Increasing The Audience for Your Podcast

A good friend of mine, who is a Podcaster, commented to me that they wanted to increase the audience of their podcast in 2023. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert podcaster myself, although I would claim to be an expert listener, so I’m going to describe what I think is the podcast audience landscape in 2023 and how that can be translated into techniques to increase your listenership.

1. Understand the Platform and Environment where People Listen

The platform on which people consume podcasts is, drum roll please, mobile. I know that sounds obvious but there are Podcasters who have such a personal desktop bias that that they haven’t yet grokked the zen of mobile listening. I recently had one person tell me “I just installed a podcast app on my phone for the first time” (January 2023).

As of 2019 from an Adobe study, 65% of people prefer listening to podcasts on mobile phones. Riverside

Now that’s 2019 and that’s four years ago and mobile devices have only gotten more powerful and more prevalent.

Why Does This Matter?

If people are listening on phones then that means that when they follow a link to your podcast’s home page, they are probably also on a phone. So if your podcast’s home page isn’t mobile friendly, you may be losing out on traffic.

I’d also argue that if you have a detailed website for your podcast and the overall site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re probably missing out.

Finally make sure that your show notes work on a mobile device. By definition you are authoring them on a PC:

• Have you ever tried them on your phone?
• Have you ever tried them on a podcast player that isn’t your preferred one?
• Have you tried them on Spotify
• Have you tried them on Apple Podcsasts

2. Understand the Places People Listen

According to Statista’s 2020 study, the top platforms and apps are:

• Spotify - 25% of listeners
• Apple Podcasts - 20% of listeners

Again this is from Riverside.

Why Does This Matter?

The first thing you need to know is that making sure you podcast feed shows up in Spotify and Apple Podcasts will get you roughly 50% of the way to your total audience so that’s probably where your podcast SEO work needs to start.

If you personally haven’t verified that your podcast works well on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts, I’d be surprised if there isn’t something that can be improved – that’s the nature of the testing any kind of software. And, yes, a podcast player is supposed to be generic and work with any RSS feed but you should verify this.

3. Make Your Podcast a Habit

Habits are incredibly powerful – we brush our teeth, generally – because our parents instilled a habit into us. What you really want is for your podcast to become a habit for your listener. I’m not saying that you should make your podcast a daily thing but what I am saying is that your podcast being consistent is really import. Consistency means people can start to remember:

• Every Tuesday, I can listen to ABC at the Gym
• Every Month, I get a new episode of XYZ

For podcasts I love, I know when they are coming out and when a new episode isn’t available, honestly, I’m just annoyed. Think about watching TV and how much better it is when you know that something will be available – a lot of podcasts seem to take the approach of “we release when we get around to it” (yes I’m personally guilty of this) and what that means is that your listener, honestly, will often just forget about you. There is always another podcast that a listener can find; making your podcast a habit is a powerful remedy to the user forgetting about you.

Specific Tips

• If I was doing a weekly podcast, I would religiously bind it to a specific day of the week and I’d be fanatical about not missing the day.
• If my topic area has a natural weekly cycle (example an NFL related football podcast might release on Saturday to cover the Sunday game; or it might be on Monday to lament the Sunday game)
• If I was doing a monthly podcast, I’d either go for a specific day of the month or the first X day of the month (first Monday or another day); either way I’d be absolutely consistent.

4. Think About How You Can Increase Your Frequency

An increased frequency flows right along with making your podcast a habit. There’s one outstandingly good podcast I listen to, CoRecursive, which is a monthly deep dive tech interview podcast. I love CoRecursive but I wish that it was more frequent. Adam, the host of CoRecursive, does deep dive tech interviews and they take a lot of prep. I get that but I’m a junkie of this podcast.

My suggestion to him is that he could likely introduce a secondary format as a once a week episode – maybe a 15 minute tech tip, a product review or a discussion with a co-host. All of that would be considerably easier to prepare and could fit into the same podcast feed since it is naturally of interest to the core audience.

Now there’s an argument here about dilution but having seen the rabid fanbase that CoRecursive has, well, I don’t think that would matter (there’s even a Slack community for CoRecursive which is one of the few communities I participate in).

Specific Tips

• Thing about a secondary format that appeals to your existing audience.
• Use the same RSS feed
• Make it a format that you can do regularly; minimize the additional work on yourself.

