hitting the New and Noteworthy section of iTunes, which, as we mentioned above, is a huge way to get traffic.
Jason’s plan hinges on these two concepts:
- Record and release several podcasts on launch day (3-5)
- Build your audience before launching if possible
4. Convert the audio to a YouTube video
Name your video “Interview with …” for potential SEO
One thing we’d love to be able to do with the podcast is to repurpose it in as many ways as possible. Some companies do neat things, mixing live video (on Facebook and Periscope) with the live podcast interview. We’re excited to try a slightly different route.
We’re keen to add every episode of the podcast to our YouTube channel.
With a YouTube version, you get a handful of benefits:
- Video to share on social media
- Closed captioning and transcripts automatically from YouTube (great for accessibility if you’re not going to transcribe)
- SEO benefits
This last one is really exciting
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