Creating a Promo For Your Podcast

0:01
Creating a podcast is the first step, then you have to promote it so people know it exists. And if you haven’t created a promo for your podcast, then you’re missing out on some great opportunities to grow your show. But what should be included in your promo? How long should it be? And how can you use it to grow your audience? today? We’re learning all about podcast promos. Take it away, radio man. Podcast Your Business.

0:33
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Podcast Your Business. My name is Sunny Gault. I’m a podcast coach and mentor and I’ve been podcasting for 17 years. I am also the founder and CEO of Independent Podcast Network, please check us out https://independentpodcast.network. And I am here to help you create amazing podcasts for your business. We do this by mastering the Five P’s of Podcasting. Yes, the Five P’s of Podcasting. So this is something that I teach in the first podcast course that I launched, and it is the A to Z of podcasting. And we talk about the five P’s which are prep, plan, produce, promote and profit. Prep, how do you get ready for your show? Should you even be starting a show some simple questions like that, that you need to ask yourself? Plan? What is the look and feel for your show? Produce? How do you create? The content may sound amazing or look amazing? Promote? How do you tell everyone about it, so they are aware of your podcast. And finally, which may be the most important for many people is profit, not because we’re greedy little piglets, but because money makes the world go round, and we have to pay our bills. And I have found that if you’re not at least covering your expenses, you’re probably not going to be podcasting for very long. So Mr. radio man, what are we talking about today? promote promote. That’s right. How do we promote our podcast because I get a ton of questions about the best way to grow a podcast audience. And my response is always the same. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget, which is 99.9% of the people out there, then the best way to grow your show is through other podcasts. And one of the most practical ways to do that requires you to create a promo for your podcast, hence today’s episode.

2:30
Here’s what we’re going to talk about. Here’s what you’re going to learn today. First of all, we’re going to talk about what a promo is, then we’re going to discuss the format for it. What should you include in your promo. And we’re also going to listen to his sample so you can get an idea of how I created one of the promos for one of my podcasts. And then we’re going to talk about how to use your promo to grow your audience. And we’ll get started right after this quick break. So you need a promo for your podcast and you have come to the right place. I’m going to walk you through this. I’m going to tell you why you need a promo. And we’re just going to do this step by step sound good? Okay, so first of all, what is a podcast promo? Most cases, this is going to be an audio clip. Although I know we just did an episode on should you have a video podcast or an audio podcast. So in theory, this could be a video clip as well, most of times, it’s an audio clip. And the whole point is to encourage people to listen, and or subscribe to your podcast. Really, there just needs to be one call of action. So it depends on what you want them to do. Now there are some general rules to keep in mind with all of this. First of all, I want you to keep it short and sweet. You’ve heard the expression of leave them wanting more. Absolutely. This applies to podcast promos, if you can keep it to 30 seconds. Fantastic. Most of my promos are somewhere around 45 seconds. I don’t think you should go over a minute, not unless it’s super compelling. But for most people keep it under a minute. And other general roll. You want to get them interested enough to take action. So you do need to be a little creative here, show off your personality. Like you’re basically telling them why they should listen to your podcast. And as I mentioned earlier, you should only have one call to action within your promo. Don’t say do this, do this, subscribe here. And then leave me a message here. That’s way too much. So figure out what your call to action is. Most of the time it’s go to my website, subscribe. Something like that. One call of action. Okay, the format for your promo. We talked about the length already, right? It needs to be less than a minute. And you guys have heard of the who, what, when, where, why and how. So you could put all of that into your promo but you’re talking about 30 seconds. It’s definitely under a minute. It’s going to be hard to fit all that information in. So I’m going to limit it to three of the w’s. Okay. The What about your podcasts, though? Where meaning where can they listen to your podcasts and the why? Why should they listen? At last check, there was like something something crazy, like 5 million podcasts out there. Not all of them actively producing. But that is a huge crowd of podcasts that people have to comb through in order to find your content. But the why is most important in your promo, what distinguishes you from the other podcasts out there? Is there something unique about your format? Is it you? Are you just absolutely amazing, that’s okay to say this is your promo. But somehow you have to stand out and then put your own creative flair on it. So this is really easy to do with some of my parenting show promos, because I like to use music and sound effects. And so I might have like a baby crying in the background or, you know, things like that. I’ve also seen true crime podcast, maybe have that eerie music playing in the beginning. Maybe you do a special voice or I don’t know maybe your show rhymes. So you know, your promos rhyme to or maybe you’ve got a comedy show, right? Bring you and let’s say you’ve got a co host, you both do the promo. It should be a reflection of what people are actually going to experience when they listen to an episode. So don’t be scared to stick with a certain theme. If you’ve got something with your podcast. The easiest way to break something down and you know give you a good idea of what should be included in a promo is just to listen to one. So here is a sample that I created a while back for one of my shows. I’m gonna play it. It’s only about 45 seconds or so and then we will review it. So here we go.

