Podcasting is the new blogging! Here’s how to get started

In the audio-only media category, podcasts come in second place after radio. According to a report by Infinite Dial, some 56% of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to a Podcast at least once. The thing which appeals to most listeners is the intimacy of hearing someone repeatedly. They feel a deep connection with the host.

The portability of podcasts has contributed to their popularity. You can listen to podcasts while you wash the dishes, commute to the office, or walk the dog. A podcast business won’t require a huge investment. You can start with just a great idea and a microphone. This is unlike a TV show, where the expenses are more.

Before you start your podcast you have to keep the following things in mind:

1. Equipment

You won’t need much equipment to start your podcast show-a a smartphone, a laptop, a microphone, and a pair of headphones, and you are good to go. With time you have to learn editing tools and some software to fine-tune your podcast audio.

2. Topic

Decide on which category you are most comfortable with, and narrow down a topic. The range is vast-from sports to spirituality, and comedy to true crime, you will find an audience for every genre.

3.  Know your audience

Knowing your target audience will help you to focus on the topic of your podcast.

Steps for attracting new podcast listeners

We all want to have more listeners for our podcasts, but the competition is intense. In this article, we will teach you things that you can do to grow your start-up podcast.

1. Make a plan

If you really want to go for podcast marketing, you first have to make a plan. Select such a theme that will be able to attract the maximum number of listeners. You should do your research well, and make the topic interesting.

Develop your hosting style. You can take interviews with celebrities who can talk openly from the confines of their homes. This will make your show popular.

Be focused on the topic you select. For example, if your topic is on a serious business issue, you shouldn’t ramble on to some entertainment gossip. If you diverge from the topic your audience can become disinterested and leave the show.

2. Guest Podcasting

It is difficult to convince people to listen to a podcast through a video or a blog post because they will have to open the podcast app on their smartphone to do so. If you are not very well known, they will have to search for your name. For this reason, it makes sense to be a guest on another person’s podcast.

This is a good podcast marketing strategy in several different ways. First, it allows you to appear at someone else’s gig with their endorsement. Since that person’s listeners are already listening to a podcast, it will be easy for them to hear your voice and subscribe to your channel. They will have a better ability to connect with you. People will get to know about you and you can get free publicity.

Make sure that on your guest podcasting efforts you are also giving the listeners a Call to Action to your own show. It can be a unique URL that is specific to that audience. It can bring them to your home page or a specific landing page.

3. Start a Business Podcast

Business is a very popular genre among podcasts and ranks among the top 5. Listening to your business podcast might make people want to start a business of their own. It will help to improve their lives, both personally and professionally.

4. Repurpose your show

This is a strategy that a lot of podcasters attempt to do. Repurposing your show would be to take the audio file from your podcast and put it elsewhere. There are several ways to do it. You can take the transcript of that audio file and turn that into a blog post for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes.

If you want to share on social media, you can take special clips from your podcast episodes to entice people to listen to the episode. You can do this with just the audio, or you might also film the recording of that particular podcast. Just have an extra camera focus on you when you are broadcasting.

Use SEO-friendly keywords in the title and description. This will help your podcast rank on the top in search results.

5. Take the help of Spotify

Spotify has recently announced new tools that will make it easy for you to share your podcast episodes through social media channels. The new timestamp sharing feature will let you share any podcast feature at a particular time. In this way, you can share with your viewers the most popular parts of your episodes.

To share a timestamp on your selected platform, you need to click on the ‘switch to share’ button.

6. Join hands with partners

Collaborating with prominent podcasts will help you tap into a pre-existing audience that will help you grow. You can also form a partnership with a business, where you talk about it on your podcast. To reciprocate the favor, the business can mention you on their social channels.

The person with whom you want to form a partnership should have a successful show of his own with good audience size.

7. Send Emails

Send an email to your follower list whenever you are releasing a new podcast with quality content. It would be good if you know your audience segmentation. Let us suppose you are speaking on a technical topic. If that specific episode is easy to understand for beginners, you can send it to beginners on your email list.

You can explain in your email why that particular podcast can be helpful to that particular audience. This will be doing a service to them, and make them feel special. If you try this even for a month, you will get more people listening to and sharing your show.

8. Offer to pay for ads

Paying for ads to promote your podcast business can be very expensive, and is not easy to track the results. But, what you can do is to be a guest on another person’s podcast, and offer to pay them for their social media posts with you featured in them. A mention of you on their Facebook posts or a link to your podcast can get new listeners and subscribers to your podcast show. It will work much better than you sending cold ads to a person you have not met before.

A podcast is the only medium that allows you to start from your home or garage, and be the number one podcast show in a year. With a low financial bar to entry, podcasts boast of a diverse range of audiences, from the differently-abled to the LGBT community. We hope that you will do try the ways we listed in this article to grow your podcast listeners.

Also Read:

1) How to Start Up a Mini-Grocery Store in a Village?
2) How Small Businesses Can Compete Against Big Businesses?
3) Best small business ideas under 50,000
4) OkCredit: All you need to know about OkCredit & how it works.

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FAQs

Q. What are the three factors that Apple takes into consideration while ranking podcasts?

Ans. The three factors that influence Apple’s ranking decisions are subscription numbers, ratings, and reviews.

Q. Which is the medium used by most people to listen to podcasts?

Ans. As per a study by Nieman Lab, 70 pe rcent of people listen to podcasts through iTunes or the iOS podcast app.

Q. Can I write a description for my podcast for iTunes?

Ans. It is a good idea to write a description for your podcast for iTunes. But the description must be within 4000 characters.

Q. How important is a host for a podcast?

Ans. Every podcast needs a host for providing network bandwidth, upload, and flexible storage space.

Q. As a new podcaster, how frequently should I publish?

Ans. Experts suggest that if you are new to podcasting, you should publish at least three times per week for the first eight weeks. This is because iTunes gives you eight weeks’ from your launch date to be featured in the “New and Noteworthy” section.