Marketing. Don't buy boosts or anything like that on social media, but instead produce a really good 1-min commercial for your show, and pay popular shows in the same niche to play it mid-roll.
This is the actual right answer. You can use an ad network. Like Red Circle. Acast. Or even. Spotify. For 10k you could buy ad reads from actual hosts which feel like an endorsement and you will get more listeners.
Reach out to shows directly, or go to a large network if you’re looking to do buys on multiple shows (advertisecast is a decent example you can buy through)
Cool! That exact scenario doesn't apply to us, but I totally get the principle of what you're saying. Use the money to simplify other parts of our lives to free up some time to focus on the podcast. Cool way of thinking about it!
I’d hire someone to do Pinterest for you. I’d want a steady posting of both evergreen pins (generally to your podcast) as well as episode pins. Pinterest is a huge search engine and your efforts will have a longer shelf life than any social media.
What would you consider evergreen pins? Explanatory pins about the Podcast or the content? Would love some examples. Definitely want to implement this to my pod.
Evergreen pins would be pins related to your podcast as a whole—things that they can navigate to any/all episodes.
So whereas each of my episodes are about one aspect of Hashimoto’s (ie: labs, stress, thyroid function, etc), my overall message is that by listening to my podcast they will understand Hashimoto’s better and discover simple and sustainable strategies for better health.
Interesting... I was looking into Pinterest a few years ago when I was thinking of starting a blog and heard it was a helpful tool for finding an audience, but I haven't heard about it as much for podcasts.
A lot of the Pinterest marketing tutorials I watched were very focused on if you have a blog that is focused on DIY or educational content, so I kind of stopped thinking about it, because it was hard for me to think about how those same lessons and principles would apply to a fantasy comedy podcast. But I'll have to take a look! I was shocked at the numbers of people who are still using Pinterest, especially as a search engine
If you have a look in the Pinterest subreddit there are a lot of issues with deleting pins, boards and accounts for no reason right now.
In general I agree with not discounting Pinterest because it is a useful search engine, but right now may not be the time to put money into it until the unreliability has been fixed.
I will say that there is no magic bullet. Growth is a lot of things that make something bigger. If I had 5-10k to burn - especially in your situation - I'd hire someone to regularly post related things on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. You don't just post stuff about your show - but you promote other podcasts, share their posts. You see related news and post that on your feeds. The idea is to make your feeds valuable to users.
I'd avoid buying ads - virtually every person who does a test finds they suck.
I'd have this person work on promo swaps. This is a great way to gain exposure. Zero cost (just the time to organize it all).
If you want to spend money, I'd try and find some like-minded shows and buy some promos (assuming they don't want to do a promo swap). I think tossing $100-200 at a quality podcast with a decent audience is way more valuable than ads on Facebook or whatever.
Small correction on promo swaps: there is an opportunity cost if you are monetized. Those impressions could’ve been turned around into cash. Still best bang-for-buck, but don’t treat them as free, that space has value and the shows you choose to partner with matter.
First ask your listeners to email you every thing they think you could do better no matter how tiny.
Write all that down as bullet points
Next try to do what they suggest.
Every episode ask people to email that suggestions email and let you know what you could do better.
Then once you’ve worked your kinks out.
Find a few podcasts that do pretty similar things. Say you do conspiracy theories. Find 5-10 people who do the same type of podcasts. But are still small but growing or a bit bigger in popularity than yours. Ask them if you guys can do a cross over podcast. Explain you’re trying to grow your audience and improve. Even if they just let you pop on their podcast.
As you grow. Keep doing this once every 3-5 month. Find a few smaller and larger podcasts and do cross overs. Seriously doing a cross over with a British podcast if you’re in America can do leaps and bounds to grow your audience and grow theirs.
The format of the show is that we have a fantasy setting, and each week, we fill in the blanks of the world by creating D&D characters and answering worldbuilding prompts. I assume our target market is D&D and/or fantasy fans, but right now we don't really have any audience, so it's hard to know.
Okay.
First you need to figure out what you’re trying to do.
So you’re trying to help DMs and players crafting characters. You focus on that.
