Launching your Podcast is no trivial thing, and you want to treat it as such. You want to make people anticipate it, make people’s mouth water to get them to view as soon as it drops. There are several methods of making an announcement and keeping your potential listeners in the loop. They include:

Existing Subscribers to Your Blog

If your business is an E-commerce business, a blog post is a great way to announce to your subscribers that you will be creating a podcast, asking for their opinions, and making it possible to reach you by email. They can reach you with topics and products they would like you to talk about, upon your request, of course, and you can also ask them to mention guests they would love to have on the show.

The onus is on you to note all responses and sort out similar requests; you should prioritize topics or products that more people want you to talk about, with ample time to prepare and get yourself ready. Remember to also send subsequent emails to let them know that the Podcast is ready.

For example, three days before your pod, you can send a reminder mail to keep them anticipating your Podcast, and on the release date, let them know that it is already available for streaming. Your old email subscribers most likely have stuck with you from the days of written content; since you offer them something they like, many of them would love to hear you speak. They are a good audience for your launch.

New Subscribers to Your Blog/Website

You can also get new email subscribers to your website. To do that, you need to generate traffic to your website; offering discounts on some products might just do the trick, this will increase the number of visitors to your website. After this, you need a landing page – a landing page is designed to bait visitors to submit their personal details (email address) with the promise of an incentive.

Now you already directed them to your website with the promise of a discount, make sure that the lead page pops up before they can continue anything, let them know that you will be airing subsequent podcasts on more products coming in at bargain prices. You should get 20% of your new visitors to submit their email addresses. In digital marketing terms, the “bait” or incentive offered to visitors in exchange for their details is called a “lead magnet.”

It is important to note that your landing page is well designed, not overloaded with information. Instead, it should focus on the information you want to pass across. The simplicity of design is important. Your lead magnets as well must hold value; yes, you are giving a discount or a coupon or other freebies, but make sure it’s something that holds value; it’ll help convert more visitors to subscribers.

The details you get from your new subscribers should be distinct from your old blog subscribers to adequately sort mails to them. Ensure to keep them posted about the launch progress of the Podcast.

Your Offline Network

The support you can get from your friends, family, colleagues at work, and school is important. It can go a long way to publicizing your Podcast. Just like your email subscribers, keep them updated about the podcast release, let them see you, and the first thing they can remember is that you are launching a podcast, and inform them when it goes live. It is very important, and if your personality is a great one, it makes it even easier. 

During launch week, thank every person who comments on your Podcast. Ask them to leave a review and share it with anyone they know who might find it valuable. Interact. Even if your audience is small to start, the direct interaction can feed your energy level and offer valuable feedback for your future podcast episodes.

Social media

If you have an active and large social media page for your business, it is a good place to make an announcement for your followers and even non-followers to see. However, if you don’t, you can make use of personalized campaigns with the assistance of social media marketers, creating hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to draw attention and traffic to your website. Don’t just make posts or campaigns. Interact with them and let them give feedback. It keeps your business in their minds.

You can also make a live announcement, as you can go live on almost all social network platforms. In fact, you can spice it up by making a live video, probably showing you with your laptop and microphone about to make a recording. Make it look great, and your subscribers will treat it as such.

These approaches and channels will help make your launch gain traction, and if you can do something decent on your launch, you will keep many of them around.

Your Subsequent Podcasts

Upon a successful launch, you have set a foundation for your Podcast, you already have listeners from different places, and your new responsibility is to make them stay. You can work on further publicity, but it is important to focus on satisfying your current listeners; you’d naturally grow if you do that.

The value of your Podcast to your listeners is dependent on content; if your business deals with selling cars, making reviews and comparison of two cars that look alike with facts and figures, to help listeners narrow down their choices when buying a car. You are definitely providing them with some value; you cannot just come on the show and list the specifications of the cars you want to sell.

That holds very little value to your listeners. Ensure you’re providing some sort of “classified information,” and your listeners will hold you in high esteem. This is why it is very important to perfectly understand what you’ll be talking about. Make sure it is a product you are very familiar with, do extra research, and have the answers to questions you think they will ask. 

Now you don’t want to totally abandon your website after launching your Podcast, you should regularly make references to your website; let people check some things out there – although you need to make it easy for them to locate it.

Make them regular visitors to your website; their attention may be drawn to something you haven’t even talked about. It is also important to create a short recap of your Podcast in written form on your website so that listeners who missed out on a particular episode will see what they missed. If it is an important topic or a product they are interested in that was talked about, they will go back and search for it.

Read Next: Marketing Strategy, Business Strategy, Business Models.

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