7 Strategies for Growing Your Podcast Beyond iTunes and Stitcher

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Podcasting is a numbers game. It’s all about who can see you, and the last thing you want is to keep yourself relegated to one or two platforms. Yes, there’s work that needs to get done that goes beyond submitting your podcast to iTunes and Stitcher!

That being said, you also don’t want to keep those platforms isolated from each other and pray that your audience will just stumble on your show.

It’s all about action! So today, we bring you some advice on how to get the maximum ROP (Return On Podcast) by getting the most exposure humanly possible with these 7 most commonly overlooked strategies. 

1. Facebook Ads & Brand Pages 

Facebook, as we’ve mentioned before, provides an effective and cheap advertising service that allows you to get in front of your target audience. In addition to giving you an easily accessible platform for promoting your show, you can create a brand page for your website or product that anyone can easily look up, like, and message.

With Facebook, you can:

  • Post a variety of media (pictures, videos, etc) to your timeline.
  • Highlight your services so that your listeners know just what you’re providing.
  • Leverage paid advertising tools like retargeting and Facebook custom audiences to build your list or sell more of your products and services.

2. LinkedIn Premium

LinkedIn is different from most other social networks in that it allows you to nurture leads and build some amazing relationships with people in your industry (we go into more detail about that here). There’s no other professional social platform that can hold a candle to LinkedIn. And when you take into account what you can do with their publishing platform, it’s a game changer.

With LinkedIn, you can:

  • Gain access to industry leaders and influencers.
  • Market yourself effectively to your peers and other focus groups.
  • Get exposure on an incredible content marketing platform – LinkedIn Pulse.

3. Twitter

Like Facebook, Twitter is a good resource for sharing content with your audience, and fast while also being able to easily share relevant information about yourself. However, Twitter also gives you the opportunity of reaching out to different people who may not be exposed to your brand on other social media platforms.  It’s a great opportunity to extend your content marketing efforts and strengthen your overall public presence.

With Twitter, you can:

  • Give your audience a more engaging experience by giving them a call-to-action with a simple voting system (they even have a poll tool) where you can ask them about what they’d like to see in future episodes, what to ask guest, etc.
  • Get direct, quick, easy interactions with an audience that is separate from Facebook.
  • Take advantage Twitter’s paid advertising platform by promoting your tweets.

4. YouTube

YouTube is special on this list in how it’s a purely audio-visual platform, and that allows you to open up a whole world of different and cool content that your audience will love. The sky’s the limit on how you want to add content to your show, and anyone can find your channel through a simple search of similar keyword phrases. In other words, it allows people to find you when they still don’t know your name.

With YouTube, you can:

  • Give your audience a special behind the scenes look at your show by posting a short video of you recording a previous episode.
  • Expand your podcast brand by creating different forms of content on a more visual medium. Peter Awad’s Vagabonding and the Backstory with Peter Awad, Host and Founder of Slow Hustle is a fantastic example.
  • Provide previews to new episodes of your show by posting a quick clip of the episode and linking it to wherever you want to direct your audience for the full episode. If you’ve been following Gary Vee’s Instagram, you know he’s become a master at directing traffic back to his YouTube channel.

5.  Private Facebook Groups

Another resource from Facebook, this nice little tool allows you to create discussions and a community around your show/brand while still allowing you to moderate what is being said so that you can build a constructive conversation. This is a strategy used by Donald Kelley, host of The Sales Evangelist. The Sales Evangelizers is a private Facebook group for sales professionals, entrepreneurs of all levels and LOVERS of The Sales Evangelist podcast who need help with selling.

With Facebook Groups, you can:

  • Allow your audience to enter a whole new level of engagement by letting them interact with each other, fostering a community.
  • Have your audience engage with your brand by having a constructive conversation around it.
  • Create new products and services based on what people are asking for in the community.

6. LinkedIn Professional Groups

Like Facebook Groups, this allows for a commutative response to your show where you can interact with people who have important things to say about your podcast. However, unlike Facebook Groups, LinkedIn allows for a purely business to business interaction, allowing you to make important professional contacts that you may not find on Facebook.

With LinkedIn Groups, you can:

  • Have a strictly business-related contacts interact with your podcast and form a discussion around topics of interest.
  • Become a valuable resource by interacting with other professionals and sharing useful, relevant post to boost your know, like, trust factor.
  • Gain a good resource for targeting focus groups with a community of professionals actively seeking helpful guidance.

7. Be a Guest on Other Shows

This is where the marketing stuff gets fun! By reaching out to other podcasters and getting on their shows, not only can you directly talk about your brand and service but do it in a way that’s relatively easy and authentic (you’re probably just fine with talking in front of a mic at this point), while still building a rapport with other professionals who have an established audience of their own.

By being a guest on other shows, you can:

  • Get introduced to your host’s audience and get traffic and backlinks back to your website.
  • Network and build rapport with other professionals in your niche.
  • Have a potential future guest for your show.

So, these are the most commonly used platforms across the podcast-sphere, but there are others! What do you think we have missed, and what ways do you use these resources that you think we may have left out of this article? Talk about it in the comments!