How To Amplify Your Podcast (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Ideas)

Podcasting takes work. It’s not enough to simply turn on the microphones, put on a pair of headphones, interview a CEO, and post it online.

You’ve invested so many resources in the podcast content before a producer presses the record button – it only makes sense to do more with every episode you create. And the name of that show is amplification.

Before you hit that record button again, think about all the ways you can help make sure your audience finds your podcast. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Beginners: Here’s how to grow

Publishing your podcast to platforms like Stitcher, Spotify, and Apple isn’t a bad way to start syndicating your work. But it’s not enough. To get every drop of value out of your content, try these additional tactics:

Host the podcast on your website

It might sound complicated, but it doesn’t take much to get your audio content directly on your website. The simplest way is to embed the audio or video player into an article or other content.

Here’s how the University of Chicago created an overview page featuring a description of its award-winning Big Brains podcast and a list of recent episodes.

If you want each episode to have its own home, consider creating a subdomain and individual podcast pages.

Having the podcast exist on your domain is crucial because it entices listeners to explore more content on your site. You also can decide how you want the podcast home and episode pages to look.

Use audiograms and videograms for promotion

Audio works well for listeners on the go. But to really amplify your podcast content, you need to raise the promotion bar without adding too many steps to the content creation process.

Audiograms can capture the attention of users using clips from your podcast along with a still image, short animation, or subtitles. Here’s an example CoSchedule created to amplify an episode of its Actionable Marketing Podcast (I was the guest):

@hollypels Thank you for teaching us how to maximize our podcast assets!💯 https://t.co/6tYt6JTY1w pic.twitter.com/hjLlAnp993

— CoSchedule (@CoSchedule) July 30, 2021

Videograms take it one step further, allowing the audience to see faces instead of just listening to voices.

Humans are inherently visual, and video provides an experience more likely to create a connection. Plus, social media was made for video. Videograms give you a chance to capture the attention of some of the  4 billion social media users globally.

Intermediate: Here’s how to expand

You’ve had your podcast for a while and used some amplified marketing strategies, but it’s time to build a more robust plan. Consider adding these options:

Leverage your blog in the short and long term

Combining your audio with your written content can take your podcast marketing to the next level. It can better serve your audience and help with SEO because the text can incorporate keywords.

Each time you post a new episode, publish an article to coincide with the release. The article can include a summary of the show and highlight essential parts of the conversation.

This approach gives the audience choices. They can:

• Read the blog only
• Listen to the entire podcast episode
• Go directly to a moment in the audio conversation based on the outline in the blog
• Read the blog and listen to the episode.

Each Big Brains episode page, for example, includes the episode audio, a photo of the featured speaker, a transcript of the episode, and links to related content.

In the long term, you can highlight content from past episodes. You could pull out a particularly poignant and insightful anecdote and plan new content around it to run a couple of days, weeks, or months down the line, for example.

Review published content regularly

As you release each podcast episode, monitor the analytics to see what resonates. Just as a restaurant brings back items from their specials menu that sold well, you can bring back a topic that performed well. If it drew in a lot of listeners, think about related subtopics that could branch off for future conversations.

Additionally, consider how you might incorporate popular themes into current or future content to take advantage of that audience interest.

Expert: Here’s how to avoid resting on your laurels

You’ve reached the point where you’re leveraging your website, blog, and social media in a robust promotional strategy for your podcast. Now you can just sit back and relax, right? Wrong. In the words of any infomercial star: “But wait, there’s more!”

You can continue to evolve your audio amplification. Here are a few more ideas to consider.

Write end-of-series or topical e-books

Don’t let the content die on the vine when you reach the end of a podcast series or season. Take the opportunity to draw everything together in an e-book. Create a piece to highlight the most interesting or critical points from the series.

Lumavate, a tool that allows anyone to build an app without code, spins its podcast content into different resources for their audience. This example shows a swipe file e-book the team created to celebrate the 100^th episode of its REAL MARKETERS podcast.

Curate a narrative podcast

You also can pull together a narrative that draws from multiple episodes to tell a complete story. Perhaps some of your audience listened to all the conversations but didn’t grasp the through-line. Now is your chance to help them see it or reinforce it in their minds. The content introduces something new and creates more content in one go while giving the listener another reason to come back to your website.

For example, my team at Casted created a narrative podcast episode for INBOUND 2020. We drew from interviews we’d done with guests on our podcast who had helped create HubSpot’s first podcast, The Growth Show. We wrote a narrative to weave the interviews together to create a new podcast episode we released during the conference.

Build ‘pod classes’ for your audience

Everyone learns differently. Podcasts aren’t everyone’s number one vessel for effective learning. These potential listeners might prefer a classroom structure, where experts teach instead of just conversing. You can pull lessons from existing podcasts and package them as pod classes to cater to this category of listeners.

The first season of The Casted Podcast focused on getting started with B2B podcasting. We eventually created a narrative three-part pod class based on interviews from that season. The course focused on strategizing, growing, and managing a podcast.

Create your podcast advantage

You don’t need to follow every single step idea in sequential order – or even every idea. You might discover one works well for your company, but something else doesn’t. You might find new strategies along the way that aren’t listed above. If you make sure to amplify your podcast, you’ll make better use of the resources that go into creating the podcast and likely reach a new audience.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute