Did you know that nearly 51% of American adults listen to podcasts? And estimates put the current number of shows available at over 2,000,000! So the question: what can you do to have a successful podcast?
Nearly 51% of adult Americans listen to podcasts!
Step One: Get Over Your Fear!
The first step to success is to just start! There’s a lot of fears people have about starting a podcast.
“My voice sounds weird.”
“I don’t have enough technical know-how.”
“The equipment is expensive.”
“A podcast is time consuming.”
Chances are that once you get started, those fears will dissipate!
Step Two: What Do Want To Say?
One of the most important things about starting a new venture, like podcasting, is to have a mission. For example, our podcast, BeGrowthDriven, was started because our mission as a company is to help business grow. We wanted to connect like-minded business and entrepreneurs to share advice and recourses. That goal informs all the decisions we make about the podcast.
How to you want to help your audience or customers? What is the goal of your business? You can expand on that to create your podcast’s mission.
Step Three: Record Your First Episode
You don’t need expensive equipment to get started! (Though podcast mics start at like, $30 on Amazon.) Here’s what tools we have found to be helpful.
Part of recording your episode is the editing and mixing side of things. It’s totally up to you how much editing you want to do! It all depends on what you want the feel of your podcast to be.
Step Four: Publish Your Podcast
There are so many directories to publish podcasts on. That big three are iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
In the past, doing well on iTunes/Apple Music is the goal. For a long time, more than half of all podcast listens and downloads happened through Apple. However, Apple made it trickery to get monetization. They also didn’t proactively update the Apple Podcast App’s User experience. In early 2021, Spotify passed up Apple Podcasts for monthly listeners. Spotify’s aggressive efforts in taking over market share have made Apple nervous and therefore, they have begun to put more of an emphais in taking back their podcast crown.
All this goes to show is that it is probably a good idea to have your podcast available on as many platforms as possible!
It’s also a good idea to publish three to five episodes at launch to give your new listeners something to listen to.
Step Five: Promote, Promote, Promote
Podcasting has been around for a long time so there are many recourses and tools available for promoting (or learning how to promote) your podcast. Here’s some tips and tricks
- Tap into your guest’s audience
Chances are if they are a good fit to be a guest on your podcast, there audience could also benefit form your content. Make it easy for your guest to share out pull quotes, images, and links from their episode.
- Use social media.
This is kinda a no brainer. Podcasts can be slip into so many different types of content that is easy to post them across many different platforms. For example, pull quotes do great on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Links can be shared on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter also has a great SoundCloud integration you can use.
Social media can also be used to promote the episode ahead of time as well as sharing past highlights. Social media is great way to connect with fans and listeners on personal level and add another channel for them to interact with you.
Step Six: Repurpose Content
Podcast content can be repurposed into many other different types of content. We’ve already talked about pull quotes and highlight clips, there’s way more things you can do. For one thing, it’s common place to film the recording of the podcast. Then that video can be put on YouTube. And video highlights can be put on social media. Putting the video on YouTube also gives you some accessibility features such as closed captioning. Since YouTube is owned by Google, videos on YouTube boost your overall brand SEO which as far-reaching benefits.
Another helpful way to repurpose podcast content is to have the podcast transcribed. If you don’t have time to do that yourself, (understandable: it’s time consuming!) companies like Rev.com or Fiverr offer cheap transcription services. Once your podcast is transcribed, it can be used as blog content to make it accessible on another channel and boost SEO.
Step Seven: Get Featured On Other Podcasts!
A great way to promote your podcasts and reach new audiences is to be a guest on other podcasts! The podcast community is well connected and worth tapping into.
Do you have a podcast? We want to hear all about it!
