How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

There’s an old saying: 

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? 

Something similar can be said about podcasts. If you have amazing podcast content that you pour your heart and soul into and nobody downloads it, does it make a sound? Great content should always come first, but knowing how to get your podcast out there is just as important. Growing your podcast means not only just increasing your downloads, but also building (and engaging with) a loyal fanbase.

 As your podcast grows, you steadily increase your ability to gain awareness with each new episode. By exploring other avenues of exposure, you’re able to increase your reach, your distribution, and ultimately, your audience. 

We’ll look at how to grow your podcast through the benefits of using podcast search optimization correctly, leveraging video content, engaging with your audience, making your content widely available, measuring results, and more. Let’s get started.

Before You Start: Know Your Listenership

You’ll hear it a million times, from everyone in business and marketing, you need to know your audience. While the idea of casting a wide net might sound enticing, thinking you’ll gather more listens, the opposite is actually true. 

You want to create your podcast and the content of every episode with your key audience in mind. Who are you making this content for? And frankly, why should they listen?

Find out exactly who will be interested in your content. Then every time you record make sure what you are putting out there is providing value to your listeners. 

Further Reading: Defining Your Ideal Listener

First Step to Grow Your Podcast: Be Discoverable

Before your podcast can grow, it needs to be found. Your show has to be discoverable. What does that mean?

Make sure it appears to those who are searching. Now, that means both ensuring you are creating content that your audience is looking for, but also being in places they are looking.

Make sure your podcast is listed in all the directories and players where listeners might find you. 

This distribution guide lists the top podcast directories to ensure you’re in all the right places. This list is far from exhaustive, but it’s more than enough to get started. Besides, directories that aren’t featured on the list above are unlikely to make any material difference to your download numbers.

Don’t Skip Out On YouTube

YouTube is now the second-largest search engine,. You could upload audio-only, by posting the podcast episode on top of a static image. And if this is all that your bandwidth and budget allow at the moment, it’s better to be on YouTube than not.

Podcast hosts like Transistor make it easy to do by connecting an RSS Feed.
But, if you do decide to upload your podcast to YouTube, investing in video podcasting is well worth it. It can increase your discoverability, and increase your engagement. 

While it does make for a much more complicated production process, it’s a great vehicle for creating shorter clips and stackable (or even clickbait-y) content for social.

We are seeing more and more video podcasts that are spawning off second channels that feature nothing but clips and highlights. And the viewership numbers for that extra content speaks for itself. The JRE Clips channel has over 3 million subscribers, the H3 Podcast Highlights channel is at nearly 1.5 million, to mention just two examples.
We’d also recommend creating a dedicated podcast channel. It’s a great place to share behind-the-scenes and other bonus material in addition to your main episodes.

Tap Into Podcast SEO

Another step to discoverability, if you want to grow your podcast you should make sure it appears in searches. No matter what your budget is for growing your podcast, it’s worth spending the time to get your SEO dialed in.  By Podcast SEO, we actually mean podcast search optimization, on platform. This can take some time investment to begin with, but once the groundwork is in place you’ll be able to steadily grow your following without too much work.

Optimize Your Show and Episodes for Podcast Platforms

By now podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify act as mini search engines. They crawl through the content provided to see if your show is a relevant result for the user searching.
That’s why it’s so important to keep SEO in mind when writing your show description and show notes. 

For starters, you need to choose keywords around the topic of your show, and then individual episode. You’ll want to aim for a mix of large and small keywords. Niche can work in your favor, but overall just make sure it is relevant. For example “True Crime” is a broad keyword, “financial crime” or “true crime in Canada” are more specific.

Take advantage of the space in your show notes to include relevant keywords, but also share compelling text to entice listeners to press play, and share any resources named in the episode.

It doesn’t have to stop there. You can get a ton of benefits from SEO traffic if you take the time to repurpose your podcast episodes into long-form blog posts.

Take a key theme from the episode and write about it more in-depth. Bringing in additional expert input—internally or externally—to further enhance your story. This makes for great bonus material for those listeners who want to go deeper, while simultaneously benefiting your organic search traffic as well.

Create a Podcast Website

Creating a podcast website that’s optimized for user experience is an important part of marketing a podcast to new listeners. And when we say optimized for users, that means make sure it’s mobile-friendly. It can mean the difference between someone landing on your site and bouncing straight off again, or having them stick around and maybe even subscribing to your show. 

Now, this doesn’t have to necessarily be a separate website, if you have an effective one already in place for your brand. But you should make sure to at least have a podcast landing page linked to the homepage.  

When it comes to someone potentially listening to your podcast, you want to make the barrier to entry as low as possible. This is critical when you don’t have a ton of money to spend on paid channels, but it’s equally important when you’re running ad campaigns. The last thing you want is to waste those valuable page visitors.

