Here is our own "sad" case study – but with a happy ending! We presented some of this at SEO Saturdays.com last week, but I wanted to follow up with the case study here: I have a “hero” episode / blog post that was on page one of the search results for a long time – before dropping off. In this post I want to tell how we “rescued” that piece of content during our last SEO Saturdays livestream, and how we used an app called “Topic” for generating SEO content briefs and content grading. Such content optimization tools can have a massive impact on your podcast website traffic, website rank, and of course subscribers who discover your show by searching no the web.
I will also share how I increased my traffic by 351% in one week. Implications for podcasters with their own websites:
More impactful episode content = happy listeners
Easier interview planning and guest preparation
A data driven approach to dominating a topic in a single episode
Transforming a back-catalog of episodes into a traffic generating machine
Grateful guests who will love to share and link to your episode article
Increased amount of backlinks to your episode article
An increased amount of social shares
So the gist of how all this started is this:
My post “How To Promote A Podcast” was on page 1 of the search results for a year. But lately, new players have been “eating my lunch”, and I slipped to page 2.
This can have a drastic effect on traffic, especially if you have podcast episodes or blog posts that rank for multiple keywords, and then drop. In my case it was over 1,000 visits a month.
It had ranked on page 1 of Google for months, then slipped to page 2.
Our Research Into Content Grading and Content Brief Tools
Sure, it happens, posts can fluctuate between pages 1 and 2 or 100. However, not satisfied – we aim to practice what we preach. On our last livestream we presented some findings from research done by Brian Dean of Backlinko. His updated article called “We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results – Here’s What We Learned About SEO” led us to a number of insights and possible areas of exploration. As Brian Dean points out in his post:
Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth.
We’ve long realized that “long form” content ranks high in the Search Result Pages (SERPs). And our long form show notes for podcasts is what is driving podcast discovery and new subscribers. But the key insight for me was this:
It’s not the # of words. Comprehensive Topic Coverage results in a high “Content Grade” – and this trumps sheer length or a high number of words.
Courtesy of Brian Dean at https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking
So we started exploring a number of tools that help improve an podcast episodes content grade. And this led to another insight: Content Briefs allow you to design comprehensive topic coverage in the first place. And this led us to the question:
What if an podcast host was to use an SEO ”Content Brief” as a way to research his guest, and the topic they want to talk about ahead of time? What if an interview could actually be designed to covering a topic more completely – and thus result in high SEO ranking?
Meet “Topic” – More Impactful Podcasts from SEO Content Briefs and Content Grading
One of these tools that excited is called Topic. It uses sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) to research a topic, and uses big data to create content briefs:
RESEARCH: Topic has a keyword research tool built in, so you can research your episode topic.
PLANNING: Topic lets you plan better for interviews or articles content. Enter a keyword, and Topic's Content Briefs will show you what you need to cover to achieve a high content grade.
EXECUTION: Topic's Content Grader allows you to quickly see what your draft episode show notes article is missing. Create a feedback loop that ensures that every episode article covers what your audience is searching for.
We tried Topic out and it worked. We ran our “sad” post through their analysis, found that I had a content grade of B+. OK not terrible, but I wanted an A++ to see what we had to do to improve the content to fill gaps and voilà!
I simply entered my article URL, and Topic made recommendations
After making some adjustments, which we demo in our video above at about 0:40, I was able to re-check my content grade, and it is now an A++.
Topic helped me to pinpoint what EXACTLY I had to change in order to rank.
Here is the article after I implemented Topic’s recommendations. A++ Content Grade
I was surprised how quickly this worked. A week later, and we’re back on page 1 of Google, in a better position than even last year. Our podcast website traffic from this one keyword has increased by 351%. Keep in mind this article ranks for multiple keywords, and they all showed a significant rise in their SERP positions.
What does this mean for podcasters? Web search is how we get our followers, and our clients attract 60% of their listeners and subscribers this way.
Here is the result only a week later, thanks to content grading we are back!Podcast Website Traffic For This Post Increase Topped 351%
Why and When You Need A Content Brief and Content Grading Tool
If you have a new podcast website, your domain authority as well as podcast website traffic will likely be low. There are 2 effective ways you can make up for this:
Make up for your low domain authority – with great content designed by an SEO informed content brief and based on a high SEO content grade
Link building. We can’t say it often enough: You need to make your guests link to your podcast articles and show notes
We are excited that Ryo Chiba, one of the founders of Topic will be joining us on our livestream as a co-host, and as usual on SEO Saturdays we will collaborate to do some live SEO for podcasters.
You can apply now for your show to be featured, and allow us to do live SEO research, and help you with content briefs and content grading for your podcast episode ideas.
https://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SEO-Saturdays-1920x1080-layout2250-1fboe0f_305d2e3d03e4c9a392056969369dd5fa_2000.png10801920Juergen Berkesselhttps://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Polymash-Logo-2019-680px-Web2.pngJuergen Berkessel2020-05-09 16:33:512020-05-13 14:12:06Podcast Website Traffic Increased by 351% in One Week [Content Optimization Case Study]
SEO Saturdays – May 2 is our latest in our fortnightly livestream event on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. We seek to expand and shift podcasters assumptions around traditional ways of marketing and promoting podcasts. We invite guests to join us – those working on elevating their content, and those who have potential solutions to offer. (NB – while our focus is specific to podcasting – this show is equally useful to any digital content).
Join us at seosturdays.com to have your podcast SEO optimization done live!
Click above for a replay of our SEO Saturdays – May 2 2020 Live Stream
How SEO Saturdays Works
SEO Saturdays is growing and we continue to experiment. In this latest iteration, we offer
LIVE SEO coaching to those who apply
New learnings and Insights from our research
Guest conversations via Skype
Livestreaming SEO coaching
You’re invited to our livestreaming event every second Saturday when we review content for its SEO strength. What’s the content that you want to bring more eyeballs and/or ears to? It is your website, your podcast, your individual episodes, your blog, your course, your book?
To have your content reviewed, all you have to do is apply and show up! We demonstrate how you can optimize for search with our methods using a range of valuable tools. We invite you to apply because we invest resources in advance by conducting some initial research before we go live. In that way, we can be of real service to our applicants in the moment.
Not only do our applicants receive expert advice specific to their content, they also earn valuable backlinks to their content as we feature them in our show notes, (see below and in our first and second LIVE events).
New learnings
In this SEO Saturdays – May 2 livestream, we share new insights and learning in the SEO space. It’s ever evolving and so are we. Featured in this SEO Saturday – May 2 were two key valuable reference and resources:
AI tool to help you create content that your audience wants: Topic. Read below for my excitingly successful outcome using this AI.
In our livestream we show you how Topic opened us up to possibilities inspired by Brian Dean’s post. totally had not thought about using a “content brief” and “content grading” approach for podcasts. And there are more possibilities for this than meets the eye.
How a content brief & grading tool increased my traffic 16X
Here is our own “sad”case study: a Polymash “hero” episode / blog post has been on page one of the search results for a long time. Learn what we were able to do to 16X our traffic in one single week:
In this segment our guests share a little of their business objectives and why podcasting is a key factor in their growth strategy. Before the show we do our research and then share observations and recommendations which they react to in real time. We then send them our findings after the show so they can take action.
Featured Podcasts
Not Real Art Podcast
Sorry To Hear That Podcast
OutDoor Biz Podcast
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We’re excited to have these podcasters applying to be on our SEO Saturday’s livestream. Each podcaster is unique and while you may think you’re alone with your issues, we find that with all the excellent teaching moments that surface during the livestream, we recognize we are not so alone. Learning together is truly valuable. Remember, if you missed the livestream, all of this is viewable on our You Tube channel.
Not Real Art Podcast
Not Real Art Podcast is intended for creative audiences only. Not Real Art celebrates creative culture worldwide. It contains material that is fresh, fun and inspiring but is not suitable for pretentious art snobs. Hosts – Man One and Sourdough – are long time friends, collaborators and art world insiders based in Los Angeles. Nothing is off-limits on NOT REAL ART. Sourdough and Man One bring a fresh, devil-may-care approach to discussing their mutual love — and hate — for the contemporary art scene, creative culture, and everything in between!
Sorry To Hear That Podcast
The goal of the Sorry To Hear That Podcast is to help create a community around grief. Host, CJ Williams interviews people who talk about the death of a loved one and talk about their processing of that grief. Sorry to hear that was a phrase CJ heard frequently after she lost her mother and it bothered her – so the show also is an educational resource to help those that have not lost a person to think more critically about the other persons' experience and perhaps give some options about what to say and what not to say.
OutDoor Biz Podcast
Each week on The Outdoor Biz Podcast you’ll hear genuine conversations with Outdoor Industry Insiders. Iconic founders and leaders from brands like JanSport, Eagle Creek, Fishpond, Redington; Industry Recruiters, Sales, and Marketing Executives and many more. These industry leaders talk about their careers, tell outdoor inspiring outdoor adventure stories and offer advice and direction on the path you can take to get your job in the industry and grow your Outdoor Career. Hosted by Author, Speaker, Adventurer, and industry insider Rick Saez.
Apply for your own podcast or to learn more. If you’re interested in free SEO analysis of your content, just fill out our application form there.
Access our affiliate links on this same page: e.g.content syndication platform, StoryChief. It helps distribute podcast show note articles and builds backlinks from multiple platforms as a result.
Learn about the SEO tools we use.
Next Time
Our next SEO SATURDAY is May 16. You can apply now for your show to be featured.
Our conversation is bound to propel your thinking to take action!
Remember, you earn great backlinks when we feature your show on our site. Each week our featured podcasts, as demo’d above are enjoying that benefit – and that’s just one! Join us next time to find out why this is a GREAT SEO tactic that can flip your script!
The current podcast ecosystem is a challenging one to promote your podcast in, admittedly. First: as of mid 2022, there are currently north of 2,400,000 shows that have produced over 66 million episodes. Assuming an average length of about 1 hour, it would take you 7,534 years to get through all the current episodes. It's a crowded space, for sure.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Podcast Marketing
The challenges accelerated during 2020, but forward to mid 2022, and the data now suggests that after the initial outbreak there was a slight dip, then a plateau in the number of podcast listeners. Surprisingly as the pandemic went on, People adjusted listeners increased by 57% US alone according to Statista in the and has only continued to grow ever since. Podcasts became a popular choice of entertainment for people amidst their social isolation and is projected to maintain their listeners even after the pandemic.
All of this makes it even more important to promote and market your own podcast with solid footing.
We would argue that podcast websites and creating a great web-based listening experience has only increased in importance.
How do you promote and market your podcast in 2022 and beyond?
Below are some of the tactics we cover in this article. This is a long(ish) read, so if you want a shorter more concise guide to marketing a podcast, visit our new article “How to Promote A Podcast: 10 Podcast Marketing Strategies”. In any case, here is a table of content:
The increasing role of Chinese click farms have had an outsized impact on the top 200 ranking for Apple Podcasts. The charts are gameable, hackable, and a lot of people are doing just that. The Youtube video above was put together by LimeLink, and if you're a podcaster you owe it to yourself to check it out. Careful, you might get depressed, or worse, be tempted to try the same for your podcast. Don't! This post is here to help.
Compounding that: launch algorithms have changed, and reviews don't matter as much as they once did. The older (still common to many) model of giveaways and contests won't work as well as it did even 1-2 years ago.
As a result of the overall landscape, promoting your podcast has to come from newer sources. But what exactly are those sources?
This is why I put together this (pretty exhaustive) post, and hope that it will prove useful for beginning podcasters, but also that the veterans will find some podcast promotion tips and tactics they may not have considered yet.
Oh, and there is now also an entire Podcast and Youtube Channel about this. It's called "The Podcast Growth Show", and if you find some of this material useful or have podcast promotion tactics you can share with us, I'd love it if you joined our community.
Reaching Your Target Audience
Understanding the target audience for your podcast comes first, and then reaching them comes second. Doing analysis of your target audience is a pre-requisite that should come with launching a podcast in the first place, before any podcast promotion even begins.
Try to build a solid understanding of who your podcast listeners are, the topics they like and what else they listen to
You can research the most popular podcasts in your niche on Apple Podcasts
You can use PodNews.net, which has a good search feature that delivers useful information about each show. For example, here is a search for “real estate podcasts” on podnews.net.
You can roughly gauge the popularity of each podcast by the ratings and number of episodes you find, and look through the episode topics of the most popular shows for inspiration.
Your job is to create episode content that is the most relevant for your target audience
Basic Podcast Promotion Tactics
Your First Episode, And Your Trailer Episode
Pay attention to your first episodes, and consider having a “Trailer” episode you can promote that will help people understand what your podcast is all about.
If you have a website, this trailer episode can be featured in a “New Listener” section of the podcast home page. This way your new listeners have an easy way to get oriented.
Some people record a brief trailer episode, and then expand on the concept and origins of their show in the first episode. I like this approach, and would then recommend featuring both episodes in the “New Listener” section.
Consider re-recording your trailer once you’re 10+ episodes into your podcast, usually we can think of ways to improve it and make it more relevant as we get the first few episodes under our belts. And perhaps re-recording your first episodes is even more important for veteran podcasters with a lot of episodes.
Launch With At Least 3-5 Episodes
If you have created a trailer episode, and assuming Episode 1 is about your show, then I would recommend launching with 5 episodes.
This allows your target podcast audience to binge-listen once they discover your show
Create Time To Stay Ahead Of Your Publishing Cadence
In addition to the first 3-5 episodes, it is a good idea to have 3 more episodes completely done and scheduled. It takes the pressure off during your launch cycle.
You want to create the mental space and the time to focus on promoting and marketing your show.
You don’t want to get stressed about producing your next episodes or lining up your next guests.
Invest In Basic Marketing Materials Like Business Cards For Podcast PR
Create a business card specific for your podcast so you can hand it out in conversation. If you are hiring someone on Fiver, 99 Designs or UpWork to design a podcast business card for you, don’t stop there.
Have the designer also create Facebook page headers, Website Page Headers, Twitter Page Headers and other basic social media PR material for you to use online as well as in print.
Word Of Mouth
Word of mouth is not to be under-estimated, especially when first starting out. Sure, in the age of Covid-19, socially distant ads and social media presence seems somehow both sexier and more possible. But word of mouth doesn’t only mean “in person”. Calling some old friends to tell them about your project can give you a wonderful initial boost. Depending on your podcast topic, you can also engage family, coworkers, virtual meetup and Facebook groups in your niche.
Submitting Your Shows To Podcast Directories
The place to start? Promote your podcast by submitting to podcast directories…
OK, this is basic, but also necessary, so let's start here. Ensuring your podcast can be easily discovered by listeners on existing platforms is key. It may be a passive promotion method, but still, it is worth it, especially doing during your podcast launch phase.
This is also one of the easiest marketing approaches you can take. You're looking to make sure your podcast has the most reach possible. Being in as many podcast directories as possible is a great start towards that end.
Now, I've seen some good blog posts about this topic alone, but that's why I'm including web stats for each directory: For each directory below I'm including sign-up links as well as web traffic stats from Similarweb. I'm doing this to provide a relative measure of popularity for each platform. I'm adding this research as a form of encouragement.
You can decide for yourself if the traffic to these directories is worth your submission effort. My own approach: if the platform has more than 50K visits a month, it's worth submitting. Many have 100s of million visits a month. So, let's get to work, and if you're a veteran podcaster, use the list below to double check.
Apple Podcasts (AKA iTunes)
Listing your show on Apple Podcasts is pretty obvious, and I'm just listing it here for completeness. It is the most important directory. But perhaps not for the reason you think.
