Hack46.Market Your Podcast

Hack 46. Market Your Podcast

Visibility is critical to building a listener base. Find out how to plug and get plugged effectively.

Marketing in the podcast world isn't as overt as it is in commercial radio, but it's definitely being done. With an increasing number of both listeners and podcasts, you need to grab listeners and hold them. This will be especially true as people start making money at podcasting.

After the initial directory listings have gone out, people get the word out about their podcasts in several ways. These are detailed in the sections that follow.

7.4.1. Trading Plugs and Promos

When you trade plugs with another podcast, you produce a short promo for them that offers your podcast to their listeners, and vice versa. The duration, style, and content of the promos should be negotiated between you and the other podcaster.

I recommend that you contact the shows that you like and that you think you share an audience with. Their listeners should be interested in your podcast, and vice versa. Obviously the topics of the two shows should be tangentially related, but they should not overlap. There is little reason why two competing shows would want to plug each other.

Once you have the right show, just contact the host and see if she is interested in trading plugs. If she is interested, work out the details of how long the spots should be and what (in general) they should say.

You can use a service such as Podcast Promos (http://podcastpromos.com/) to find promos for other podcasts, and to upload your own podcast promo.

Another option after you trade plugs is to trade links.

7.4.2. Trading Links

Your podcast should refer people to your blog and your blog should link to your podcast. The blog should provide extra material for your listeners. You should include links to the resources you talked about in the show, and any supporting material.

The blog should also link to other sites or podcasts that you think will be of interest to your listeners in the permanent links section of the blog. These links usually appear on the home page as part of the navigation system.

Just like you trade plugs with another show, you can also trade links. They link to your show on their site, and you link to theirs. You will be able to check the referrer logs on your web server to see whether people are coming from the other podcast site.

7.4.3. Conference Presence

Go to the conferences related to your topic. See and be seen. Have a bunch of cards printed up with the name of your podcast and a link to the site so that when you talk with people about the podcast, you have something to give them.

If they are new to podcasting, be sure to tell them that your site is a good starting point for podcasting because it has links to all the fundamental podcast sites.

Giving a talk is another way to make your presence known at a conference. Be sure to plug your podcast during and at the end of your talk.

The parties before and after each group of sessions are a wonderful time to mingle and drop off some cards with people. Cards are cheap, and if people are interested in the topic at the conference, and your podcast relates to it, you have a captive audience. Make use of it.

Interviews are another relatively cheap way to cross-market and get great content for your show. If the conference relates to your podcast, lots of people should be around whom you can talk with.

Podcasting is so new that for larger conferences, you should be able to contact the conference coordinator to get a press pass. Not only does this get you in free, but also you should have the opportunity to get the podcasts you publish about the conference linked off the conference's site.

7.4.4. Interviews

People and companies love to talk about what they do. It's both a boost to the ego and good publicity. It's also an excellent opportunity for cross-marketing. You interview them [Hack #33] and talk about what they are doing. Then they link to your interview with them on the public relations portion of their site.

Always make sure that the people you are going to interview do this cross-marketing if they have a web site. Ideally, in addition to a link to their interview, they should include a small description of your podcast with a link to the home page. To make this easy on them, you should have example copy of such a blurb on hand.

7.4.5. Advertising

When all else fails, you can buy marketing through search engine ads. Google AdSense (http://www.google.com/adsense) makes it easy to register your advertisement for various keywords. Pricing is highly variable and depends on the value of the word. You can cap the money you are willing to spend on advertising on a daily basis.

Smart marketing and search engine submissions should keep your ranking high in the search results if you understand the basics. A recent Pew study showed that surfers couldn't distinguish between paid ads and free ones. So, why buy the placement when you can get it free by doing the legwork to get your page designs right and trade links appropriately?

7.4.6. Voting

Podcast Alley (http://podcastalley.com/) maintains a comprehensive list of podcasts, partly because it's also where people go to vote on their favorite podcasts. Make sure your podcast is listed on Podcast Alley, and encourage your listeners both in your podcast and on your blog to vote for your podcast.

7.4.7. Pinging

Another way to get noticed is to ping the Audio Weblogs site (http://audio.weblogs.com/) each time you post a new podcast. This site has a list of the most recent podcasts that people can subscribe to. You can add your podcast to the list simply by filling in the ping form at http://audio.weblogs.com/pingform.html. Blog software such as Movable Type [Hack #38] can do this automatically for you by specifying the URL of the ping form.

Another option in a similar vein is the MSN Alerts service (http://alerts.msn.com). This service monitors your RSS feed and then updates subscribed listeners via instant messaging when new posts and podcasts are available.