When it comes to podcasting, your work doesn’t end with creating the episodes! To take full advantage of what podcasting has to offer, your game must be on point in all areas, including marketing. This will ensure you get the maximum amount of exposure from the episodes you work so hard to create. Read on to learn about 5 of the most common podcast marketing mistakes to avoid.
Expecting the Podcast to Grow Itself
Once upon a time, having a podcast could be considered a marketing strategy in itself, especially if you selected a lucrative niche and targeted a specific audience. However, with millions of podcasts available, competition is fierce. You must do more if you want your podcast to succeed.
Podcasting is a great way to share information and have an impact in the world. It can also help with reaching your sales and marketing goals.
Though a podcast can be an effective marketing tool and lead generator, it must still be marketed in order to grow those download numbers and achieve the success you’re seeking.
Make this mistake and your podcast’s growth will be forever sandbagged.
Overlooking the Importance of Show Notes
To the amateur podcaster, show notes are sometimes seen as an unnecessary expense or waste of time. After all, you’re creating great audio content, so there’s no need for any written content. Right?
This couldn’t be more wrong! Show notes are a critical element of your podcast.
We’re getting closer to the day when search engines could automatically transcribe all podcast episodes, but until that day arrives, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) remains king. Search engines like Google require quality written text to index your podcast and bring it in front of people who are searching for information.
No matter how great your episodes may be, without quality show notes they are effectively non-existent to search engines.
In addition, some people simply aren’t interested in listening to your whole podcast episode. But perhaps, by landing on your website, they’d discover a product of yours or join your mailing list. They just might even subscribe to your podcast and listen at a later time.
SEO is essential to your podcast’s growth, and show notes can serve as great long-form content. They also help your podcast get discovered by audiences in podcast directories like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A website, ListenNotes.com, exists solely to let users search through podcast show notes!
Without well-written show notes, your return on investment from podcasting is greatly reduced.
Not Owning Your Content
Show notes with proper SEO are only part of having a successful podcast. If you don’t also own a website, you are throwing all your hard work out the window.
Even if you podcast as a hobby, you may still wish to have listeners join a mailing list, donate, or buy merchandise. If you’re selling products or services, or doing some other marketing within your podcast, this is even more critical to understand.
You should have your podcast on a domain that you own and can customize. The standard podcast websites created by many podcast hosts do not allow for customization such as the addition of mailing list opt-ins, special offers, sales funnels, and other things you may want to add. Plus, if you ever switch hosts, you’ll lose everything. Don’t let your hard work go to waste! Set up a proper website.
Publishing Inconsistently
Humans are habitual. Most of us survive with the comforts of having daily routines. Consistent, predictable things fit easily into our lives, and your podcast should be no exception. Having a consistent schedule, no matter how frequently you publish, will help ensure that you have an engaged audience eagerly awaiting your next episode!
In addition to a consistent release schedule, you must deliver consistently high-quality episodes with similar durations.
Choose a schedule and stick with it, right down to the time and day of the week you publish.
Not Making It Easy for Guests to Promote Your Episodes
Bringing valuable guests onto your podcast not only creates great content and provides them an outlet for self-promotion, but it can also help grow your podcast audience.
By having your guests share the episode with their network, their followers can explore your podcast and learn more about what you do. The important thing to recognize is that your guests have busy lives. They’re not always going to check back with you to find out when their episode was released.
To help ensure they share your episode, make it easy! On the day of the episode’s release, e-mail the guest with a quick note letting them know the episode is now live. Include a link that they can share and perhaps prepare some pre-written social media posts!
You can even tag them in social media posts of your own. This makes it even easier for them to share or retweet!
There you have it! 5 of the most common podcast marketing mistakes which you can now be sure to avoid.
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