In this article, we’ll discuss the best methods on how to promote your podcast.

Once you know the strategies outlined below, you’ll have insight into how even if you’re new to podcasting, you can attract sponsors, land top-notch guests, and get thousands of listeners very quickly.

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Below you’ll learn the very same methods that I used when I was homeless. I had no audience and was completely new to podcasting. You’ll see the same strategies I use to promote my podcast today when thousands of listeners tune in each day.

Learning how to grow and increase the listenership of your podcast has many benefits.

Benefits Of More Listeners

Attract paying sponsors
Monetize your show
Make it easier to land A-list guests
Sell more affiliate and sponsored products
Drive more traffic to your website & get more email subscribers
Grow your customer base
Enhance your ability to get social media fans
Expand your impact
Appeal to a broader audience
And much more

With your bigger impact, the more you’ll be able to take advantage of the perks of having a significant reach.

Once you learn and execute the methods below for promoting your podcast – you’ll find that podcasting is much more fun.

How To Promote A Podcast

Invite Guests On Your Show
Share Your Show On Social Media
Promote Your Podcast With Your website
Promote Your Podcast With Email
Ask Guest To Promote Your Show
Create A Private Group For Fans Of Your Show
Be A Guest On Other Podcasts
Create Content On YouTube

Strategy One For How To Promote A Podcast: Invite Guests On Your Show

When we first jumped into podcasting, we learned that having guests made it much easier to expand our reach.

When you first release your show, you’ll be limited by who you know, who knows you, and the audience you have.

But when you invite a guest on your show, you’ll immediately expand your appeal by having a guest who already has trust and audience.

Solo Podcast Vs A Guest-Based Show

While a solo show with just me on the microphone can be entertaining, it’s limited because I can only attract and speak to my audience.

On the other hand, when guests appear on my show, I can bring a fresh and new audience to check out my podcast.

A guest offers variety, new topics, new insights. And guests also allow you to borrow some ‘brand-name association,’ thus lending trust to a new audience.

If you look at famous talk show hosts, you’ll likely see that this is what they do. Oprah, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman – distinguished interview-based shows leverage guests to help attract audiences.

Having guests with unique audiences helped make people like Oprah famous. And it’s what can help you gain the confidence and attention of new viewers.

Strategy Two: Share Your Show On Social Media

No matter who you are, you have an audience and groups of people who pay attention to you.

Getting guests will help your show immensely, but you’ll still have to do some work to promote and grow your show.

One of the low-hanging strategies for promoting your show is to share your podcast with your already-built-in audiences. If you use social media, you already have an audience of people who you can share your show with.

For social media, use the most popular sites that you likely already use, and where you can start to share your show.

Most Popular Social Media Sites To Share On:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Linkedin
Snapchat
Tik-Tok

Sharing on social isn’t as easy as announcing and yelling out, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast. Check it out here.”

That method rarely works. Instead, you’ll want to tease it out a bit more.

If you do an episode with a cool guest, write up a post, or do a video that helps incite interest.

For example, if you had a guest who talked about how to retire early, do a post saying something like:

“I recently had the unique opportunity to sit with a man who retired in his 30s, and he did it while saving from the meager income of a grocery store clerk.
Instead of investing, he used this special strategy of putting money into a little unknown fund. After doing this episode, I started saving as he did…come check out the episode. *Insert link*”

You can, of course, tweak that. Maybe if you had a guest who lost 50 lbs in 2 months, you might say something like:

“If you’ve struggled with weight loss, you’ll love this guest who came on my podcast and shared how he lost 50 pounds in two months.
He has nothing to sell and gives the exact formula he used. Here’s the show link.”

Tease Out The Show

The idea here is that you want to entice readers and viewers by teasing out the show a bit. Give them something, but make them feel a need to go push play to get all the information.

With each social media platform, you’ll want to adjust your post. But the idea is always the same – tease and encourage your readers to check out the episode.

To help you a bit further, let me give you one more example.

Let’s say you had a guest on your show who went to prison for ten years, came out, and started a successful business.

