Podcasts: the definitive guide

First of all… start thinking about who your target audience is because ultimately you want to be connecting your message with your market, and there needs to be a level of interest from them for a podcast.

Whether you’re launching a new product or a new podcast the closer it is to what you do the more aligned it will be to your current market and the more leverage you can get from the work you’ve already done.

There’s nothing worse than having to start over from scratch because we all know that’s where all the work is.

My second recommendation is… make sure you put together a very strong list of guests to interview for your launch sequence.

Our launch sequence was a podcast a day for the first seven days straight, so a full week, then we pulled back to one podcast per week which we still currently do.

Before we launched we recorded 40 or 50 podcasts, so that we had a nice fat bank of podcasts to select those launch sequence podcasts from.

A mistake some people make with podcasts is that as they record them they release them, the problem here is if you have a super busy week, or you get sick or can’t get a guest for that week or your guest cancels, then there’s a hole in your podcast strategy.

Importantly… to get onto itunes new and noteworthy list you must have consistency of publication. Whether it’s on itunes or any other social media platform, the platforms really do like consistency when it comes to publishing.

Now because we have that nice fat bank of podcasts already done, depending on what’s trending or happening in the market, we have some choice as to the best podcast to release to respond to that. We can prioritise the release of content.

Another thing… build up the hype for the podcast launch and release.

Pre pre-launch

For just about 9 months prior to launch we had the pre pre-launch phase so we were talking about our #secret project and built up the tension over that time.

For the most part it was pretty obvious it was a podcast but it was interesting that when we’d ask our community, what do you think the secret project is we’d get a huge range of different answers.By doing that we created a huge level of intrigue.

The pre pre-launch phase is where people can see and hear that there’s something new and exciting coming along.

Pre-launch

The pre-launch is where you actually drop the announcement, ‘Hey guys, we’re launching a podcast. Unstoppable with Kerwin Rae is coming soon’. And you give them all the details, the date, the time.

I think for us the pre pre-launch went for nine months, and the pre-launch went for about two weeks.

Launch day

This is the day, when your first podcast goes live and out into the world!

Now that our podcast, Unstoppable with Kerwin Rae, is out there we market it perhaps two or three times a week.

We also film our podcasts in full. We’ve got all the gear, cameras, lights etc. These long form videos become pillar content that we can pull lots of micro content from. We can use 15 or 20 second grabs from the podcast to use for promos or stand alone rants.

Create pillar content

For us, the podcast is pillar content. So with our pillar content we can then carve it down and thereby we get a whole lot more bang for our buck.

Micro content

Now those independent rants also serve, with the right branding, as little marketing tools or marketing teasers just like a commercial. This micro content all adds to the content mix, the publishing schedule and the content calendar.

You get, 15, 30 and 60 second commercials for new television programs and we use the rants as pretty much the same thing. We just make them loaded with value.

Ask for reviews

The last part of the strategy is, asking people that listen to the podcast to go and review it.

One thing we’ve learnt from the process is that to get on to the itunes new and noteworthy list you need completed listens of the whole episode.

It’s not like a Facebook or Youtube video where they count a view as three seconds, you’ve got to get an entire viewing for it to register as a view.

Complete downloads and complete listens get you on the new and noteworthy list as well as reviews, so we ask our community for reviews. We did that through our social media, through our database, and difference Facebook groups as well.

We’ve put together a Podcaster Starter Kit which is packed with all the essentials for producing podcasts. Here’s a free copy (opt-in).

So if you follow that schedule you should have some success.

Hope that helps!