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Follow These Tips To Promote Your Podcast Channel and Increase Your Reach

As the North Phoenix Chamber of Commerce is breathing life back into its podcast channel, we are learning how to promote the channel.  Ultimately, we want our guests to be more visible in the community.  So our podcast channel is much more about promoting our members than it is about promoting the chamber of commerce.  Well, at least it's a balance between helping all of us be promoted more.


We are discovering there are several industry best practices to promote podcast channels.  I want to share what we are learning with you, because you may be facing the same challenges with your own podcast channel.  A rising tide lifts all boats, and our chamber of commerce is here to help lift up the business community  So we share the results of our research here with you today.


Host The Podcast Channel On Your Website


Regardless of which platform you use to record, edit, and publish your podcast channel, you'll want to start out by embedding your podcast channel on a page in your own website. 


Why is this important?  Because you want to drive traffic to your own website, not off to a 3rd party podcast hosting platform.  Your website should always be the central hub of all your marketing efforts.  Share content from your website to your social media accounts, newsletter blasts, etc.  The bottom line: get in the habit of placing your original content on your own website, even if it's really embedded from somewhere else.


Educate Your Guests How To Share & Promote Their Episode


One important strategy to increasing your listenership (is that a word?) is to have more people learn about your channel.  There's no better way for that to happen than for your guests to promote their episode to their followers.


As soon as you publish an episode that featured a guest speaker, send your guest an email with a link to their episode, a checklist of actions they should take with the link, and attach artwork for the episode for them to include in their sharing.


Develop a template email that you can send to every guest, simply change the link and the attached artwork. Quick and easy. You can also provide suggestions of social media posts and other communications for them swipe.  Make it easy for them to promote.


Be sure to follow up with the guest a week later to share stats about their episode and ask if they had a chance yet to promote to their followers.


Promote To Your Own Followers


Don't forget to leverage your own database of followers. Send a link to your website's podcast page in your newsletter and highlight the most recent interview and the featured guest.  Create social media posts yourself that drive traffic back to your website's podcast page and the featured episode.


Use Video To Promote An Episode


What?  Is Tom nuts?  This is a podcast, not a video.


Seriously.  Think TikTok style short 15- to 60-second reels to build excitement about a podcast episode.  Use those "shorts" across your social media accounts, newsletter, and share them with the episode guest.  Or encourage them to shoot their own quick promotional video clip.  Even better, two of you shoot a quick promo clip together and share that across both databases.


Your podcast listeners want to know they are connecting with a real human.  Feed off the energy of each other, have fun, let your personalities shine through. 


Build A Montage Promotional Video


If you've been shooting these short clips and have a collection of them built up, leverage them by building a "podcast trailer".  Compile the voices that will be heard in the current season episodes, assemble show highlights from the video clips, and finish with a strong call to action: listen to the podcast channel by following a link to your website's podcast channel page.


Push this promotion out to youtube, your social media accounts, and your newsletter readers.


Blog About Podcast Episodes


By adding keyword rich, search engine friendly content to your website about the podcast channel and about specific episodes, you have a powerful one-two promotional punch.  The blog post can be used to curate additional content such as a link to a white paper, worksheet, invitation to a webinar, additional research, transcript of the podcast episode, a link to the guest's website and other materials, social media accounts, and so much more.


Be sure to include a link in the blog post to a specific episode.  And on the podcast episode description, include a link to the supporting blog post.


As a follow-up with your guests, send them a link to the blog post 30 days after you've published the podcast episode and you've both promoted the episode to your followers.  You can each gain more momentum by sharing the blog post.


Repeat What's Working


Avoid the temptation of wanting to broaden your reach by venturing away from your core channel theme. 


Instead, study your metrics and figure out what is working.  Then double down on that by recording more episodes that resonate with the followers you've been appealing to.  More followers will find you because of this.  You'll build deeper relationships and have better retention numbers by sticking with what works.


Don't Be Afraid To Experiment


As with all things marketing, you're unique, just like everyone else :)   Our consumers are different, and advice that works for one business or industry may not work for you. 


I stated at the beginning of this article that this is a summary of best practices I've learned as I'm researching how to promote our chamber's podcast channel.  While all this advice sounds like it should work, I am in the early stages of testing it myself.  We are just breathing life back into our own podcast channel. 


Conclusion


I have a half dozen interviews published in the past two months.  We have taken the first step of embedding the podcast channel on the chamber's website.  And we've taken the second step of sending a checklist to each guest with tips on how to promote their episode.  As of the time of writing this blog post, however, we don't have any statistics on the effectiveness of this yet.  And we do not have any video yet to promote the channel or specific episodes. 


I'm not telling you all of this works.  I'm sharing with you, hot off the presses, what I've researched and started implementing for our channel.


As we learn more here at the North Phoenix Chamber of Commerce about the effectiveness of our own podcast promotional efforts, I'll add a date stamped UPDATE section to the bottom of this article.


In the meantime, consider either creating or continuing with your own podcast channel.  Define an easy workflow that works well for you.  Experiment with ways to promote your channel, and share with us what works and what doesn't in the comments below. 

 

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