Growing your podcast from that first and single recording into a globally and frequently listened to show requires a lot of commitment, patience, consistency and smart strategy.
Making your podcast a star among its contemporaries depends on a lot of crucial factors, one of which is how large, consistent and loyal your audience are to your podcast.
Increasing the number of listeners to your podcast may seem taxing, long and almost impossible, but it is possible. You can grow that audience if you make it a goal to increase the size of your audience, and you’re willing to do what it takes.
The following are ways to help you achieve that goal.
Know Your Audience
You want to grow your audience? Then get to know your audience. Know your target audience, what they would prefer, trending topics related to your niche that they would like to consume, their keyword searches, their demographics and their online behavior. Knowing your audience can give you more direction for your content creation.
Create High Quality Content
How quality and how well conveyed your content is will do a lot in bringing a larger audience to your podcast. Always value quality over quantity when creating your content.
Select your topics well and write them in a simple and understandable manner. Your topic attracts your audience, and your content makes them stay.
Note that the quality of your content largely depends on you finding your niche in podcasting. Your niche is the category you create about, it could be in sports, entertainment, fashion, health, trending global topics or anything at all.
Finding a niche and focusing on it helps you deliver more quality content.
Be Discoverable
When and where will your target audience reach you? When you are discoverable on social media, during peer-to-peer interactions, in seminars and conferences, you gain more following.
The internet is now the fastest way for people to find others so maximize the internet. Create publicity on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others.
Join online communities of podcasters and promote your content regularly. Request to be referred by your listeners to other potential listeners. Get e-fliers created and ask family and friends to help you share on their social media platforms.
When your podcast is ready to go out to the world, you can upload it to distribution platforms like Apple or Google podcast, SoundCloud and Spotify. You can find more in this Spotify guide. It’s quite resourceful.
Leverage Social Media
Know your audience. Though it is equally important that your audience knows you, because you are not just a voice behind a mic, you are a person with a life. A person with a personality, hobbies and a lifestyle.
Your podcast is not only about your audience and the content, it is also about you. Using social media to reach your audience along with your podcast will help promote you. People eventually would want to know about the voice behind the podcast.
They want to know who you are. Having accounts, pages and online communities for people to follow can help you interact more with your audience. You can get feedback, reviews, recommendations from your audience and use that to help your podcast improve.
Develop A Great Content Schedule
The frequency of a podcast also determines how successful it will become and also the size of your audience. Humans thrive on constant entertainment. They want something they can get regularly and have a good time every time while at it.
Don’t let your podcast come up only one in a blue frozen moon, but set a comfortable schedule for your shows. Being consistent with your podcast will eventually help you get used to it until it becomes a habit.
You should create your schedule in such a way that you are scarce enough for your audience to expect your next podcast and frequent enough to keep them engaged.
Network
The internet has made it easier for us to find people doing things similar to what we do. You can find various online podcasting communities where you can share experiences, learn from others’ experiences and have fun too. Belonging to communities of people with similar goals or niche can increase your confidence and chances of becoming better at what you do.
You could also attend events on podcasting where you will meet other podcasters like you. Networking also increases your chance of having a larger audience.
Have Fun While at It
It’s your podcast, it’s your show, and it’s important that you have fun at it. Having fun at what you do will help you love it more.
When you love what you do, you will improve easily, and do it better. And it becomes easier for you to get people to love it more. When people love your podcast, they come back for more and also tell others about it. That’s how to increase your audience.
