Skyrocket Your Podcast Traffic: 3 Powerful Strategies and SEO Optimization Secrets

If I'm being really honest , podcasting kind of sucks at this . Can we just say that It really does . Compared to blogs and YouTube channels , that has really gotten SEO figured out . Traffic for podcasting is a little complex and it's not great . It's just not .

I wanted to share with you today three ways that you can increase your podcast traffic so that you are utilizing all those efforts and skills and abilities that you're trying to get better at , because I know that you're working so hard on your marketing and it's one of those areas where you actually may have great marketing , but we just need to up the amount of

people that are being exposed to your podcast and to your message . So let's talk about three ways to increase your podcast traffic . Let's get right to it . Welcome to the Profit Podcast , where we teach you how to start , launch and market your content with confidence . I'm your host , crystal Prophet , and I'm so excited that you're here .

Thanks for hanging out with me today , because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation , this is the show that will help be your time saving shortcut . So let's get right to it , shall we ? Okay ? so we have a lot to cover today , so I'm just going to dive right in .

We've already kind of talked about marketing strategies and what that looks like , so let's just start with number one , and it's really utilizing effective marketing strategies .

Now I could go into all the 50,000 ways that you could actually market your podcast , but I want to take this high level approach because it's going to look different for every type of podcaster and I just want to throw some ideas out there .

Let's treat this podcast episode as a creative brainstorm that I hope that you'll listen to this as you're walking or driving or walking the dog , whatever it is that you're doing right now . I hope that you're encouraged and inspired by some of these ideas and you pause it and like say oh wait , i got to go write that down .

Let me go open up a Google doc or an Asana note and then go ahead and start dumping ideas in there . Because that is exactly what I want this episode to be today . I want it to spark inspiration and give you a lot of insight into what you could do as a podcast host to grow your show .

So when we talk about effective marketing strategies , the first one is social media . If you are not utilizing social media , i don't care which platform it is , i don't care . I don't care if it's LinkedIn , i don't care if it's Instagram , i don't care if it's TikTok or whatever Facebook , whichever one that you decide to use , but use one .

Use a social media platform . And I know you're going to say , crystal , hang on , don't you have to pay to play ? and shouldn't you do this or shouldn't you do that ?

Yes , there are probably a thousand little side conversations that we could have about social media , but at the end of the day , if you're not publishing any social content anywhere , then I'm just going to be the one to tell you that when someone finds out about your show and then they go to find you as the host or more information about your podcast , it's 2023

. They're going to think it's weird that you don't have any social content at all , and this sounds super weird . I'm going to go ahead and say it . You remember what are they hiding ? Why don't they have a social media account ? What's going on there ? It's gotten to that level where , if you don't have social for your business , it's not having a website .

It's not having a website for your business in 2023 . People are like you're not a legit misdisk until you have social media . I know , i know It's weird , but these are the times that we're living in . So start creating engaging posts , in doing audio clips , audio grams , whatever you want to call them , or just sharing a carousel that has several takeaways .

Or do a Twitter thread that talks about the key points , or why someone should listen to your show using hashtags . There's so many different ways that you can do this , depending on which platform that you're posting on , but you need to be utilizing social media . I'm just going to step off my soapbox . I'm going to get down . I prefer Instagram .

This is the one that I like to be . I never really got into Twitter . It's not the app for me . Linkedin is okay . I still don't utilize it that much . Facebook is . It's the love-hate relationship with Facebook , right ?

I don't really post stuff on my page there , but I will post stuff in our Facebook group because that's where I like to hang out , that's where I feel like we have a community of people , but it's not on my Facebook page . I would prefer to just post on my Instagram account . So that's what I'm doing for social media promotion .

So that's the first effective marketing strategy . The second one is guest collaborations . I mean , you have a podcast , let's share it through some collaborations . I actually i just got back from craft and commerce . This was convert kits . You know it was their annual event and i met so many incredible people and guess what i did and i'm still doing ?