For that, maybe you’d write something like this: Have you ever eaten Dave’s Killer Bread? It’s sold at Costco and just about every other grocery store.

Well…My recent guest went to prison, then came out and started a highly successful bread company. Check out his inspiring story here: LINK.

Do you get the idea?

Now it’s your turn.

Strategy Three For How To Promote A Podcast: Promote Your Podcast With Your Website

Many people who get into podcasts do this whole promotion thing all wrong.

First, they hope that a show alone will do the work, and secondly, they completely disregard their website.

Related: How To Get Podcast Sponsors

Your website is your most valuable asset to podcasting, business, building an audience, and making sales.

In some rare cases, you have guys like Joe Rogan who don’t seem to have websites but he does – and you can bet his website helps sponsors reach out, helps fans find him, and helps him accrue email subscribers who stay tuned into his podcast.

But Joe is an anomaly, even Tim Ferris and Dave Ramsey, as well as the iconic show Serial – all have optimized websites.

In this day and age, it’s essential to have a strong website to help your podcast grow. If you’d like to see examples of websites we created and optimized for podcast show growth, here are some podcast website examples.

How to get more listeners to your podcast on your website

Create an email optin machine on your website.
Write SEO friendly show notes that help you rank in Google.
Have buttons on your website that push people to iTunes, Google Play, and other pod feeds.
Have an active blog that pushes people to listen and subscribe to your podcast
Install a pixel from Facebook and Google on your website.

Those are the most fundamental strategies that you’ll want to deploy to help you grow your podcast via your website.

When you use the methods above, you’ll have a variety of ways to promote your show.

For example, by collecting email subscribers, you can send out emails to encourage your readers to listen to your podcast.

Having an email list will allow you to share your latest episodes, sell your products, and promote anything you wish – and the cherry on top, you can broadcast to that list whenever you want.

With SEO friendly show notes you’ll help Google send you organic traffic and thus feed you a pipeline of listeners and new subscribers to your podcast.

And by having a pixel for paid ads on your website, you’ll be able to retarget visitors of your site with paid ads.

From now on, I want you to think of your website as an essential tool for your podcast growth.

If your site is optimized to collect email subscribers, organic Google visitors, and receives the pixel data of your website viewers – you’ll be optimized to grow your podcast in ways that are vast in their potential.

Strategy Four: Promote Your Podcast With Email

If you use email and have a list of friends, family, acquaintances, and associates – you know people who would check out your show.

You know people who would review your show, and you know people who might share your show with their friends and family.

Email is, by far, one of the most powerful and often-times overlooked tools of new podcasters.

For more seasoned marketers and show hosts, it’s a no brainer to send out emails to help promote a new podcast.

If you’re afraid of sending out an email to your friends, family, and close associates – let me tell you it’s not as bad as you think.

No one will be offended if you create a personalized email telling them you’ve created a cool podcast, and you’d like them to do you a favor and check out your show.

When I first did this, I thought some people emailed would be bothered that we hadn’t talked in years, and now I send an email sharing a passion project.

To my surprise, most people gladly left reviews, subscribed to my show, and shared it.

That’s it! The email is short, sweet, and requests a simple favor that most people will gladly give you.

It may not seem like a lot, but bit-by-bit, the more clicks and reviews your podcast gets – the more it can help you grow your podcast.

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Strategy Five For How To Promote A Podcast: Ask Guest To Promote Your Show

When a guest shares your show with their audiences – it’s a huge boost to your growth.

In my experience, when Jack Canfield, Bruce Lipton, Russell Brunson, Bas Rutten (UFC Hall Of Famer), Robert Bly, and other influencers across the globe – makes a HUGE difference to any podcast.

If you want to have your guests share your show, follow these methods (and you could have shot outs and emails just like we have).

4 Steps To Get Your Guest To Share

Step One:

Use something like Calendly (or some other schedule tool where guests book themselves).

Step Two:

In your scheduling tool, have a question that asks that guests if they would be interested in sharing the show with others.