Most people focus on submitting to Apple Podcasts or iTunes in order to be in the "New and Noteworthy" section. But for me the most important reason to submit to Apple Podcasts is that most mobile apps (AKA podcatchers) use the Apple Podcasts directory to list all available podcasts inside their app. This means you need to submit to Apple Podcasts if you want your podcast to be found on a majority of podcatchers out there.
Spotify is a relatively new player, but has been growing fast. Most podcast hosting services now provide integration with Spotify. In Libsyn, for example, you can define Spotify as a target publishing destination. Libsyn also provides detailed "how to" guides on setting this up in the first place.
Submissions to Spotify are handled inside your podcast hosting platform. This should be the preferred way to publish on Spotify, as I understand it "preferred partner hosts" like Libsyn integrate with Spotify so that you get analytics.
Spotify also just launched their Podcast Portal, which means you can submit your podcast manually if you are not with a preferred partner. However, your episodes will be cached on Spotify, and this means your analytics won't reflect listener credits in your hosting platform. This is why you should submit via your Spotify preferred podcast hosting platform if possible.
Web Stats: 387.77M visits a month
Stitcher
Formerly the #2 podcast promotion and listening destination. Lately I feel the platform has become somewhat ad saturated, and there a lot of other listening apps and platforms have emerged. Stitcher requires it's own submission process.
Google Podcasts is a relative newcomer, compared to Google Play, where podcasts were submitted before mid-2021. Google Play is now consider irrelevant for podcasters. When doing Google searches, ironically Google Play still comes up in the recommendations and instructions. I would ignore this, since Google Play is about to be officially retired.
Instead, you can now submit your show to Google Podcasts using the Google Podcast Manager.
TuneIn
TuneIn has been around a long time, with available apps for almost all operating systems and mobile devices.
Their process is straight forward using their submission form.
Web Stats: 9.25M visits a month
Podhound
This is an AI based podcast discovery engine. You should list your podcast there. The PodHound AI searches thousands of podcasts to find ones people enjoy. The system is relatively new, and as of mid 2020 is still in beta and is constantly learning.
To add your podcast to podhound simply register to their site.
iHeart Radio
iHeart Radio is another podcast directory that gets your podcast information from your hosting platform. In Libsyn, for example, you can define iHeart Radio as a target publishing destination. Libsyn also provides detailed "how to" guides on setting this up in the first place.
Submissions to iHeart Radio are sometimes handled inside your podcast hosting platform. For example on Libsyn.
Sharing your podcast on Bullhorn gives you access to millions of under served and rural listeners in the US who do not have access to or cannot afford expensive data plans.
Blubrry is best know as a podcast hosting platform. So if you publish your show on Libsyn or one of the other podcast hosting services, Blubrry may not be something you've considered. However, Blubrry has a very popular podcast directory not limited to only Blubrry hosted podcasts. So as part of promoting your podcast, you should consider adding your show to this directory.
If you ever need to find out who has turned up where in the podcasting scene then podchaser will surely help you on this. Podchaser is a podcast directory discovery platform that allows you to research podcasts to be a guest on, with options for contact information.
Add your podcast by making an account and filling up the details here
Web Stats: 988.72K visits a month
Spreaker
Update December 2o19: No longer available, unless via email request to rob [dot] greenlee [at] spreaker [dot] com
Like Blubrry, Spreaker is both a hosting platform as well as a podcast directory. You used to be able to submit your show even if it is not hosted there. You sign up for an account, and then supply your RSS feed there. If you are not hosted on Spreaker, see above.
Player FM is the multi-platform podcast app that helps you find shows on the topics you care about and play them at your convenience, even when you're offline.
Update December 2019: With recent podcasts launches, I have noticed that the current ACAST submission page is no longer available. I am hoping it will come back, because this was a terrific directory, but it could be that they are requiring your podcast to be hosted there now.
(Formely) a podcast hosting service with it's own app and directory. You can submit your show to be featured on their site and inside their app.
Digital podcast is a directory that will help you promote your podcast by listing it there. Their submission process is really simple, all you need to do is to create an account and then paste your podcast RSS feed URL.
Podcast search engine that claims to have audio transcripts of 542,280 podcasts. Their web stats seem to indicate a good level of activity, so I am listing it here.
Good Pods is a little different in that it is a podcast curation platform. This means you need to apply and provide a brief justification why they should promote your podcast and why it should be included in their directory.
Download their app and create a podcasters profile to get into their directory
Web Stats: Not available, may indicate the platform is no longer active
More detailed instructions?
If you would like to promote your podcast by submitting to each one of the above directories, each of the links provided are pretty intuitive. But are looking for more detailed instructions, a good start would be here.
Podcast Guesting On Other Podcasts
Guesting on other shows is a great way to promote your own podcast
Steve Olsher 's Profiting from Podcasts is a program for non-podcasters and podcasters alike to appear on other people's shows. As part of his site he gives away "lead magnet". This is a currently free directory and contact information for 670 podcasters whose show you could appear on. So that is one useful resource for this.
We also dedicated an entire episode for a deep dive into this topic, especially if you are the DIY type and want to avoid spending money on expensive programs.
In our tutorial video we show step by step how to automate a highly personalized "podcast guesting" outreach campaign.
So read on for some summary tips on this topic, but if you are interested in our deep dive and ready to explore details on how to execute podcast guesting outreach campaigns, please check out episode 2 of the Podcast Growth Show called Podcast Guesting – A Cure For Stalled Subscriber Growth [S1E02]
Here is the short version:
Work the bigger players in your space
Listen to full episodes of some of the bigger players in the space you're podcasting in. Make notes. Find their contact info and email with feedback. Be open and honest, saying something like
"I'm very interested in podcasting in this space. I particularly loved how, in Episode XXX, you talked to Guest XXX about Topic XXX and got him to admit Fact XXX. I'd love to know more about your process for guest selection, guest prep, and more. Would you have maybe 20-30 minutes for that? I'd be willing to help you out with elements of your show in return for your time."
A message like that articulates what's in it for the bigger-name show. Now you might get to work on their show, learn from them, or maybe eventually be a guest or get intros to their previous guests. You're on your way.
Steve was very gracious in making this list available, so please do not abuse it.
What do I mean by that? Do not send cold mass emails to all 670 big name podcasters! besides not getting on any of these shows, your name will be dirt in the podcasting community.
Instead, do this: Ask yourself if you're 100% ready. If you can answer "yes" to 4 out of these 5 questions, then you're good:
Have you already been a guest on at least 20 other shows?
Have you already added value to the person you're reaching out to in a meaningful way?
Do you have your own show, or a substantial online presence, and have you already connected with, or had a podcaster on my show?
Have you made your presence felt in their community?
Do you know this person, their interests, likes, dislikes and have a solid affinity for them?
Work the smaller players in your space
Steve's Olsher's "profiting from podcasts" list features some pretty big podcasters with established audiences, and that's great. However, if you are in a smaller niche, you may have an even better success rate by doing some of the initial leg work yourself.
Reaching out to other relevant podcasters in your niche is easy, and Apple Podcasts is the perfect tool to look up interesting shows in your category. Each show lists a website, and you can quickly get a sense how professionally each podcast is set up. Almost all podcast websites have a contact form or other way to get in touch, and again you can send a templated email requesting to be on their show.
You will want to listen to the show you want to appear on, and comment on something that you heard and liked about it. This gives you a much better chance of being accepted than sending what may look like a templated mass email.
The more personal you make your inquiry, the better the results.
To promote your podcast, guesting can be a crucial part of the ecosystem. When you appear, you inherently get to promote your podcast and other work (provided you're interesting, which we'll take as a given right now).
If some listeners like what you have to say, they will jump over to your own podcast and subscribe.
Using Paid Ad Strategies To Reach Your Podcast Audience
Marketing your podcast with paid ads can be very effective – especially on other podcasts
Using paid ads for promoting a podcast is not for everyone. But appropriate if you have a budget, for example for business podcasts where lead generation and email list building are part of the overall objective.
And don't just think "ads don't work" – not all platforms are alike. When it comes to promoting your podcast using paid ads, there are a few options.
It explores 3 platforms in greater detail, and also offers our simple 5 step process to better target podcast listeners with Facebook Ads:
To promote your podcast with Facebook ads, you will want this 5 step quick guide
But read on for the Cliff Notes summary of our deep dive, here's my take on 3 platforms.
Google Adwords
Generally speaking AdWords is expensive. So the question you'll want to ask yourself is this: Can I afford driving traffic to my podcast at $5-$20 per click?
My own view is that you need measurable results for this, and for most businesses this means sending traffic to a good landing page that features a gift or give-away and collects an email address. Sending ad traffic to Apple Podcasts and hoping that people subscribe is difficult to measure, and not worth it in my opinion. On AdWords you cannot even target podcast listeners easily. So we don't use it except for corporate podcasts (as we are producing several)
Facebook
Facebook is one of the most affordable paid choices for promoting a podcast. It may seem easy to simply "boost" an episode specific post on your podcast site, and then hope people listen and subscribe.
But I would not recommend this approach when first starting out. Instead, I would recommend sending traffic to a dedicated podcast landing page that features an incentive for signing up. Boosting a post is a quick solution but rarely converts as well as a carefully crafted visual and ad specifically outlining the listener benefit and value proposition of your overall podcast.
Consider combining these ads with "Share Gates" covered later in this post.
If you have not done so before, getting started properly with Facebook ads can be intimidating, so consider taking a Facebook ads course or hiring someone experienced to help you get started.
With both AdWords and Facebook you will mostly be advertising to non-podcast listeners. It is difficult to target podcast listeners only on Facebook, and next to impossible on Google.
But this is why in-podcast advertising networks are so effective. By default, your entire audience consists of podcast listeners.
One great way to get new listeners is to advertise on other existing podcasts in your niche. Most podcasters only think of podcast advertising networks as something to help them monetize their own show. But placing an ad inside one of the most popular podcasts in your niche can be super effective. According to Midroll, 61% of podcast listeners have purchased from such podcast ads.
The real benefit of this approach is the fact that you are advertising on your medium. if people are listening to your ads, that means they are podcast subscribers already. It is much easier to convince them to check out your show, than to show your Facebook or AdWords content to people who may not even listen to podcasts at all.
So how much does this cost? Here is some information from Midroll, by far the best known podcast advertising network.
All Midroll podcast ads are priced on a cost-per-thousand downloads model, or CPM. For instance, with a $25 CPM, a spot on a show with 10,000 downloads per episode costs $250; with 100,000 downloads, it’s $2500.
So let's do the math. If your ad is highly relevant to the audience of the podcast you place your ad into, and assuming 3% of listeners take action and subscribe to your show, your cost per new listener would be $0.83. If only 1% of listeners take action, then it would be $2.50 per subscriber. Either way, these numbers compare very favorably to advertising on Facebook or AdWords.
Here is a link to Midroll's metrics, demographics and pricing, everything you need to know to advertise your own show on one of the best known podcast ad networks
How To Promote Your Podcast By Leveraging Your Own Guests
Make sure your guests help you by sharing episodes they appear on
If you have an interview show, you might expect that your guest will help you promote your podcast. But make sure this is not an unspoken assumption on your part. After having launched over a dozen shows, I've found that getting your podcasts guest to share episode links with their own social networks can be like pulling teeth.
And the more connected and "famous" your guest is, the less likely they are to do this without being prompted.
Go Through Lengths To Present Your Guest In A Good Light
For example, we have an on-boarding sequence when we book guests on our shows. During this phase, we ask them to fill out a simple form, and to provide social media links, books they are promoting, short bios, profile pictures etc. This is so that we can create a great looking guest section with pictures and links to their work. In other words, you want to create great looking show notes that your guests would be proud to share and help with promoting your podcast.
Make your expectations clear from the beginning
But in our guest on-boarding sequence we already make it clear that we expect podcast guests to share the episode on their social networks, in a nice way. And we tell each guest that when the show goes live, they will receive ready made sharable links and notifications.
Create macros and scripts for sharing links
What you need to be doing here is leveraging the power and networks of your guests to promote episodes, but also promote your own episodes. Again, this needs to be done sparingly to an extent; you don't want to be seen as a self-promoter. That usually gets you silenced algorithmically on Twitter and other sites. But if you have scripts for yourself and your guests, it's an easier process.
Some Example Scripts
Use something similar for Facebook/LinkedIn and/or Google+
“I was just on the [NAME OF PODCAST] with [YOUR NAME] and talked about [WHAT YOU TALKED ABOUT]. If you’re [REASON WHY SOMEONE MIGHT BE INTERESTED], listen here: [PASTE THE LINK FROM STEP #1)
Use something similar for Twitter and include a service like ClickToTweet:
“I was just interviewed by [YOUR TWITTER HANDLE] and talked about [WHAT YOU TALKED ABOUT]. Listen here: [INSERT SHORTENED LINK FROM STEP #1]”
Automate This Process Using Text Expander Or Email Macros
Scripts are designed to make your process easier. You can even make them a Macros in your email so that deployment is just a matter of filling in the brackets.
A great tool for this on Mac is an application called Text Expander. This will allow you to enter templates like the above and recall them at the touch of a button or shortcut key. And a popup will prompt you to simply fill in the blanks with the needed information.
Beyond Guests, Make It Easy As Pie To Share Your Episodes
Ensure your podcast episodes are easily shared
This means having social share buttons on your episode landing pages that are bright, high, and prevalent. You don't want people having to dig around to share with their networks. Make it easy. We over-complicate so much in marketing (and, well, life). Why over-complicate this?
There are dozens of helper platforms out there that place attractive social share buttons next to your episodes.
Look for the type of share buttons that float on the side of your podcast. This way your social share icons are always "above the fold" and visible in the browser window.
There are some really cool tools to help design 1-click "ready to use" social share messages.
Contests and Promotions To Gather Apple Podcasts Reviews
Promote your podcast and get reviews with a contest
This used to be a very popular launch tactic. The idea was to launch a contest, and ask people to enter the contest by leaving an Apple Podcasts review, and then emailing the iTunes ID to enter the contest as proof.
iTunes and Apple Podcasts Have Changed
Since then, the algorithm to rise to the top of Apple Podcasts has changed. It is no longer driven by the number of reviews. Instead, at the time of this writing, the number of new subscribers have the most impact, followed by the number of episode downloads. Therefore the number of reviews no longer contribute to being at the top of the "New and Noteworthy" section.
Therefore the "Launch Contest" is less common now. Besides no longer being as effective, setting up a launch contest usually takes a good deal of time to set up. You need landing pages, marketing automation capability and time. But if you have the passion, time and effort to spare, a launch contest will still give your podcast launch a great boost, for some of the below reasons:
But Reviews Are Still Important
Reviews are still important and should not be ignored. They lend credibility and social proof to a podcast. Seeing that dozens of people are leaving great reviews for a podcast you might enjoy might tip the scale for you to take action and subscribe. On the other hand, seeing a podcast on Apple Podcasts with no reviews at all also tells you something.
Adding The Right Incentives
The tactic of offering some kind of incentive, give-away, or lead magnet for leaving a review still works well for getting reviews.
The selected give-aways don't have to be expensive. It is more important that they be relevant, related to the podcast topic or context. So for example, for a customer experience podcast you might have a contest to win free tickets to the biggest yearly Customer Experience conference. That beats offering an iPad as a prize, simply because your subscriber and contest participants are much more likely to actually care about your podcast and topic, instead of just trying to win an iPad.
