How to Grow a Podcast Audience Using Content Amplification

[Dani Timor is Co-Founder and CEO of Podcast Israel Media, the creators of Curious Minds, a podcast about science, technology, and history.]

We in the podcast industry are fortunate. We have tons of content — interesting content of a sort that a typical company would kill for.

But if you haven’t noticed, podcasting is exploding. There are thousands of other audio creators producing great podcasts every day. How are future loyal listeners supposed to find you in the first place? Without much metadata surrounding an audio file, SEO is an uphill battle.

The other thing that’s exploding, is content marketing. So we did some research and decided to commit to a content marketing strategy. A strategy that includes content discovery campaigns using Outbrain.

For us podcasters, who were used to people finding out about us through cross-promotion on other podcasts, Outbrain wasn’t immediately intuitive. Will people who are reading an article on CNN be interested in receiving a recommendation for a podcast? If they click, will they convert to actually listening to an episode, when in that type of content consumption mode?

So the short answer is Yes, the longer answer… YEEESSSSS!!! It worked extremely well!

We experienced an astounding 2:1 download rate, meaning that every click on the recommendation converted to two downloads. We then saw additional episode downloads, newsletter, and RSS subscriptions grow drastically.

Outbrain generated massive traffic with a very high CTR – in some points higher than 0.5%, much more efficient and a tenth of the price of social networks and search engine campaigns we ran.

Here’s a look at our episode download graph, after running with Outbrain for six months.

Recently we made Blogtalk Radio’s Prime list. My co-founder and host of our Curious Minds podcast, Ran Levi, had this to say about our experience with Outbrain:

“When Growing the number of listeners to our podcast, Outbrain performs far better than any other paid marketing channel.”

Make sure you pay attention to the following tips when running your Outbrain campaign for your podcast. These helped us out a lot.

Tips for Optimizing Your Podcast for Content Discovery

1. Make sure that the headlines you use in your Outbrain campaign indicate that the content is a podcast or audio file – “ What was Genghis Khan’s real conquest? (Audio).”

2. Use questions as headlines – “Did you know that LSD is classified as more dangerous than cocaine? (Audio).”

3. Use eye-catching photos or graphics but make sure it’s relevant to the podcast. Clickbait never delivers the desired results.

4. Publish your episode script or at least a summary of the episode below the audio file. – People do want to understand what they are about to listen to.

5. Make sure that the audio player stands out on the page.

6. Put some links to other episodes or embed a few episodes, so the visitor has the opportunity to discover more. Remember, they’re in content discovery mode. What are they going to listen to next?

I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you’re in New York next week, we are telling our growth story at the Outbrain office on Monday, July 11th.