How to Grow a Podcast Through Organic Online Traffic
The podcasting industry is flourishing and airways are brimming with a wide range of audio content. But this explosion in podcast popularity now has hosts across the web questioning how to grow a podcast in the current industry climate.
On one hand, there's never been a better time to be in the business of content creation, with studies revealing that podcasters stream their content to roughly 144 million listeners in America alone. The rise in global audiences is paving the way for creators to reach more people and earn a living from behind the mic.
However, along with the army of dedicated listeners, also comes a lot of competition. There are currently an estimated 1,000,000+ podcasts on the air and all of them are fighting for a place at the top of the podcasting charts.
Luckily, podcasters can turn to a selection of tools and strategies to organically grow their audience. With the right approach, you can get more listeners and even begin to make money podcasting.
✴ How to Grow an Audience Through Podcast SEO
Back in 2019, Google took note of the rapid growth of the podcasting industry. To streamline the process of connecting podcasts with their audience, the Google team updated its algorithms to index podcasts and rank them based on SEO implementation.
However, this doesn't just apply to your show's title and episode descriptions, as users are now noticing that Google pulls keywords from spoken audio as well. With the search engine's ability to process and scan every aspect of podcasts, creators can naturally integrate high performing keywords into their content. This enables them to appear higher in search engine rankings and drive their exposure to a wider audience.
✴ Leveraging a Website to Generate Organic Traffic
When you’re podcasting, you can employ the same marketing strategies that other businesses with an online presence use to advertise your content and organically increase the amount listeners coming to tune in to your podcast.
Having a podcasting site is an effective way to promote your show. By giving your content a dedicated home on your website, listeners can discover new episodes, learn more about you as a creator, leave feedback, and even find episode transcripts.
Podcast websites are also an excellent way to take advantage of backlinks, with your site acting as ground zero for all your content. It's from here that you can build a network for your show and create various channels between your podcast, website, and social media.
This allows new audience members to seamlessly travel from one facet of your digital presence to another. In turn it encourages prospective listeners to explore more of your content and facilitates sustainable podcast growth.
✴ Create a New Page for Every Episode
Creating a new web page for each of your podcast episodes is easy to do and comes with some worthwhile benefits. Firstly, it helps you maximize your SEO efforts by optimizing each page individually for the specific subject matter in each of your episodes. Secondly, you can direct backlinks to different website pages directly, making it easier for visitors to locate and listen to their content of choice.
To really establish yourself as an authority, you can collate additional resources and references on the topics you discuss for your audience to learn more. A dedicated page for each episode is perfect because it provides access to useful information, enhances the perception of your podcast and can ultimately do wonders for your audience growth.
✴ Growth and Monetization
‘How to make money podcasting’ is one of the most common thoughts on every creator's mind. Growth is crucial for this, and in most cases, you won't earn anything until you build a steady listener-base.
The key to growing your podcast is to focus your attention on the tools and best practices that will grow your online traffic organically. SEO is a long-term process and the results won’t happen overnight. With consistency, however, you will eventually find yourself reaping the benefits of your labor.
There are many ways to make money podcasting, but most monetization strategies require you to have a measurable and consistent audience. One of the best examples of the correlation between audience growth and potential earnings is affiliate marketing.
✴ What is Affiliate Marketing?
In essence, affiliate marketing is a monetization method that allows podcasters to earn a commission for referring their audience to an organization. Although it's a relatively straightforward process, there are conditions to these kinds of deals. For instance, most organizations will require you to have a certain audience demographic and size before you'll be considered to join their affiliate program.
✴ Developing Your Website for Podcast Growth
It's safe to say that giving your podcast a website home and implementing a range of SEO tactics, will play a major role in generating more online traffic. This presence outside of podcast directories only serves to boost your exposure to more potential listeners.
When you implement some of the methods above you’ll no longer be asking how to get more listeners, but rather why you didn’t employ some of these strategies sooner.
To learn more about how to grow your podcast through organic online traffic, check out The Wave’s free guide to podcast growth and monetization here.
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