PLA Blog

Christopher Penn, the madman behind the PodCamp unconference, speaks about marketing a podcast once you have it. The value of this presentation is not just in the marketing information for a podcast, but the importance of social networking to the future of marketing, especially viral marketing, and how libraries should definitely be thinking about reaching the web market at multiple age levels.

Here’s the quick and dirty on how to market your podcast:

• First things first, make sure to search optimize your site. Make sure your name, or at least a few keywords on your show, is in the <TITLE> tag, list your site with search engines that accept site registrations or in directories. Your site for your podcast needs to be as searchable, indexable, and search-relevant as possible, so that when anyone types in your
• Keep your content as close to you as possible, and offer direct links to your content are key. Try to avoid second-party feed hosts (Yahoo! Podcasts is apparently notorious for fouling up podcasts, losing episodes, etc.) Hosting your own content, then creating feeds to that content allows you to keep a handle on the content as well as get better statistics.
• Create as many access points to your content as possible by creating as many accounts on as many social networking sites as possible, from LiveJournal to MySpace to Xanga to Facebook to Second Life. Provide linkage back to your content and feed, as well as adding the coding for in-page players.
• Create calls to action in your text as well as in your audio. Make sure your content feed and player are “above the fold” on your page, imbed a player so that people can click and listen, allow options for email subscription and email a friend. Also, in the audio of your podcast, tell people how to download iTunes or your podcast player/aggregator of choice and subscribe.
• Make your listeners evangelists by making it easy to let them pass the viral word along about your podcast. You can record little promos that other podcasters can use in their broadcasts, you can do interviews with anyone who wants to talk to you.
• MySpace, MySpace, MySpace. Books and book groups are *huge* on MySpace right now. Creating a profile that mirrors a few important bits of your podcast site, add the web-based player to your page as well as iTunes and direct links to your feed, and add friends like crazy. It does require a bit of homework, spending time in Groups on MySpace to add as friends to push your content to, but it’s a huge marketing boon for podcasters.

While these tips are podcast advertising oriented, I’d say this is a good way for libraries to start thinking about advertising what the library can do for people, especially for people who wouldn’t normally think to use or visit the library.

Tags: marketing, outreach, PLA Blog, PodCamp Boston, podcasting, technology

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 10:47 am and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.