I'm sending them invites to come be on my podcast . I'm like you know what we met . We connected about this one story , like will you come on the podcast and share it ? And they will be excited to share their interview once it goes live to their audience .

So you can look at this a few different ways , but those collaborations are everything And it's so effective . I mean it's word of mouth . It is you being able to spotlight someone else's business or the work or the messages that they're contributing to the world . So Guess , collaborations are super important .

and then the third point under effective marketing strategy is just cross promotion If you can find a way , and i love how you can get creative , whether it's like a show takeover and you take over someone show . I'm actually gonna be doing this later this year .

Have a friend who's gonna be on maternity leave and she said hey , you know , i think it'd be kind of fun if you did a takeover for one of my episodes . Whenever i'm out , i'm like , absolutely , that sounds like so much fun .

But think of other creative ways that you can appear in someone else's content and get in front of an audience that would be Complementary or the direct audience that you're trying to reach . So that's the first way to increase your podcast traffic . It's utilizing those effective marketing strategies .

Now the second one is the one that i get most excited about and i talk about it so much because it's so important , and that is engaging with your audience , building those deep connections . I actually just did a presentation , what as of me recording this .

It was today And it was talking about cultivating deeper relationships with your audience , and i cannot stress this enough . Especially if you are a podcaster , this is your main Means of putting content out into the world .

You are likely not having a dialogue with your audience when you're podcasting , you're either creating solo content or interview content and unlike on youtube , when you can put something up and somebody can put a comment and you can chat right there with them like The podcast apps , like they're not all up to date and they don't all have that same ability .

So you have to think of ways that you can Step outside of your comfort zone and actually engage with your people in building those stronger connections . So the first way that you can do this is Having those call to actions .

So whether that is a cta for joining your facebook group or sending you an email or clicking on the link to go leave a pod inbox voice memo . If you haven't done this , this is really fun You can go to our pod inbox page . I'll have a link in the show notes , but Go check it out . Like it's so fun . I love it when y'all do .

The listener submitted questions . It's so fun for me to one , hear your voices . But two , i love sharing your voices and your questions on this podcast because it helps other people connect deeper with you and feel like they found their people . I hope that that's what you feel when you hear someone else air like I air someone else's question on the show .

I hope that you feel like oh , i'm so glad Kathy asked that question . I had that same question too and I'm glad that we're talking about it . So having very clear calls to action , that's the first step to engaging with your audience . The second one is having least listener feedback in Q&A .

So , whether this is a live stream , where you're asking people to give you real time feedback , or you're sending emails to them and saying hit reply , or you're doing Instagram polls or saying you're in your DMs , i've done several times where I will do an Instagram story and then I drop the question box and say , all right , you have more questions , put your

comments in here or ask your question here And I will solicit Q&A and feedback . I want that because , as a host , i'm always trying to get better , because I want this to be your show , like I'm creating this for you . This isn't the Crystal Prophet show . I'm just here to deliver a message and make myself sound great .

I am delivering this message to add value and be a resource to this community . So having that listener feedback is so crucial for you to develop that relationship with your audience , and I'm just going to say it if I haven't said it before steal all of my ideas . Did you need that permission ? Here ?

I give you full permission to steal the ideas that you see on the show , whether it is listener submitted questions or one of my surveys . Like , if you've ever taken one of my surveys and you still have the link to it , like , go back and look at the questions that I ask in my listener feedback . I actually just recently did this in profit podcasting .

The new version , this is my digital program and I shared with all of my students , like these are actually the forms that I use . Like , go look at them and take them . Use them , because this is what it's here for . I didn't just create this and say , oh , it's a secret , i'm not going to tell anybody how I get feedback on stuff .

No , i want you to do this . I want you to replicate these processes because they're so valuable . Oh , my gosh , it's so valuable

. When I hear from people in this community and you tell me exactly what you want to hear or what you're trying to learn .

I have this collection form where , when people join the Facebook group , i'll put like , i'll grab their topic and I dump it into a Google sheet and I have this running list of topics that are brought up and concerns that people have or ideas . I will go take screenshots on my YouTube channel and I've been saving those .

