Where To Host, Syndicate, Share, Optimize, And Promote Your Podcast

October 31, 2024

Thomas Brodbeck

An estimated 135 million consumers listened to a podcast last month in the United States, an increase from 120 million monthly podcast listeners last year. In fact, 47% of the US population ages 12 and up are monthly podcast listeners, with growth continuing.

Podcast Growth

I believe a lot of the continued growth is the adoption by social media sites to support and promote podcasts. For example, YouTube – primarily a video channel – hosts millions of podcasts.

So, have you decided to start your own podcast? Well, there are a few things to consider first—where you will host your podcast and where you will promote it. Below, I have listed a few tips and lessons learned from promoting the podcasts I’ve hosted and developed. I hope they will be of use to you!

Podcasting Workshop and Presentation

I recently developed a workshop for enterprise podcasters to deploy specific strategies to syndicate and promote their podcasts. We utilized many of these methods with the Dell Luminaries podcast, pushing it into the top 1% of all business podcasts.

[slideshare id=181346690&doc=2019-promoting-podcast-191012112959]

Where to Host Your Podcast

Before distributing to any directories, you must decide where to host your podcast. Where you submit your podcast will determine where you host it, as some directories have certain ties with others.

Don’t host your podcast on a typical web host or in your current website. Podcast hosting environments have an infrastructure built for large audio file sto stream and download from the web. Typical web hosting environments may cause listening interruptions and could even cost you money with overage costs on bandwidth usage.
Douglas Karr, DK New Media

Martech Zone recommends hosting on Transistor. You can read an overview of the podcast platform here, but in short, it’s easy to use, offers unlimited show hosting, and offers some great tools for collaboration and business.

A few other podcast hosting companies you can use are:

Acast: Podcast discovery, listening, hosting, and RSS distribution.
Audioboom: Reach dedicated listeners and deliver your brand message through dynamic advert insertions and endorsements from the top podcast talent.
Blubrry: Blubrry.com is a podcasting community and directory that gives creators the power to make money, get detailed audience measurements, and host their audio and video. Whether you are a media creator, advertiser, or consumer, Blubrry is your digital media interface.
Buzzsprout: Start podcasting today with free podcast hosting from Buzzsprout, the easiest podcasting software for hosting, promoting, and tracking your podcast.
Casted: From hosting and scheduling to activation and analytics, Casted is a content management platform for B2B marketers with a voice.
Fireside: A unique podcast host with a beautiful user interface that incorporates both a website and your podcast.
Libsyn: Libsyn provides everything your podcast needs: publishing tools, media hosting and delivery, RSS for iTunes, a Website, Stats, Advertising Programs, Premium Content, and Apps for Apple, Android, and Windows devices.
Omny Studio: Omny Studio is an enterprise podcasting solution that includes an online editor, monetization, broadcast capture, reporting, and other features.
Spotify Megaphone: tools to publish, monetize, and measure your podcast business.
PodBean: Ultra simple podcast publishing solution. Unlimited bandwidth and storage. Everything a podcaster needs to host, promote, and track your podcast.
Simplecast: Publish your podcasts the easy way.
SoundCloud: Podcasting on SoundCloud makes it easy for anyone to tell stories, upload, and share. Build your community on the most stable and intuitive audio hosting platform in the world.
Spreaker: Spreaker has it all! Set up your account and start recording podcasts or hosting live radio shows from your computer or mobile device.

After setting up your podcast hosting, you must have a valid RSS feed. A lot of times, when you are setting up the podcast hosting account, you will miss something that will break the RSS feed. Before submitting to any directory, check whether your RSS feed is valid.

Validate Your Podcast Feed

Where to Syndicate Your Podcast

Before submitting your podcast to any available directories, I recommend having more than one podcast episode in your RSS feed. You can submit to most of the directories with only one podcast, but most listeners to your podcast will want to see more than the episode before subscribing to your show.

Because iPhone and Android devices dominate the mobile market, these first two registrations are necessary for every podcast!

iTunes

After you have created your RSS feed, submitting your podcast to iTunes should be your first step. iTunes has one of the most popular networks of listeners for podcasters. You will first need to have an Apple ID, if you already have an iPhone, you should have an ID already. Sign in to this the iTunes Podcast connection page with your Apple ID and paste your RSS feed into the URL field and submit your show. Depending on your account, it could get approved pretty quickly or could take a couple days. Once you get accepted into iTunes, your show will appear in a lot of other different podcatchers automatically as those tools get their feeds from iTunes. Unfortunately, with iTunes, you will not get any analytics associated with your account.

