Promoting Your Podcast

Places to promote your podcast

There are plenty of places that you'll have great success marketing your show—and in fact, you may not need to go beyond this.

Tap social media

First, start social media groups for your show. Facebook groups or other places for your listeners to gather are a great way for folks to stay engaged. Post new episodes to these places to keep listeners engaged and reach their networks.

If you have a fair number of followers online, be sure to post your episodes to relevant social media sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram could be great ways to drive listenership.

Use our Short Links feature to post your content to social media. Short links are optimized for social media previews, and are designed to drive folks to subscribe (rather than just check out a single episode).

Find relevant communities

Post your podcast and exciting episodes to preexisting communities online, like subreddits. Be sure to observe the rules of each community that you post in, and don't spam your content. Choose places that have an audience that are likely to enjoy your show.

Think outside the box: podcasts relevant to places might find communities on sites like NextDoor. Some communities meet in person: if your podcast is about popular topics, you might find folks to share to and network with at meetups.

Find podcast friends

Engaging with other podcasts that are relevant to your own is a great way to build listenership. Appearing on other podcasts and hosting guests from other shows will help cross-pollinate your content.

• There are tons of directories listing folks who would be interested in appearing on your show as a guest to promote their work, and they're often happy to promote the episode(s) to their network. A simple Google search lists over a dozen podcast guest directories.
• Look in relevant communities, like Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. for folks who are interested in appearing on your show, or who are looking for guests.

For some kinds of podcasts, reaching out to shows of a similar size can be useful. Folks who play games (e.g., D&D and role playing), talk about community news (e.g., video games or pop culture) are often open to collaborating.

Subscriber growth is built around your podcast community: marketing your show is a function of finding people who would otherwise be interested and attracting them to your content. They might be attracted because the content is relevant to them, or because they've heard a bit of your episode and want to hear more.

What NOT to do

• Don't spend money on display advertising. Almost nobody clicks through Google or Facebook ads for podcasts. The return on investment for these kinds of ads is near zero.
• Don't waste your time worrying about SEO. Pinecast podcast websites contain all of the features you need to be successful out-of-the-box, and most third party websites are good enough. Homepages aren't a huge driver of subscribership—the folks visiting them are either already subscribers or likely to become subscribers. You will rarely attract non-subscribers to your homepage and convert them to regular listeners.
• Unless you're attending an event, don't spend money on swag as a way to grow your audience. Swag is great for keeping existing listeners engaged, but it's not a useful tool for building listenership.