How to Make Your Podcast Stand Out

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In 2010, I launched a podcast in a seemingly already-saturated market. One year later, that podcast enabled me to leave my full-time job, where I had been for 10 years, and launch my own company. Two years later, that podcast was nominated for and won the international podcast award for best technology podcast of 2012. To this day, The Audacity to Podcast remains the only award-winning podcast (“Best Technology Podcast”) in its now even-more-heavily saturated niche. This podcast stands out.

In 2012, I launched a podcast for a new TV show. Mine wasn’t the first. In fact, we were late to the party. But we soon rose to the top of our field and gained the respect of our “competitors.” To this day, ONCE podcast remains the only award-nominated podcast for ABC’s TV show Once Upon a Time (three-time finalist for “Best Produced Podcast,” “Best Entertainment Podcast,” and “Best TV & Film Podcast”), and we dominate relevant searches.

Do you want more?

You're watching this because you want more from your podcast: more listeners, more viewers, more money, more relationships, more business, more respect, more trust, more authority, and more “more”!

That’s all attainable! But the truth is that getting more requires giving more. This is often hard work, but it’s totally worth it!

This may be a lot of “I know I should, but …” kind of stuff. But you need to get off your “but” and just do this stuff! You don’t have to do all of it. Do what you can, and you’ll quickly be on your way to standing out.

1. More quality

In 2010, Steve Jobs lumped podcasting under the label of “amateur hour.” Of the more than 300,000 podcasts now in iTunes, most of them have ceased or are of horribly low quality. It’s not hard to stand out with more quality.

Serial is heralded as a huge success in podcasting and it’s no surprise. They spent nearly a year with a whole team to plan, prepare, produce, and promote their show, and their investment paid off. You don’t have to have a whole team to help you stand out, you just need to give more quality in these five cornerstones of a great podcast.

Content

People get on the Internet to be either helped or entertained. Thus, the best content you can make for your podcast will be either helpful or entertaining. Your goal should be to make content so good, that your audience will want to tell others about it. After all, people usually come because of the content, but they stay for the connection.

Presentation

Communicate your content clearly, concisely, and confidently! You may have the best content in the world, but if you don’t present it well, your audience won’t benefit much from your podcast.

Production

Your production should enhance the presentation of your content. Don’t edit to perfect; edit to enhance and remove distractions.

Tools and tips for improving your production quality

Audio will always be the most important production quality—for audio or video podcasts—because this is how your audience will receive the presentation of your content.

Thus, consider your “audio chain” for improving the quality of your audio: microphone > preamp and/or mixer > recorder.

Here’s some inexpensive audio podcasting gear for good audio quality.

Here’s some premium audio podcasting gear for great audio quality and greater flexibility.

Video gets more complex and more expensive. But remember that your audio quality is always most important. For video, the second important quality is lighting. The actual camera you use is third.

Here’s some inexpensive video podcasting gear that produces good quality

To make even better videos, consider this premium video podcasting gear for great quality.

Don’t get stuck worrying about the tech of your production. Get what works well and learn how to use it well.

Promotion

Don’t wait to stumbled upon. Proactively work to make your podcast more visible and rank higher. Spend some time or money to promote to your ideal audience.

Word of mouth is the most powerful form marketing. So always look for ways to leverage your existing relationships to grow your audience.

Build trust with your potential audience where they are before you invite them to your place.

Profit

Don’t think profit is only about money. Profit should be synonymous with purpose. Why are you podcasting? What do you want to get from your podcast? What do you want your audience to get from it?

Create more quality than others, and your podcast will stand out

2. More content

Dumping a lot of content onto the Internet isn’t always helpful. It’s consistently published, high-quality content that will help you grow your platform and stand out above the rest over time.

More content doesn’t have to mean doubling, tripling, or even higher. It could be “bonus,” alternative-form content, such as a short answer to feedback, short review, etc.

Here are some areas where you could focus on creating more content.

Podcast episodes

If you publish whenever you get around to it, try publishing at least monthly. If you’re monthly, try biweekly. If you’re biweekly, try weekly. If you’re weekly, try semiweekly. If you’re semiweekly, try daily. If you’re daily, you could go crazy and try twice a day. If you’re twice a day, try getting a life!

These additional podcast episodes don’t have to be “full, normal” episodes. One episode could be your usual length and content, and the other could be shorter. For example, on Monday, you publish the hour-long episode. On Thursday or Friday, you publish a 5-minute episode.

Blog posts

I think all podcasters should also be blogging—if nothing else, making a blog post from your podcast show notes.

Try blogging between podcast episodes. This doesn’t have to be a lot of content. It could be any sort of short-form content. You can even reuse this content in your podcast!

Videos

Most podcasts are audio. But try to make video sometime! Video is highly shareable, engaging, and works best in short form—why not do it?

Your video could be live (such as with YouTube, Facebook, Periscope, or similar) or prerecorded.

All video should be on YouTube, this also helps your podcast SEO. You should also try uploading as native video to Twitter and Facebook.

Again, this doesn’t have to be long. In fact, short video is best for everyone!

Email

Building an email list is a common way to grow your business. It’s also a great way to strengthen your relationships with your audience. Your email newsletter could be a small tip, resources you found, a peak behind the scenes, and more. Email calls to action are often more actionable than podcast calls to action.

Listen to “13 Ways to Use an Email List for Your Podcast” for more ideas.

Social posts

“Be everywhere” is a great policy, but it may be impossible. I think that you should try to be everywhere you can be well. My top recommendations can be easily remembered with this little insult: YouTwitFace—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. However, there are plenty of other worthy networks for engaging: Pinterest, Reddit, forums, Snapchat, Clammr, and more.

