Five Questions To Ask Your Podcast Hosting Platform
You’ve got the idea. You’ve made your first episode. Next: finding the right podcast hosting platform. It’s crucial to getting your show off the ground, growing your audience, building a proper community and making money (if that’s your goal). But what should you be looking for, and what are the right questions to ask?
Every podcast is different, and will have different needs. Look for a platform that provides options while letting you choose what works best for your own show. You want to be able to tailor your approach to you and your audience. Are you able to exclude specific categories of ad that don’t suit your topic? Can you offer your listeners a membership option for bonus content, or to listen ad-free if they want to??
Acast gives podcasters full control over their monetisation strategy - from the types of ads you’ll take, and where you’ll put them to how you want to offer your listeners subscription options, and at what price.
No one gets into podcasting to spend their days doing admin. Creators want to create. So make sure the platform you choose has the tools you need to make your life as easy as possible. Look for automations that handle a lot of the grunt work for you. On Acast these include things like the simple fact of being able to distribute your show to all the listening platforms out there at the click of a button. Or our AdCollab tool which allows podcasters and advertisers to collaborate in real time when creating host read sponsorships - cutting down the back and forth needed by over 85% compared to the “old” way, via email.
The best hosting platforms build or integrate with apps and services of all kinds to help you promote your show. Acast partners with tools like Headliner.app for easy social sharing and Podcastle for AI-powered show creation, transcripts and more. Also check what relationships the team has with the major platforms such as Apple Podcasts, in order to help get your show featured editorially at the right moment in sections such as “New & Noteworthy”.
To encourage brands to want to advertise on your show, you need to be discoverable to them. This goes beyond simply being on all the podcast apps - at Acast, our ad marketplace includes a fully searchable “shop window” of our more than 100,000 shows, where brands can pinpoint exactly the podcasts and audience demographics which best fit their needs, whatever the show’s size.
Robust data is crucial for growing your show. Knowledge is power. You need to know who’s listening, when, where, how and for how long so you can tweak your podcast as you go. Acast provides all this and more in our easy-to-use dashboard.
So, what have I forgotten? Comment below ??