Just like a sales landing page, your podcast homepage is a sales funnel. Instead of making a purchase, you want the site’s visitors to convert into podcast subscribers. You therefore need to look at your homepage design with the same level of scrutiny you would a marketing site for a product or service.

Should You Transcribe Your Podcast?

Transcribing your podcast helps both accessibility and podcast search engine optimization. Today many apps like Apple Podcasts will automatically transcribe your podcast, making it at least a bit easier on your end.  But if you want to ensure the language is correct, and the transcription hasn’t made any odd errors, you can submit your own. 

You should offer episode transcripts for accessibility reasons, since it gives deaf visitors the opportunity to enjoy a podcast by reading transcripts. It’s also suggested that transcripts are good for podcast SEO.

Collaborate with other Podcasters

When looking to grow your podcast, you should consider ways you can collaborate, rather than compete. Established or growing podcasts in your niche might be interested in sharing your knowledge. You could spread the word about your own show by either guesting on their show, or doing a feedswap.

Guesting on other shows lets you grow your thought leadership, and share your show. You should look for shows with overlapping or similar audiences to your own. Pitch them a great topic, and grab a spot on their show. Listeners already trust the host, so by aligning yourself with them, they’ll look to you as well.

Cross-promotion with other podcasts can take shape in a few different ways. Swap trailers or shoutouts with shows that have similar audiences. This is a super effective strategy and helps build relations within the industry. Feed swaps especially can help you reach a new audience, if you step slightly outside to an aligned, but not identical show audience. This involves featuring an episode of another show on your own podcast while they feature one of your episodes on theirs. By doing this, you can expose your podcast to a wider audience and potentially gain new subscribers.

Leverage Social Media for Podcast Growth

After being discoverable on podcast platforms and through SEO, the next channel to find listeners is social media. We do want to make it clear, social media can help build a community, but it won’t necessarily convert followers into listeners.  

Using these free outlets to promote your podcast seems no-brainer, but social media marketing is a world of its own. You’ll need a strategy in place to grab attention and spread the word of your show. Repurposing your podcast content for each platform in order to reach more people. What works on LinkedIn probably won’t work on Reddit.

Pull quotes from your episode and highlight surprising, inspiring, thought-provoking, or otherwise relevant snippets to use as bite-sized teasers to hook your followers.

Formatting them as plain text quotes and open questions encourages a dialogue that increases a post’s view count. However, most platforms are now pushing video content in their algorithms, so we’d recommend transforming these into video clips. 

Where is your community most active? Beyond popular social media channels, it could be relevant subreddits, old school forums, Discord or Slack communities. Get involved in conversations around the topic your episode covers, and link to your episode as a resource. These things might sound obvious, but the vast majority of podcasters aren’t doing these things.

If you’re active on YouTube, shorts might be a great way for you to attract new subscribers and lead people to your full episodes. 

Here’s a few other ways you could share your podcast and engage with your community on social media. 

Instagram Story Sharing

Instagram and podcasts haven’t always been the best mix. But by now podcasters are leveraging their Instagram following, and it’s common practice to use your profile for cross-promotion.

One great way to drive traffic straight from Instagram to your show is by sharing it from Spotify to your stories. You can add plenty of other engaging elements on these stories like polls, Q&A’s or small quizzes. Each one of these elements helps boost the story in Instagram's algorithm, and creates more dialogue with your audience.

Linking to Your Podcast on Social Media

This can be tricky. The person reading your carefully crafted video tweet could be on Android, so if it links to your show on Apple Podcasts it’s of no use to them and you’ve wasted their precious click!

You want to make the journey from reading a message on social media (or anywhere else for that matter) to listening to your podcast as simple as possible. It’s therefore important to have a way of linking to your show that works no matter what device the user is on, or whether they prefer to listen—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts, or anywhere else.

Our advice used to be to send the social traffic to your podcast website. That way, you can track your traffic, control the user journey, and give your audience all the options they need to listen wherever they prefer. But now, thanks to services like Linkfire, you can make one link that will open the show straight up in the user’s preferred podcast app. You can get even more detailed, and tightly control where the traffic is sent.  Awesome.

With trackable links, you’re in the best possible position to gauge attribution, which will inform your future social campaigns.

How to Grow your Podcast? Connect With Your Listeners

Fostering meaningful relationships with your most loyal listeners—your true fans—is especially important for the long-term growth of your podcast.

Setting up a place for your audience to have an open dialogue with you (and each other) is a great way to encourage engagement, get feedback on the content you're creating, develop new content ideas, and provide value outside of the confines of your podcast RSS feed.

Now on Spotify you can use the commenting feature to open up feedback and conversation with listeners. Even better at this is YouTube, which offers longer comments, and more interactivity amongst you and your listeners.
Just make sure you reply to comments, and interact beyond publishing your episode! These features open a conversation with your listeners, not just a one-way chat.