Google

Google released a platform with outstanding analytics for monitoring your podcasts’ listenership. You can see the number of plays, plays in the first 30 days, and average duration and then monitor performance over time. Sign in with a Google account and follow the steps to add your podcast.

Pandora

Pandora continues to have a huge audience and fully supports podcasts, even with the ability to monetize them.

Spotify

Spotify continues to expand into audio content and, with the purchase of Anchor, is taking serious aim at owning the medium. With so many users, you won’t want to miss out!

Amazon Music

Amazon Music is a relative newcomer but with Audible, Prime, and Alexa’s voice assistant reach, you shouldn’t leave out this important channel.

Optionally, you can also register your podcast with these tools and directories to expand your reach:

Acast

Even if your podcast is hosted by another provider, you can register it with a free starter account.

Blubrry

Blubrry is also the largest podcast directory on the Internet, with over 350,000 podcasts listed. It provides advertising and other services for podcasters.

Castbox

Castbox provides Castbox Creator Studio, a set of tools with robust podcasting analytics so that you can measure and engage with your subscribers as well as stream and provide downloads.

iHeart

For iHeart, this is where it pays to have Libsyn as your host. They have a relationship with iHeartRadio, and you can set up your Libsyn account to automatically create and feed your channel.

Overcast

If your podcast is already on iTunes, it will show up within a day on Overcast. If it’s not, you can manually add it

Pocket Casts

A web-based and mobile application that enables users to manage and listen across devices.

Podchaser

A podcast database and discovery tool. Their goal is to make it easy for you to provide feedback about the podcasts you love and easily discover podcasts. Find your podcast at Podchaser and you can claim it using the registered email in your podcast feed.

Podknife

Podknife is an online directory of podcasts that organizes them by topic and location. Users can also review and favorite their favorite podcasts. Once you register and log in, you’ll find a submission link in the menu.

RadioPublic

RadioPublic is the healthy, scalable, and financially sustainable podcast listening platform podcasters have been waiting for. We help listeners discover, engage with, and financially reward podcast makers—you. Verify your show on RadioPublic to start connecting with your audience today.

Simplecast

Simplecast is a podcast hosting and analytics platform that helps creators publish, distribute, and track their shows.

Simplecast

Simplecast is a podcast hosting and analytics platform that helps creators publish, distribute, and track their shows.

Audiogram: Turn your audio into engaging social videos with Audiogram.
Headliner: Create waveform audiograms and full episodes in video, automatically transcribe, and promote your podcast with as many videos as you want on Headliner.
Wavve: Wavve enables you to create audiograms—videos with your podcast audio—that can be shared socially using its player.

How to Optimize Your Podcast

Did you know that Google now indexes podcasts and displays them on a carousel on search engine result pages? Their support article provides details on how to ensure your podcast is indexed. I’ve written about how to ensure that Google knows you have a podcast if you have WordPress but are hosting it on an external podcast hosting service.

iOS devices can add a smart banner to the top of your website so that Apple iPhone users can view your podcast, open it in the Podcasts app, and subscribe to it. You can read how to do that in this iTunes Smart Banners for Podcasts article.

Podcast Web Players

Jetpack: WordPress’ premiere plugin for enhancing your site now has a podcast block you can add to your content that automatically creates a podcast player.

Don’t forget the vital role social media can play in promoting your new and old podcasts! X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram… can all help you to grow your audience and drive more listens and subscribers for your content.

With a social media management tool like Agorapulse, you can easily queue up shares to all of those profiles, as well as set up recurring shares for those podcasts that you might consider evergreen. Or, if you use a tool like FeedPress, you can publish your podcast to your social media profiles automatically.

As you grow your audience on those platforms, new fans may not have seen your older podcasts, so that’s a great way to increase visibility. The key is to create engaging social media posts rather than just broadcasts of your podcast title. Try asking questions or listing the major takeaways. And if you interviewed or mentioned another brand or influencer, tag them in your social shares!

Originally Published on Martech Zone: Where To Host, Syndicate, Share, Optimize, And Promote Your Podcast