Sean Reiser

Recently, on Craigslist, there was a post looking from some new podcasters looking for someone to promote their podcast for them. I wrote them the following email while I felt might be of interest to the world at large. BTW, you can replace podcast with blog, twitter, or anything else and I feel a lot of the advice here will work for you.

Saw your post on Craigslist and got to thinking about the best way I can help you.
I'm a technologist who's rather active in the social media and I have been watching the podcasting community since it started. Over the years I've gotten to know a number of podcasters personally and have watched them grow their brands into sucesses amd failures. Where I don't have the talent to actually appear on a podcast I have learned things from them.

1) Have you done 10 podcasts yet? If not then don't worry about promoting them yet. As a wise man first said "Your first podcast is crap, your second is better but it's still crap". That's not a reflection on you, persay. You're still figuring out how not to step on each other when you talk, how close to the microphone to sit, and what compression settings to use. You're adding and deleting segments and just trying to figure out what your podcast is about and what it's format is. You don't want to start any sort of push until you've doped that all out.

2) I know you say you don't "understand blogs or podcasts" but I assume you are posting your podcasts someplace every week. If not you might want to take a look at libsyn (http://www.libsyn.com/). The price is reasonable (most folks get away with the 5 bucks a month plan) and you really don't need to understand how podcasting works to post your podcast. They also make the process of submitting your podcast to directories like iTunes easy.

3) No one can promote your podcast better then you. I assume your podcast has a specific genre and that you're active in the community for that genre. Whether it's the Yankees, a Science Fiction Show or Knitting, I assume you comment on blogs and post in forums. You should make sure your signature says something like "Check out my podcast at " and wherever one can find the podcast. Reach out to those site owners and ask for a link.

4) I know you're concerned about getting word out about your podcast via twitter and social networking but take advantage of the networks you already have first. Building a network at the same time you're building spreading the word about your podcast is hard. Reach out the to networks you've already established and worry about twitter later.

5) I assume you listen to other related podcasts. Cut a promo (30 secs or so) and ask those podcasters to run the promo (offer to run their promo in return). If you're not listening to related podcasts you should be.

6) You should also be including the link in the signature line of your emails (take a look down at my .SIG; 2 of my blogs and my company site are listed there).

7) Meet other podcasters. Check out meetup.com for when the podcasting meetups in NYC area. If you want to be a podcaster, be around other podcasters, they are gennerally friendly folks who freely share their knowedge. Have cards with you with your email and a link to your podcast.

8) Always remember this is about having fun.

In closing, I remember something that Evo Terra once told me while he was in town. We were discussing generating blog and podcast traffic. At the time I was getting around 50 hits a day on my blog and I was dejected that I was never going to break past that. As close as I can remember he said "Sean, if you were giving a lecture series at a local library and every week 50 people showed up to listen to you talk, you'd be estatic. Why is this different?". Over time my numbers went up, but it takes time.