I recommend that you post at least twice per week on all platforms. But at least once per day is best. Twitter content can be repeated and you can post several times per day on Twitter. Try to keep things varied if you’re repeating links.

Publish more content than others, and your podcast will stand out

3. More humanity

Podcasts are very social and even intimate. They are typically consumed by an individual human at a time. Thus, you’re speaking directly to that one person, often in places and at times where no one else is welcome.

Embrace this human side of the podcast! You can be more human than the “podcasting machines” of major broadcasters.

Personality

You’re using your voice to communicate. That is instantly more personal.

Remember to address the audience as a person. You’re speaking to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people one person at a time. Use “you” instead of “all of you.”

Authenticity

Be true to yourself and don’t try to be like someone else. People will relate more if you are authentic.

This doesn’t mean you have to tell about your personal life or allow mistakes because you’re “just being authentic.” This is more about being honest with yourself and your audience, and perhaps limiting your transparency.

Emotion

Don’t be afraid to show joy, anger, disappointment, fear, and other emotions. This does make you more vulnerable, and people will connect more deeply with you because of it.

Give more humanity and your podcast will stand out.

4. More interaction

Be easy to contact

If your email address on your site is, “podcast [ a t ] gmail [ dot ] com,” you’re telling your audience that you don’t really want to hear from them!

The burden of protecting yourself from spam should be on you, not on your audience. If you have a WordPress website, use a plugin like CryptX to encrypt your email address. Thus, you can make it easy for humans, not easy for bots and spammers.

Start conversations

Get your audience involved. Ask them questions. Request their feedback. Answer their questions.

Turn your audience into a community

When you have passionate fans trying to interact with you, they could be eager to interact with each other.

Consider opening comments on your site, hosting live chats, creating a forum or social-network groups, etc. These let your fans start their own conversations and build relationships with each other. This makes them feel more at home and more loyal.

Read more about this in Tribes by Seth Godin.

Go where your (potential) audience is

Don’t wait for an audience to come to you, go out to them! Find the places your audience (and potential audience) hangs out and interact there.

Consider Facebook groups, Google+ communities, Subreddits, forums, hashtags, etc. Don’t go just to spam with your own content. Go to engage and build a reputation.

Work with your “competition”

Yes, this is very controversial, especially if you’re in a business. Work from the perspective of abundance, not scarcity.

Find ways to to collaborate and even support your “competition,” so that you’re not acting like rivals.

Sometimes, this means just “being the better man/woman.”

When you give more interaction your podcast will stand out.

5. More search-engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is about optimizing your content for humans, not for machines.

I have a whole course on SEO for Podcasters that goes into this in great detail.  But here are the most important things for you to know.

Create content for humans

Don’t spam your content with keywords. Remember that you must appeal to humans.

The #1 spot in Google is worthless if it doesn’t interest humans. Google algorithms are increasing their human imitation, so focus on make things that humans would actually want.

Write great titles

Titles are the most important text on the web. They are visible in searches, podcasts, and social-shares. A great title can pull people in, but a bad title will not attract any attention.

Avoid front-loaded patterns

Front-loaded patterns are anything that repeat episode after episode. This could be in your titles, “My Awesome Podcast – Episode # …” or in your show notes and descriptions, “In this episode, …”

These patterns waste space. Make your first few words unique to each episode—even your spoken words in the podcast!

Learn the tools

Most “advanced SEO” simply involves knowing the tools you probably already have.

If you’re running a WordPress website, the two best plugins for podcast SEO are Yoast SEO and PowerPress by Blubrry.

I cover these tools and a lot more in my complete SEO for Podcasters video training.

Make your podcast more findable with SEO and your podcast will stand out.

6. More design

Design is more than visual, it’s also about flow, format, and funnels. Each of these should be designed for the best “user” experience.

Podcast cover art

Text-based SEO helps your podcast to show up in search results. But in iTunes, your cover art will then take over as being the biggest opportunity to stand out above others.

Listen to this episode to learn more about making great podcast cover art.

If you need high-quality cover art designed for you, try 99designs.

I strongly recommend against hiring a “designer” from Fiverr if you want a quality, legal result.

Website design

Podcast consumption should be as easy as “visit website; press play.” Toward this end, I highly recommend the following WordPress theme providers.

Design enhances the content and can help visitors more quickly get to the content or hook them into digging deeper.

I also recommend my own Social Subscribe & Follow Icons plugin for WordPress to get attractive, scalable, versatile buttons and icons on your site for people to subscribe to your podcast.

Listen to these episodes to learn more about great website design.

Experience

How is the overall experience of your podcast? Have you designed it to be rigid and radio-like, or more personal and organic?

Design the “experience” of your podcast so that your audience will feel comfortable enough to stick around.

Give more and better design and your podcast will stand out!

7. More niche

It's very difficult to succeed with a general podcast. You have to have a lot of leverage and marketing. But there's greater power in “niching down.”

Less competition

You can be the #1 podcast in your niche by creating your own niche.

More influence

Niching down causes your audience to be even more committed to the topic. That gives you a lot more influence over a smaller group of people.

8. More broken rules

Now that you know these “rules,” break them!

There really are no “rules” in podcasting, only “guidelines.” Sometimes, you’ll succeed by following the rules more than anyone else. Sometimes, you’ll succeed by breaking them more than anyone else.

Intention

Breaking the rules unintentionally is called an accident. So if you’re going to break the rules, break them intentionally.

Reason

If you’re going to break the rules, have a good reason for doing so. Laziness is not a good reason.

Break rules with a purpose and your podcast will stand out.

Getting more from your podcast is about giving more!