Without simple directions, listeners won't take action. Make your podcast shareable, link your podcast correctly to get discovered by listeners and reach further with your shows.
Do NOT Say Subscribe
“And make sure you subscribe to my podcast to get all the latest episodes straight away!”
Stop right there! It’s time for a quick game of Word Association. The word subscribe, for a lot of people, is usually associated with paid subscriptions. If you start telling your listeners to subscribe to your podcast, newbies to the world of podcasts may not understand and may assume they need to pay to listen to the rest of your podcast. In which case they’ll just stop listening. Think about your word choice and maybe try out other options, like “follow my podcast”, or “check out my podcast”.
Add a Website Player
Don’t rely on apps. Our Podcast Pages have all your app links in one drop-down list, so they just tuck away nicely and don’t clutter up your page. You could opt to do something neat and tidy like this, or just embed a player on your website to minimise clutter and confusion even more!
We actually provide embeddable players as standard with all our accounts, so you just copy and paste the HTML code into your website. Then when listeners visit your website, all they have to do is press play! Simple!
Keep Apps to a Minimum
While it’s great to get your podcast in a bunch of different apps to make your podcast easy to access, you don’t need all the app icons on your website. According to the RAJAR Winter 2018 report, 67% of podcasting hours are listened to via smartphone.
So, just have one app for iOS users and one for Android users. Basically, just have an icon for Apple Podcasts for iOS users, and an icon for Google Podcasts for Android users, as both of these apps come pre-installed on the respective phones!
Simplify Your Message
Make things simple. There’s a great video that was essentially used to launch Serial from Ira Glass, who got his 80 year old friend, Mary, to explain how to listen to a podcast: “Go to the website and click play.” It should be that simple, and if you look at Serial’s website, that’s exactly what they’ve done!
Each episode just has a very simple play button on it. Make it easy and watch your listener numbers increase from there. Those who know how to use podcast apps will find you there, others who aren’t as sure will find the website and know to just hit play!
Link Your Podcast Using Smart Links
Speaking of simplifying things, smart links are great for this! Take the company, Plink, for example. They make one link for your podcast, so that instead of having a bunch of different app links cluttering up your website, you can have one link that magically pushes your listeners to the most relevant app for them!
They click the link on an iPhone? No problem! It’ll automatically open Apple Podcasts! What about on an Android? Don’t sweat it! Google Podcasts springs into life! They don’t call these links smart for nothing!
Hopefully, you get the idea now. Make things nice and simple for your listeners, and they’ll appreciate it! You’ll start getting more listener numbers because people are able to easily find your podcast.
