There are many good things to be said about podcasting. It allows tremendous creativity. You can do anything you like within a soundscape from the comfort of your home. Tell stories, sing songs, act out skits, play original music (or use Royalty Free Music to save you the work), talk to people: it’s all viable. You can make bite-sized episodes or cover topics for several hours at a time. And that’s not all. The advantage we’re going to expand upon here is the ease of getting heard.
It’s incredibly affordable, for a start: even if you have high production standards, you can record something perfectly respectable with a modern laptop (or even a smartphone), a budget-friendly microphone, a pop shield, and some audio editing software (which needn’t cost you: Audacity for an example can work wonders for free).
If you’re going to put time and effort into creating engaging media, you’ll obviously want people to experience it, and putting out a podcast allows you to reach the world. Plenty of successful podcasters have gathered massive audiences without having to spend huge amounts of money or engage in non-stop self-promotion. But how can you efficiently spread the word?
In this post, we’re going to set out four distribution strategies that can help. The more work you put into getting your podcast into the right places, the more you’ll succeed. Let’s get started.
| Table of contents
Reach out to compatible shows
Create a convenient compilation
Interview experts in your niche
Put snippets on YouTube
Podsafe music license
Conclusion
Reach out to compatible shows
Within the podcasting world, there will inevitably be numerous shows that are reasonably similar to yours, but this is actually a good thing. Why? Because the average listener won’t just check out one show covering each topic that interests them: they’ll find the time to listen to many different shows, going back and forth between them. This means that there isn’t much of a sense of competition, and you don’t need to be antagonistic towards other podcasters.
On the contrary, you can reach out to those podcasters for the purpose of mutual promotion (there’s even a company called RedCircle that concentrates on making this happen). They can tell their listeners about your show, and you can tell yours about theirs. You can even collaborate in notable ways to get some extra attention. Before reaching out, though, be sure to have a clear pitch about what your podcast has to offer: the more impressive you can seem, the more likely you’ll be to earn some partnerships.
Create a convenient compilation
While some people occasionally pick out podcasts to try, others have voracious appetites: they like to have things to listen to while they do other things, whether they’re exercising, studying, or even working repetitive jobs that don’t require concentration. A good way to get your podcast out there is to cater to those people by curating a compilation of great podcasts (ideally built around a topic or set of topics) and, naturally, adding yours to that list.
The easiest way to go is to create a blog post to explain what’s so great about your curated compilation and push people towards giving your choices a try (with yours at or towards the top of the list). You can provide your curated selection as a list with links to platforms like Spotify, or offer links directly to dedicated podcast websites, and explain your reasoning.
An off-the-wall option you can try is creating a podcast torrent as a way of distributing your podcast (along with various others). Torrenting allows you to distribute files without needing to pay for hosting, deal with awkward platform restrictions, or worry about storage terms changing and requiring you to re-upload things. Furthermore, there are various torrent search engines out there, so you could plausibly pick up extra interest through those.
Interview experts in your niche
Guest stars have long been used throughout the media world to bring in fresh eyes and ears. TV shows have brought in Hollywood actors to pop ratings, and radio serials have engaged in stunt casting simply to spark curiosity. You can do the same with your podcast by seeking opportunities to interview experts in your niche. By asking the right questions and establishing a decent rapport, you can show your professionalism, and the detail of the conversation can be so valuable that people actively seek it out.
As for how you can attract high-profile guests, it may be easier than you think. Look around and you’ll soon see that big names in some moderately-large niches have appeared on very small podcasts with minimal reach. What matters is how you approach prospective guests, how you come across, and whether they think they can have an engaging discussion on your platform. So if you truly believe that you bring something fresh to the table, aim your sights high: there’s every chance that you can land some impressive guests if you’ll only take the risk of asking.
Put snippets on YouTube
YouTube isn’t the ideal platform for podcasts, obviously: it’s a video-centric system that isn’t suited to extended listening. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take advantage of it when seeking to spread your podcast. One option you can take is to take extracts from your shows and put them up on YouTube. A two-minute highlight can get people paying attention and inspire them to give the full show a try.
If you’re going to do this, though, you need to understand how to get something seen on YouTube, and that means learning about YouTube SEO: how to create alluring thumbnails, how to choose click-worthy titles, and how to include links that people will actually notice. But if you can manage that, you can squeeze a lot of promotional value out of just one of your episodes. After all, if you record an hour-long podcast, you might be able to get ten highlight segments.
What is PodSafe Music?
Podsafe music is a term created in the podcasting community to refer to the legal use of a musical work to be used in podcasting products. If you can’t spend a minimum of $2k for background music on your podcast show, you would probably be interested in getting royalty-free music license for a few bucks.
What is Royalty-free music? you can read more about it here – http://www.foximusic.com/what-is-royalty-free-music to sum it up in one sentence – Pay once per music track for an unlimited online use.
Here at Foximusic you can license great music for your podcast shows at a very low budget and be 100% sure you are using risk-free music while promoting your brand.
Get your hands on beautifully produced music for your podcast shows! You get an exclusive 100% Podsafe music tracks with our Standard License.
conclusion
There can be value in podcasting even if you never reach a significant audience. If it brings some joy to your life, or allows you to sharpen your production skills, then it’s surely worthwhile. But if you go to the effort of creating something great, you should do what you can to get it heard by as many people as possible. It’ll be good for your career, your personal brand, and even your level of self-esteem: positive feedback is a powerful reward.
The suggestions we’ve put out in this piece — partnering with other shows, creating handy compilations, interviewing experts, and uploading snippets to YouTube — aren’t guaranteed to work. Your podcast obviously needs to be strong, or else no amount of distribution will ever help you. But if you’re proud of your work, they’ll move you in the right direction. Good luck!