In some cases, I’ve seen podcasters make it obligatory to share the show. I don’t certainly agree with that, but you’ll have to decide what you want. That being said, a simple checkbox where they click or type in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ works well to encourage guests to share the podcast via email and social media.

Step Three:

After the interview, send out a quick email thanking the guest for coming on the show. Then in that email asking if they would be interested in sharing the episode with their audience when it airs.

Step Four:

When the episode airs – tell them via email the show is live. Give them a link and pre-write an email and social media copy and paste template they can use to share their episode with their audience.

Here is an example of a guest who used our pre-written template to his 60,000+ email list (we saw a considerable uptick in listeners that day).

Share the podcast episode on all social media channels. Wherever you can, tag your guest and thank them for the fantastic interview.

Strategy Six: Create A Private Group For Fans Of Your Show

Group mentality is one of the most powerful tools used by politicians, marketers, big brands, cults, and celebrities.

As a podcaster, you, too, can benefit by creating a group for your show fans.

One of my good friends and host of the Order of Man podcast, has created a private Facebook group for his show fans. The group now has over 60,000 highly engaged members.

Similarly, the show ‘The Goal Digger Podcast’ has a private community on Facebook for fans, and the group now boasts 58,000 members.

For each of these shows, these communities work as great community-building tools as well as promotional tools that assure fans stay tuned in and engaged.

Create a free private community

If you want your show to have an engaged audience, you’d do well to create a free and private community.

To do that, go into Facebook and create an open and closed community. If you’re not sure how to create a free group, here are some simple directions.

Strategy Seven For How To Promote A Podcast: Be A Guest On Other Podcasts

Being a guest on podcasts is a great way to promote yourself and your show.

Since the data is pretty clear – people who listen to one podcast, listen to other shows, it stands to reason that being a guest on shows will help you reach audiences of podcast listeners who might tune into your show.

In fact, from my own experience as a podcast and guest on over 200 shows myself – I’ve found that when I go on other shows, it helps me attract listeners to my podcast.

To be a guest on other podcasts, here are some tips.

Find shows by going into iTunes
Check out the New and Noteworthy for shows to be a guest on
Use the names of other influencers in your niche to find shows they’ve been on
Use keywords to help you find shows that are similar to yours
Join podcast groups and network, then when the time is right, ask if you can join other people’s shows
Use my podcast pitch template and podcast training to find more shows (it’s a free template you can use)

Those are just some ideas, but if you look in iTunes, you’ll find that there are many shows that you can pitch.

Strategy Eight: Create Content On YouTube

Part of promoting a podcast is being omnipresent.

This means, be where your customers and listeners are at – make it so you’re hard to ignore and hard to forget.

To make yourself more prominent, make content across other channels. We’ve already covered social media, being a guest on other shows – but we didn’t cover YouTube or major magazines.

With YouTube, you can create videos or upload still images with your interviews, or if you have the budget and time you can do a video conference interview that you take and edit like Noah Kagan did here.

By splicing in images like Noah did, you’ll make the video more engaging for the YouTube platform and ensure more views. If you don’t have the budget, skills, or time to do what Noah did – I still recommend uploading your interviews with still images to YouTube (it’s one more way to be omnipresent).

Make Videos For Youtube

Another way to use YouTube as a tool to promote and grow your podcast audience is through making videos.

Before you upload your video include links sending people to see, read, or listen to your show – the goal here is to get clicks to your website and thus increase the likelihood of a subscribe and listener. Here’s a useful video that encourages a click (which I clicked on, consumed the content and felt compelled to subscribe).

As one of my friends pointed out – the more you can get people to engage with you across the internet, the higher likelihood they’ll turn into customers.

How To Promote A Podcast Summary

Promoting your podcast is all about consistency.

Bringing on great guests, joining other shows, sharing your episodes online, creating a community online, and asking guests to share it respectfully – over time, will work to help your podcast.

By using these methods, I’ve seen my show have days where I saw an increase of 1,000, 5,000 and upwards of 15,000 downloads in one day –which all helped to increase sales of my courses, my appeal to sponsors, future guests, and my show and email subscribers.