5. Make a Community

The aforementioned CoRecursive podcast has done an excellent job building a community around this podcast. There’s a Slack group with relevant discussion threads to the audience (including an announcements thread of every new podcast episode) and a volunteer moderator who welcomes everyone to the community. Yes only your most rabid fans are going to join your community but succeeding online in the 21st century really is about your hardcore fans. Give them a place to interact with you and they likely will.

Whether you are using Slack or Gitter or another community tool probably doesn’t matter but a ton of people have slack already installed.

Note: An even more powerful community that was spawned by a podcast is the Acquired.fm Slack community.

Specific Tips

If you’re going to do this, make sure that you highlight the community on your podcast – it took me way too long to find CoRecursive’s community as the host didn’t focus on it.

6. Engage With Your Audience

If you have an audience (and, better yet, a community), you can pretty easily cement their relationship with you by engaging with them. If you haven’t ever had an audience member onto your podcast – why not? If your audience cares enough to listen to you, maybe they have something to say. Figure out a way that you can pull an audience member into the show.

7. Get Yourself Onto Other Podcasts

Podcasts, sadly, suffer from a very, very real discovery problem – there simply isn’t a good discovery mechanism for podcasts – but, as a podcaster, you can often get yourself interviewed on another podcast. I listen to CoRecursive because the host, Adam, got interviewed on another podcast. If you aren’t regularly either being interviewed or interviewing someone, you are missing out on a real marketing opportunity.

Specific Tips

Here’s the dirty reality of this: every podcaster needs to regularly make an episode and an interview where you are talking to another podcaster about your shared area of competence? That’s like a low easy softball over home plate – it is an easy home run.

8. Leverage Your Cross Promotion Abilities

A lot of podcasters have businesses on the side and yet you don’t always see cross promotion used successfully. Here are a couple of thoughts:

• Use your podcast to promote your business. I’d actually suggest that this can be done organically at both the beginning and end of the episode; shorter at the beginning / just a mention and then longer at the end. The reason for both the beginning and end of the episode is not everyone hangs for every moment of an episode.
• Use your business to promote your podcast. Just as a suggestion, goto a printing company like VistaPrint or GotPrint and get a 4 color postcard made up about your podcast (this is actually super cheap) and then drop that postcard in every order you get.

9. Leverage Your Personal Email

If you haven’t been leveraging your personal email to promote your podcast that feels to me like a simple marketing fail. Here are two specific thoughts:

• Add a footer to every mail you send (i.e. an email signature) that links to your podcast
• Send an email blast out to your close network when a new episode is available

10. Leverage Your Social Network

As with email if you aren’t promoting your podcast on your social network then that is also a marketing fail. My way of thinking is that every single time you have a new episode, you need to make a tweet, create a Facebook post, add it to your Instagram story, post a Snap, make a TikTok excerpt and so on.

11. Use QR Codes

QR codes, in 2023 are like urls were in 1996 or .com web addresses in 1999 — hot! Remember that postcard I mentioned above? Make sure that in addition to a url, it has a QR code to your podcast – maybe even right to your RSS feed.

Why Does This Matter?

Always remember that if the bulk of your consumption is on a phone, making it easier for people on a phone to get to your podcast is a huge win. Typing on a phone, for a large portion of the population, is just an activity that sucks. QR codes are just plain easy.

12. Use a TinyUrl or a BIt.ly if You Can’t Use a QR Code

If you can’t use a QR code for some reason then consider using a TinyUrl or a Bit.ly (or maybe both; the QR code can encode the Bit.ly and then you get the advantage of link tracking metrics).

12. Try and Use TikTok Creatively

I will confess that I don’t fully grok the zen of TikTok but I know that it can be a huge source of traffic. In general social media works when creators use them to make media that works for the platform. If we’re talking about TikTok and Podcasts, I’d use TikTok to make a 30 second clip excerpt each episode, specifically calling out:

• Something controversial from the episode
• A simple way to get from the TikTok to the podcast i.e. a short url
• I’d make that simple url something that you can say as well as showing it in text on the video
• Given that people may find your TikTok long after the podcast episode has gone live, I’d make a TikTok landing page that has, in large format text, the controversial quote linked to the specific episode. Ideally every quote that you use on TikTok would be linked to the episode where it was said.