How to promote your podcast
What do we want?
More listeners!
When do we want them?
Now!
Whenever I talk to podcasters, one desire comes up. More listeners.
So I spend my time on coaching calls discussing promotion tactics for podcasting so you can get more listeners to your show.
Some of these tactics require daily effort, while others are much more passive, set-and-forget style strategies. And I’ll give you a hint, it’s not about day you release your podcast.
Let’s dive in.
1. Collaborate with Other Podcasters
If there’s one behavior you need to understand about audience building, it’s that users are much more likely to move within a platform.
I mean that podcast listeners listen to other podcasts, and newsletter readers will read other newsletters. However, getting a newsletter reader to become a podcast listener is much more challenging.
That’s why collaborating with other podcasters to get your show in front of podcast listeners is so important.
Your ideal listeners are out there listening to podcasts with no idea that you exist. By collaborating with other podcasts, you can appear in front of their listeners and expose your show to the people who want to hear it.
A few ideas:
Trailer swaps – You play a trailer of their show in your podcast episode, and they do the same with your show.
Feed Drop – You swap a full episode and release it on each other’s feed with a short introduction.
Host Swap – Each hosts an episode of the other person’s show.
Multi-part episodes – Each podcast hosts 1 part of an overall topic, and listeners have to go to each show to listen to the full story
Themed Series – You agree with other podcasters on a theme of episodes and promote each other’s episodes as part of that theme.
Guest Swap – Each host appears as a guest on the other person’s show.
2. Become a Prolific Podcast Guest
Whenever I look through my podcast feed, I’m reminded that I found 90% of the shows I listen to from hearing the host as a guest on another show I already know and trust.
This has the double benefit if you’re a business owner that you get to both promote your show and your services on the guest show.
Daily reaching out to potential podcasts you want to appear on will do wonders for your show’s popularity. It will get you out in front of the people who want to hear from you and let you discuss your ideas and projects in a public forum.
Those listeners then get to hear you speak, and if they like what you have to say, they’ll come listen to your podcast for more.
3. Include Your Podcast in Your Email Signature
This is such an easy win.
You can open up your email settings (personal, work, podcast email, all of the above) and include a link to your podcast with one sentence saying what it’s about. You never know who you might email that sees it and gives it a listen.
In fact I gave out this advice in a Tweet and one person took me up on it and a week later had a co-worker telling her they’d listened!
An easy win that you can start today.
4. Tell Everyone You Meet
I’m a big believer in small gains leading to big wins over time. That’s why it pays to bring up your podcast with anyone who will listen. Before I started as a podcast coach I used to answer the question “So what do you do?” with “I’m a podcaster”. Sure, I had other jobs, but I was a podcaster, and it started up a conversation about my podcast.
People would take a note of the name and then start listening.
Your podcast will grow drip by drip. One listener then tells another, and your podcast keeps reaching more people. It starts with you being able to articulate your podcast.
5. Create QR codes or NFC cards.
Make it even easier when you tell people about your podcast by having a QR code on a sticker on the back of your phone or an NFC card they can use to access your podcast.
A link either to your podcast website or your episodes.fm link is the best idea. That way they’ll have it open on their phone ready to listen.
NFC cards are about $30 and you can use Canva as a free QR code generator which you can then turn into a sticker with someone like Sticker Mule to create your stickers/business cards.
These won’t promote your podcast by themselves but they can make it easier to promote a podcast in person and get new listeners that way.
6. Wear Your Merch
“What does your hat say?”
Is something I’ve been asked more than once when I’m wearing my merch. Especially if you have particularly eye-catching merch this can be great advertising for your podcast. And of course if you sell merch and someone else wears it the same thing happens.
More eyes on your podcast logo. More conversations about your podcast. More podcast downloads for you.
7. Go Where Your Audience Are (Events/Conferences/Clubs)
One of my coaching clients launched his podcast on Magic Books and then attended the biggest magic convention in America to promote it. It was a huge success.
Because he got to talk to people in person about his show, directly to hundreds of people who are his traget audience. What can go wrong?
