I was listening to the Book Feed the Muscle Burn the Fat and he relayed the story of a man at a Tony Robbins event (Tony is a major Business Guru). He told Tony that he had done EVERYTHING to grow his audience. Since he had tried everything Tony asked him, "Tell me the last 100 things you've tried." To this, the man answered, "Well I haven't tried 100 things." Tony then stated, "Then tell me the last 50 things." The man replied, "I haven't tried 50 things" Tony replied, "Then tell me the last 10 things you've tried." It turned out the man had tried about four things. We think we've tried everything, but there are more ways to connect with your audience, many of them that require just a little bit of time to setup up some technology. Today we need to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, "Have I really done everything I can to promote my show, connect with my audience, and increase my reach? I think if we look deep into our hearts we know there is more. Here Is The Low Hanging Fruit Social media: You should be promoting your show on the social media channels. There are plugins such as social warfare. There are automation tools like Social Jukebox. Media hosts like Spreaker and Blubrry will publish your audio file as a video on YouTube. Spreaker will tweet out about your episode. Blubrry will create a sample of your show to tweet out and paste on Facebook. Libsyn will post to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, iHeart Radio, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr. Podcast Directories: There are four main directories you should be listed in. Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes), Stitcher, TuneIn, and Google Play Music. Do You Have Subscribe Buttons On Your Site? One way to keep your numbers going up is to get people to subscribe. This includes buttons for ANDROID. Subscribeonandroid.com is a free site from blubrry where you can point people to that site (using your RSS feed) and if they don't have any apps to subscribe they will be prompted to download one. My friend Daniel J Lewis has a great plugin call Social Subscribe and Follow that creates amazing looking subscribe buttons Do You Have Share Buttons on Your Website? There are plugins (again I love social Warfare) that make it easy for your audience to tweet out your show. There are players like the coolcast player, the Smart Podcast Player, the Simple Podcast Press player. Don't get hung up too much on players as 80% of people are listening on on portable devices. With that said, can people share your episodes from their phone? Local Meetups I've had three people sign up for the School of Podcasting and I got to be on TV all from meeting local podcasters in Ohio. If you don't have a local meetup, do what I did. I created one. In the words of my friend Glenn "the Geek" Hebert, it's not who you know, it's who knows you. Check it out at www.meetup.com I run a local podcasters group for Northeast Ohio www.neohiopodcasters.com Reach Out to Other Similar Podcasts Some of my best friends are my "Competition." Daniel J. Lewis from the Audacity to Podcast, Ray Ortega who does the Podcasters Studio, Mike Dell works for Blubrry and does the Podcast Help Desk, there are others as well. Reach out to them and see if they'd like to co-host an episode or a segment, or be interviewed, or... or ... or.. Remember there really isn't any competition in podcasting. They can listen to you on Monday and your competition on another day of the week. It's not like radio where you are both on at the exact same time. Reach out to Businesses? If I did a show about weddings, I would reach out to every dress shop in the area and see if I could put some CDs at the check out for exchange for a link to their site, or a mention in the show. Go Record People at Events You can get a portable recorder for as little as $99 for the Zoom H1 or just use your phone. Then give these people your business card, and tell them they will be on a future episode. You do have business cards right? There are...