Promoting your podcast with social contests is also the topic of our video episode 6 of the Podcast Growth Show: Podcast Marketing With Social Contests [S1E06]. We examine and recommend both free and paid platforms to do social contests right.
Leverage Email Subscribers With Social Media Share Gates
The idea is to try and promote your podcast launch to go viral.
The contest launch tactic described above has a sister. You can run this campaign as a variant of the more traditional launch contest. The difference? Much easier and less time consuming to set up.
Introducing the GoViral Tool
Bryan Harris over at GrowthTools has a great free tool called GoViral. GoViral gets you more quality traffic and shares by offering a free gift to your new subscribers in exchange for sharing your site with their friends.
GoViral automatically gets people to share your content – it’s instant word of mouth.
A Dead Simple Setup
The cool thing about GoViral is that it creates the social share landing and download pages for you behind the scenes, and this makes it dead simple to set up. So the sequence is as follows:
Susan signs up for your email list This could be on your homepage, for a webinar or in a blog post.
GoViral offers her a gift for sharing your site This could be anything from a free PDF, to a discount, to a free course.
GoViral gives her the gift and you get free traffic Works with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and 16 other services.
GoViral is integrated with most social media platforms, and checks behind the scenes that someone actually shared your podcast link before making the gift available.
We have used this system extensively to increase our webinar registrations by ~35%.
Here is a live example of this: You can download a PDF version of this entire Podcast Marketing Guide by sharing it on Facebook. For one thing, if you are enjoying this post, I'd appreciate it! Plus it makes a handy reference.
Help us out by sharing this post!
Just click the download button above to see the GoViral system in action.
How To Promote Your Podcast Organically With SEO
Promoting a podcast with SEO is a long term strategy
We actually have an entire dedicated SEO course on how to promote your podcast, but realize most podcasters are probably looking for quicker solutions when first launching their show. The rest of this article has been covering all sorts of other promotional approaches, but overlooking organic search is short sighted and a strategic mistake.
Getting Long Term Traffic
In the rush to launch a promote a podcast, this is often overlooked, or placed on a back-burner, and before you know it you're 25 episodes in without taking advantage of the long term benefits of SEO. Optimized episode landing pages tied to long-tail, low-competition keywords will drive valuable traffic to your site.
Consider How People Actually Find Podcasts
Have a look at the below chart from Edison Research. It makes my point: The most popular discovery for podcast is not Apple Podcasts, not Google Play or Spotify, but Internet search.
Edison Research 2019
The lesson?
Google Search Is What Really Matters
We are big fans of using SEO tools to research podcast topics, and utilizing your podcast’s website (and more importantly, episode specific articles AKA show notes) to attract traffic and interest. In fact we presented this form or promotion at the PodFest conference in early 2020, and here is a free mini-course on podcast promotion using SEO research, which outlines why and how this works.
Transcription Services Are Your Friend
Transcripts are your SEO friend, and increasingly affordable. The reason you want to use transcripts in your show notes is that Google will index this content, and attribute more rank to your episode because of the length of the episode show notes post. Machine based translation is getting more accurate, and costs around .10 a minute. 100% accuracy comes at a slightly higher cost, about $1.00 per minute. Still, considering the time it would take you to write bespoke show notes, this is an easy time saver investment. It's a nice 1-2 punch of automated services and human narrative context.
When you do this, pay attention to readability. Transcripts are almost always hard to read, and often look line dense, run-on text. And people on the internet like to "skim" content. Plus, from an SEO perspective, Google's new search algorithms values content quality, and this means readability in addition to length.
Our "best SEO practice" is to break said transcribed shows notes into readable chunks with H2/H3 headers for the main themes of the episode.
Ideally the H2 and H3 headers tell the story of the episode for someone just glancing and skimming.
Content Strategy & Patience In Promoting Your Podcast
Content marketing takes time
This is a broader content problem in marketing. Anything with content takes time to develop, but if it's tied to a business that needs to show short-term results, leaders often lack that time.
Embrace The Time It Takes
If this is a solo effort, you need to make the time and you need to embrace it.
Being passionate about your podcast is almost a pre-requisite.
For example: we know two gym owners who launched a supplement business and, at the same time, a podcast. It took about 75 episodes consistently week-to-week before their traffic started to go way up, and that was largely because one episode in the 60s-range was about the Keto Diet, drew a lot of attention, and helped them out getting noticed for other episodes. But 75 episodes weekly is about a year and a half. It will take time.
That Said: Plan For Great Content and Interesting Topics
Interesting topics can come from researching your audience
Look at BuzzSumo and similar sites to see what has interested people in your niche before. Ask people on LinkedIn. Ask people on Twitter. Ask your email list. (More on that in a second, as the email list is somewhat the holy grail of this process.) Have conversations with people.
Let's go back to that small business example again. Supposed you pose a question like "What episode topics would you like to hear?" on LinkedIn and several say they want to know how to improve hiring on a budget. Well, find a good guest for that (again it's about research), produce the episode, and when it's produced, GO BACK TO THAT THREAD and share it with those who asked for it.
They'll find value and are much more likely to share it around more. Interesting, consistent, relevant-to-core-target content is going to help any podcast launch well. It takes time, but you'll get noticed faster on that approach.
Join a podcasting community or network
Podcasting networks actively help cross promote, but can be difficult to get into
What are "Podcast Networks"?
A podcast network is a collection of podcasts that are produced, distributed or made available to advertisers through a single company, or network.
The advantage of being a member is that these networks frequently have agreements to cross-promote other podcasts on the network. Therefore the ability to attract advertisers is better for the entire group as well. Be prepared that you will be asked to promote the other participants as well, often you don't have much of a choice about who gets promoted. So joining one of the big players is a no brainer.
However, in order to join a network, the burden is on you to show that you can bring existing audience equity to the table (this audience could be from a different medium) or your product is so good, that given the megaphone, you will quickly build equity for the network (this could be in the form of a unique vantage point, expertise, or refined production skills).
Be careful about smaller podcast networks
Think twice about joining a smaller podcast network just to save time and effort, or because they promise you to build a site. And especially if they ask you to give up your feed and offer to host your show from their own feed. You will want it in writing that your podcast feed will be given back to you once you leave the network.
The ideal situation is to join a network that allows you to keep your own personal website and hosting arrangement.
Use your email list
Email is underrated
This is where we recommend you focus some energy and effort.
People opt-in to your lists because they care about some element of what you've put forth. So, now you've got a podcast (or you built the list with the podcast). Well, if they opted in, they are somewhat interested. Keep them interested. That starts with good subject lines. Use the same techniques already covered in episode title development.
Your Guests Make You More Interesting
Think of the most interesting, different-sounding point that your guest made. Figure out how to spin that into an emotional subject line. You can use Headline Analyzer Tools (CoSchedule and others have this) to see how powerful a headline is, and then use said headline as the subject line for the email about a specific episode.
Every so often, engage with your people about guests they want to see, topics they want covered, how they feel about the show in general, and more. Be human. Respond to these emails directly. Marketing automation is the bee's knees but people want to think they're having a convo with the actual creator. You might drum up some business for yourself as well in this process.
Many do email marketing wrong because they just blast out the latest thing they have with a generic subject line and limited context. That gets you low open rates and high unsubscribe rates. At that point, why even have an email list? Be interesting and different. It takes work and sitting down and thinking about the most intriguing thing said on an episode, even if it was just one tiny nugget, but it's worth a ton if you do this with every email send.
Make Your Your Podcast Homepage Design Less Egocentric
Make it more about your audience than your podcast
Most podcasters already realize that their great podcast needs a great website. If you’re unsure of all the reasons why this is important, be sure to read Spreaker’s recent post on the topic.
But as you create your podcast website, how do you design it to best engage your audience?
Make it more about them, and less about you and your show. And while you do that, you will increase conversion and list-building opportunities.
The Definitive Guide To Design Podcast Sites For Conversion & Engagement
How can you do that? Glad you asked. We have a full long-form article on how to design podcast sites for list-building optimization, where we discuss The Upside Down Podcast Homepage — and we also debate the relative merits of 1,000 Apple Podcasts subscribers vs. 100 dedicated email list subscribers. (Hint: the latter is more important.)
Even though we did not list this at the beginning, this is where almost everything marketing-and-sales-related needs to start, and it's no different with podcasts. It's just that it's time consuming. And anything time consuming often gets overlooked. But OK, let's assume you've got some time.
Let's say you want to target small business owners; that's actually a relatively common target for podcast producers in the business genre. You need to start by thinking this out loud to yourself:
Where do small business owners hang out?
Well, scaling a business is hard. Very few do it successfully. In all likelihood, then, a small business owner would be hanging out on his/her:
LinkedIn overall
Specific LinkedIn groups
Reddit
Quora
HBR and similar sites comments
Facebook groups about SMB/entrepreneurship
Reddit
Quora
Their own email looking for emails that seem helpful (this goes to a point later on)
Make a list of where your audience is or would be. Find groups connected to said audience. Join those groups.
Your Contributions Are Key
And now, this is the part many people miss. It's not about joining those groups and just blasting every episode. That won't work — and on Reddit, it might even get you shadow-banned.
What will work is this: join those groups and contribute to discussions. It's time-consuming, yes. But it's important. Add value to discussions and respond to the comments of others.
After you do this about 20 times, you can start sharing episode links — but this is a big one — ONLY share the links if they are relevant to a specific discussion.
In short, you want to make your sharing conversational and not forced. If it's part of an ongoing dialogue about, say, doing taxes as a small business and you have an episode about that, it's totally relevant and within the knowledge flow people need, they will click on it and listen. But if you just blast that episode devoid of context, it's a much steeper hill to climb.
5 Mistakes to AVOID when promoting your podcast
Podcast marketing mistakes to avoid in podcast promotion
Apple actually recently launched their own podcast marketing best practices, and since Apple is where about 500 billion hours of podcasts have been streamed, it seems like a great place to get some tips on what to do — and maybe more importantly, what not to do.
A few things Apple says to avoid include:
Mistake #1: Long Flowery Intros
Skip the vague, flowery intro and let the people know what they can expect to hear.
Mistake # 2: Non Relevant Show Notes Content
After you tell listeners what to expect, make sure they know how to find what you’re talking about. Whether it’s a specific episode or your show in general, give them a link to go to.
Mistake #3: Poor Images and Screenshots
Pick screenshots wisely. If you want to display a screenshot of your show as it appears on Apple Podcasts, capture it from the Podcasts app using a mobile device, like iPhone or iPad. (If you don't know how to take a screenshot from an Apple device, read this.)
OK, and here are some mistakes we often see
Mistake #4: Lack of Content Strategy
It is much more difficult to promote your podcast episodes without planning ahead. This means scheduling and producing episodes a couple of weeks in advance. This will allow you to dedicate more relative time towards ideas for promoting the show, thinking of good episode titles, and writing show notes.
Try not be in a rush
Plan and research your episodes ahead of time. If your show allows it, plan for content themes. This can enable you to implement a powerful SEO ranking technique called "cornerstone content", where several related episodes share links to one primary episode about the theme. We have consistently used this to SEO boost blog posts and episodes onto page one of Google search results.
Research a bunch of potential keywords for an entire season. Then you can craft your episode titles and show notes to be optimized around high value keywords. These are long tail keywords with low difficulty scores, but that still attract search volume. Use a utility like KWFinder to do the research.
Make sure your show notes are of sufficient length. If your show notes are less than 300 words, the likelihood that your content will appear in Google search result is close to zero. You will want to have show notes that are at least 700 words or longer to give your content a chance visibility.
Mistake #5: Weak Episode Titles
Don't create boring episode titles. Avoid titles that start with "This week our host XXXX talks to our guest YYYY about ZZZZ". Don't start episode titles with "Episode nnn:" Within Apple Podcasts and all podcatchers, space for your episode title is at a premium. So don't waste it with obvious, redundant or irrelevant. Podcast listeners increasingly consume podcasts on a per episode basis, by searching. So your episode titles have a fraction of a second to attract a listener.
Make sure your episode titles pop.
Write down 7-20 versions of your planned episode titles – do this every time, and I can almost guarantee that the quality and click-worthiness of your episode titles will improve. We use a tool called CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to craft our episode titles.
For examples of this, search for "podcast content strategy" – polymash shows up on page one, or google "customer experience podcast" – our client Customer Bliss shows up on page one, or "appreciative inquiry" – our client Positivity Strategist is on page one, or "podcast SEO course".
Learn a bit about SEO – think of it as an investment that will pay dividends for years to come. I offer an SEO for podcasters course, take advantage of this, or learn the basics of SEO elsewhere. The importance of titles, as well as how to create more interesting ones, is covered there in detail.
DIY or Done For You? If the concept of doing SEO yourself makes your eyes glaze over, invest in some help to make your show grow.
Conclusion – And How We Help
How do we help? Why are we writing this article, even?
Years ago, we were helping a client with her overall content strategy. If you've worked in digital at all, you know that people from previous business model generations often don't initially "get" how to market with content, and this client — while great overall — was no different.
Ultimately, we convinced her to try podcasting as a content strategy, and the results have been amazing. It has bolstered her brand within her expertise area, and allowed her to build a community through her podcasting.
Perhaps more importantly, she just loves being a well known podcaster now, and meeting all the people she gets to impact with her show. (Think about the impact of the first season of Serial and you'll probably understand what we mean.)
And our clients eventually prefer podcasting to blogging, since the content ideas and content strategy emerges much more effortlessly. Plus, they are more likely to advance to video and multi-channel content models.
All marketing is two things:
Storytelling
Effectively building a community
All great podcasting is those two things as well. It's a different landscape than it was even in 2018/19, but you can do this.
You can help us by downloading a PDF version of this post
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https://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Promote-Your-Podcast-1200_4fe51a2583ccc33aeea60921ae975883_2000.png4361200Juergen Berkesselhttps://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Polymash-Logo-2019-680px-Web2.pngJuergen Berkessel2020-02-09 06:15:062022-12-08 15:48:29How To Promote Your Podcast – Top Strategies, Tactics & Mistakes
Things are always changing, and this is especially true in content marketing. Podcast content strategy is still wide open to get your brand, message, or business out there. If you're in this field, you'd be aware that the internet runs on content. With regards to lead generation and attracting the right traffic with SEO savvy, the rules change often.
Add to this a bewildering array of potential channels for content, it's no wonder that navigating this terrain can seem difficult. With so many bright shiny objects everywhere, many of us lose our way.
I. A Podcast Content Strategy Avoids Digital Sharecropping
We've seen exhausted clients pour all of their efforts into “rented” social media platforms, posting on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium, Twitter, YouTube and other channels. To them, it seems like they are doing the right thing. They gravitate to where they feel their audiences' attention is.
Nothing seems wrong with that. But often there is a lack of underlying strategy. More on that in a minute.
Meanwhile, our clients' website's content often lies neglected. It is no longer at the center of their efforts or content they publish. For most clients, social media seems so much easier than blogging. The occasional viral attention gained appears more attractive than building a body of authority content – a convenient and sexy shortcut.
The issue is that social media content has a limited life span. It disappears up Facebook's or Twitter's timeline. Thus it serves no real purpose in growing a website, domain authority and SERP rank. The social posts need to refer to and drive traffic and engagement back to the central website.
The social networks fight this tooth and nail, they want ALL engagement to take place on their own platforms.
So what's the solution?
I won't pretend to have all the answers, but in the last couple of years we have discovered a self-generating content strategy that seems to works well for the “content marketing” challenged: Podcasting as a Content Strategy.
This might surprise you, or you may think of it as another content fad; but hang on for a minute and allow me to explain the often surprising benefits.
