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Promoting a podcast?
Cross-posted from my blog.]
On of the hats I wear now for my chief client is new-media editor of OnEarth Magazine. For the last six months, OnEarth has been putting out a podcast — 28 episodes so far, with everything from free-flowing interviews to radio-worthy feature stories to poetry readings. It’s really good content — the people who’re making the episodes are doing great work, and they deserve a big, healthy pool of listeners.
So what I’m going to do over the next week or so is pull out every word-of-mouth and social-web move I can think of, and see what happens. This will be interesting — I’ve been touting, for a long time, the power of organic, inclusive, word-of-mouth mode in conducting relationships with constituents, and reading about others who've enjoyed success, but after over a year of building various social web initiatives this is my first chance to really get it cookin' for NRDC. I’ll blog the results here.
I know there are lots of experienced podcasters and cluetrain-y marketers here on net2 -- anybody willing to volunteer ideas? I’d love to have some help making this work. And if you listen to an episode or two and like it, I’d be overjoyed if you’d send to del.icio.us, digg, blog it, tag it, all the good stuff there is to do. Thanks in advance!
- Ian Wilker's blog
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podcast promotion for the nonprofit podcasts
Hi Ian,
Britt pointed me to your post and invited me to share some of what I’ve done with the 501c3Cast podcast. My experience has been that podcast take a while to grow in listenership, but it’s certainly worth it!
Here are some techniques that I’ve tried:
When I interview someone from a nonprofit that works in a specific area, I email and post messages to others that might be interested. For example when I interviewed Scott Skinner from the Drachen Foundation (a nonprofit preserving the history and art of kite flying), I emailed some of the most popular kite enthusiasts websites. When I interviewed a physician who volunteers in Haiti, I posted messages on many Haiti community message boards and chat rooms. Pretty standard promotion techniques but I think they may have attracted some listeners who I wouldn’t have normally thought would have been interested in the podcast. I could see this working for you, for example, you mentioned poetry readings; how about letting spoken word and poetry websites know about the episode?
I’ve experimented with burning podcast episodes to CDs and sharing them with friends and family to pass along. I’ve also “lost a few CDs” in places that I thought people might notice them and be interested. Conferences, bookstores, and coffee shops have been places that I’ve thought of so far.
My largest source of new listeners has definitely been iTunes. The 501c3Cast has been lucky enough to be listed in featured subdirectories in the iTunes podcast library. My understanding is that these are picked by the iTunes staff so I don’t think there’s much that you can do to help the odds of getting mentioned there. One tip that I have heard is to make sure that your feed is compliant with ALL the iTunes feed standards. You can find their info at: http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html
Listening and participating in the discussion on other podcasts and blogs may also be helpful. I try to keep up with some of the larger indie podcasts and leave voicemails or emails from time to time. Checkout podcastalley.com, podcastpickle.com, and podshow.com for highest ranked podcasts there. Speaking of those sites, make sure you are listed in all of the podcast directories. You can find a pretty thorough list of them at: http://www.podcast411.com/page2.html
I hope some of these tips help or spark other ideas. Thanks for posting! I unfortunately didn’t know about your podcast until now and you’ve gained at least one more listener with me just by sharing your information in this blog post. Best of luck and keep in touch!
Corey
Podcast Marketing
Hi Ian,
I have found that posting transcriptions of podcast interviews and including a link to the podcast at the top helps a lot because podcasts don't travel as quickly as text. I use CastingWords. I'm going to email Corey P. at the 501c3Cast and see if he has time to post some tips since he is always one of the top rated nonprofit podcasts in the iTunes Music Store.