Spreading the word -- how do you do it?

[SamuelBLupowitz]

As millennials go, I came pretty late to the podcasting game, but due to the influence of a number of friends and relatives, including an incredibly enthusiastic coworker, I now produce podcasts both for my day job (for the language center at a big university) and my, you know, "other" gig (a behind the-scenes music/interview podcast for one of my bands).

 

Creating things is second nature to me, so I fell into it pretty easily. Marketing myself has always been much more of a struggle. As much as I try to get the word out, I very often find myself shouting into the void, and shrugging my shoulders.

 

Podcasters, how do you find an audience for your work? Do you start by seeking out sponsors, or do you have to know who your listeners are first? What has worked out (or failed) in trying to find an audience, and (more importantly) know that audience? And since many of the forumgoers are also musicians... how is it similar and/or different from finding the people who engage with your music?

[Dr Nursers]

Samuel this is a brilliant question and hopefully you get some useful answers. In my experience with podcasting this is the biggest challenge on assumption you're wanting people to actually hear what you've produced.

 

I've had mixed success with building a podcast audience. I've never hit the 'big time' with 10's of thousands of listeners but I've had a podcast where around 1000 people listened each fortnight and a lot of them were actively engaged. That was because it was a niche podcast - in this case it was a gaming podcast devoted to a new MMO game and we started the podcast to build interest BEFORE the game launched. We ended up running that podcast for more than 140 episodes although the audience had depleted substantially, mostly because I expanded to podcast coverage beyond that one game. This seems like a good move at the time but it was the beginning of the end: it was no just one of thousands of gaming podcasts out there.

 

Now with marketing, I find it requires money that you need to spend before there's any chance of the podcast generating revenue (if it ever does). So that means PAID advertising on social media, building a presence on Twitter / FB / Instagram etc. Even then there's obviously no guarantees sadly