How to Start a Podcast With No Audience

Today, we are going to go over something that a lot of people struggle with. We are going to attempt to give some guidance to make things a lot easier and more achievable! This blog post will be about how to start a podcast with no audience. Bringing in a new audience can seem like a daunting and hard to achieve goal. To help, are a few tips to give you a better start!

Tip 1 for How to Start a Podcast With no Audience: Keyword Research

 In our experience, this is the most important step in starting a podcast and growing your audience. We covered this a little bit in our article about starting a podcast: How To Start a Podcast - Stock Music Central

In this blog post we are going to go over it more extensively. Taking the time to do this sort of research can do a few different things for your project. These are:

• Helping you Find a popular topic to podcast about.
• Showing you the possible interest level in your chosen topic.
• Giving you valuable insight about what your potential listeners want you to talk about.

 To get started, we will post some of the available keyword research tools, free and paid!

Wordstream: This is a free and valuable keyword tool and can be found at this link: Free Keyword Tool | WordStream

Mangools: This keyword tool, using the most affordable plan, will be about 29 dollars a month, but you'll also get other valuable SEO tools with it and in our experience is fantastic! It will even show you who is ranking for the keywords that you look up. They have a few option. You can get started at this link: Free & Juicy SEO Tools You Will Love | Mangools

Ahrefs: This option is a very detailed SEO tool and will give you a lot more than just a powerful keyword tool. In our opinion it's worth it because you can get a lot of valuable insight into your competitors! They also have a free option. You can find their link here: Ahrefs - SEO Tools & Resources To Grow Your Search Traffic

 

How to Use These Tools

For this lesson, we are going to be demonstrating how to use a keyword finder. To start, we'll pick a general podcast topic and break down how the keyword tool works. We will use home fitness as an example topic. We will think of several keywords for the topic of home fitness. These will be what we believe may be effective for building an audience. The first one will be fitness equipment. All we need to do is enter it into the search box for the tool and let it do its thing.

Now let's look at the results of the keyword search. First, we'll break down the sorts of information columns that come with these tools. There's the number of monthly searches, that's pretty straight forward, and the next one we will want to use is the competition column. This will tell you how hard it is going to be to rank your podcast well for a that keyword on search engines.

In our search, quite a few keywords have come up! Many having a six digit monthly search count. This is good, but there are two other factors besides monthly searches that we have to take into account to pick effective keywords for our podcast. These are competition, and search intent.

Picking Keywords to Build Your Podcast Audience

If we take our top keyword, treadmill, and look over at the far right column, we can see that it has high competition. This means that a lot of other websites, YouTube videos, and other things like that, are using this keyword. This is going to make it much harder to rank in a good spot and it will take longer.

In order to start a podcast with no audience, you are going to want to go with a less competitive keyword. You can often find keywords that are close to the one you want a have less competition!

Let's also take a look at the keyword treadmills on the web. This is to get an idea of what the usual search intent of most people is. Web browsers do a good job of knowing what the intent is and showing the results that match the users intent in the top ranks. 

Almost every result that has come up is an online store where you can buy treadmills. If e-commerce is one of the goals of your podcast then this is ideal. Let's say we're going to be doing things more along the lines of reviewing equipment, talking about exercises for them, talking about safe usage, and other things like that. We aren't likely going to be selling them with this podcast. In that case, this is the wrong keyword to use.

If we aren't selling them, we aren't meeting the search intent for treadmills. So, because the competition is high, and because we aren't meeting intent, we need to refine our keyword search a little more.

Refine Your Search Terms

Often times you will find a better keyword on the list brought by the first search. If you aren't seeing anything that works, then refine your search by using long tail keywords. We will try "how to use a treadmill." For our podcast, this one sounds a lot more geared towards our content. That's a very important step, thinking of a keyword to research that is more relatable to your intended content subject! 

This one has brought up some good ones. Our entry of how to use a treadmill is the first one that comes up. It has high search traffic and a medium competition rating. The next one is "how to use a treadmill for beginners" and has decent search traffic with low competition. This in itself can be an entire podcast episode! The interest from potential listeners is there and there potentially aren't many people talking about it.

Let's continue to see what we can find. The next keyword is how to use a treadmill for weight loss. Here we have another potential episode, or you can even use it as a subject in the beginner episode that we just talked about. 

Now we can see how useful keyword research tools are, even for starting a podcast with no audience!

Tip 2 for How to Start A Podcast With No Audience: Research Other Podcasts 

Another great way to get started is by researching other podcasts that use your chosen subject matter. Start by finding the most popular ones. Listen to a few episodes of each and take note of what they do and how they do it. You don't have to copy them, but this will give you an idea of what sort of content works. For example, are they using a more relaxed conversation style or are they a high energy informational style? This is a great way to find out what styles of content will attract and interest potential viewers and listeners in your subject matter! 

Take note of these popular podcasts and subscribe to them. Once you get your first few episodes going, some of these popular podcasters may be interested in collaborating with you! This will be a major step in helping you attract an audience! Since they are already popular, they'll have more listeners. These listeners potentially will become fans of yours as well! This is a great way to get a lot of exposure when you are first starting out! 

You may also benefit from observing the way they interact with their listeners! Engaging content that encourages listener interaction will boost the enjoyment of your podcast! This will boost your number of listeners because if they're enjoying themselves, they'll tell others who also enjoy your subject matter! Watching what the podcasters that have been doing it for a while do for this is a great way to learn what works.

Tip 3 for How to Start a Podcast With no Audience: Advertising 

Gone are they days when advertising would cost an arm and a leg. These days you can advertise your podcast effectively at a relatively low cost! You can do this multiple ways including:

• Social Media Influencers
• Advertising Platforms like Google Ads

Social media influencers are a great option for advertising your podcast! They are relatively easy to find and normally are very easy to contact and get set up with. All you have to do is look up accounts in your niche that have a high number of followers. Often times they will have a short message in their profile about dming them to talk about advertising.

Using advertising platforms like google ads is another great option for pulling in listeners! With their in depth ad customization features, you can set up your ads to pull in the right crowd! The great thing is that these ads are usually very affordable! If you use the right search terms and write your ad copy well, you'll often get high interest traffic!

We will continue to add tips about how to start a podcast with no audience to this page regularly so be sure to check back for more!