Maybe if you're listening to this in real time , like be on the lookout . I have two videos coming up that were comments that I had on YouTube . I'm using feedback to feed the different content and the resources and the things that we talk about here and I want it to be an engagement tool to build deeper connections in this community with my audience .

So you have full permission to steal all of those ideas . Like I said , i hope that you're like pausing this as you're listening to it and writing things down and saying , okay , yeah , crystal said this , i'm actually going to go try that and I'm going to go check it out . But then the third one for engaging with your audience is your newsletter .

I love this .

I love it whenever I put a call to action in the newsletter that says hit reply and tell me this , or hit reply and share your story with me , because it is just so meaningful , because I don't take it for granted that there are other people on the other side of my emails when I send them out , i don't just send them out to the void and say , well , that

just went out to a whole bunch of people , i hope somebody reads it . No , I can see . I see , whenever y'all read it , like I could get a notification of how many people open it right after I send it .

And then what's even more fun is when I make that call to action and people actually respond and they tell me their story or they share with me what they're struggling with or how I can help them , and it forms this deeper bond , this deeper connection that I have with that individual contributor to this community And I think it's just such a beautiful relationship

and it's so important . And just know , if you've written an email to me and we've had a conversation in email , i truly do cherish those . They are so important . So if you're listening to this , here's a CTA for this episode . Reply back to my last newsletter that I sent and let me know what's on your mind .

I would love to engage with you or ask me a question about your content or your podcast . It would be so much fun . I'd be delighted to chat with you , all right ? so those are the first two things . So I'm going to do a quick recap . So we're talking about the three ways to increase your podcast traffic .

Number one we talked about utilizing those effective marketing strategies social media , guest collabs and cross promotion . And then the second thing was engaging with your audience through CTAs , listener feedback and Q&A , and then your email newsletter .

Now the third one is where people kind of want to shut down and I get it , because this was me , this was me for a long time and that's optimizing your podcast for search engines . Yes , we're talking about SEO , the thing that all of you non-techie people want to tell me .

Crystal , i'm not techie , i'm not tech savvy , so I don't need SEO , i don't have to understand it . Like . I've heard the most ridiculous things from you and I've said them myself , so I'm calling myself out . Okay , i'm not just calling out people in this audience , i'm calling myself out too , because this was me for a long time .

I thought that I had to have a deep knowledge and understanding of how SEO worked and how search engines work and all this other stuff . And I'm coming to realize or I have really in the last six months , i've been going on a deeper journey with SEO . It sounds like we're going like on a like a walkabout with SEO , but it is .

I have forced myself to learn it , to understand it better , and I feel like I'm a better creator for it . So let's talk about where it matters specifically for your podcast And then I'm actually going to dive into a really fun resource that is specifically catered to SEO and your podcast . So , number one episode titles and descriptions .

Now I have done previous episodes and YouTube videos on SEO for your podcast , so I'll link to those in the description and you can go check those out . But I think it's really important that you hit the nail on the head with your episode titles and the descriptions of your individual episodes .

Now your larger podcast is like that description is going to weigh heavier in the SEO , like that's just the name of the game as of today , as of me recording this . So the keywords , the target audience that you're trying to reach make sure you have those in your podcast description .

So , for example , for the profit podcast , i have keywords in there about starting a podcast for online business owners and entrepreneurs , because these are the type of people that I'm trying to reach And it's what I'm trying to teach them starting a podcast , launching a YouTube channel , but , most importantly , creating with confidence .

But then the next layer down is the episode titles and the descriptions for what I'm trying to rank for . So you don't want to overdo it with keywords And this is why I'm really like I heavily rely on tools for this for my podcast and my YouTube channel .

So I recently started exploring cohost AI , which you know you've heard if you listen to the show or you're . You know you watch my YouTube channel .

You know that I've been playing with Buzzsprouts newest feature , cohost AI And sometimes it will spit out an episode title that sounds really good , but it's not keyword focused on what I really want to use for that specific episode , so I'll just add it in there .

