Being able to share short samples of your podcast in an easily-digestible package that can be immediately or auto-played in someone’s feed is exactly what will help build your audience and lead you to success.
Launching a podcast is exciting and seeing audience for the first few shows is exhilarating. But then, things tend to slow down a little as the ‘newness’ of your podcast wears off. Typically, somewhere around show seven, people get disheartened, feel what’s the point and chuck it all in. This is called ‘podfade’ and sadly around 80% of new podcasts give up.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that 80% of new podcasts give up!
Why is this good news? With so much competition left behind in the dust, the 20% that do stick with it, tend to find success.
There are three cornerstone elements that make a podcast successful.
1 – Make a great show. Give people the best content you can
2 – Be consistent with your publishing schedule. If you say you’ll podcast every week, be there every week. If you take a week off here or two weeks there, you become erratic and unreliable. Commitment and consistency is what gets you through ‘podfade’
3 – Market and build your audience. You have to actively tell people about your show or you won’t get listeners. It doesn’t happen by magic.
HOW DO YOU BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE?
At DustPod we employ two methods; free sampling and low cost advertising.
Free Sampling
Every day we all flick through social media and YouTube to see what’s going on or just to pass a few minutes with some quick entertainment. This is the perfect place to put a highlight or a best bit of your show. People can sample it for ten or fifteen seconds and if they like it, bam, you are on their radar. The next time they come across you, you get a little more of their attention and a third time they may click the link to hear a full show.
This works exactly like recommendations from friends. One friend suggests something, you think about it. A second friend suggests it, it gets your attention. A third friend recommends the same thing and you almost can’t help yourself but to check it out!
Build Audience with Video
For online sampling like this you need a short video which showcases a best bit. Why video? Videos work great on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube.
YouTube is the best content discovery engine. Have you watched a video on YouTube that you didn’t click to watch. YouTube suggested it or just played it next and you liked it! Why shouldn’t your podcast participate in that ecosystem and gain those benefits? This is exactly what The Joe Rogan Experience, does. The full show is on Spotify but clips of the best stuff are on YouTube.
Offering grazable clips of your podcast on YouTube and other social media platforms works perfectly.
What kind of video?
We love using animated text subtitles over appropriate stock video. It’s looks very professional and catches the eye. The animated text means people will ‘get it’ even if they don’t have the sound active on their device. One thing we never do is use video clips from the actual podcast recording. Internet video calls are not like tv. People don’t dress up, the background is messy, the video is often not properly lit. It all looks amateur and this is not the impression you want to make.
The final part to building audience with video is to make it very very simple for people to click one link and go directly to your podcast. You can do this using a Smart Link from Chartable. This looks at the persons device and opens the most appropriate app for that device. For example, if it’s an iPhone, the link will open the Apple Podcast app. How easy can that be.
Build Audience with Show Notes
These are the notes you see on a podcast player which outline what each episode of the podcast is about. People do browse through podcast apps to see what’s there and if they like the first sentence or two of your show notes, they are more inclined to sample your show. Show Notes will also sit on your podcast website which means they are equally great for SEO.
Show Notes also make for great Facebook posts.
Show Notes include a killer headline and sticky first sentence which draws the reader in. They then expand on what the reader will get out of the podcast, teases what stories they will hear and what they can learn. Comprehensive notes would also include a short bio about featured speakers or guests, contact details and relevant links.
Build Audience with Summary Articles
A written summary of your podcast is not just high-quality content for your website, it is also SEO gold. All your keywords, delivered naturally, in one place. How could Google resist! It also gives you a whole new medium to share your message on, the written word, which is shareable in ways video is not (and vice versa).
Low Cost Advertising
Generally we use two methods, both of which are very low cost.
Firstly, a €5 a day campaign on Facebook really delivers results. This does what is says on the tin. Set up a campaign, spending just €5 a day and you will literally get new subscribers every single day. For your first few weeks, this is exactly what you need and something which especially helps you get through ‘podfade’.
To help your money go further, when you are defining your audience, the first thing you select is people with an interest in podcasting. That way you’re not showing ads to non-podcast users. Another tip, is to select audience by platform. So have one ad especially for people on iPhones, so your link specifically opens the Apple Podcasts App. For Android users, have a link for Google Podcast app and/or Spotify. Best yet, use a Smart Link from Chartable. Our friend Tanner Campbell, an American podcast strategist, shares more on our podcast here.
The second low-cost advertising route is Google Adwords. Set up a specific campaign for the exact title of your podcast. When people become aware of your podcast using the methods above, if they want to listen, they’ll most likely try a Google search. This is such a specific search term, that it costs literally a few cent per click.
Podcasts and Facebook
Facebook are about to become a lot more podcast friendly. In the next twelve months they’ll be integrating podcasting right into Facebook which represents an enormous opportunity to get short and entertaining samples of your content in front of people right where they graze.
For years, Apple was the No.1 platform for podcasting. Now they share that title with Spotify. Not because Apple has declined but because Spotify has surged. The same will happen again with Facebook, who are multiple times bigger than Apple and Spotify put together.
Being able to share short samples of your podcast in an easily-digestible package that can be immediately or auto-played in someone’s feed is exactly what will help build your audience and lead you to success.