7 Smart Ways To Improve Your Podcast Promotion
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Podcast Promotion: 7 Smart Ways to Improve Your Social Sharing

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Podcasting is super hot, but many skilled podcasters aren't using social media to its advantage to build their podcast tribe. Although the main focus is the podcast, it really helps to have a website, social media, and visual brand to grow your podcast to its full potential. Here are seven innovative ways to improve your podcast promotion that are totally doable.

Podcast promotion is similar in many ways to promoting blog content, but here are a few tips specifically for podcasters based on less-than-optimal planning that I've seen.

Podcast Promotion Tips:

  1. Be consistent with your brand
  2. Create shareable content for your fans and guests
  3. Write solid Show Notes
  4. Be creative

Craft titles with creativity

Think beyond the name of your podcast when crafting titles for each episode.

Utility has its place, but you need to entice people to listen to your podcast. Having a uniform title format can be beneficial, but don't forget the creative element of crafting a title for your podcast.

Skip the episode number for social shares

While it holds value in some places to talk about the episode number, on social sharing, it uses valuable real estate.

In this example from Erik Fisher's Beyond the To Do List podcast website, Erik has the episode number at the end of his blog title. Still, when I hit the social sharing button for Twitter, he's customized the text to include the @mention of his guest and removed the episode number. Perfect!

Beyond the To Do List

You only have seventy characters for Google's snippet, which is what shows in Google's results for blog articles.

Use this tool to test your title and optimize for Google search results.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization

I use the free Yoast SEO plugin which has this feature baked in.

Yoast SEO plugin

Write solid show notes

Show notes are the write-up that accompanies your podcast. Many successful podcasters partner the launch of the podcast episode with an entire blog post, which is very smart. Michael Stelzner's most recent podcast for Social Media Examiner was called Instagram Algorithm: How Marketers Should Alter Their Strategy. This is a complete stand-alone blog article that also provides links to everything discussed in the podcast interview as well as a bio for the guest and some of the interview.

The bare minimum for podcast show notes should be: guest bio, links to important items from the interview, links to guests' social media accounts and blogs, a great shareable graphic, and a call to action to subscribe to your podcast.

Embedding your podcast is a must! Podcast Master Pat Flynn created a fantastic plug-in for you: The Easiest to Use, Best Looking Podcast Plugin Ever Made

As your podcast becomes more successful, creating show notes would be a great task for a virtual assistant to handle. You can create a format for your show notes that could be used for each one. This way your assistant can fill in the information and you could finish it off by adding your own intro and closing.

Create shareable tweets

Click-to-tweet graphics make it easy for people to share. If your fans look like rockstars when they share your content, they'll get more conversation and interaction which will lead to more sharing from your website. It's a win/win for you and them.

Create shareable moments on your blog for more social shares. Click To Tweet

I use the WordPress plugin Better Clicks to Tweet. It's easy to install and use.

Design a memorable visual brand

Adobe Spark (25)

The elements of a visual brand for your podcast design are:

  • logo – hire a pro to design something that represents your message
  • color palette – two or three colors
  • font – should fit the tone of your brand
  • style of brand – fun, serious, funky

If you're unsure how to create a visual brand, this is an excellent place to hire someone. It's possible to find someone within your budget, no matter how small or large.

If you have a tight budget, find someone who can develop your brand kit in Canva and provide you with a brand board with all the elements so you can create your designs and remain consistent with your visual brand.

canva for work

Canva Pro is fantastic for maintaining your brand elements (color codes, fonts, etc.) as well as templates for your designs.

Punctuate with quote graphics

Surely, you pulled a few intelligent nuggets of wisdom in your interview, right? What were the ah-ha moments during the conversation with your guest? Create a shareable quote graphic for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's not.

Find a few thoughts from your guest interview and create a tweetable quote of about 120 characters. You'll want to leave room for a hashtag and mention your guest. Then, pop a short phrase into your favorite design tool.

The best part is that you can create one graphic and then resize it for any social platform with a click. This allows you to create one graphic template and reuse it for each interview quote.

adobe spark

Inspire your guests to share

Once your podcast is ready to go live, you can contact your guest with a short, authentic email to say thank you for being a guest on your show and include links to the podcast.

Don't cut and paste something impersonal with too much crap. No one has time to read it.

It's also excellent to tag them on social media when you post your podcast, but don't be in your face about it.

I hope this gives you some new ideas to implement for your podcast promotion. Let me know which ones you try and how they work for you.

I'd love to know what some of your favorite podcasts are and why.

If you liked this article, please share it with your network. I'd really appreciate it!

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8 Comments

  1. Hello, Peg!
    It is an excellent article. Loves the way you explained some creative methods to promote brand and service awareness to more and more people. Definitely going to try them all for y website. But here I would like to add one more way to the list that is adding social sharing buttons. These allow your users to share your product with their social networks if they like it.
    Thanks for sharing the great content and keep doing a good job.

  2. Hi Peg,

    Another thing to do on your social media posts is to tag/mention the people and companies that are discussed favorably in each episode. Not only is this likely to catch the attention of the people you tag/mention, but it also catches the attention of anyone who is monitoring tweets that reference those people.

    The key is to do it in a genuinely gracious way. Perhaps a thank-you of some kind or an extra brag about them that makes them look and feel good – along with a link to the episode’s show notes. (Not only is this the right way to be social… it also increases your odds of having them share/retweet your post.)

    It’s so nice to see more people talking about podcast promotion Peg! Such an important topic.

  3. Good tips. I’ve stopped using to the Yoast plug in myself, since it caused problems with powerpress. Maybe updates to one or both of these have fixed that incompatibility?

  4. The podcasting business is booming. Like blog posts, you’ve got to promote your podcast to make it visible. Regardless of how many people are ready to listen to you and craving your content, no one will know it exists if it’s never promoted.

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