Podcasting Hacks

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.

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 ...