Promoting Your Podcast

It's been a few years since I've added to the "Boys and Ghouls" blog. I've made a podcast a month for the last 34 months and here's some things I've learned: First of all, if the computer you're recording onto has a fan, don't record to close too it. The microphone picks up the fan and everything sounds like hell. Our third episode was just-about wrecked from that.

 Second, if you're just starting a podcast, start with its Twitter account. If the name of your podcast is already taken on Twitter, just pick a new name. It's not like Twitter is legally binding or anything. But, maybe its the way Twitter will verify some accounts that makes people perceive what's on Twitter as the real deal or the final word on a subject. You might have your own web site for your podcast but, too often, a web site can just be like a ghost ship on the internet, sailing un-updated for years. And, too often, folks don't put the year on their posts. A web page will say "ON MARCH 14th, THIS AWESOME THING IS HAPPENING..." without an indicator if this is current information or it refers to March of three years ago. Web pages aren't like newspapers, you can't tell an old one just by looking at it. And so, people are just more likely to trust what's on Twitter. Everything posted has the day, month AND year.

 So, there you are. Twitter. It's popular for a reason.

 At Boys and Ghouls, we try different methods of promoting our podcast and, I really don't know which one brings people in the most, but we get a lot of listeners (a lot being about 400 hits in the first month of any new episode and about a hundred hits on that episode every month after that). The thing I do the most is promote on Pinterest. It's a good way of finding people with an interest in the subject of your podcast. And, every photo you post can contain a link to your podcast. If anyone repins one of your photos, they take that link over to their page. Right now, Boys and Ghouls has almost 4,000 horror movie related photos on Pinterest. Some on these photos get repinned a little, some get repinned a lot. That's a lot of links out there, getting onto the screens of like-minded people who might be interested in giving our podcast a listen.

Tumbr used to let users link their web sites to the photos they post, but not anymore. However, if you post your own photo on Tumblr (not just repost one) you can have a web address accompany the photo. Regardless, like Pinterest, the benefit of Tumblr is that when you "like" or repost a picture, the original poster of that picture will get a notification that such-and-such-podcast likes their picture. Like and repost enough pictures from people with your interests and maybe they'll become listeners. 

Also, join free blog sites and put up good content that will attract people interested in your podcast's subject. Be sure to write your podcast's name from time to time (Boys and Ghouls Podcast) so Google searches have something to bring up. If the name of your podcast is only used in the banner of your blog, it could be overlooked in a search.

 A final piece of advice is this, don't bury the lead in you episode titles or descriptions. On iTunes, a title or description gets cut off after so many characters. So, don't start your title with the name or episode number of your podcast. Like, "Boys and Ghouls: The Lost Boys". Someone searching your episode titles, especially on a mobile device, will only get to read the first few characters. The same goes for the episode's description. So, always write what is key about your episode first. Let it be visible in its abbreviated form. And then, after you've made your point, you can be clever or amusing with your description. I hope this has all been helpful to you.