Why Your Podcast Needs its own Website
Podcasting is considered one of the incredible ways of establishing links and communicating with others over the internet. Podcasts give you an opportunity to share your thoughts through audio and visual channels. Creating an incredible podcast requires proper planning. Part of the planning should be towards ensuring that your message is well researched on and well composed. Additional effort should also be put towards ensuring that your listeners get to establish links so they don’t miss an episode or a message.
When seeking to penetrate the market as far as obtaining new listeners is concerned, marketing your podcasts should also be emphasized. The more exposure you have in regard to customers across the internet, the higher the chances of you becoming a successful podcaster, and therefore obtaining sponsorships. When seeking to expose yourself over the internet, there are numerous channels and opportunities you can always utilize.
Social media, being one of the channels of communication suitable for interacting with your listeners, is not quite effective as far as establishing an identity and niche for yourself in the marketing concerned. As a successful podcaster, you should consider going beyond the obvious channels of communication to establish a dedicated website for yourself. A personal site for your podcasts would give you additional boosts and benefits as hereby outlined.
1. Attract new listeners
Your audience is particularly important when seeking to reach out to more persons. Seeking to expand your audience should, therefore, be your primary goal. Besides self-marketing and advertising your podcasts through the internet, creating a site will give you a suitable opportunity to attract new listeners. Such a personal site should contain, among other things, relevant content that you publish from time to time in the form of blogs and web articles.
When seeking to attract new listeners over the internet using your site as a channel, you should focus on creating content that befits search engine optimization. Incorporating SEO in your web content ensures that web users can be actively directed into your site and podcasts whenever they use Google or any other search engine to search relevant content.
Search Engine Optimization also gives you an opportunity to expand your reach as you would have the chance to create content that is relevant to a particular concept or topic that are of importance in a certain market. When thinking about incorporating search engine optimization to your site, focus should be made on certain relevant key terms which help give your podcasts a boosted preference in users’ Google search results page.
2. Boost your podcasts
Podcasting regularly through the various channels available over the internet gives you an opportunity to have a wide database of podcasts. Channels of podcasting can sometimes have limitations when it comes to the storage size and the number of podcasts that you can store. If you intend to be successful in podcasting, storage space should not be a concern as you would need to store an archive of all podcasts that you have ever created.
A website gives you a suitable channel of ensuring you have a comprehensive archive of all past episodes. A well-created site will also give you an opportunity to analyze the history and progress of your podcasting in terms of analytics on the viewership of your podcasts. The site also expands your listeners’ ability to specifically track particular podcasts that you created a long time ago.
Depending on your preferences, you can also choose to incorporate synopsis and transcripts of all your podcasts, thereby giving your internet visitors and your customers an opportunity to easily trace particular podcasts containing specific information. The transcripts also come in handy when seeking to improve on your search engine optimization. To be successful in podcasting SEO, you should endeavor to write your transcripts and incorporate the necessary keywords before doing the actual podcast. Posting both the podcasts and the transcripts on your site would ensure a boosted viewership.
3. Establish a successful brand
When it comes to branding yourself across the market as a successful podcaster, emphasis should be put towards ensuring you utilize every channel of communication available in the market. In addition to the podcasting channel that you primarily use to publish your podcast, you should incorporate a social media site dedicated to interacting with your audience. You thus need to incorporate an effective site that gives you an opportunity to not only publish your podcasts but also include pertinent information such as your mission, vision, and what you stand for in your podcasts.
4. Enhance audience interaction
Creating and publishing podcasts for your channel is often referred to as a unidirectional communication as you can only disseminate information to your listeners. To make it bi-directional, you need to think of ways of incorporating avenues for your listeners to interact with you. Interactions such as your audience asking questions and clarifications are particularly important in helping keep your audience engaged.
