Podcast on a budget – Promoting your podcast

July 1, 2019June 26, 2019 Mark Webber 3055 Views 0 Comments

This is the seventh and final part of a multipart series on podcasting for publication staffs.

In order to have potential listeners become aware of your podcast you’ll need to promote it.

KTSA-AM, a commercial radio station, uses its Facebook site to promote its programming. Shown here is a promotion of its morning show hosts’ program, along with a link to its location. (Screenshot from facebook.com/550KTSA.)

Here is a compilation of research from around the internet on how to successfully promote one’s podcast.

According to buffer.com, posting on iTunes can result in as much as 70 percent of a podcast’s listens and downloads.

To promote your work, here are a few pointers from not only buffer from several other sites:

Promote your podcast on social media. Send a tweet or post on Facebook with the URL from your school paper’s website when you publish the podcast. This would work well also, using the podcast hosting site or iTunes’ URL, but in my opinion promoting the newspaper’s website is the better option.
Reshare the podcast episode several times on social media.

Using Pablo or Canva, create a quote image and share as a standalone social media post with the URL.
If you have guests, ask them to promote the podcast on their social media sites.
Be a guest on other podcasts to promote your own.
Repurpose your podcast’s audio file into a video production to publish on YouTube. For visuals, you could use an appropriate graphic or videos, photos of the participants, or video showing what is being discussed.

This podcast published on YouTube, produced by a student in the author’s colleague’s class, uses a graphic as a visual to accompany the audio. (Screenshot from youtube.com/user/RTVVMTProductions.)

Submit your podcast to podcasters and aggregators. If your podcast is published on iTunes then it’s also automatically posted on PodcastLand. There are a number of others, some of which take the form of downloadable apps for cell phones.
Use Search Engine Optimization techniques. Numerous articles and books have been written on this, but in very simple terms it’s using a website’s contents or key words to drive traffic to the site.

Using YouTube and Facebook

Both allow for live broadcasting, so either could be an alternative to recording a podcast if you wanted to go live.

Thank you for joining me in this journey through the world of podcasting.

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Mark Webber

Mark Webber, CJE, who retired at the end of May 2019 after 40 years as a classroom teacher, was a founding faculty member of Vidal M. Treviño School of Communications and Fine Arts in Laredo, Texas, a school district free-standing magnet school program, in 1993. He founded the print journalism program and taught it for 26 years and added the creative writing staff to his 5th journalism block class for his final three 3 years of teaching. His former students produced The Magnet Tribune print and online newspapers and Revelations literary magazine. (The school’s publications program has since been terminated.) He stays active in scholastic journalism as a JEA-certified mentor and critique judge, a Texas UIL journalism events judge, and as a member of the JEA’s Mentor Committee.

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