Make sure you're in these 5 podcast directories

Imagine you're having a conversation with a friend over the holidays. You're catching up and you tell them about your podcast and they're like, wow, that is awesome. How do I listen to it? And you tell them, oh, just subscribe at Apple podcasts. One problem. They have an android. You don't want that to happen to you. You want to make your podcast as easy to find and listen to as possible. Now, you don't need to submit your podcast to every directory in player just five.

If you get into the five we're going to talk about in this episode, you'll be set, and I'm going to go through these in order of importance. All right , so the number one most important podcast directory that you need to make sure your podcast is in is apple podcasts. Apple podcasts is the king of directories. In fact, more than 60% of podcast listeners use the apple podcast app. So if you're not in apple podcast , you're missing a majority of podcast listeners.

And not only does apple podcasts have a lot of listeners, but other players will pull feeds directly from apple podcasts , players like overcast, which is a very popular third party app for listening to podcasts. So if you're in apple podcasts , you'll also be able to get into those other secondary players as well. So that's number one. You gotta be an apple podcast. If you're not in apple podcasts, you're missing most of your listeners.

The second most important podcast directory is Spotify, and that's because it's the number two podcast player in terms of volume, in terms of the number of downloads, and Spotify has even made some really big acquisition moves recently, so they're going to be really relevant in podcasting into the future. So you want to make sure that your podcast is listed in Spotify. The number three podcast directory might be a surprise to you. It's tune in radio, right?

And so tune in radio on its own is just a streaming internet radio app. So we'll kind of think like Sirius XM on your phone, but the thing that sets tune and radio apart is it's the default podcast player for Alexa devices. So all those Amazon Echos that everyone's buying up and putting in their houses, they can listen to your podcast through their Alexa device if you're in tune in radio.

So you want to make sure you're in tune in radio so that as people start to use their home assistant devices more and more for consuming content for listening to podcasts and audio books that your podcast available. All right? The number four podcast directory is Google podcasts. Now, more than 80% of the world's smart phones run on some form of Google's android operating system.

Now, to be honest, they haven't done a good job of promoting and improving their new app since they've launched it, but that can change in a heartbeat. So you don't want to wait until Google podcast starts to pick up steam to go through the effort of actually getting included in the directory. Go ahead and take the steps you need to to get into Google podcasts . And then you can always send a link to your buddies that have android phones. All right.

And then number five, the last directory of note is stitcher. Stitcher was one of the early podcast platforms and still holds a meaningful amount of podcast plays . So you want to make sure that you can get into stitcher as well. So if you can get your podcast into these five podcast players, just about everyone on the planet will be able to find and listen to your podcast.

If you're a bus sprout user, we've put together instructions to help you successfully submit your podcast to each of these directories. All you have to do is go to your dashboard and click on the iTunes and directories tab.