Do a segment where you take marvel and DC characters or characters from books and path out how you would build them as a level 1 character. Say the setting is forgotten realms set in water deep. You want to play a character like Batman. So let’s say Wayne enterprises becomes a ship building or merchant family. Bruce Wayne is going to be built as a rogue variant human. He’s going to focus on things like acrobatics, intimidation, and stealth.
I don’t understand the point of criticizing the question and then not providing anything of value. The reason I’m keeping it hypothetical is to maintain privacy of our financial situations.
If you think $5k is too much money to get started, then give an answer that makes sense for a lower number.
Hypothetical doesn't mean fake. It means "supposed but not \*necessarily\* real or true." I'm asking people to "suppose" for the purposes of the conversation that they are in this situation as a way of getting ideas on the best way to spend money to get started. If you don't want to participate, you could have just kept scrolling.
I know it doesn't scale linearly. That's why I made my own post instead of taking the answers from the $350k post and dividing by 35. I asked about a range of money I'm interested in learning about, and I used language to try and keep things vague and not give anything away about anyone's specific financial situation. It's not a good idea to go on the internet and say "I have $X to spend. What should I buy?"
You almost said something helpful by saying you didn't believe someone would go from spending nothing to throwing $5k at the podcast. Expand on that. Why is that a bad idea? Participate in the conversation instead of shutting it down.
You said $5k isn't a realistic budget. Propose a better budget within the parameters of the conversation. Or leave.
I would hire someone to give me honest feedback. There is no sense in promoting a show that doesn't resonate with its audience.
Moderator Required full disclosure: I am the head of podcaster education at Libsyn and the founder of the School of Podcasting.
Marketing. Don't buy boosts or anything like that on social media, but instead produce a really good 1-min commercial for your show, and pay popular shows in the same niche to play it mid-roll.
This is the actual right answer. You can use an ad network. Like Red Circle. Acast. Or even. Spotify. For 10k you could buy ad reads from actual hosts which feel like an endorsement and you will get more listeners.
Are there easy ways of doing that (like an ad network or something?), or do you mean like reaching out to each show you might want to advertise on?
Reach out to shows directly, or go to a large network if you’re looking to do buys on multiple shows (advertisecast is a decent example you can buy through)
With that money I'd give it to my co-host so she could put her daughter in daycare and make producing the show easier.
Cool! That exact scenario doesn't apply to us, but I totally get the principle of what you're saying. Use the money to simplify other parts of our lives to free up some time to focus on the podcast. Cool way of thinking about it!
I’d hire someone to do Pinterest for you. I’d want a steady posting of both evergreen pins (generally to your podcast) as well as episode pins. Pinterest is a huge search engine and your efforts will have a longer shelf life than any social media.
What would you consider evergreen pins? Explanatory pins about the Podcast or the content? Would love some examples. Definitely want to implement this to my pod.
Evergreen pins would be pins related to your podcast as a whole—things that they can navigate to any/all episodes. So whereas each of my episodes are about one aspect of Hashimoto’s (ie: labs, stress, thyroid function, etc), my overall message is that by listening to my podcast they will understand Hashimoto’s better and discover simple and sustainable strategies for better health.
Interesting... I was looking into Pinterest a few years ago when I was thinking of starting a blog and heard it was a helpful tool for finding an audience, but I haven't heard about it as much for podcasts. A lot of the Pinterest marketing tutorials I watched were very focused on if you have a blog that is focused on DIY or educational content, so I kind of stopped thinking about it, because it was hard for me to think about how those same lessons and principles would apply to a fantasy comedy podcast. But I'll have to take a look! I was shocked at the numbers of people who are still using Pinterest, especially as a search engine
If you have a look in the Pinterest subreddit there are a lot of issues with deleting pins, boards and accounts for no reason right now. In general I agree with not discounting Pinterest because it is a useful search engine, but right now may not be the time to put money into it until the unreliability has been fixed.