6:56
(Promo plays) The wait is over and your new baby is here.Didn’t come with an instruction manual. That’s why there’s new bees. We help guide new mothers through their baby’s first year of life. Listen, as newly postpartum moms celebrate the excitement of becoming new parents, and share the emotional and physical struggles of recovering from childbirth and caring for a newborn baby. Subscribe to your favorite podcast app and visit New mommy media.com to check out our other parenting shows Preggie Pals, Parents Savers, Twin Talks and The Boob Group, This is Newbies, new moms new babies.

7:39
Okay, so this is interesting. I haven’t listened to this promo for a while. But I can actually critique myself on this. I got a couple of the w’s right. I talked about the what the podcast and what the podcast is about. I talked about the where, which is how they can subscribe. I also mentioned the website. I didn’t hit the Y very hard. And I’m surprised I didn’t do as you know with this promo, because I’m usually pretty good about doing this. With this podcast. The nice thing is, and if I were to redo it, this is what I would say. Not only do we have experts on our show, but we have real parents that talk to the experts that ask the questions. So it gives them a real life perspective on whatever it is we’re talking about. That would have been a better why. And that was missing from that promo. So shame on Sunday. But that gives you an idea, right of what you can do. Now you don’t have to have background music, you don’t have to have sound effects. You just needs to be you and it needs to accurately represent your podcast.

8:39
So now let’s talk about how you can use this promo. We have talked about this a little bit when we did the episode about podcast directories. That was a few episodes ago. But if you go back and listen to that, we talk briefly about a promo. And how when you are first getting your podcast into directories, a promo can be really helpful, especially if you have a specific debut or release date in mind. Because in order for your podcast to be published on these platforms, you have to have some form of content. And if you don’t want to release your very first episode, what I always recommend is that people create a podcast promo. And then that goes out and you don’t really care when that is released. But what that does is that gets you in the podcast directory. So when you’re ready to say, hey, it’s time for a big release, you make sure in advance that you’re in all the directories. So the moment you publish, right, then it goes out. So that’s one way that I encourage people to use promos. But even if you have already launched your podcast, I do recommend that you go back you create a promo for your podcast. You put it in episode zero for your podcast RSS feed. So what do I mean by that? That means it should come before your very first episode. So if I scroll through your feed, I’m assuming most people listening aren’t at the max number because sometimes people get maxed out on the amount of episodes. If you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of episodes, you could actually max out in your RSS feed, but I’m assuming most of the people listening to this have not done that yet. So you’re gonna go back and this promo should appear before your very first episode. It’s just an easy way for people to be able to find a promo. So how do you get it to do that it’s really easy. When you release your podcast promo, you need to know the date for your first episode. And then just make sure the date you basically have to backdate it, make sure the release date for your promo is before that first episode, and then it will naturally appear in your podcast RSS feed. So that’s how you can use the promo on your own within your own RSS feed. But the best way to really use this overall, is to promote your podcast on other podcasts. Now, you can go out and buy ads, you couldn’t do this not too long ago. But there are more and more places popping up that will do this. I know pod bean, if you happen to host on Podbean, they encourage cross promotion between the podcast on pod bean you do pay money, but that is an option over there. But the good old fashioned way of doing this is by researching other podcasts that are somewhat similar to your show or at the very least share a similar demographic. So you might have to do a little research to figure out what your demographic is, and other things that your audience might be interested in. So if I have a parenting podcast, I’m not necessarily just going to try to cross promote with other parenting shows, because parents are interested in a bunch of different things. So don’t just think about your own genre, expand a little bit. So you can buy ads. That’s one option by you know, just time essentially in other people’s shows, you can cross promote, which is free. It’s one of the reasons I love cross promotion. It’s one of the fastest ways to grow your show. So you’ve got a podcast promo. The other podcast has a podcast promo and you swap promos, that’s the easiest thing to do. If you want to take it a step further, you can appear on each other shows you can be a guest on each other shows. But that’s going to take a lot more work. What’s easier, is if and you can have it even as a post roll, you guys know what a post roll is, that is what appears at the end of your show. So it’s not a mid-roll like an ad in the middle of your show. But you can have post-rolls. And if you use dynamic ad insertion, which I talked about a lot, you can upload a promo and have it play immediately after your podcast is over. It’s the easiest thing to do if you’re doing cross promotion.