I’m a big believer in in-person marketing for podcasting because people listen to podcasts when they like the host. So if you, as the host, can go out and talk to people directly it’s like you’re giving them a live taster of your podcast.
This can look like conferences, conventions, and meetups, but also smaller. If you have a podcast on gardening and join a local allotment, you’ll have access to 50 people who might listen to your podcast.
Go where your target audience is so you can position yourself to talk about your podcast to people who will be excited to hear about it.
You’ll also like this article on tips to get more listeners.
8. Sponsor a conference
Darknet Diaries takes this to the next level by fully hosting an event within a conference:
The party he’s hosting within the conference then has its own sponsors!
The sky really is the limit for podcast promotion. It just takes a little creativity and a lot of commitment to partner with people, make relationships be helpful, and keep trying.
9. Do Live Shows
When I suggest doing live shows, people always assume you have to book out a concert hall and try to sell 500 tickets. Which works great, of course, but there’s an alternative.
Host a small live event at a local cafe.
Many cafes offer free venue hire, so you can get yourself a free venue, promote the event in a social media post and in your podcast, and host an event for 20 people.
And what do you think those 20 people will do? They’ll talk about your podcast and the event. When they’re talking with co-workers about what they’re up to at the weekend, they’ll talk about your podcast.
Worries no one will turn up? The great part is… You can just not tell anyone if that happens! But I believe people will. You are a celebrity to your podcast listeners. They want to meet you and get a chance to listen to you talk in person.
10. Infiltrate Online Communities
Hopefully you’ve got a clear idea of who your podcast is for. A group of people in mind that you know will love your podcast. They are your first 1000 fans. Those people likely already exist in a group somewhere on the internet, likely a Subreddit, Facebook group, or maybe a forum.
It’s your job to infiltrate that community and make them dying to hear your podcast.
DON’T go in and make the first post you do a promotional post of your podcast.
Instead, start replying to comments, add to the conversations, ask thought-provoking questions, and give useful advice. THEN, you are in a position to start dropping in that you have a podcast. You can bring it up in conversation almost as an afterthought that you have a podcast talking about this. Maybe drop a link, or maybe wait till someone asks.
This builds up your credibility and trustworthiness in the group so that you can then start promoting your podcast, and people will be excited to hear about it.
11. Put Audio Podcasts on YouTube
If you just create a podcast and then do no promotion or marketing, no one is going to find it. Podcast players aren’t the most searchable and so your show will just sit there.
YouTube, however, is a search engine. Billions of people are on there everyday searching for everything and anything, your podcast can fall into those searches.
A video podcast will do even better, of course, but even if your podcast is audio only, you can use YouTube to promote your podcast. I did this with Generally Spooky History and it was on the advice of the Mad Fientist whose audio only podcast has had almost 1,000,000 views on YouTube.
You get what you put in, but this is not something you want to sleep on.
12. Ask Your Guests To Share Their Podcast Episode
This is hit or miss.
Most guests appear on multiple shows a month talking about very similar topics. They don’t want to bore their audience by sharing that they were on a podcast talking about the same thing again.
But some podcast guests will be more than happy to share their episode appearances.
How do you find out?
Ask.
The day the episode comes out you can send the guest a follow up email thanking them for their time in coming on the show and politely asking if they would mind sharing it out on social media. You can give them a link to make it easy for them.
It’s a low-effort promotion technique that I encourage all my coaching clients to use.
13. Leverage Your Assets
It’s an often forgotten technique to use the attention you already have to grow your podcast. Yes, if you have a big social media following, email list, or popular blog, you should use that.
But even if you just have a personal Twitter account with 50 followers, that’s 50 people you get to tell about your podcast. Or if you’re a business with employees, you can ask them to listen to your business’s new podcast.
Maybe if you go to a Yoga Class, you can talk to the people there about your podcast.
This will be entirely unique to you, but think about the communities you are a part of and the digital assets you already have that you can use to promote your podcast. Maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. But you have to try.