I picked the one that I think sounds really good or sounds very clear about that episode And then I'll add the keyword to it . Like it's as simple as that , don't overthink this , don't overthink this . And then there's other keyword tools out there . There is keywords everywhere which I've used for a long time .

I've used Yoast for my website , i have used what's the other one ? I'm trying to think of TubeBuddy for my YouTube channel . Like I couldn't I don't think I could function without TubeBuddy . This is not sponsored by TubeBuddy , but it's so true , i am an affiliate , though , so I'll link to that in the show notes . It's crystalprofitcom forward slash TubeBuddy .

It is fantastic for anybody that wants to have a YouTube channel , but having those very specific episode titles and descriptions that are keyword rich are super important .

Now the next one is transcriptions , and I still am frustrated with the speed at which transcriptions are available for podcasting , because it doesn't seem to be universal across the board that every podcast player supports transcriptions in the way that we see them for video .

So , for example , on a YouTube video , you could pull it up and it's going to at least have auto-generated transcriptions of what the bots think that the person is saying .

That's better than nothing at all , and so , when it comes to transcriptions for podcast , it's important to have those either uploaded into your podcast host , like Buzzsprout , or utilized on your podcast website , whether that's on WordPress or somewhere else , because it does let bots know like oh , this is about podcasting , this is for online business owners , this is

for digital entrepreneurs , this is for creators that are trying to create with confidence , like all of these things that have keywords attached to them . It's going to be in the transcript if you're saying it And , again , it's optimizing your podcast for SEO , so that you get that organic traffic to your podcast .

Now the last one is obviously SEO for podcast websites . So I'm not going to go too deep into this one , because it is a little bit more complicated And there's a lot of exceptions to the rule for this , because people will say well , what about pod page ? Is that SEO optimized ? What about WordPress ? What about Wix ? What about Squarespace ? What about , like ?

there's so many different tools and platforms out there . Kajabi , that's another one . I've been doing a lot of content audits recently and people have their websites hosted on Kajabi and they'll ask me well , do I need to move to WordPress ?

Because I hear it works better for SEO And there's a lot of ways that we can again slice this cookie and think about SEO . But the first thing I think that's most important is you need to have a website for your podcast . I really don't care where it's hosted .

You need to just start somewhere , because what having a podcast will teach you , whether it's creating show notes for your website or you have it on Buzzsprout , because I know a lot of people and I encourage this too . If you don't have a podcast website at all , you need to at least have the one that Buzzsprout offers with their plans .

Like , at least set things up from there and then we can move into . Well , what does it look like to have show notes live on a different website where it goes into more detail of what your episode is about ? and we can make it more keyword rich . And , let's be honest , y'all use AI .

Use AI to make your episodes have specific keywords and make those outlines that you're using or make those show notes that you're going to create keyword rich . You can do this with AI prompts that say , make sure this blog post is optimized for this specific keyword , and it will go in and do it .

It's pretty fantastic and I cannot wait to see where these tools are . I mean , they've just recently come on the market and I feel like they're already getting better . So it's a super exciting time to think about traffic , to think about SEO , to think about just optimizing your podcast for all these different things .

But I actually want to tell you about something that's super fun . I kind of tease this a little bit , but if you want to know more about using SEO and video together to increase your podcast traffic , then you need my upcoming live training . Increase your podcast traffic with SEO and video . So this is a custom training . I've never taught this before .

It is brand new , exclusive and it's something I created for this year's BC Stack Bundle . So if you're not familiar with what this is , bc Stack is a bundle that is blogging concentrated . That's what that stands for the BC and it is their bundle that they do once a year and it is officially open .

If you're listening to this in real time , the sale this year is from June 18th through the 24th of June And it is awesome . It is awesome . It is affordable . I think this is why I love it so much is because it's not one of those that's like , oh , it's a bundle and it's $5,000 and you're like , oh my gosh , i cannot afford that .

It is $49 USD , so it's super affordable . It's super , super affordable and it is only once a year . So if you're listening to this past the June 24th deadline , i'm so sorry you're going to have to wait until 2024 to grab it , but if you're listening to this in real time , then this is one of those product bundles like you just want to grab it .