II. Podcasting Builds Relationships With Other Influencers
Podcasters are often overly obsessed with subscriber growth, metrics and statistics. Yet one of the most important and meaningful success criteria for most podcasters is hard to measure:
Podcasting establishes lasting relationships
Whenever we review podcasting programs with our clients, one of the benefits they appreciate the most is that they have connected and even become friends with influencers and people active in their field.
So how do you go about this? Reaching out to thought leaders in your field is so much easier if you have a podcast, and then invite them to talk about their passions and insights on your show. Most are happy to oblige, especially once you have an established show. After all, you are helping them promote and grow in return.
In addition, opportunities to be a guest on influencer podcasts yourself will also appear over time, as many influencers have podcasts themselves. But even “guesting” on other shows in your niche will establish you as a thought leader and influcener yourslef over time.
III. Podcasting is a Self Generating Content Strategy
Instead of laboring over creating blog content, our clients interview other people in their field. They love doing it, it’s fun, energizing and not as time consuming as blogging. They jump on a Skype call, hit the record button and discuss a topic they and their guest find energizing, and voilà: original content.
I’m not saying it’s easy or less work, but it’s a less intense effort for clients. They focus on recording a meaningful conversation, and we, as their podcasting partner, take care of the rest. For example, we use a transcription service and edit these conversations, and have an almost instant 5,000+ word article. We then apply both technical and other SEO optimizations – in fact the topics and episode titles are based on SEO research and low competition key phrases in the first place.
Podcasting can serve as the missing center for a multi channel strategy
Once a podcast is recorded, the show notes become the central business asset from which all multi-channel and social media efforts emanate. So yes, we still do “traditional” social media content distribution campaigns to share and boost the podcast show-notes. But that’s only the beginning.
Podcast Content Strategy as Multi Channel Content Distribution
We often produce videos from our podcast episodes. There are some automation tools that help us. These transform audio into video. Later, we publish these episodes on YouTube, DailyMotion and other social video channels.
And for a completely automated tool that converts audio into video, check out a tool called “Headliner”. It produces audiograms and even adds relevant images and slides to the videos. In our previous post, Podcast Audiogram Alternatives For Promotion and Visual Storytelling, we are excited to show how we now use the Invideo platform as our video platform of choice.
Social Content Platform Syndication:
We syndicate the content to platforms with existing engaged audiences and built-in internal search engines, for example Medium, Blogger, Facebook Stories or LinkedIn.
Snackable Videos:
Michael Seltzner’s “Social Media Examiner” team recently cancelled 3 Facebook video shows. He moved them from Facebook to YouTube. Why? Because the data shows that videos longer than 1-2 minutes penalize your Facebook page rank. So when publishing video to Facebook, the idea is to take 15-45 seconds from the podcast video episode and publish it as “teaser content“ with subtitles. I’m still working on automating this part of the process.
Syndication And Content Distribution Automation:
We use a smart and affordable content syndication and distribution platform from a Belgian company called StoryChief. The reason I like it so much is that it can publish natively to multiple platforms (like WordPress, Drupal etc.), and supports podcast player embeds.
What’s smart about it is their use “rel=canonical” tags. You get to decide where your primary content should live. For those unfamiliar with this tag, it lets search engine indexing bots know where to apply the SERP rank credit and link juice. This way, your podcast show notes will rank pointing to your site, NOT to Medium or other platforms.
Podcast directories RSS syndication:
Promoting a podcast requires submission to dozens of podcast directories. These directories will automatically link to each published episode and your primary website. This results in a valuable SEO benefit, namely, links from high domain authority sites.
IV. Podcasting as SEO Cornerstones
A lot of podcasts tackle content themes. In podcast parlance, these can be thought of as "Seasons". For example on an SEO podcast, you might focus on "Technical SEO" in Season 1, and "Link Building Techniques" in Season 2.
This is the genesis of a cornerstone strategy. You cross link this content to other important long form content pieces on your site. Such content will naturally rank higher because of the relevance of all participating articles. Furthermore, we have seen this content rank very quickly.
Podcast Guesting as a Lead Generation & SEO Link Building Initiatives
For people not interested in launching their own podcast, “Podcast Guesting” is an alternative. It results in effective link building, lead generation and launch strategy for any business. For example, this method has become a very popular book launch technique. The idea is that you find relevant podcasts in your niche and then run an outreach campaign to approach the hosts of these podcasts to invite you on as a guest.
Benefit: Intimacy With Your Ideal Audience
The first set of big benefits include getting to talk to your ideal and relevant audience when they are in a receptive mode. Think about what people are doing when listening to their favorite podcast, the one you are appearing on. They are likely commuting, working out, going for a walk. The modality is very different from interrupting an audience in the middle of browsing through their Facebook feed.
This is why Podcast Listeners are such a lucrative audience. And you get to present your core ideas to them.
Benefit: SEO Back-Links
The second big benefit is SEO related. Each podcast you appear on will create show notes that feature highly valuable back-links to your site and product or launch. SEO agencies charge a lot for high Domain Authority back-links. And the link building process can be onerous.
You can automate the outreach campaigns, or you can hire agencies to do this for you. We have a free downloadable podcast guesting outreach automation system for this, including outreach email templates and mail merge tools. To learn more how these campaigns can be automated for free, check out our podcast guesting system and templates.
Podcasting Benefits Summary
Our clients love having a podcast. It helps them re-connect with content as their own business asset. “Having a show” re-introduces a strategic purpose and promotes content discipline. Our clients keep on a weekly schedule much more easily than when they were just “blogging”.
The ROI is in lead generation and list building and SEO. A year into their podcasting journey, most our clients with medium sized shows get 65% of their traffic and leads from organic search and podcast listeners. These are for keywords they would otherwise have to pay $1,000's a month for on Google AdWords.
What's a truly viable podcast audiogram alternative for promotion and visual storytelling? I've been looking into video and audiogram platforms and tools to help promote podcasts on social media – particularly beneficial for that back-log of episodes that offer evergreen content that are still highly valuable. Using video as a way to bring your back catalogue to life is a no-brainer!
In this post, I explain how excited we are about the InVideo platform. It is an alternative to pure audiogram platforms, and an easy way of using short videos to tell the story of podcast episodes. Most podcasters are already familiar with audiograms for social sharing of podcast episodes.
I've been wondering if podcast audiograms are really the best way to promote in a "video" format, and if there might be better alternatives.
We think the overall effect is visually more compelling than ordinary audiograms.
Those of you who know me accept that I'm somewhat geeky when it comes to tools and process automation. I have this knack (my wife, the Positivity Strategist calls it a gift) of taking seemingly unrelated things and mashing them in some way. (And now you also know why my business is called Polymash.) I mash many things. I can see connections and relationships in things that at face value are not meant to be mashed. Maybe that's what leads to innovations, and is definitely about next-level thinking.
Are we really clear about what we want from our audiograms? What is attractive and enticing is the promise of
Easy "Repurposing" a piece of audio into video format
More shares and listens for your podcast episodes
Increased organic reach on social media
Greater discoverability for your podcast as a whole
I'd like us to look into these promises and underlying assumptions.
But first, some basic background.
What Are Podcast Audiograms and Why Are They Popular?
Some examples of audiograms
Podcast Audiograms are a way to produce social media-ready video from a piece of audio.
Typically, audiograms feature a static image with room for the "waveform" as an animated element.
Audiograms also offer captions as a way to see what is being talked about with the audio on mute, which is how audiograms most often appear in a social feed.
Most often, these audiogram videos are designed for use on social media and are relatively short, from 20 seconds through several minutes.
When audiograms first became popular a few years ago, Facebook had started to emphasize and favor video in their feeds. Videos auto-play (with the audio on mute) in Facebook feeds, and those moving images capture our attention as we scroll through our feeds. Other social platforms like Twitter and Instagram followed suit, and before long podcasters were trying to figure out the best way to promote their episode on those platforms using video.
How do you convert a podcast into a video?
For podcasters, converting episode audio into video has always been possible, but over the last few years several platforms have emerged that make this easier.
Reel.so (one of my personal favorites, watch for an upcoming review)
The available audiogram specific platforms are improving, and are in the process of automating some of this workflow, but for me it is not just about saving time through automation.
Platform Maturity – Ready For Primetime?
Some of the podcast audiogram platforms out there have not reached the kind of maturity level I would expect, as an ex UI designer.
Notice how the captions are covered!
I won't name names, but above is a rather poor example.
This is from a major audiogram platform
The auto-generated captions aligned to the bottom of a Facebook post, and are being covered by the Facebook player chrome.
There are no options for text size, text styling, colors, font choices, and most importantly the position of where the text occurs.
Who tests, approves and releases this stuff?
Platforms are improving, but still when compared to cloud based video tools, podcast audiogram platforms are relatively clunky.
We might favor and use audiogram specific platforms, but I feel that we podcasters have gotten sucked into "shiny new object" thinking. Let me ask some basic questions to challenge our assumptions about podcast audiograms:
Do we really need those "waveforms"?
For me, the waveform display is only there as a decoration, a way to provide animation to an otherwise static image.
Sure, it is mesmerizing to look at for a few seconds, but does not add value beyond that.
Must we always use an actual clip from the podcast episode we are promoting?
I propose that existing episode audio is not always the best or only way to tell a story or summarize the content of an episode.
In fact, very few people will go through the trouble of un-muting the video to actually listen to the audio content.
Are podcast audiograms the best way to visually tell the story of your episode?
My hypothesis is that the visuals are what's most important to grab the attention of people watching the audiogram on a social feed.
But frankly, a static image with a waveform and captions is pretty boring to look at, and does not visually tell a story, or stimulate the imagination.
Do podcast audiogram creation platforms save time compared to alternatives?
For most platforms, the workflow involved is to
Locate a suitable piece of audio that represents a "sharable" snippet or quote from the episode. This alone can be very time consuming.
Extract this snippet of audio from the podcast
Upload the audio snippet into the podcast audiogram platform
Transcribe the audio into text
Edit the transcription
Apply a branding template or an episode specific background image
Export the resulting video
There are at least 7 steps. That takes a fair amount of precious time. If you're like me, you value your time.
Next-level thinking kicks in: what are the alternatives?
The Emergence of Audiogram Alternatives
So here is the "Polymashing" part. As a small creative agency, we have used a number of video generation platforms over the years. They are designed for creating marketing & social videos in minutes. Sound familiar? Platforms like:
And in applying "Next-level thinking about audiograms" it occurred to me that these platforms excel at visual storytelling in a way the ordinary podcast audiogram platforms do not.
Why limit ourselves to a single static images with a waveform as the only piece of interest?
Why use an audio snippet to start with, when a written episode description can serve as a quick script?
Why obsess about using host read audio at all, when few people "unmute" to listen as posts travel through their social media timelines?
Why not use multiple, quick scenes to create more interesting video?
Why InVideo is our Podcast Visual Story Platform of Choice
Disclosure: I will earn a small affiliate commission at no cost to you – should you ever upgrade to a paid plan
Having used a range of other online video tools, I've landed on InVideo for a whole number of reasons.
Reasons Why We Are Using InVideo
It helps us to create professional-level videos in minutes with pre-made templates. The user interface is highly intuitive and offers wide scope for being creative. It makes creating videos to promote shows really easy and fun. And it does so in multiple ways that go far beyond the uni-dimensional video of an audio wave.
Audio-visual storytelling for episode promo videos is made easy, using the text to video mode.
Our workflow is to paste in an episode summary, break it into segments, and InVideo will automatically produce multiple short video scenes for each segment from my choices.
It comes with a vast library of video clips, and of course we can upload our own as well, so we get to use existing episode level artwork in the video.
Easy to Use Interface
As a former UX and interface designer, I appreciate the "Easy to Use" interface mode, all the while still having access to more "Advanced" features that allow trimming clips, cropping frames, looping video, and tons more.
Speedy and Fast
I've measured how long it takes us to produce podcast audiogram content using InVideo versus 3-4 other platforms, and InVideo is by far the fastest to use.
Performance
Also, internal servers seem to perform more quickly when exporting videos and doing video previews, something that had always frustrated me with other platforms.
Multiple Modes
First of all, this platform can be applied in multiple ways that are useful for not just podcast promotion, but for multiple video purposes:
Text To Video
Marketing Videos
Social Videos
PR videos
Last but not Least: Great Value
InVideo also offers great value, with more affordable price-to-feature ratio when compared to the high subscription rates of other platforms.
InVideo Podcast Audiogram Creation Demo
Here is a video walk-through of how we use the Invideo "text to video" mode to create our podcast storytelling videos to replace our podcast audiograms:
InVideo Applications Beyond Podcasting
There are virtually limitless use cases, and perhaps the best way to get some inspiration is to visit their site for some examples:
Check out the types of videos you can produce with inVideo beyond podcasting
Conclusion And A Special Offer
No matter if you are creating audiograms now, or if you've been curious about trying to share your episodes in a story telling video, you owe it to yourself to check out inVideo.
InVideo Free Sign Up
They offer a "Forever Free" plan, which is a great way to get started. If you found this review valuable, I'd appreciate if you would use my affiliate link below to sign up.
Disclosure: I will earn a small affiliate commission at no cost to you – should you ever upgrade to a paid plan
Special Coupon Code For Polymash Readers, 75% Off
Not only have the guys over at InVideo been great with rapidly developing new platform features and with support, but they also have made paid plans a no-brainer with this special offer: Use the code 'InVideo75' when signing up for a paid plan to receive 75% off.
In this season we have occasionally touched up our own podcast workflow. For those of you who follow us, you realize that we often talk about "podcasting as a content strategy". So as we approach the end of season 1 of our Podcast Growth Show, I thought it was time to zoom out for a big picture episode.
Basically, this episode is our blueprint to go from podcast content strategy to execution.
From Podcasting Strategy to Execution Blueprint, Click for expanded detail
So I'd like to reveal our overall podcast workflow, all the way from strategy to execution. And in this episode I'll reveal all our little secret tips, tricks, tools and gear we use to save massive amount of time along the way.
Strategy Segment
For both new and existing podcasts, it is good to start with the end in mind, to have clarity about your audience, as well as confidence that the value proposition for your listeners, as well as the reason why you are doing a podcast is clear.
Planning Segment
A lot of people just want to get started and hit the record button already. But unless you already have a dozen or so episodes under your belt, you will discover that there is a lot of planning involved. Especially if podcasting as content strategy is something even remotely on your horizon. I talk to new podcasters all the time, and some get lost in the planning stage. Let's discover how having a planning framework helps us retain clarity.
Execution Segment
I'd like to go into how we approach podcast production ourselves. This is only one of many possible ways, and in no way am I suggesting you should adopt our methods. There is a lot involved, and it can sound scary. We tolerate an amount of complexity because it produces results for us. And complexity doesn't mean things can't be automated, simplified or even outsourced. Both complexity and simplicity can co-exist. For us, it's the results that count.
Promotion Segment
This entire season has been about how to promote a podcast. So we may already have covered some of the methods we use to promote each episode. I'll keep that segment short.
Season Strategy
Podcast seasons can help organize our podcast content strategy
We like the concept of seasons, as it provides some amount of flexibility when thinking about the overall goals for your podcast as business content strategy.
Advantage of Seasons
Do we have a solo show or an interview based show? Do we have a co-host? Does our podcast have a theme? Would we like to try a different episode structure? Are we afraid your audience is getting bored with our content? What if we want to change up? Or are we suffering from "podfading" and just plain tired and need a break?
