Five requirements for a successful podcast
In this episode of the your own pay podcast, I discuss with you the five requirements for a successful podcast. I will be the first to admit that my podcast isn’t as successful as what it could be, however coming from someone who has done Podcast work in the past my Podcast at this point is more successful than it’s ever been. And I haven’t gotten the last required element of thesefive requirements for a successful podcast implemented as of yet, however that’s being implemented in the near future. I will say that out of the 31 Podcast, this is the 32nd, since October 1 I’m averaging about six downloads per day. (9 per day if you count soundcloud)I’ve got a total of hundred and 89 downloads for all of my podcast episodes, so, I will say that it is important to consider these requirements for a successful podcast.
The first requirement for a successful podcast is that you use a content distribution service. People might think that using their word press site to host their audio files is just fine, which honestly I did for the longest time myself. However, if you think about the fact that your WordPress hosting account needs to present content from your blog to all of your viewers when they come to your website, and then if you ask your web host to present your podcast content this will be additional unnecessary strain for your web hosting company, maybe you will come to the same conclusion that I did. That is, having a content distribution service makes perfect sense. Oh yeah, did I mention that if your website is off-line, and your podcasts are hosted on your blog that iTunes will remove you from their podcast directory if they can’t access your files whenever they decide to?
The content distribution service for podcast that I recommend is Libsyn, that is not an affiliate link. The reason I recommend Libsyn can be found on an earlier blog posting i did titled “3 reasons i use @libsyn to host my podcast”. Their plans are affordable for everyone! They start out at five dollars a month. If you subscribe to the your own pay podcast club however, by sending a text message that just contains the word
payown
to the number
44222,
I’ll soon have a coupon code that will allow you to try Libsyn out for the remainder of the month that you signed up and the full month after that so if you signed up today, you would be able to try Libsyn out from 6 November through 30 November, and then from 1 December through 31 December. Your next bill date would be the beginning of January 2016. Libsyn also will make the third requirement of these 5 requirements for successful podcasts a lot easier.
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The second requirement for a successful podcast is the ability to capture contact information from your listeners quickly. Above, you’ll realize that I gave you a word to text to a number, and you can be subscribed to the your own pay podcast club waiting list. This ability is brought to you by Leadpages, which makes it very easy to generate ways for people to join your subscriber list. This could be via a capture page such as this one, or via a text message such as referenced above. I use Leadpages because of these reasons, check out this blog post. And if you would like to try the Leadpages platform out for your first 60 days for free, you should reference this blog post where I show you how you can do just that. Can you use an alternative lead page system? Of course, I’m just sharing with you the tools that I use.
The third requirement of these five requirements for a successful podcast is that you have a social presence on several different social media sites. Lipson easily simplifies this, as you can set these social networks up as destinations for your podcast, so that whenever you post a new episode to your Libsyn account, these destinations are notified and you’re following on each of these networks are in turn notified as well. The five social media accounts that I recommend are tumbler, Blogger, LinkedIn, twitter, and Facebook. As I mentioned in the podcast, you also want to have a Soundcloud account, because I am averaging about three downloads per day just from the SoundCloud network. Oh yes, and did I mention that Lipson also will post to SoundCloud on your behalf? Those in the your own pay podcast club will also learn a secret I’ve got, to help you get your podcast published to the other popular audio social media platform, Audioboom.
Having the ability to host your podcast somewhere, not have your everyday web traffic hogging up all of your bandwidth from downloading the podcast, and being able to capture leads while sharing your podcast automatically with other social networks is just the first part. You need to have something that people actually want to hear about. If you have an existing audience, reach out to them and asked them what they would like to learn about. Then, create a content calendar for the content that people want to hear about. Implement into a podcast, and start distributing to your hearts content. Maybe you don’t already have an existing audience, if this is the case then my honest truth to you is to figure out what you’re passionate about, and then start producing content based around that passion. I am very fond of podcasting and video marketing, simply because those who you are targeting can easily hear and feel the emotion/honest feelings you have for your topic in your voice. Are you sharing emotion when it comes to sales?
The final but not least important requirement for these five requirements of an effective podcast is that your podcast is being distributed to the popular podcast directories. At the time of recording this podcast these are iTunes, number one, and stitcher, number two. Right now, the your own pay podcast is only available in stitcher, however iTunes is coming fairly shortly. As a warning, Apple the company who owns iTunes, has some strict requirements when it comes to submitting your podcast. I’m using a site called Fiverr, click here to get a free gig, so that I can pay someone five dollars to create me Podcast cover art that is in line with the requirements that Apple has four podcasts in iTunes. Once you have your cover art, yet again, Lipson will automatically distribute your podcast to iTunes after it’s approved.
You obviously need a microphone that sounds fairly decent when you capture your voice and produce it with intro and Altro files that introduce and leave the listener with an amazing experience. However, these five requirements for a successful podcast, are things that I wish I would have known the first time I took a stroll down the podcasting lane. Did you get any value out of this? If so, leave me a comment or get in contact with me and I’d be delighted to share your thoughts with our readers and listeners. Do you have a podcast? Again, get in contact with me because I really want to share your message with those who it might resonate with. Definitely subscribe to us wherever you’re seeing this, and share with your social media connections; someone else might find some tips with this as well.
Never stop being amazing.