4 Tips to Grow Your Audience for Your Podcast

Podcasts continue to grow in popularity and forecasts suggest that the number of podcast listeners will surpass 160 million in 2023 after increases of around 20 million each year. If you’re interested in something niche, chances are, there’s a podcast on that. The downside of having so many options: How can you stand out with your own podcast? Here are 4 tips to grow your podcast audience:

Invest in Yourself

Before you reach out for more listeners, reflect on whether or not you’ve done everything to optimize your podcast’s success. This includes: A website, social media accounts, and newsletters.

A website is an opportunity to have a space just for your podcast, including show notes and blog posts.

Social media accounts are the perfect place to get to know and interact with your audience, while creating content and trailers for your episodes. Don’t forget to promote new episodes on your own social media accounts.

Lastly, newsletters are an opportunity to give dedicated listeners special content and have direct communication with them.

Broaden Your Visibility

Optimizing your audience also means optimizing your reach through your available platforms. The most popular apps include: Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, SoundCloud, Acast and Spotify.

You can also appeal to the audience who enjoys watching and listening to podcasts by uploading your episode on YouTube. Need more incentive? When you utilize YouTube, you position your videos to come up as “suggested” when people view other videos of a similar topic. It is important to use proper keywords and tags to increase your chances of this.

Be a Guest

As the saying goes, “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Lots of podcast hosts swap places with their guests on their own podcasts, in addition to having the opportunity to promote their own podcast.

Being a guest is also an opportunity to build rapport with your podcast host’s audience during your time there. For your guests, regardless if they have their own show or not, be sure to have them promote their episode on their social media for their followers to check out.

Get Your Listeners Involved

There are four things that content creators need to focus on in order to grow their ranking: Subscriptions, downloads, ratings and reviews- preferably good ones!

Most listeners don’t leave reviews unless a podcast is super good or super bad, which is great, but how do you get the majority of your listeners to help you get more?

Some podcast hosts have gotten creative with getting listeners enticed to whip out their keyboard. You can give followers the opportunity to leave a review in exchange for a chance for you to read it aloud. Some podcast hosts choose something funny, some choose to answer a good question in their field.