All of these can be addressed by organizing our podcast into separate seasons:
They allow us to take a sabbatical from your own show if we need a break
They enable us to develop focused themes for each season
We can switch the format of the show, including who is hosting, guesting or if it's a solo show
And all of that with no surprises for our listeners, as we announce the end of the current or start of the next seasons
Each season is a good excuse for a podcast re-launch and much needed promotional activities
Value Proposition Design
I know a lot of podcasters who just barrel on producing episode after episode without ever pausing, re-thinking, changing direction or taking stock. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the audience is with us on this.
Other podcasters plan each season carefully, and conceptualize exactly what they want to cover, who their guests will be, and most importantly what experience they want to create for their audience. Either way:
Periodically revisiting the value proposition of our podcast is an excellent habit.
But just how we do that? We have developed a process for developing a podcast's branding and value proposition. This Value Proposition Design (VPD) process is driven by over a hundred trigger questions designed to achieve clarity about our audience. To be more specific, clarity about what our listening audience is experiencing, what problems we help them solve or wrestle with, and what goals and transformation we help them achieve.
Not only that, there are also over 100 trigger questions to get us to think about how well our podcast topics match up to our audience desires, needs, tasks and expectations.
We have online forms for these trigger questions, and the answers we produce during this process are worth their weight in gold: They become a rich source of podcast themes, episode topics, SEO keywords, episode titles.
Think of your podcast as a product – with a market fit
This clarity is what you can when going through the VPD process.
Focus on Overall Goals
It is also important to keep focused on our podcast goals, and to periodically revisit these.
Perhaps we started out just wanting to have fun and get our message out to the world, but now we are finding ourselves wanting to build a list, or speak on stages, or to use your podcast as a vehicle to help promote a book. These are significant shifts in goals, and require significant adjustments to the way we utilize and market our podcast.
Strategy Planning Session 3 Month
Of course none of this has to do with the week to week podcast workflow of producing episodes in the middle of a season.
I'm just pointing all of this out as an important baseline activity that we try to do every 3 months or so. And to point out 3 things:
If you are about to launch a podcast, take the time to go through the VPD process to achieve clarity and a product market fit for your show
If you already started to podcast without any of this in mind, it's not too late to start and revisit once in a while
If you have a podcast based on seasons, revisit your goals and value proposition for each seasons
Podcast Episode SEO Research
SEO for Podcasts
Why do we do SEO research for something audio based?
SEO = Developing A Business Asset With Positive ROI
Our own podcast website gets 65% of subscribers from SEO search. 50% of my new clients come from search. Our podcast is less than 2 months old at the time of this recording, and has yielded 4 new clients and many more prospects. Not from iTunes discoverability, not referrals. So our entire podcast workflow is based on solid SEO research.
You may think that this is all overkill. And again, I will point out that this is just the process we follow because it works for us and our results speak for themselves. BTW, we have a whole course on podcast SEO.
For Our Podcast, 80% Planning and 20% Execution is Normal
Topical Research
So the assumption is that we do have clarity about our goals and value proposition for the audience. At this point, we want to identify potential SEO opportunities and turn these into topics for our season long episode plan.
The goal is to be able to rank for our show notes pages.
And there are 2 important pitfalls that we avoid by doing some quick SEO research:
If we target impossibly difficult keywords, we will never rank on page one in Google, and thus we will never get search result traffic or new listeners
If we target obscure keywords that no one ever searches for, we may rank on page one of the search results, but no one will ever visit our podcast from that.
SEO Keyword Opportunities
I myself may have a bit of an unfair advantage, because Polymash started life in part as an SEO agency. So we have access to some enterprise level SEO tools.
But the good news for podcasters is that there are affordable and even free tools out there to do the same thing.
So here is a quick demo (at 13:50 ) of how we identify high opportunity keywords using Mangool's SEO suite, particularly the KWFinder utility. This is a central part of our podcast workflow, and KWFinder is by far my favorite and simple to use SEO keyword research tool. We have coached a ton of podcasters to use it to good effect.
Disclosure: This free sign up is an affiliate link
It gets better: This keyword research tool is only on part of an entire SEO suite to quickly add the following capabilities to your podcast planning:
KWFinder: Our favorite keyword research utility for podcasters.
SERP Watcher: Allows us to track progress as you start ranking for your desired keywords
SERP Checker: Provides deep insights into Google search results, and allows us to judge which keywords to target and which to stay away from
Converting Podcast SEO Keywords into Episode Ideas
So in the podcast workflow, once we have identified a list of keywords with potential, it is time to take these keywords and base our episode plan on these.
In our Google Sheets planning template we have developed a formula to address the following SEO issue:
Each site has something called Domain Authority and Alexa Rank, which indicates how likely the site's content will rank on Google. This means every site needs to target keywords that are commensurate with their Domain Authority and Alexa Rank.
For old, established and popular sites it is easier to rank for more difficult keywords.
But new site owners with low DA and Alexa rank need to choose key-phrases they can actually rank for.
The formula we have developed matches the domain authority of any site with the keyword difficulty to target on KW Finder. This is all about prioritizing high opportunity topics, from high opportunity keywords.
Google Sheets to Organize Output
We have developed a Google Sheets template to help map this out.
Episode Topic Identification
Identifying topics for each podcast season
Here is the process we follow to identify episode themes and topics based on our Podcast SEO research.
SEO Based Topics
As I mentioned earlier, we base our podcast episodes on our prior SEO research. By the time we are mid-season, we usually have a range of potential topics for a season to choose from, and hundreds of potential SEO keywords to choose from as well.
Initial Titles
Initially we develop working titles for each episode before we even incorporate relevant SEO keywords from our list. But at some point it is important to design episode titles with relevant keywords that fits the topic, and that are commensurate with the ranking power of our site as well.
Episode Title Optimization
The exact wording of our episode titles is more important than many podcasters realize. You can have a great episode, but if the title is not compelling, click worthy, interesting or thought provoking, people will never click through.
Sure, your existing subscribers may listen. But this is about attracting new listeners and subscribers. Just think about where your episode titles appear, and what role they play in your podcast workflow and the way people consume podcasts.
People may see your episode title on their iPhone or listening device of choice. Will they be interested enough to tap and listen?
People may come across your show notes and episodes as a result of a Google search. But will your episode title be compelling enough for them click through?
Your episodes titles may appear on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Will it arouse people's curiosity?
So what makes a click-worthy episode title?
CoSchedule Headline Optimizer
There are a bunch of tools out there that help, for example the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. CoSchedule is a well know the social media scheduling platform we use, and they have developed a wonderful tool for designing highly converting titles for blog posts as well as for podcast episodes.
The tool is free, and you can try it out here. Their recommendations are based on a ton of research, word usage and title patterns proven to be successful on social media. Their algorithm checks for the presence of unusual words, power words, emotional words and the structure and length of each title.
Of course, fair warning: Don't become a slave to such a tool.
Making Title Optimization Part of our Podcast Workflow
But my point is more about following this thinking process and formulating a range of potential titles. I guarantee you this: If you formulate only a single title for each episode, it will never be as good as if you formulate 7+ titles to choose from. So it is making this discipline part of our podcast workflow that makes all the difference.
Google Sheets to Organize Output
For us to stay organized and to collaborate on SEO research as well as podcast topic and title planning, we again use our trusty Google sheet template to stay organized.
Episode Recording Preparation
Episode Recording And Script Preparation
OK so we've finally gotten closer to actually recording an episode.
Pre Recording Notes
Our own podcast's current season is a solo recording effort.
Using StoryChief For Script Development Ahead Of Time
#Podcasting as a business content strategy is about a multi-channel approach: So when podcasters market their show, podcast directories are an incomplete solution and not enough for multi-channel podcast syndication and distribution. Here's the solution: https://t.co/6Lnk9zUJN7
But we also use StoryChief to develop our solo episode scripts. This saves us a lot of time later, after the recording process. And because this season is video based, the podcast workflow to incorporate video is by nature a bit harder.
If you are interested in giving StoryChief a try, they offer a free account:
Disclosure: This free sign up is an affiliate link, if you choose to upgrade the account later
Beyond this it's 5 stories for 10$/month, 10 stories for 20$/month, 15 for 30, 20 for 40, 25 for 50 up until 30 for 60$; and 20% discount if you pay yearly.
Episode Specific Template Google Docs
Google docs are great for collaboration with clients, and we have designed our template to work for preparing, ID3 tagging, and creating show notes.
Episode Metadata
Our episode preparation template on Google docs that works for solo, interview or co-host driven formats. We also use this for our own podcast, but that is for capturing titles, descriptions, video metadata, ID3 tag information, embed codes for the episodes once everything is done.
Episode Video Data
This season combines an audio podcast with a video tutorials, demos and more. Because we cross publish each episode to our YouTube Channel as well, it is important to formulate the YouTube tags, description and links for each episode, and again our template allows for this.
Our Podcast Workflow Process for Video + Audio Recording
Podcast production workflow containing audio as well as video
Finally, after all this planning, we are ready to record something.
ScreenFlow Video Templates For Youtube Channels
I use a somewhat unusual setup for podcast + video recording. You may have heard of desktop screen recorders like Techsmith's Camtasia and Telestream ScreenFlow? These are screen recorders that also use your webcam. Many people use them for creating courseware or evergreen webinar content. We've used both extensively here at Polymash. But for our podcast workflow a clear winner emerged:
ScreenFlow launched an innovation this year that I had been looking for a long time.
It automates the production process with the ability to configure recording templates. These templates then place your video into a template with a pre-existing intro, outro, lower thirds, resizing and repositioning the webcam image as a picture in picture on the screen.
ScreenFlow templates save us an amazing amount of time for our YouTube channel
If you click play on the video above, you can see the effect. After the initial setup of my YouTube channel, I do nothing more to produce these videos, other than to press the record button. Clever, no?
If you are relatively new to podcast, and video is not something you are considering right off the bat, here is our review of several new and highly innovative podcast recording software
VEED, A New Innovative Video Tool For Podcasters
VEED, and interesting addition to our podcast workflow
Ever since the COVID pandemic hit, a lot more work is happening virtually. And this means a lot of us are spending more time with video tools. A side-effect from this has been that video tools are increasingly becoming innovative. There is a new player on the scene that is especially interesting for podcasters.
This new platform is called VEED.IO, and here is what it does:
You can record and edit your audio or video podcast online. You can use their live streaming software to record your camera, audio, and screen then edit your recording straight away. Their video editing software features pro tools to help you make high-quality podcasts perfect for streaming on various social media and video-sharing platforms.
Lots Of Creative Video Tools:Video effects and filters, subtitles, auto-transcription, video effects, drawing, cropping, progress bars and ways to add text are only a small part of all that VEED offers.
Screencapture: VEED allows you to capture your screen with multiple layouts, including side-by-side, top-bottom and PIP (picture-in-picture) layouts.
Podcast Audiograms: You can turn your podcast into a video, add your podcast artwork and add a waveform too.
You might also have noticed that in my opening sequences I talk directly to the camera. Hopefully I come across as fluent in these videos, but what you may not realize is that I'm assisted by a mini teleprompter attached to my webcam.
My scripts live on an iPad on my desk, which I can speed up or slow down as I record. It's a strictly one man operation.
The actual teleprompting screen is driven by my iPhone, and all of this allows me to look directly into the camera as I record my episodes.
If you are curious about this setup, below is an (affiliate) link to this amazingly small and affordable teleprompting device.
Meet our unique mini teleprompter
Big part of our podcast workflow: The ability to record smooth video
We use a compact, versatile, and easy to use teleprompter that helps us quickly deliver polished show notes to our listeners. Until now, teleprompters have been clunky, expensive, and difficult to operate–and many required film studios or a production team. This teleprompter changes all of that.
It’s a simple tool that helps us nail smooth delivery using just a smartphone and our desktop computer, DSLR, or webcam.
Our video production workflow is so much easier using a mini teleprompter
Podcast Quality Audio While Recording Video
One issue with doing a video podcast, especially one where one stands or moves around, is audio quality.
While sitting I can use my microphone and arm easily, but if I'm standing or moving around I like to use a wireless mic. This is also true for general video production or conducting on-camera interviews. I really did a lot of research before investing in this piece of kit.
What we use is what I feel is the most affordable and yet high quality pair of wireless lavalier microphones on the market. I think the quality is as good as the famous Sennheisers, but the price is 1/2. The system is called the COMICA CVM-WM300(A). There is also an optional interview mic to take this setup on the road and conduct amazing mobile podcasts and or video interviews.
Again, if you'd like to check it out, below is an (affiliate) link.
Lavalier systems can be useful add ons to podcast and video recording workflows
Live Audio through Loopback and Audio Hijack
We produce our client podcasts using a professional audio editing platform called Adobe Audition.
One of my favorite things is when podcast clients comment on how amazing they sound on the podcasts we produce for them.
This is in part because as a former audio engineer and record producer I have a few tricks up my sleeve to get that professional "broadcast" sound. (Let me know in the comments if I should do a special episode on that, happy to share!)
But it is also because Adobe Audition comes with some professional and sophisticated tools to help us shape a warm and inviting sound profile for each podcast host of guest.
So far, so good. But when recording video as well as an audio podcast, things become more complicated. And time consuming.
We would have to extract the audio tracks from video to import them into Adobe Audition to achieve the same custom broadcast ready sound, and then re-import them into the video. Too much work…
Luckily, I'm both lazy and smart:
Loopback interface for routing audio on my desktop
So we've come up with a shortcut to get broadcast quality video sound, using 2 apps by a company called Rogue Amoeba:
Loopback to create virtual audio devices to take the sound from apps and audio input devices, then pass it to any audio processing software.
Audio Hijack, which functions like a real-time, virtual mixing console with EQ, compression and noise gating built in.
These 2 apps allow me to apply sound profiles in real time. Ordinarily this is done with a mixing console or in post-production, but this happens live. So the final video has that "broadcast" ready sound as it is being recorded.
Our Audio Hijack setup to produce real time optimized audio
The other advantage is that I can create profiles to attempt to make my lavaliers sound the same or similar to my Heil PR40 mic. (I can hear audiophiles groaning now). But at least I can get similar sound quality.
Audio Extraction and .mp3 Files From Video
Our podcast workflow includes several conversion tasks
So now that we have the video portion of our podcast recorded, it's time to extract the audio from the video and to export and upload it to our podcasts' .mp3 file
A swiss company called Auphonic has developed a brilliant set of audio automation tools every podcaster should check out. We use Auphonic desktop app to automate the following steps:
Establish a noise profile
Applying Noise reduction from that noise profile
Speech Volume Leveling
Industry standard loudness standards for broadcast ready files at -16LUF
Export to .mp3 formatted output file
This automation saves us at least 20 minutes per episode.
Audio Export to Libsyn
So now we finally have the .mp3 file to upload and release on our podcast hosting software Libsyn. First we apply the episodes title, descriptions and other podcast metadata to the .mp3 file. Then we upload to Libsyn and schedule the episode to go live at the desired time.
Video Export to YouTube
Remember we are using Screenflow to record our video content. It has the built in ability to export each video to our Youtube channel, including custom thumbnails, tags, descriptions and links. So the video portion of our podcast was already uploaded and scheduled on YouTube in a previous step.
Multi Channel Show Notes Syndication
Sign Up For Free, Disclosure: The above affiliate link, if you choose to upgrade the account later
I will keep this short, since syndication and distribution of show notes was the topic of an entire episode, episode 8. Suffice it to say this:
A critical step in our podcast workflow is to distribute and syndicate our show notes to as many platforms as possible.
After all, our podcast's audio files are being syndicated to be available in iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify and Google Play.