14. Old Fashioned PR
If you want to get attention, do something attention-worthy and then tell people about it.
A mammoth 5 hour deep dive in a single episode. An interview with an elusive guest. A charity drive episode.
Something newsworthy that you can then release as a press release and leverage as attention for your podcast.
Word of mouth comes with people remarking on your podcast. For remarks to happen, you have to be remarkable.
15. Repurpose Your Episodes
You don’t have to spend loads of time coming up with content ideas to promote your podcast. You’ve already got them within your podcast.
On podcast can become
- 5 Tweets,
- 5 Instagram posts,
- 1 blog post,
- 1 audio gram
- 1 newsletter
You can use a tool like Swell.Ai to do this for you, or you can do it yourself. But, don’t spend time coming up with new ideas when you have episodes full of content you can pull apart.
16. Use a Website and SEO
Your need your own podcast website, or at least a landing page if it’s part of your business. Some place where you can hold all your episodes, post your show notes, and generally collect people onto your podcast.
Each podcast episode should have its own page so that people can find it through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). People who are searching for your podcast guest or topic can stumble upon your website and your podcast. Don’t waste this opportunity.
I have a short guide to optimizing your podcast website for SEO here.
17. Start a Newsletter and Mailing List
There is a danger if you start a newsletter that you’ll just have another channel that needs to be promoted and grown. But as a way to promote your podcast to existing listeners your newsletter is a must.
Amy Porterfield is a great example of this. She said on an appearance on the Grow The Show podcast that her downloads are never as high when she doesn’t send out a newsletter telling people about a new episode.
This is the exception to people moving across mediums (as in podcast to podcast) that I mentioned earlier. When you take people from YOUR podcast to YOUR newsletter, there is a different investment.
One place to promote your newsletter and so your podcast is the ConvertKit Creator Network. When you sign up for a newsletter, it sometimes comes up with a list of other creators you can subscribe to at the same time. You can become a part of these lists by joining the Creator Network and partnering with other newsletters. This is a different way to collaborate, but it can be effective.
18. Effectively Use Social Media
Podcasters tend to come at social media the wrong way. They dive onto social media and immediately try and promote their podcast.
This doesn’t work.
Instead, you have to learn how to grow your target audience on that platform, whichever one it is, learn what content works, and learn what it takes to get attention. And get attention around promoting your podcast.
You can do this on Twitter by using a tool like Hypefury to plug your podcast underneath posts that do well. You can also use Many Chat on Instagram to set up auto replies that send the link of your latest episode to eager listeners.
You can’t just turn up and say “Hey, I have a podcast” because people won’t care. Learn the platform, learn how to build an audience and get attention, then promote your podcast.
Or, use it as a way to keep connected with your existing listeners. Send people from your show to your social media of choice so they can leave comments, send DMs and generally have access to you.
19. Do Giveaways for Reviews or Shares
There are two ways to do giveaways.
- Giveaways for Reviews
Do a giveaway in which the user has to leave a podcast review, and you offer them something as a prize. They work best on Apple podcasts because you can leave written reviews. Offer up a free coaching hour, free merch, or some small part of your service for free and in exchange for a review. Tell them to write something specific in the review so they know you’ve entered. Create a 2-week time frame and drum up reviews!
This is indirect promotion where more social proof helps you get more listeners.
- Giveaways on Social Media platforms
These help you reach more followers on a social media platform. Usually, in the form of “like, follow, and share this post,” they help get your account seen by more people.
They aren’t as effective as they once were but it’s certainly worth experimenting with. I don’t think the social media giants liked people getting free reach, so they limited their effectiveness. That’s why I like option one the best.
20. Work With Influencers
There’s a good chance that you can look around the landscape of the internet and identify a few people who you think, “I bet the people following them would love my podcast.”
You can sneak into their comments and become an active participant there. Or you can pay to have them share you in some way. Social media posts, sponsored videos, podcast shoutouts.
Or, if you have something you can offer in return, you could collaborate. You could shout out their social media, and they could shout out your podcast kind of thing.
This works best if you have enough of a following for it to be worth it to the influencer or if your audiences are similar sizes on different platforms. It all starts with asking, so don’t be afraid to reach out.
21. Use Keywords in Your Podcast Title and Descriptions
I said earlier that podcast players aren’t the best for searching. But people still search on them, so you can do your best to be included in those searches.
One way to do this is to use keywords in your podcast title and description. That allows your podcast to be picked up when people are searching for podcasts like that.
For instance you can put a hyphen on your podcast name “podcast name – a running podcast” and then mention running in your description a few times so that when people search for “running” your podcast is more likely to get shown to them.
This is a more passive strategy for promoting your podcast.
22. Use paid ads
If in doubt, get your wallet out.
Paying for podcast ads can be a great option. You can buy premium placement inside podcast players:
These give you priority listening on people’s devices. Otherwise, you’re looking at running in-episode ads alongside traditional advertising. Whether that’s host-read ads or programmatic ads that you have pre-recorded. Here are a couple of resources to get you started:
Then you have the options of paying to be featured in podcast promotion newsletters
You could also pay for boosted social media posts, billboard ads if your audience lives somewhere specific, If they read one magazine then paying for sponsors from that magazine could be a great option.
Audience first. Where are they? How can you pay to be in front of them?
23. Make Sure You Can Be Found Everywhere
This is more marketing than podcast promotion, but it’s important that you can be found wherever your audience wants to listen to you. So, you need to make sure you can be found on all podcast directories.
This is, of course, a check I perform for you as a part of a growth machine podcast audit.
24. Ask for Reviews
In each podcast episode, you want to make sure your calls to action are effective. Calls to action work and are an effective podcast promotion tool in your arsenal. Asking for people to review your podcast is a great way to build social proof and grow your podcast.
25. Reference Older Podcast Episodes
You always want to be promoting older episodes from within your podcast. This encourages new listeners to go through the back catalog and explore your world so they turn from listeners into fans.
Casual references to past podcast episodes, when they come up, and then a link in the description so it’s easy to find ensures this can happen.
26. Make Word of Mouth Possible
The biggest podcasts in the world got that way because people listened and told their friends, and it spread out from there.
There are two secrets to word-of-mouth marketing strategy
27. Associate Your Podcast With Something
This is the topic, the niche, the subject, whatever you want to call it. It’s the clearly defined subject that when people are talking about something like losing weight, they can say, “Oh, I listened to a great podcast about that,” and then they mention you. This only happens if you can become associated with something. That is choosing your target audience and associating yourself with them.
28. Make a Great Podcast
Nobody tells their friends about a middle-of-the-road podcast they listened to. “I listened to that, and it didn’t move me up or down” is not the most inspiring thing you’ve ever heard. It certainly doesn’t make me want to listen.
So focus on quality. Make a top quality podcast that you are proud of so that when people listen they will want to tell their friends. That’s how you promote a podcast I a nutshell.
Final Thoughts on Podcast Promotion
Podcast promotion doesn’t have to be complicated. Choose a couple of podcast marketing strategies from this list and give them a try. Be a good podcast host, make sure you are in all the podcast directories and podcast apps, and don’t go overboard trying to master all the social media channels.
A good podcast marketing strategy is simply about reaching your podcast audience, where they are, and letting them know about your show. Don’t overcomplicate it.
And when you’re ready. Here’s how I can help:
How I Can Help You
1) Free 5-day Podcast Marketing Fundamentals Course – Learn the basics of what it takes to grow a popular show, get more listeners, and earn more money from your podcast. The five day email course is totally free
2) The Template Vault – Learn how to grow your podcast on autopilot. Get fill-in-the-blank templates to set up your podcast’s foundation for growth, success, and making money.
3) Podcast Marketing Coaching– I am an experienced podcast coach, and I want to help you master your podcast marketing. Check out my full list of services and discover how we can work together.
4) Recommended Tools– These are the tools I use to grow my podcast. I focus on tools that improve quality and save time.
Great post! Some really good ideas here. Thanks for sharing!