A site would be a perfect opportunity for your listeners to post the relevant information in response to your podcasts. A well-designed site also gives you an opportunity to obtain necessary audience feedback through interactions that they post. For example, the listeners’ posts, replies, questions, and other follow-up information in response to your podcasts may have important suggestions on how to help improve on your podcasts. Besides, you can also have an opportunity to engage your listeners actively by asking them relevant information on particular topics that they would perhaps need you to handle in future podcasts. Such levels of audience engagement and interaction are important in giving you boosted audience numbers.
Also, your audience will have an opportunity to interact with each other when it comes to responding to your podcasts. This helps create a sense of belonging where your audience maintains loyalty to your podcasting channel. In the long-term, the site helps create a community where everyone feels well engaged and is an active member. You can also choose to personalize the audience interaction with your podcasts by giving them an opportunity to create personal accounts on your site.
5. Enhance the opportunity for marketing & sponsorships
As a successful podcaster, you may want, at some point in time, to partner with sponsors and companies to help promote their goods and services. Podcasting on its own can be quite a challenge and a nightmare when it comes to meeting your ambitions of becoming a marketer. To market more effectively, you need to have a centralized site platform which in turn gives you an opportunity to launch your marketing ambitions. Using podcasts as a channel of marketing can be too challenging, especially since the audio messages do not accurately support search engine optimization own. Incorporating a site ensures that you have a rather stable channel that can come in handy to boost your marketing initiatives.
In addition, having a site significantly boosts your likelihood or securing sponsors. Some sponsors would tend to favor podcasters who have additional channels of communication such as sites as they have an improved audience base.
6. Create opportunities for mutual benefit
As opposed to podcasting channels, a site gives you an opportunity to establish certain practices that are of mutual benefit for yourself and your listeners. Sites have additional functionalities that podcasting channels do not have. Depending on your preferences, you can incorporate certain features on your site that can greatly boost the added advantages that your listeners would enjoy. For example, you can have your listeners willfully subscribe to certain free benefits such as periodical publications and newsletters. In turn, you will also benefit from having a database of potential customers to whom you can market your sponsors’ products.
The site will also give you an opportunity to visualize analytically how your audience behaves. With certain features and Google analytics, you can be able to analyze the bounce-back rate in terms of the number of visitors who visit your site but fail to listen to your podcasts. A higher bounce back rate would, for example, advise you accordingly or certain changes that you need to incorporate in your content development among other necessary improvements.
You will also be able to gauge additional statistics as relates to your audiences such as the number of visitors who visit your site from time to time and their relative locations. Such information is particularly important when it comes to helping commercialize your podcasting by obtaining sponsors and marketers to work with you. It also advises you on measures you need to incorporate as regards marketing your channel to improve on your audience base.
7. Compete successfully
As a podcaster, competition is perhaps one of the vicious forces that drive your market. Podcasters struggle to establish a niche and wide audience base which is particularly necessary when it comes to establishing a good profile that can be trusted by sponsors. Most podcasters, however, tend to use the traditional way or creating podcasting channels where they can post their podcasts as the only channel of communication with their audience.
Seeking to go a step further and creating a site for yourself gives you a competitive edge over other podcasters in the market. Such a competitive edge is highly necessary in helping keep you ahead of competition as you will have an easy time to stand out of your competitors. To achieve this, you need to, among other things, create a unique but simple site that is not only authentic but also attractive enough to retain internet audience.
8. Expand your vision
Having a site for your podcasting channel can also help you expand your vision from simply podcasting to other channels of communication such as blogging or ecommerce. The expanded vision for your channel ensures you can survive in the long term by giving your audience reason to continue trusting and maintaining their loyalty to you.
In conclusion, being a successful podcaster requires much effort, with an emphasis being put on content development and channels of reaching out to your audience. With competition a necessary force that can either push you to success or eliminate you from relevance, you need to think of revolutionary ideas that would help boost your reputation in the market. Creating a site is one of the relevant opportunities you have to ensure your market presence is significantly boosted. The additional benefits that come with having a site for your podcasting channel including the ease of being tracked by internet users through search engine optimization ensure that you can succeed in the long run. With a well-created website, you undoubtedly stand a better chance of becoming a successful podcaster.