Content syndication with StoryChief is to show notes what RSS feeds are to your podcast audio.
Finalize Episode Show Notes on StoryChief
Because we prepare our episode scripts in StoryChief, by the time we record our episode the show notes are 90% written already.
Embed YouTube Video Player
So all that's left is to embed the episode video into StoryChief.
Embed Libsyn Audio Player
We love StoryChief as a content syndication in part because it is podcast ready. We easily embed the Libsyn player widget into our episode to allow site visitors to choose their modality: Read, Listen or Watch.
Embed Lead Generation Widgets
Another reason we love StoryChief is that it allows for embedding various lead generation and email capture widgets. So if our episode has a "Lead Magnet" like a bonus guide, mind-map or check-list, we embedding it right in the StoryChief show notes.
Publish to 16+ Channels
At the end of the day, our show notes are scheduled to go live and to trickle out to an ever growing list of platforms, communities and blogs and "Ambassador Networks"
1/2 Year Evergreen Social Boost Campaign
Saving time in our podcast workflow involves creating evergreen social campaigns
In an upcoming episode I am planning to go into detail about how we create a 1/2 year long automated campaign to promote each episode on social media. Over the years we have tried and used a ton of different platforms for this.
The one I think is most innovative is called CoSchedule. It allows us to design a social campaign on autopilot.
I am lazy, but engagement cannot be automated
I answer every RT, question or DM related to our podcast episodes. But that does not mean I want to spend a lot of time on social media crafting individual tweets and social shares for our episodes.
CoSchedule has a clever automation concept called "social helpers". These are content snippets that help to produce a varied social feed, with different hashtags, images, messages. It shares our episode show notes content, but does not repeat the same tweet or image all the time.
Again, it's the sort of one time up-front effort that takes some time to set up initially, but then saves a ton of time for each episode. If you are interested in seeing this in more detail, let me know in the comments.
Conclusion
Again – this episode was just the process we follow because it is producing results for us. I do not recommend it to everyone, and the fact that we are producing video alongside the audio portion complicates things a bit.
If you are a new podcaster or a business considering podcasting as a content strategy, you may well think all of this is overkill.
But keep in mind that the lion share of the work goes into the initial planning, the setting up of templates and designing and implementing the various automation steps. And this is a one time only effort. And the routine production can be done by other people.
If you'd like to chat and explore possibilities for your own podcast workflow, feel free to book a time with me.
5 reasons why the recommended Facebook ad process to promote a podcasts is flawed
You may think running Facebook Ads would be an excellent vehicle to promote a podcast. Facebook ads allow you to precisely target your audience amd promise to increase your subscribers in a cost-effective way.
My point with this episode is not to argue that Facebook is a poor platform to advertise podcasts on. Rather to point out that the Facebook Podcast Promotion Process most bloggers and marketers recommend it is flawed.
There has been a slew of recent posts on how to best advertise podcasts on Facebook. I fundamentally disagree with the premise of these posts. Here is why:
So what’s the problem with using Facebook Ads to promote a podcast?
The issue has to do with where to send traffic once someone clicks on your Facebook ad.
Many marketers recommend promoting Facebook episodes by directly linking to the iTunes or Android or Spotify episode pages.
They argue this is better than sending people to a show notes page on your site
In fact, many of these posts argue that you don’t need show notes pages at all, or to simply go with your podcast host's default episode pages and minimal content
The writers make the point that iTunes and Stitcher is, after all, where you want people to go to subscribe to your show
The advice is that direct links to the iTunes episode is the best way for Facebook ads to capture people on mobile devices. And also for targeting Android audiences by sending these ads to Google Play or Stitcher episodes directly
And we see many podcasts following this advice and missing out in the process.
I fundamentally disagree with sending your Facebook Ad traffic directly to your iTunes and Stitcher podcast links for the following five reasons:
#1: It Costs Too Much
Facebook Ads cost too much if all they are used for is to send traffic to iTunes
Sure, your ads may get you more listeners for your podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. But Facebook podcast marketing ads should also have a better goal in addition to just adding listeners. Because the cost per new listener is usually quite high.
Think of it this way, in terms of analytics:
“Cost per anonymous listener” IS NOT THE SAME THING AS “Cost per qualified lead or email subscriber.”
Instead, you could be getting greater value and ROI from your Facebook ads by focusing on lead generation and list growth. Instead of on just getting more listeners, you could be adding leads for your business, building your email list, increase the rank and traffic for your site, and building a digital asset for your brand.
FB Ads for Podcasts: ‘Cost per anonymous listener’ <> ‘Cost per qualified lead
#2: iTunes and Google Play Do Not Need More Traffic From Your Facebook Podcast Marketing
Apple and Google don't need more traffic from your promoting a podcast
You are paying for ads traffic that you are sending to iTunes and Google Play Music.
Really?
Instead, your own site could be benefitting from greater traffic, rank, and authority.
#3: Blind Dates
Would you go on a date without ever asking the other person's name?
Don't let your site visitors and podcast listeners stay anonymous. That's like going on a date without ever asking the other person's name.
iTunes and Facebook may know who your listeners are. But they won't let you, the publisher, in on that secret. You won’t know how many listeners subscribed to your show on those platforms.
Click here for a complete analysis of Google AdWords vs Facebook Advertising for podcasts
More importantly, you don’t know whose these listeners are. Since you are not capturing their email address, you have much less of a chance to engage with them. Even if they are big fans of your show. If you don’t attract listeners to visit your show pages, you are essentially going on blind dates – without ever even asking for a name. So, a very passive way to promote a podcast.
Instead, your podcast listeners could be coming to YOUR site, because you offer valuable additional episode information there. They could be signing up to receive podcast notifications via email. They could discover links and resources about your guests. And they could be downloading relevant resources from you in exchange for an email address.
So, when recording your podcast, make sure you mention an easy to remember episode show notes link like “mypodcast.com/132”. Mention this often, for example at the start of the show, create your own mid-roll segment inviting people to visit your site, and include it again in the outro.
#4: No Digital Sharecropping
She who does the work should benefit
In my opinion, too many authors, speakers, entrepreneurs and small businesses spread their entire online presence across 3rd party platforms. They want authority and recognition in their space. But are also conscious of the promised audience, engagement, ease of use and time savings these platforms promise.
…the distribution of production into the hands of the many – but the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.
So, what we often see with new clients who come to us for help is this: They post all of their valuable intellectual capital and thought leadership content on platforms like Medium, LinkedIn or Facebook. Their videos can be found only on Youtube, their podcasts episode only on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher. In other words, on platforms they themselves don’t own outright, but platforms that have a built-in audience and engagement.
In the long run, this is short-sighted
What to do instead?
I am not proposing to avoid these platforms. However, I am saying that all social and ad traffic to promote your podcast should land on your own great conversion optimized podcast home page. We recently published a video walkthrough which showcases a highly converting podcast website design pattern. It is called “The Upside Down Podcast Home Page”.
The effort (or cost) involved in creating a podcast home page and maintaining your podcast show notes are well worth it in the long run. The time spent pales in comparison to the effort of actually creating your content in the first place.
Your content should live on your own site FIRST AND FOREMOST.
Only then should it be shared from there centrally, spreading out to 3rd party platforms for social engagement. Especially if you are using Podcasting as Content Strategy.
Outward Syndication
We call this process "Outward Syndication". Many podcasters build their own system for sharing new podcast episodes once they are published.
The process we follow for our clients cross promotes their episode show notes posts gradually, across a range of platforms. These syndication channels include Youtube, Medium, Blogger, Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, Linkedin Personal pages, LinkedIn Business Pages, Google Plus, BeBee, and other social networks.
Why do this gradually?
Before episodes are promoted on any 3rd party platforms, we want to ensure that the show notes page goes live on our own site first. And that our own episode page gets indexed by Google first. We don't want to search for our episodes online only to see our medium article pop up in the search results. Therefore we use a "rel=canonical" tag to indicate where the original article lives. This is true to Google, Bing and other search engine crawlers as well.
There are several ways to do this and to ensure our episode is indexed on our own site first. First, we can use Google's webmaster tools (AKA Google Search Console) to manually submit our episode post for indexing. This is quicker than waiting 2-3 weeks for Google's crawler to come around and visit your website. Typically we do this the day we publish to instantly be included in the search results. We discuss the importance of SEO based podcast cornerstone content strategy elsewhere on my blog, but we have seen episodes rank in the top 30 results within a week using our approach.
Delay by 2-3 weeks
So it is only after that has happened that we publish and syndicate on other platforms. Getting back to the "rel=canonical" setting when publishing on other platforms. Take Medium for example: It is very important to use their own content import tool, which uses the "rel=canonical" tag and honors the original source of the article and channels the Google rank score to that original post. So do not just copy / paste your episode show notes into a new Medium article, use their import tool.
Podcast Promotion and Syndication with StoryChief
Automating MultiChannel Syndication For Podcasts
We utilize a platform Called StoryChief, which automates the cross platform syndication of podcast and blog content. What I really like about StoryChief is that it
Automatically applies the "rel=canonical" settings when publishing on other platforms.
Supports Libsyn Podcast player widgets
I will talk about how we utilize StoryChief to automate much of our podcast episode syndication in an upcoming episode. If you'd like to find out about StoryChief in the meantime, below is a link (disclaimer – this is an affiliate link:)
There is a one-time up-front effort in setting up multiple platforms to syndicate to, but promoting an episode to multiple platforms with built in audiences like Medium makes this worth it.
To conclude the topic of "Digital Sharecropping"
Having your own SEO optimized podcast show notes pages builds a much more valuable asset on your site, audience, and email list.
Would you not rather build free traffic and rank for your site? Don't overlook the value of SEO for your show notes pages. This is one of the deadly podcast marketing sins I often write about.
I think most marketers would agree that an email list is still the most valuable asset to build for your digital presence.
#5: Analytics & Measuring Performance
Analytics are important when using Facebook to promote a podcast
How do you measure your investment in Facebook ads?
For me the answer is this:
Success = how many people SIGN UP for your podcast or blog.
The Facebook marketing term for this is called a "conversion". It is NOT how many people clicked on your ad, nor how many more anonymous listeners you might be getting on iTunes.
Before running ad campaigns on Facebook, you get to decide the “Goal” of each ad campaign during the setup process. Simply measuring “clicks to a website” is the weakest form of available analytics. Yet this is the only goal you can use when sending traffic to iTunes or Stitcher.
Facebook ads cannot measure who subscribed to your podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Facebook won't know if they listened to an episode after clicking on your ad. So how do you optimize or test your ads? If you are sending your ad traffic to iTunes and Stitcher as proposed by many marketers, then the only way you can tell if these ads are even working is to see if your Libsyn or Blubrry stats increased during the time you ran the ad. And of course, even then you don’t know the identity of the people who subscribed.
So don't set this as your Facebook Ad campaign goal.
A better goal is to measure “Conversions”
Facebook algorithms are more effective when optimized for conversions. When setting up an ad campaign on Facebook, you can choose "conversions" as the goal. A "conversion" is triggered every time someone goes to your podcast subscriber "thank you page", so you will need one of these on your site.
Facebook learns from who signed up and then increasingly shows your ads to the best possible and highly “converting” audience. You will need to install a “Facebook Pixel” on your site, so that actual sign-ups to your podcast email subscription list can be recorded on Facebook. Having a Facebook Pixel on your site is not complicated, there are great plugins for this. (My favorite is PixelYourSite, which makes installation and managing Facebook Pixels a snap)
Conclusion
If you use Facebook to boost or promote your podcast, don't send traffic directly to your episode pages on iTunes and Stitcher. Instead, send traffic to your own episode show notes pages. Be sure your site features a "subscribe by email widget" that redirects to a thank you page, and triggers a "conversion" on Facebook.
https://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/007---5-Reasons-Not-To-Promote-On-Facebook_ccfe908e59ce605a6a19a26fb07981ce_2000.jpg10801920Juergen Berkesselhttps://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Polymash-Logo-2019-680px-Web2.pngJuergen Berkessel2018-11-27 08:30:042021-04-26 18:03:425 Reasons NOT to Promote a Podcast on Facebook
Podcast Marketing With Social Contests And Give-Aways
Promoting a newly launched podcast with a Facebook contest used to be a very popular podcast marketing tactic. The idea was to launch a contest featuring a relevant give-away and to boost it with paid Facebook ads. To enter the contest, contestants were asked to subscribe to the show, leave an iTunes review, and then to email the iTunes ID name used for the review to the podcast host as proof. The podcast host would then enter the applicant into the contest drawing.
In today's episode we examine:
The reasons why this is not as popular launch strategy anymore
But also why this podcast marketing strategy is still a good idea today
Prize selection tips and why they are key for this podcast marketing strategy
Contest Structure
We will cover some of the best paid and free contest platforms
Tips for setting up and running such contests
Need some help for your own contest launch?
iTunes Focused Launches Have Changed
Podcast marketing no longer focuses on iTunes alone
The reason this was a successful strategy a few years ago was that the "New and Noteworthy" algorithm within iTunes was driven by the number of reviews a podcast would receive in the initial weeks after launch. And contests were a great way to get lots of reviews in a short amount of time.
Since then, the algorithm to rise to the top of iTunes has changed. It is no longer driven by the number of reviews. Instead, at the time of this writing, the number of new subscribers have the most impact, followed by the number of episode downloads. Therefore the number of reviews no longer contribute to being at the top of the “New and Noteworthy” section.
As I have said elsewhere:
I feel that podcasters needlessly obsess about getting into the "New and Noteworthy" section.
The reality is that over the last two years iTunes has become a highly competitive space, given that major popular radio stations have shifted their energies from terrestrial and satellite radio to podcasts as a way to create a digital presence.
And there has been evidence that being featured in "New and Noteworthy" typically yields only a few hundred additional subscribers.
Podcast marketing through “Launch Contest” is less common now
The main reason is that N&N is no longer as influenced my the number of reviews a podcast gets. Besides no longer being as effective, setting up a launch contest usually takes a good deal of time to set up. You need landing pages, marketing automation capability and time. Or money to spend on contest platforms.
But if you have the passion, time and effort to spare, a launch contest will still give your podcast launch a great boost, for some of the below reasons:
But iTunes Reviews Are Still Important
Reviews are still important and should not be ignored. They lend credibility and social proof to a podcast. Seeing that dozens of people are leaving great reviews for a podcast you might enjoy might tip the scale for you to take action and subscribe. On the other hand, seeing a podcast on iTunes with no reviews at all also tells you something.
Why a Launch Contest is Still A Good Idea
Getting reviews and testimonials is as hard as it ever was. We've seen this play out countless times. People are happy to offer leaving a review, but iTunes doesn't make this process very straight-forward. So when it comes down to it, even your friends and relatives somehow don't get around to it without repeat reminders.
Contest Prize Selection
Prize selection matters in podcast marketing with contests
Adding the right prizes and incentives is key. The selected giveaways don’t have to be expensive. It is more important that they be relevant, and related to the podcast topic or context.
So for example, for a customer experience podcast you might have a contest to win free tickets to the biggest yearly Customer Experience conference. That beats offering an iPad as a prize, simply because your subscriber and contest participants are much more likely to actually care about your podcast and topic, instead of just trying to win an iPad.
Another example might be a podcast about podcasting, podcast growth and promotions such as my own show. If I were to run a contest for the Podcast Growth Show, I would choose to give away a premium microphone or podcasting gear package as the grand prize.
Why Choose Multiple Prizes?
But one prize is not enough. By giving away multiple prizes, you increase the desirability and success of your contest simply because there are better odds and many more ways to win.