Beyond podcast platforms–Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Slack channels, or even good old forums, are all great ways to give your listeners a platform to communicate with you and one another.

Call-Ins and Questions From the Audience

Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo is a great example of using listener interaction to increase engagement and directly respond to his listeners' thoughts and questions. Consider doing something similar.

Using a service like SpeakPipe, you can easily add this functionality to your website to make it easy for listeners to record and submit their questions to your show.

Keep in mind though, that this is only worth something if you actually respond to your audience’s questions and comments. People want to know they’ve been heard. If they feel like they haven’t, there’s a good chance they’ll go in search of another podcast to listen to.

Promoting Your Podcast With Paid Campaigns

While the ways to grow your podcast we have mentioned above can largely be done with little to no budget, there’s something to be said about investing in ad promotion. But you’ve got to do it strategically. 

The most effective targeted campaigns are via other podcasts. You could, in theory, argue for paid promotion on social media, but it may not be as effective as you think. While social media can be great for getting followers there and raising awareness, there’s less of a guarantee these will convert to actual listeners. Promoting directly on podcast platforms means your audience can click to subscribe or listen right away.

You can use your relations with other podcasters to get host-read ads. These involve a clip of the host themselves recommending your show. They are most valuable as listeners trust the host, and are more inspired to check out your show.

Alternatively, you can produce your own ad snippet to insert with programmatic ads. You can use an ad service to find shows with audiences similar to yours. This means you are directly talking to who you want to convert, and it might be the best investment.

Further Reading: How to Advertise Your Podcast

Measure Your Results

With so many ways to promote your podcast, it’s important to measure the results to find out what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re just tossing out promotions and seeing your numbers go up, it’s time to start measuring and optimizing.

By leaning into what’s driving results—and away from the things that take up resources without accomplishing all that much—you’ll be able to exponentially increase how effective your podcast growth strategy is. Before you can interpret the data, you’ve got to gather it.

Where to Find Podcast Analytics

Apple Podcast Connect and Spotify offer information on the engagement and consumption of your episodes. This is useful data to let you know which episodes are resonating most, which segments are being skipped, or where you’re losing listeners. These platform-specific stats only tell part of the story, but they’re a solid starting point.

Combining this information with the data from your podcast hosting platform can inform how you structure your episodes, what kind of content to double down on, and what to cut.

Your media host will also show where your listeners are based, what time of day or week they usually listen, and what device they’re using. This helps you understand how your show is being consumed, which can impact both your content and your promotion strategy.

If you're running a campaign to grow your audience, tools like Linkfire, Podtrac, or Swap.fm can help track how many downloads your marketing efforts are generating. Think of these as conversion tools—they show how many people clicked “download” after seeing your campaign. It’s a great way to measure how effective your outreach actually was.

But downloads are only one part of the picture.

To see how many people actually hit play, you’ll want to look at verified listeners from Apple and Spotify. That tells you who went from just downloading the episode to actually listening to it.

Then, to figure out whether people liked what they heard, check your average completion rates. If listeners are dropping off early, that could mean a couple things: either the show needs some quality improvements, or your campaign is attracting the wrong audience.

If you’d like to see the results of your podcast search optimization, Ausha PSO is a great tool to track visibility. You can use it as a workspace to track your keyword and edit your show notes.

Another source of analytics is your podcast’s website. Podcast tracking and analytics can be broad, and not really let you dial in specifics about each listener. However, combining your podcast data with data from Google Analytics (or another web analytics service) can help you paint a clearer picture.

Putting the Data to Work

Podcast analytics aren’t always as in-depth as we would like them to be, and there are some traps to look out for to make sure you aren’t forming false conclusions.

For example, if you're only looking at data from your website, it’s easy to assume those behaviors reflect your whole audience. But listeners who visit websites for podcasts might behave very differently from those who discover your show through an app. Use that data, but don’t overgeneralize it.

Tracking the ROI of your podcast can also be tricky. Brand podcasts don’t necessarily need tips on monetization, but they want to look at the big picture. Focus less on direct conversions and more on long-term value—things like relationships with your audience, trust, and brand awareness.

And if you want to go deeper into podcast ROI, we recommend checking out this blog.

Final Thoughts on Growing Your Podcast

No matter where you’re posting your podcast, you’ve got to respect the platform. 

It takes a bit more time and effort to learn and understand the nuances, but if a platform is worth pursuing in the interests of podcast growth, then it’s worth doing right.

Now that you’ve studied up on how to grow a podcast audience, it’s time to get to work. There's no getting around it. If you’re serious about learning how to get more podcast listeners, you'll need to put in the hours to make that happen. The good news is that it doesn't all have to be done in a day (or even a week).

Before you know it you'll have a steadily growing podcast with engaged listeners who keep coming back for more.