How To Grow A Podcast
You probably already know that podcasting is a great way to attract an audience and build trust and a relationship with them. There’s a reason podcasting is such a great way for companies to generate leads and grow their businesses after all.
There’s just one problem, an effective podcast has to have its own audience. That means you need to put in the work to help your podcast grow. Just producing and publishing a podcast isn’t enough either.
Here are some of the most powerful tricks to help your podcast grow.
Get To Know Your Podcast Audience
The first few episodes of any podcast are usually testing the waters, seeing what kind of traction you can get, and fine-tuning the technical details of your sound and presentation. That's fine, but it's not enough to grow your podcast in the long run.
If you want your podcast to grow you need to know who you’re talking to and why they’re listening.
Getting to know your podcast audience should be an ongoing process, starting when you first create the podcast and choose a target audience, and then continuing as you start to collect data about who is listening.
Most platforms will give you some tools to research your audience, use them. Conduct your own audience research. Then use that data to refine your podcast further, either targeting your current audience or shifting to the audience you want to attract.
Use Tags Well
Tags are often mostly invisible when it comes to podcasts, but they’re one of your most important tools for getting new listeners. Tags tell podcast platforms how they should categorize your podcast and what kinds of listeners might be interested.
Want to attract a larger audience without spending a lot of money or time on advertisements? Study how to use tags.
One of the easiest ways to get started is to find similar podcasts, especially podcasts you already like or listen to. See what their tags are, and how they change tags between episodes. That will tell you what techniques are already effective for your type of podcast.
Find Relevant Social Media Groups
Podcasting doesn’t exist in a vacuum, use that to your advantage. If your podcast is tied to your business, your business probably already has social media accounts, use them. Consider building social media profiles for your podcast as well.
Once you have a profile to promote with, start looking for groups that might be interested in what you have to say. Make sure you’re choosing well. Many social media groups will tune out people and businesses that post too often, or that spam self-promotion.
Limiting promotion to groups that allow self-promotion, and to the groups most relevant to each episode, will help build trust and grow your podcast at the same time.
Connect To Your Audience On Other Platforms
Self-promotion is great, but why stop there? If you’re already using social media to promote your podcast, why not connect to your audience there. Even if you only post rarely, take advantage of social media as a place to host discussions, run polls, and post interesting information you can’t tackle in your podcast.
Your audience will appreciate thoughtful engagement, even if it’s rare.
Bring In Relevant Guests
Growing a podcast also usually means reaching out to other communities and seeing if you can attract listeners there. Guests are a great way to tap into other communities since they’ll often bring some of their audience with them.
Try to select guests that are relevant to your audience and interesting over guests who have a lot of social clout or a big personal audience. Bringing one-time listeners is great, but you’ll get more consistent listeners from relevant and interesting guests than popular but unrelated guests.