The most successful contests offer a single grand prize, and then a number of secondary prizes in decreasing value.
In fact, you should give away a free resource for everyone entering your contest. This could be a simple lead magnet PDF, as long as it is related to your podcast's topic and focus.
Podcast Marketing Contest Example Prizes
For the Podcast Growth Show, here is how I would plan to structure my own podcast contest. My goal would be to attract new podcasters. So my prize selection would focus on thinking about what would be relevant for new podcasters.
Pretty much every podcaster I know tried to save money during their initial studio setup. And the thing they most likely tried to save money on is their microphone boom arm. A cheap version of this can be highly frustrating to use, and a more professional model with greater reach and a more solid feel is a pleasure to use. Believe me, podcasters will appreciate the difference.
2nd Prize: A Great Dynamic Podcast XLR and USB Microphone – The Audio Technica AT2005 (a $79 value)
3rd Prize: 15 copies of our "Podcast Marketing & SEO Online Course" – (a $97 value)
9th-25 Prize: Our Podcast Marketing Bible Ebook (a $9.97 value)
Prize for all contest entrants: "How To Market Your Podcast" ebook and access to our online "Podcasting Resources Guide"
Contest Structure
There are many facets to consider when launching a podcast promotion contest
As I previously mentioned, the launch contests of yesteryear focused on getting iTunes reviews. But that should no longer be the only focus now. For me, it is much more important to attract the right listeners to join my email list and to subscribe to my podcast through email notifications.
These are multiple actions to take, and people might think this is a lot to ask just to enter a contest. And that is right, except:
Each action completed creates additional chances to win the prize
So the logic is this: You must subscribe to my email list, that part is required because otherwise I cannot communicate with you and send you the prize. But if you complete the other additional steps, each completed tasks enters you in the contest additional times, greatly increasing your chances of winning one or more prizes.
And, each action is weighed differently: For example, subscribing to my Youtube channel is worth an additional 5 entries, but leaving an iTunes review is worth 25 additional entries.
The genius of this approach for podcast reviews is that it makes it a no-brainer for a contest entrant to do the hardest thing: Leave you an iTunes review.
Later in the podcast I explore the differences between a DIY approach versus utilizing one of the contest platforms out there. This approach of multiple contest entries for multiple actions is only possible by using proper contest management platforms like.
An example of multiple actions to increase your chances
In our video we feature a great example of this in a contest currently underway. The company is Syrp, and they are giving away some photo gear. Click below to start the video at 10:44 seconds:
At 10:44 – an example of multiple ways to enter a contest
Is it necessary to validate iTunes Reviews?
Unfortunately I don't know of any platform that integrates with iTunes directly to validate if someone actually left an iTunes review. But in my mind, most people will do so if asked, because they are afraid of missing out and being found out. What if you were to ask them for the iTunes name they left a review under before sending them their prize?
Note that with the Gleam.io platform, there are several easy ways to enter a contest by answering a question or by leaving a comment – and here you can simply ask the user to enter the iTunes name under which the review was left.
Creating Contest Landing Pages
If you want to create a contest, you will want to set up a contest landing page. A contest landing page is a distraction free website or page where you can send ad traffic to, and where people can learn about and sign up for your contest.
You can build such pages manually, but you may not need to when using the contest platforms we will discuss a bit later. They handle the creation of and simplify the design of landing pages, and some even allow you to create multiple versions of these pages and conduct A/B tests to see which ones perform best.
Q: Do you need to A/B test pages? A: It depends. There are people out there that have tested their contest pages. Here are some links to these tests and their outcomes. Why not learn from their tests and model your landing page on their winners? This will save you time and effort.
Generally speaking, it seems that contest landing pages with video perform better.
The Facebook Ad Campaign
Once you have a landing page, it's time to set up a Facebook campaign to boost your contest landing page. Facebook marketing is too big a topic to tackle in this episode, but here are a few tips to make this work:
There are many easy ways in which you can create a Facebook ad. You shoot a quick video or FB live post, create one or more images about your contest, and come up with some fun language to use for a Facebook post.
We use the AIDA method when creating Facebook ads and landing pages for contests:
A =Attention – Ask a provocative question or make a statement that earns the attention of your audience
I=Interest – Expand on attention grabbing line with something that will peak their interest and explain.
D=Desire – What's in it for them to enter your contest. Duh, that's easy, right?
A=Action – This is the call to action, what you want them to do
Finding The Right Audience
The key in making Facebook ads effective and affordable is to show your contest ads to only your very best, most relevant audience. In Facebook parlance this is called "audience targeting". If you have never done Facebook ads before, this can be a bit tricky. Basically you are trying to limit the number of people who see your ads to only those interested in your primary topic.
Targeting Podcast Listeners
But that is not all: You also want to make sure the audience your Facebook ads are shown to are likely podcast listeners, and that part is much harder.
The 5 Step Process to Advertise To Podcast Listeners On Facebook
We have a 5 step process to target likely podcast listeners on Facebook. It walks you through our method on Facebook Ads manager, and you will learn how to target people generally interested in your podcast's topic, but who also are likely podcast listeners.
Free vs Paid Contest Platforms
Are paid contest marketing platforms worth it?
Should you use a paid contest platform like the ones we outlined above? Or is there a way to build this all for free?
Advantages of Paid Contest Platforms
Paid contest platforms are the way to go. For a relatively low monthly fee they offer a range of distinct advantages over a DIY approach.
They integrate with social networks. This means they validate that someone actually shared a post, liked your Facebook Page or Youtube channel. All of this before they are entered in the contest.
Most paid platforms offer pre-built contest landing pages for you. You get up and running much more quickly, and don't have to invest in fancy landing page builders.
They send out custom email reminders. This saves you from having to create your own email funnels, saving a lot of time.
Some have A/B testing built in. This means you get to test out multiple landing pages to see which perform better.
Here are some of my favorite contest platforms to consider:
Rafflecopter
Rafflecopter – One of the most affordable platforms out there. Rafflecopter offers a free plan, trials for the more advanced plans starting at $13 a month at the time of this writing. While an easy platform to start with, it is basic.
It lacks some of the more innovative features features found on higher priced platforms.
Gleam.io
Gleam.io – I really like Gleam.io. It is a smart and flexible contest platform. It rewards people to take multiple actions to promote you while entering your contest. This increases the viral potential of your podcast marketing or launch contest. After having reviewed about 10 different contest management platforms, Gleam has emerged as my favorite. It is, however, not the least expensive, the Pro plan being $45 a month.
Upviral
Upviral – a good alternative to Gleam if the expense of that platform is a hurdle. By automatically emailing reminders, setting goals and providing incentives/rewards, your contest entrants stay on track and deliver. They get rewarded, you get new subscribers and everyone’s happy! Upviral has an example case study on their site of their own podcast launch contest which resulted in 7000 contest site visitors, 450 leads and 50+ reviews on iTunes.
Contest Domination
Contest Domination – a flexible platform that offers 7 day trial and a per contest payment option for $100 for a month. The benefit of their approach is that you get access to all features, where some of the other popular platform restrict their features for the basic plans.
To summarize these contest platforms, I feel that Gleam is the most innovative platform to try, and you can expect to spend perhaps $90 for a pro plan for a 2 months campaign. The major spend for podcast launch campaigns comes from Facebook ads anyhow, I would expect to spend between $20-$50 a day for the duration of the campaign. Be sure to check out Episode 3 of our podcast on Paid Podcast Advertising – A Look Behind The Scenes [S1E03]
Free Contest Platform Options
If you want to run your podcast launch contest with absolutely no additional expense, here are some ways to do it as well as some things to keep in mind:
To save money on prizes, you can give away content and prizes that don't cost you anything, like courseware, or eBooks or other premium content you have previously developed
You can use your own email list software like Mailchimp or Constant contact or even free Gmail automation tools like YAMM (we covered YAMM for Podcast Guesting Outreach in episode XX of our podcast)
You will need to develop your own landing pages on your podcast or blogging site.
Rely on your social network for free promotion and awareness of your contest, with a big enough following you can save on promoting your contest with paid ads
You can use tools like GoViral – a free platform from Growth Tools which ensures and validates social sharing. It is great to use as an add-on for thank you pages.
Try out GiveawayTools – a new contest design platform that's currently still in beta, but is free and integrates with several social platforms.
So it can theoretically be done for free, but it will require a large investment of time on your part.
My own view is that a zero cost and DIY approach is not likely to succeed
And the question you should ask yourself is about the relationship between time spent and likely effectiveness of the contest campaign you are setting up.
Need a guide to help with your own contest launch?
I've just published a resource for folks wanting to set up their own contest. This is published in "Open PDF" format, meaning the entire guide is provided on-line with no sign-up required, but you can download it guide as an option if you want.
Podcast Marketing with Launch Contests
I also offer some ways to collaborate around setting up your own launch contest, from low cost "DIY" sanity checks all the way to "Done for you" contest setup and management.
Conclusion
Apart from getting iTunes reviews, a podcast marketing contest with the right prizes and incentives can quickly add a ton of visibility and email subscribers to your podcast.
While it may not reliably get you into the "New and Noteworthy" section of the iTunes podcast directory any more, having some great reviews still lends social proof and credibility to your podcast. And email subscribers to your show are a permanent asset.
If you decide to run a podcast marketing contest, I recommend using a paid contest platform, as this will save you a ton of time and effort.
https://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/006-Podcast-Launch-Contests_10602ba21dc40356c532a06ae5c18c5d_2000.jpg10801920Juergen Berkesselhttps://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Polymash-Logo-2019-680px-Web2.pngJuergen Berkessel2018-11-20 09:02:052021-04-26 18:05:50Podcast Marketing With Social Contests
Podcast guests are key in helping promote an interview style podcast
One of the best things about having an interview style podcast is that you get to know and collaborate with some really cool people. And if you're lucky, your podcast guest will help you to promote "their" episode and your podcast.
If you're even more fortunate, your guests are well connected and have a large social media following – resulting in more people being aware of your podcast and subscribing along the way.
Don't Fall Into The Expectation Trap
You might expect that your podcast guest will help you promote "their" podcast episode.
But make sure this is not an unspoken assumption on your part.
After having launched over a dozen shows, I’ve found that getting your podcast guest to share episode links with their own social networks can be like pulling teeth. It's a bit like asking for reviews, people seem happy to do offer them in principle, but then it rarely happens without gentle reminders. Repeat reminders.
And depending on your own personality type, asking explicitly may not be in your nature. Repeatedly.
Add to this the fact that the more connected and “famous” your guest is, the less likely they are to do this without being prompted.
Getting a podcast guest to want to help co-promote breaks down into 2 parts:
Designing a pleasurable experience of being on your show
Making it super easy to help promote your podcast
So here are some tips to make this easy on yourself, and even easier for your guest.
Part 1: Designing the Podcast Guest Experience
Podcast guest experiences are a matter of design
You want your guests to be excited to be on your show. For guests that have never been on a podcast before, this may require some gentle education about the mutual benefits of being on your podcast. The goal is to foster a sense of excitement, collaboration, co-ownership and reciprocity.
In fact we have found that once guests truly understand all of the benefits of "guesting" on your podcast, they are much more likely to chip in and promote the episode when it goes live.
Explain How You Will Present Your Guest In A Good Light
We have an on-boarding sequence when we book podcast guests on our shows. During this process we reiterate that the process is designed for us to be able to promote the guest, highlight their background, links to their website, current initiatives and so on.
During this phase, we ask them to fill out an on-boarding form. They are to provide social media links, books they are promoting, short bios, profile pictures etc. This is so that we can create a great looking guest section with pictures and links to their work.
In other words, we want to create great looking episode show notes that our guests would be proud to share and to help cross promote. Essentially, we're doing this on THEIR behalf.
Making the Sign Up Process Easy
Still, people are busy, and they hate to fill out forms. Especially if they seem complicated. So here are some design aspects to help make this process easy:
Do not use a super long intimidating looking forms with lots of fields to fill out
Instead, break fields into manageable small sections with fewer fields
If you are on WordPress, use a forms tool that supports a "wizard" like interface, which breaks the sign up process into smaller steps or pages
Display a progress bar on the sign up form
Extra credit for forms that can be "saved" in the middle of filling out a form
Here are some WordPress tools that support multi-step forms
Typeform – not exactly multi step, but their designs provides a similar UX
You want your interview to go smoothly, and making sure there are no last minute technical difficulties is important. Look at it from your guests point of view: They may not be used to Skype. They may not have headphones, earbuds or microphones. They may not know how to connect these or configure Skype in the right way.
We produce some podcasts where our guests are an older demographic or simply "tech averse". Or we get people who cannot use Skype because they are behind a corporate firewall, and we therefore need to offer alternative recording platforms like "Ringrr".
In any case, the last thing you want is to discover these things the last minute before starting to record, which usually results in a flustered guest.
2 tips for eliminating technical issues
Send a "technical setup" email as part of your guest onboarding sequence.
Arrange for a brief test call a day or so before the actual interview to iron out any issues. Some podcasters have a brief 10 minute "test" conversation with their guests right before the interview starts, and this is OK as long as you are confident that your guests have the equipment and experience to handle that.
Prep Your Guests On What To Expect
Being comfortable doesn't just depend on technical issues. Guests appreciate having sense of the flow of the conversation.
A lot of podcasts follow a set interview structure, with predictable segments and questions that the guest will be asked. Take John Lee Dumas' "Entrepreneur on Fire" podcast. He has an episode format with certain questions that each podcast guest can easily prepare for ahead of time.
Open ended conversation with surprise questions may be more unsettling for your guests. But this may make for a much more interesting listening experience for your audience, and result in more surprising and compelling podcasting.
In the end you may have to balance your guests comfort with your listening audience's expectations for compelling conversations.
Tips for balancing guest vs listener experience:
Approach it from a hybrid perspective. Feature open conversation segments, but also have several prepared questions for your guest to fall back on.
Ask your guest to listen to one or more representative podcast episode so they know what to expect.
Send your typical episode structure outline to your guest via email as part of the aforementioned "onboarding sequence". Even if you have mostly unstructured conversations, sending a "guest cheat sheet" ahead of time is a good idea.
Part 2: Getting Your Guests To Co-Promote Their Episode
Make sure your podcast guests know you would like them to share your episode
Make Your Expectations Clear From The Beginning
In our guest on-boarding sequence we already make it clear that we expect podcast guests to share the episode on their social networks, in a nice way. And we tell each guest that when the show goes live, they will receive ready made shareable links and notifications.
Automate The Process
Scripts and templates are designed to make your process easier.
A great tool for this on Mac is an application called Text Expander. This is where you can store pre-written emails. When you are ready to send the email, a popup will prompt you to simply fill in the blanks with the needed information. In this case that would be the name of the guest, name of episode, episode URL, etc.
Which emails are part of our typical on-boarding sequence?
"Thank You Note", sent right after filling out our podcast guest application. This is a short simple email. We don't want to overwhelm with too much information at this point. But we do include a Calendly or YouCanBook.me link to schedule a test call and get this on the calendar.
"What To Expect" email, sent an hour after filling out our podcast guest application. This includes our podcast "one sheet" PDF with typical episodes, show structure, about pages and other useful links. It also contains guides for technical setup, wearing earbuds, Skype etc. We ask guests to ask questions at this point.
"Reminder Email", sent 2 days before recording. By this time you as the host might have formulated some guest specific questions in addition to the normal episode structure. Also this is discussed on the pre-call.
One of the easiest ways to get people to share is to send them an email containing instructions on how to share your show notes post on your website. They will want to check out the show notes pages anyhow, and in many casts that is true.