Again , it's only $49 and you get introduced to a ton of experts in the digital space . I'm contributing something about podcasting , so it's . The whole theme this year is about traffic , so I'm contributing mine .

Again , it's increase your podcast traffic with SEO and video , and I'm going to go deeper into how I use SEO and video specifically for this podcast and what that looks like and how you can replicate some of those for your own content . But again , it's only $49 and it is the thing that I used . I guess it was in 2019 .

I think that was the first year is either 2018 or 2019 . I always get my dates mixed up , but I bought the bundle and and Jennifer Maker . So Jennifer Maker really is someone that I've looked up to . It must have been in 2018 , because I remember her saying , like that's when she really got serious about video And she met with someone that worked at Google .

Like she went to some conference somewhere and she talked to someone at Google and they were like oh yeah , video is going to be the next thing , and that's around the time that she started her YouTube channel And I actually don't even know . Oh , we're going to look this up in real time .

I'm so curious how many YouTube followers she has today , because I mean , whenever I was following her . It was one of those things where she just kept steadily growing and growing and growing And I was like , oh my gosh , like this is so wild .

And I think that her channel really exploded just because she's been consistent with it and she's just kept doing it , and it's just so fun to see all the amazing things that she's done . Okay , here we go . Oh my gosh , how fun is this ?

So , as of me looking at this right now , she has 966,000 subscribers , so she's getting close to the one million subscriber mark . And guess what she talks about ? She talks about crafts crafts like cricket designs

and 3D images And I mean I'm just reading off some of her layered vinyl shirts , like all these decal mugs that she's doing like vinyl decal mugs . She does SVG files that are custom like so incredible . And she's the one that taught me about video and lighting and really using skills that I didn't know that I needed for video And this was in at that time .

Bc Stack was $27 . It was a $27 product that has gone on to help me grow . My YouTube channel I'm getting close to I think I'm at like 6,500 . I know I'm over 6,000 and it just keeps growing And I'm so grateful that I invested in the BC Stack that year because it's the kickstart that I needed to get my button gear and start publishing on YouTube .

So I want you to go to crystalprofitcom forward slash BCS23 to grab this deal . I'm a proud partner and affiliate with them , so this is my affiliate link . But go to crystalprofitcom forward slash BCS23 to grab this year's bundle . It will only be here until June 24th , so don't wait . You wanna grab it And I want you to come to my free training .

I mean well , i guess I say it's free . You'll have to buy the bundle and that's the only way that you can get it . So I guess it's technically not free . You have to buy the stack to get it . But this is the only place you're gonna see this training this year . I create a custom training every single year and there's a reason for it .

I wanna add value to the people that are excited to sign up and this program would probably cost at a minimum $97 if I were teaching it as a workshop . But I am excited to contribute the increase your podcast traffic with SEO and video .

It's gonna be a live training , so you'll have all the details when you go to crystalprofitcom forward slash BCS23 and register for this year's BC stack . So fun . I'm just super excited about this . So I hope that you found so many ideas inspiring .

I hope that your brain is swimming in things that you can do to increase your podcast traffic , but at the end of the day , i hope that you're just encouraged to try something new . If that's the only thing that you take away from today is don't be afraid to experiment .

Try a cross collaboration , try a new marketing strategy on your social media , try working with SEO , like changing up the titles of your podcast or just create a listener feedback survey but do something . Get into action . As soon as this episode is over .

Maybe it's just jotting down a note to yourself that you should look more into one of these things that we talked about here today , but I do wanna see you get into action , and actually I would love it if you would take a screenshot wherever you're listening to this and tell me the one thing that you're gonna do .

Tell me the one thing , after listening to this episode , that you're going to achieve in the next 30 days . But that's all I have for you today . So , once again , to check out the BC Stack 2023 bundle , go to crystalprofitcom . Forward slash BCS23 . And , as always , remember , keep it up . We all have to start somewhere .