12:58
The other thing is, and this is somewhat related, but a little bit different. But I’m still going to talk about it and that is add drops or in this case, it would be a promo drop. So instead of the promo appearing in the middle of a show, or perhaps at the very end of the show, it appears as a separate line item if you will in your RSS feed. Now this is probably going to be a little bit more detailed. Maybe not a minute long promo or a 30 second long promo, but I want to talk about it because it is a way to promote your show. So with these ad drops, what typically happens is whoever’s podcast, you know that this is going out on the RSS feed is going out on they will do some sort of intro. And then they will play either a portion of another podcast or sometimes sometimes especially if they’re paying for it. The podcast wants the whole episode. So they’ll pick an episode. So basically the host of the podcast where it’s going out in their RSS feed, they will introduce it Hey guys, I thought you’d really liked this podcast, I talked to the guy the other day seems like a nice guy wanted to help promote whatever you want to say, Okay? And then tell them why. You know, don’t just play it, but tell them why. Introduce it a little bit, and then play the promo. And that might be a whole episode. So we call those ad drops. And they do differ a little bit from traditional promos, because traditional promos will just appear in an episode that the actual host is doing for their podcast. But I wanted to explain that because you might be able to use these promos as an add drop or a promo drop as well. The nice thing about that is it because it appears like as a separate line item if you will in the RSS feed, it gets more attention and you don’t have to leave it in your show forever. So if I’m you know, the podcast, and someone paid me to run a promo and it’s, you know, a promo drop or an ad drop. Usually there’s an agreement to maybe have it in there for at least a month or 30 days, and then the podcast can remove it from their feed. So it’s very clean, right? It doesn’t stay on their podcast forever. Neither would it stay on their podcast if you were doing dynamic ad insertion, but I realize not everyone listening to this podcast has access to those tools. Okay, we’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I’m going to tell you how you can get a free handout that goes along with today’s episode.

15:27
So if you weren’t taking notes, that’s okay. I do have a guide for you guys. That will walk you through some of the things that we talked about today and how you can create a promo for your podcasts. It’s also gonna have some samples on there if you want to get an idea of some other podcasts promos and how you might be able to create yours. Also, we’ve made a bunch of changes to our website at https://independentpodcast.network, we have a ton of free resources. That includes blog posts, podcasts episodes, like today’s episode, videos, handouts, and if you’re brand new to podcasting, as I mentioned at the start of today’s show, I do have a free how to podcast course that you can begin taking on the website. It’s also available on our YouTube channel if you want to check that out. Okay, until next week, remember, you should start a podcast!