The problem with that is that you are asking your podcast guest to take the time to visit your website, check out your show notes page and then use social share buttons to share. And in this scenario they have to come up with some clever text to share. This is not exactly distraction free, as they might start reading your show notes, listening to parts of the interview. Next thing you know they have forgotten to share, and OMG, look at the time.
Usually our guests are extremely busy people, what if there is a better way?
Well, there is. By all means, first send your guests to the show notes page to check it all out and to see what a quality job you did.
But then send them ready-made share links in one or more separate follow up emails. A big benefit benefit of this strategy is that you want your guests to share your show notes page. NOT the iTunes link. Not the episode on Stitcher or SoundCloud or Spotify.
Social share traffic needs to go to your website, not iTunes.
There are some really awesome services out there that let you prepare ready-made tweets and Facebook shares. They are easy to use, and you can prepare several social shares for your guest to click on and use. These can simply be sent via email. Your guest does not even have to visit the show notes page to use these:
The idea is to send your podcast guest a separate email with a range of pre-made tweets and social shares.
Click To Tweet – is a twitter specific service that generates tweets. Click here for another example of a ready-made tweet to our "The Podcast Growth Show" homepage.
A Simple Sharing Text Example
Use something like the below for Facebook/LinkedIn and/or Google+
“I was just on the [NAME OF PODCAST] with [YOUR NAME] and talked about [WHAT YOU TALKED ABOUT]. If you’re [REASON WHY SOMEONE MIGHT BE INTERESTED], listen here: [PASTE THE LINK FROM STEP #1)
Use something similar for Twitter and include a service like ClickToTweet:
“I was just interviewed by [YOUR TWITTER HANDLE] and talked about [WHAT YOU TALKED ABOUT]. Listen here: [INSERT SHORTENED LINK FROM STEP #1]”
But be creative, and don't just send one single share. Send a range to choose from. Outline the text for each share and then paste the share link next to the share text in the email
Share The Success And The Once Is Not Enough Rule
You may think that after the initial share of your live episode you should not repeatedly ask your guest to help promote. I get that.
But your podcast guest will love to hear about how popular their episode was. So here are some good ways to stay in touch and to send additional shareable links without being a nuisance:
Let them know how well received the episode was, and place some additional shareables at the bottom of that email.
Even months after the interview, you can reach out to let your guests know that you are getting great feedback. Again, place some share links into that email.
Conclusion
Involving your podcast guest in the promotion of their episode and your podcast overall is a critical element in building a community around your show. I can summarize the important bits like this:
Educate your guests on the benefits of appearing on your podcast
Set an expectation that this is a collaboration that can succeed only with their help, beyond just showing up for an interview
Make it as easy as possible to be on your show
Make it as easy as possible for your guests to share your episodes
https://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/004---Episode-Images-GuestExperience_f78f064803c17bbcc4c1bf7de3b7e0bb_2000.png4361200Juergen Berkesselhttps://polymash.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Polymash-Logo-2019-680px-Web2.pngJuergen Berkessel2018-11-06 08:32:062021-04-26 18:05:51How To Get Your Podcast Guest To Promote Your Podcast
Podcast Advertising – a look behind the scenes of the top 3 platforms
Podcast Advertising, especially with paid ads, might not be something most podcasters consider in promoting their show and growing their subscriber base. Lots of questions arise:
How effective are paid podcast advertising strategies, and do they work for podcasters trying to promote their show?
Which ad platforms are the most effective? And which are the most affordable?
We take a look behind the scenes of 3 platforms, Google AdWords, Facebook and Podcast Ad Networks.
Using Paid Podcast Advertising Strategies
Using paid ads for promoting a podcast may not be for everyone. A lot of casual podcasters are in it just for the fun. If their show grows organically, fine. But spending money on ads is not something they'd consider.
However, when podcasting is part of a business content strategy, then paid promotions seem to make more sense.
Still, here are some common questions and objections:
It is an expensive way of getting new subscribers?
Measuring the effectiveness of paid ads is difficult?
Your ads may not even be reaching podcast listeners?
A Podcast's Business Purpose
I find that podcasting for business is more inbound than outbound. Successful business podcasts should offer solutions, solve a prospects problems or provide training and education. Thus they are extremely effective in building a brand's authority.
But Podcasts are not effective for direct response selling to cold traffic.
If you are a business getting into podcasting as a way to sell something, stop. You might be better off advertising on existing podcasts in your niche. We cover this later in this episode.
On the other hand, if a business has a good inbound content marketing funnel, podcasts can serve as a great entry vehicle. As a business podcaster you get to talk to your ideal and relevant audience when they are in a receptive mode. Think about what people are doing when listening to their favorite podcast, the one you are appearing on. They are likely commuting, working out, going for a walk.
This listening modality is very different from interrupting an audience in the middle of browsing through their Facebook feed. So the "getting to know, like and trust" factor is huge in podcasting. And this is why Podcast Listeners are such a lucrative audience. You get to offer solutions, entertainment, education – and present your core ideas to them. But this takes the vision to invest in a longer term "inbound" strategy.
High Ad Awareness
Podcasts result in exceptionally high awareness levels for ads.
Among those who listen to or watch podcasts, just over two-thirds (67%) say they’re aware of ads in podcasts. While not an apples-to-apples comparison, the number far exceeds the 26% of smartphone users who recalled seeing an ad in a Facebook newsfeed in the last 30 days, or banner ad on the mobile web (22%)
I'd like to compare several podcast advertising platforms in this episode, and point out the differences between them. Not all ad platforms are created equal.
So here’s my take on 3 platforms.
Google AdWords
Facebook Paid Ads
Podcast Ad Networks
Podcast Advertising With Google Adwords
Google AdWords is the 800 lbs gorilla. Can it work for podcasters?
Generally speaking AdWords is expensive. So the question you’ll want to ask yourself is this: Can I afford driving traffic to my podcast at $5-$20 per click? How do you even know if your ads are reaching podcast listeners? On AdWords you cannot target podcast audiences easily.
My own view is that you need measurable results for AdWords to make sense.
For most businesses this means sending traffic to a good podcast landing page with a compelling reason to subscribe to their podcast.
Often such landing pages features an incentive for subscribing to the podcast via email, for example a guide, gift, contest or give-away. At least these landing pages should collect email addresses. Using Google Ads to send cold traffic to iTunes and hoping that people subscribe is difficult to measure, and not worth it in my opinion.
So we don’t use it except for certain corporate podcasts or non-profit podcasts in search of PR (as we are producing several). Some organizations have a PR budget, and promoting their show on AdWords seems appropriate for them.
For example, we have a non-profit organization with a podcast that has a grant from Google. We should all be so lucky! Podcast advertising using AdWords makes sense when the cost is reduced by such a grant. Plus, in their case Google stipulates that the grant money be spent this way:)
When is AdWords Appropriate?
If you are promoting high ticket products, services or programs costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, then running a podcast advertising campaign costing $5-$20 per click may appear to make sense.
But assuming that you can convert 3% of these clicks into podcast podcast listeners and subscribers, your cost per subscriber would be between $170 and $670. If you think that's expensive, so do I.
One example where AdWords could make sense is a Financial Investment and Trading Podcast. A client signing up to such a podcast and becoming a client later is worth many thousands of dollars.
But for casual podcasts with a small budget I think Adwords are hardly ever worth pursuing.
Facebook Advertising For Podcasts
Podcast Advertising With Facebook
Facebook is one of the most affordable paid choices for promoting a podcast. It may seem easy to simply “boost” an episode specific post on your podcast site, and then hope people listen and subscribe.
But I would not recommend this approach when first starting out. Instead, I would recommend sending traffic to your main podcast landing page that features an incentive for signing up.
Where to Send Facebook Traffic?
When you're first starting with Facebook ads, you should send these ads to your podcast home page, not your episode pages. Do not simply boost your episode shared post on Facebook. This is because boosting an individual episode show notes post seems like a quick solution but rarely converts as well as a carefully crafted visual leading to a conversion optimized page. And your ad should be designed to specifically outline the listener benefit and value proposition of your overall podcast.
Some podcasters promote on Facebook by sending traffic straight to their iTunes page. This makes no sense to me, since iTunes makes for a very poor landing page. By sending your valuable ad traffic to iTunes, you miss the opportunity to present the benefits of signing up for your podcast, and to capture an email subscriber in the process. Plus, from an SEO perspective, iTunes doesn't need traffic or social signals, but your own site does.
So let's assume you are sending ad traffic to your own podcast homepage. You therefore want to ensure your podcast home page is optimized for conversion. We have a huge guide on podcast design patterns for conversion, I suggest you check it out.
There is an exception to this rule.
If you have a lead magnet or give-away specifically for each episode, Facebook can be a great way to take advantage of that. Your visual for the Facebook ad can focus on the lead magnet give away, instead of on static or boring podcast art. Your Facebook episode specific ads should make it clear that there is a "must have" lead magnet associated with the ad.
The more your "lead magnet" is aligned with the topic of the episode, the better the conversion rates will be.
Targeting Podcast Listeners On Facebook
As I mentioned, targeting podcast listeners on Facebook can be tricky. Here is our 5 step process for creating custom Facebook audiences that are more likely to be podcast listeners. You can use this to drive Facebook traffic to your podcast's home page. By the way this is an example of an episode specific lead magnet:
Using Facebook Paid Ads For Contests
A popular and effective way to gain podcast subscribers is by running a contest or give-away on Facebook. This used to be a popular podcast launch strategy. Contests were typically set up to ask for an iTunes review in exchange for entering the contest. However, the iTunes algorithms have changed since then. Reviews no longer play as much of a role in driving a podcast into the New and Noteworthy section.
That said, contests can work for subscriber growth even after the initial launch period. The benefit here is that people entering your contest are providing their email address, and you can make it clear that by entering the contest your listeners are signing up for email notifications when new episodes launch.
The prize for a contest does not need to be anything super expensive.
But it should be aligned with the topic of the show. It is much more important that the prize is relevant. Take a Customer Experience podcast for example. Rather than giving away an iPad or some other expensive gadget, consider giving away tickets to the premiere Customer Experience Conference that year. If you were to give away an iPad you would get tons of meaningless content entries of people just fishing for an electronic gadget. But it you are giving away conference tickets, you can be sure that people entering your contest are interested in your topic, and thus ideal podcast subscribers.
Here are some good Facebook Contest Resources.
Heyo – Beautiful and easy to set up, including a free trial and affordable monthly rate after that.
Wishpond – Lots of contest templates to choose from. Also includes a free trial.
Shortstack – A platform for contests and quizzes. More options and a greater learning curve.
Agora Pulse – Most affordable platform, and ROI focused.
For a more complete review of Facebook Contest platforms, check out this in-depth review by Venture Harbor.
Additional Ways To Use Facebook for Podcast Advertising
While Facebook advertising is affordable and effective, it is also a pretty vast topic, requiring lots of expertise. We will do a deep dive into this in a future episode. Here are just some additional ideas on utilizing the Facebook ads platform.
Facebook Messenger bots to invite people to subscribe or leave a review. These messenger bots result in you acquiring leads with emails.
Installing Facebook Pixels on your site and re-targeting your site visitors to subscribe.
Running Facebook ads to social share gates, using our favorite social share gate tool called "GoViral". This saves you from having to create a landing page, and still results in people sharing your podcast pages with their Facebook audience in order to "unlock" your lead magnet offer.
If you have not done so before, getting started properly with Facebook ads can be intimidating, so consider taking a Facebook ads course or hiring someone experienced to help you get started.
With both AdWords and Facebook you will mostly be advertising to non-podcast listeners. It is difficult to target podcast listeners only on Facebook, and next to impossible on Google.
In-podcast advertising networks are so effective because by default, your entire audience consists of podcast listeners.
One great way to get new listeners is to advertise on other existing podcasts in your niche. Most podcasters only think of podcast advertising networks as something to help them monetize their own show. But placing an ad inside one of the most popular podcasts in your niche can be super effective. According to Midroll, 61% of podcast listeners have taken action and purchased or signed up for something from such podcast ads.
The real benefit of this approach is the fact that you are advertising on your medium. If people are listening to your ads, that means they are podcast subscribers already. It is much easier to convince them to check out your show, than to show your Facebook or AdWords content to people who may not even listen to podcasts at all.
So how much does this cost?
Here is some information from Midroll, by far the best known podcast advertising network.
All Midroll podcast ads are priced on a cost-per-thousand downloads model, or CPM. For instance, with a $25 CPM, a spot on a show with 10,000 downloads per episode costs $250; with 100,000 downloads, it’s $2500.
So let’s do the math. If your ad is highly relevant to the audience of the podcast you place your ad into, and assuming 3% of listeners take action and subscribe to your show, your cost per new listener would be $0.83. If only 1% of listeners take action, then it would be $2.50 per subscriber.
On the surface, these numbers compare very favorably to advertising on Facebook or AdWords. However, there is a rub: Podcast networks charge per download, and the number of downloads do not equal the number of listens. And in order for your in-podcast midroll ads to work, you need people to listen, right? How many downloads are actually listened to depends greatly on the type of podcast. A daily news podcast might have a much lower download to listen ration vs. a podcast with a loyal fan base. Just something to keep in mind.
Midroll
Midroll is the largest player in this field, with an inventory of over 300 podcasts, and a focus of matching podcasters with
Here is a link to Midroll’s metrics, demographics and pricing, everything you need to know to advertise your own show on one of the best known podcast ad networks.
Archer Avenue works with you to ensure your ads are placed only on the shows you are interested in. They can also help you design an audio ad matching the style of the show you would be advertising on.
Advertise Cast
Advertise Cast has an interesting tool to help you find podcasts to advertise on, as well as predict the total spend of your campaign. Look for the "filter" tool in the left sidebar of their site. You can set the Cost Per Thousand (CPM) downloads to display podcasts that match your budget, and then proceed to select shows that would be a good fit.
Podgrid
Podgrid focuses on small to medium sized shows, and go the extra mile to match you with the best podcasts to advertise on.
Because they are small, they work to match your budget. Thus I think they are a good choice if you want to experiment with a limited budget.
Podcast One
Podcast One is a large network with 200 shows and "400 million impressions" according to their page.
They claim to be able to offer metrics on spots actually being heard, instead of using downloads. This is done through "3rd party verification". I do no know to what extent this increases their pricing, something you might wish to ask when reaching out to them,
How To Get Started With Advertising on Podcast Ad Networks
If placing ads on podcast networks seems intimidating, there is a good article on Adopter Media explaining podcast advertising rates and how they work. It answers the most common questions about how costs are determined and common pricing approaches.
In order to figure out if this will work for your podcast and your budget, I would suggest the following: Study each podcast network website listed above. Remember that the best outcome results from being aligned with the show you are advertising on.
Make a list of podcasts that would suit your niche and messaging.
Set a budget you would be comfortable with for 1/2 year.
Contact each network through their online form and describe what you are looking for.
If your budget is limited, try the Podgrid network first.
All of the podcast networks are very customer friendly. They offer consulting sessions to help you get started, and I'd suggest phone or Zoom meetings with each one to get a sense of how they work and how well aligned you are with their stable of available podcasts.
Conclusion
All in all, I think I can summarize it like this.
Google Adwords is appropriate only in rare circumstances. If your podcast is associated with a "big ticket item" business, or if you have a grant:)
Facebook is the most versatile podcast advertising platform simply because it's targeting flexibility and relative affordability.
Podcast Ad Networks are the most effective way to get to existing podcast listeners, but require a decent budget.