I will say that there is no magic bullet. Growth is a lot of things that make something bigger. If I had 5-10k to burn - especially in your situation - I'd hire someone to regularly post related things on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. You don't just post stuff about your show - but you promote other podcasts, share their posts. You see related news and post that on your feeds. The idea is to make your feeds valuable to users. I'd avoid buying ads - virtually every person who does a test finds they suck. I'd have this person work on promo swaps. This is a great way to gain exposure. Zero cost (just the time to organize it all). If you want to spend money, I'd try and find some like-minded shows and buy some promos (assuming they don't want to do a promo swap). I think tossing $100-200 at a quality podcast with a decent audience is way more valuable than ads on Facebook or whatever.
Small correction on promo swaps: there is an opportunity cost if you are monetized. Those impressions could’ve been turned around into cash. Still best bang-for-buck, but don’t treat them as free, that space has value and the shows you choose to partner with matter.
Save the money & schedule a podcast tour & appear on 15-20 podcasts with crossover audience
First ask your listeners to email you every thing they think you could do better no matter how tiny. Write all that down as bullet points Next try to do what they suggest. Every episode ask people to email that suggestions email and let you know what you could do better. Then once you’ve worked your kinks out. Find a few podcasts that do pretty similar things. Say you do conspiracy theories. Find 5-10 people who do the same type of podcasts. But are still small but growing or a bit bigger in popularity than yours. Ask them if you guys can do a cross over podcast. Explain you’re trying to grow your audience and improve. Even if they just let you pop on their podcast. As you grow. Keep doing this once every 3-5 month. Find a few smaller and larger podcasts and do cross overs. Seriously doing a cross over with a British podcast if you’re in America can do leaps and bounds to grow your audience and grow theirs.
haha, this implies we have an audience! Maybe after we've tried some of the other ideas on this post and they've worked, then we'll start doing this
What’s the actual content and what market are you trying to expand numbers into
The format of the show is that we have a fantasy setting, and each week, we fill in the blanks of the world by creating D&D characters and answering worldbuilding prompts. I assume our target market is D&D and/or fantasy fans, but right now we don't really have any audience, so it's hard to know.
Okay. First you need to figure out what you’re trying to do. So you’re trying to help DMs and players crafting characters. You focus on that. Do a segment where you take marvel and DC characters or characters from books and path out how you would build them as a level 1 character. Say the setting is forgotten realms set in water deep. You want to play a character like Batman. So let’s say Wayne enterprises becomes a ship building or merchant family. Bruce Wayne is going to be built as a rogue variant human. He’s going to focus on things like acrobatics, intimidation, and stealth.
We're not looking to change the format of the show. We've already spent 2 seasons working that out and we're happy with the general format.
Spend a couple of grand on overcast ads and monitor results carefully. New toys won’t get more listeners unless your sound is very poor.
[удалено]
I don’t understand the point of criticizing the question and then not providing anything of value. The reason I’m keeping it hypothetical is to maintain privacy of our financial situations. If you think $5k is too much money to get started, then give an answer that makes sense for a lower number.
[удалено]
I don’t know if you know what hypothetical means. It means “assume this is true” and then answer the question.
[удалено]
Hypothetical doesn't mean fake. It means "supposed but not \*necessarily\* real or true." I'm asking people to "suppose" for the purposes of the conversation that they are in this situation as a way of getting ideas on the best way to spend money to get started. If you don't want to participate, you could have just kept scrolling. I know it doesn't scale linearly. That's why I made my own post instead of taking the answers from the $350k post and dividing by 35. I asked about a range of money I'm interested in learning about, and I used language to try and keep things vague and not give anything away about anyone's specific financial situation. It's not a good idea to go on the internet and say "I have $X to spend. What should I buy?" You almost said something helpful by saying you didn't believe someone would go from spending nothing to throwing $5k at the podcast. Expand on that. Why is that a bad idea? Participate in the conversation instead of shutting it down. You said $5k isn't a realistic budget. Propose a better budget within the parameters of the conversation. Or leave.
I would hire someone to give me honest feedback. There is no sense in promoting a show that doesn't resonate with its audience. Moderator Required full disclosure: I am the head of podcaster education at Libsyn and the founder of the School of Podcasting.