Podcasting as Opposed to Radio
Radio is more familiar, but can only reach a local audience. While podcasting is a harder ball to get rolling, it has much greater personal potential. In further contrast, radio has oversight. Managers closely monitor content. Podcasts are under no such oversight. But there is one place where radio has a definite advantage: instant listenership across a broadly used, essentially “free” medium. Because of this, radio stations have a ubiquity of sponsors advertising on them continuously, providing funding and expansion under cogent management. Podcasts do not have this inbuilt marketing strength, but conversely they do have a different one: opt-in audiences, ensuring continued listenership and often word-of-mouth advertisement.
More Than One Way To Skin A Cat: Podcast Marketing
From Search Engine Optimized content to episode publication schedules, to paid marketing (in some cases), growing your podcast can be done many ways. Ask yourself what podcast marketing approach best works for you; what you can handle. According to life-longlearner.com, in the first 8 weeks of your podcast, you need to publish 3 episodes a week, or a total of 24. Why? iTunes will put you on the “new and noteworthy” section of their page for eight weeks immediately following your launch. But if you’re the head of a family, or involved in other things like paying the bills, you may not have time to do 3 episodes a week. A podcast can take anywhere from a half hour to half a day to publish. It’s advisable, then, to have a backlog of episodes built up in order to launch successfully, regardless of life’s exigencies.
Optimize Content To Reach A Wider Audience: Podcast Advertising
Today approximately 80% of readers never get further than the headline of an article. Unfortunately, podcast marketing is also subject to this title bias. The important thing is to optimize your title so that it is appealing to the widest audience. Audiences are more likely to accrue in size should the title be relevant to them. To this end, optimizing your podcast such that it closely follows trends in culture, entertainment, technology, politics, and anything else ubiquitously relevant can statistically yield increased audience.
Fishing For Listeners: Generating Traffic From Podcasting
Podcast marketing can come from traffic generated via content as well; just because titles pull traffic doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to optimize. Make your content such that it can be search-engine optimized and tagged. Be consistent with your episode production–you’ve got to build an audience over time, and regularity helps do that. Make subscription to your podcast easy. Social media is a necessity today as well. You should also be sure to engage commenters, and make commenting something that’s easy to do. Check out some more handy tips on generating podcast traffic here.
Podcasts Yield Fruit
There is the potential for exponential growth in a way that reaches more than radio can via podcasts. Podcast marketing and advertising, combined with content and engagement, will generate traffic for your podcast, enabling profit.