The Podcaster's Path

00:00 - Speaker 1
What's up, podcasters? Welcome back to the Podcaster's Path. I'm your host, coach Chris, and today I want to get into why you should run a press release for your podcast. Now, this is something that most podcasters are not trying to do, but I can tell you that this is a thing that will help you get in front of way more listeners than you ever could have imagined. More listeners than you ever could have imagined, and I think this is a kind of a secret marketing strategy, because any tactic I talk about when it comes to putting money into your show, podcasters run other way. If I say you should spend fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, they run other way. I'm here to tell you first before we get into anything else. If you want to grow your show faster, put money into it. That's simple. That's not guaranteeing it's going to grow, but put it this way for most of the shows I've worked on, as soon as we start putting money into it, the results got better, a lot faster. Again, I'm not guaranteeing it, but it's highly likely because it depends on how you put money into it.

01:05
The press release is just one way. I'm making this a series, so I'll have like a whole advanced podcast marketing series where you can look through and you'll see the five or six ways you can put money into a show and start to grow. Right as simple as that. Number one. So why should you write a press release? Number one is you can reach a journalist who can share your story. You can reach the people who are, who have made an entire career out of telling other people's stories. That's what journalists do, right like, that's what they want to do, and you, putting your show in front of them gives them a story to tell. Simple as that. Another thing is you improve your seo, because what happens is when the journalist has your story, they write about it or you write about it. You send it to them and they can send out the publications. When those publications talk about you and they post it on their website, they should be linking to your website. We'll talk about what goes into the press release later, but they'll link to your website and so what happens is if you're linked, the more websites you're linked to to online, the better your domain authority is, or seo.

02:07
All right, so now you become more relevant. You know, think about it. You just started the show and your name's relevancy is like here. But every time a new press release comes out or some of them do things where I've seen some of these people where they'll have you on like 300 publications in like a two week timeframe and it's crazy how much traffic you get. It is absurd and that's what you want, because you're going to get a lot of benefits in terms of SEO, long-term search engine optimization and it's just super valuable because once you become ranked in a field like that for like long tail keywords or your show becomes relevant in SEO searches and stuff like that.

02:45
It's hard to get, but from my experience, it's easy to maintain when you keep putting the show out. You got content coming out all the time, every time your episode goes out, from your hosting platform to Apple, spotify, all these different platforms. If your show is, if your show notes have your website link, that's another backlink to your website. It just keeps going. You know it'll feed itself, um. This is why I think you should do press releases consistently.

03:12
The last part of this is I think you just attract a lot of new people. You might think that you're going to get a ton of listeners and the truth is you won't get a ton of listeners from the press release specifically. But what happens is somebody will see your show on some website and some blog or whatever, right, then that'll be the same person that sees you on social media, or they see when somebody else shares your show. And then it's like huh, wait a second, this show is everywhere, right, it just keeps going. And then by that third or fourth time, that's when they start listening. So it does take more time for you to get the results and start to see the major benefits. But I'm telling you, once it starts flowing and it just goes, it takes off Like, and I love that. So let's talk about when you should write a press release.

04:02
Obviously, when you're launching your show like if you're launching a show, you're just getting started that is the perfect time to write a press release. That's when people want to know about a new show to start in. And that's why we talk about positioning, because if you position your show correctly, then we read a press release. The journalists look at it and see, wow, okay, this is great, we got to talk about this. That's why you want to do a good press release.

04:25
Another time is when you're releasing an episode with a well-known guest, like for one of my shows, my Seattle-based podcast, when I interview certain people that are relevant in the community, it's perfect for me to just say, hey, I'm having so-and-so on, who did this thing in the community? Right, I could do it as simple as this If I wanted to. This is a simple process I can follow. Get the Seattle Business Journal as simple as this if I wanted to. This is a simple process I can follow. Get the seattle business journal it's a magazine here in the seattle area, a business magazine. Whoever's on the cover, get them as a guest on the show and then, before the episode comes out, I do a press release on it. And I can do this every single month because the journalists are gonna want to talk about it, because it's relevant. They were just on the cover of seattle business journal. Whoever is on there, they probably have something else big going on that's relevant to the city, the space, like.

05:11
It's a perfect. That's how easy you set up these processes and systems. You can just follow over and over again. Man, it's a layup. You can also do a press release when you reach 100 episodes downloaded, or 100 000 downloads I would say 5,000. You can make up whatever it is that you want Every 1,000 downloads, you can do a press release on it and I know it sounds crazy, but you can. There are some journalists who will talk about that, who will post it, and some publications who are looking for those kinds of stories about all kinds of markets and industries all the time.

05:46
And you don't want it to be a chance for you to get more publicity. And you didn't take it because you were like oh, I got to wait until I get to 10,000. Nah, man, once you get to 500, 500, 1,000, 2,500, keep going. Press release every time, every single time. Obviously, if you're doing live events or meetups and stuff, you want to have that. You want to put together something you know so that the space can see more about what you got going on. Right, you want to just make. If it's local, national, whatever, you want to put it out there. And then, obviously, if you get an award or recognition, if you get some kind of award, you have to talk about that Like that. They love that kind of stuff. Even it's from some year, one uh, industry or whatever it is like. If it's something that's brand new and nobody's ever heard of, still do it, do a press release for it all the time. Do as much as you can.

06:38
So now I want to get into kind of the anatomy of a press release and, by the way, if you're enjoying this episode so far, I do have a full breakdown, a full template for you. That is a part of the podcast playbook, my new book, where simply a manual for podcasts is. Whether you want to launch, grow or monetize your show, this is the book that you need. I'll put a link to it down in the description box down below. You go and grab your copy Now. You get this whole template for free, completely. I will send it to you in an email Now as part of a press release. I want to kind of go through what it looks like top to bottom. I'll break down each step of this.

07:11
Number one is a headline you got to make it clear. Make sure it's engaging and direct. Keep it simple. Don't try to overcomplicate the headline where you're trying to be super creative and spicy. No, make it clear. So when I read it I know exactly what it is. You ever read one of those headlines on facebook or twitter or something and after you read it you like wait what you got, to reread it again because it's a bad headline. You're confused. You don't want that with your press release. You want to be simple and straight to the point. Man, don't mess around with it. Have a good sub headline, right? You want to provide more context. This is why it's easy to write a good headline, because the sub text, the subhead, is where you can get more in depth on what you're talking about. All right, you don't want to be super clever with the headline, you just want to be enough to get people's attention. And after that you want to have the date. Put the date on there.

08:09
I think the opening paragraph is kind of the lead who, what, when, where, why, who, what, when, where, why, who, what, when, where, why? It is going to be the easiest way for you to answer all those questions and get the best results from your press release. You don't want to be sitting here rambling on talking about a bunch of random stuff and no, nobody cares. Nobody cares. That's not what the press release is for. Who, what, when, where, why. So, to kind of frame it up, if I was talking about um, you know Pod Central, right. If I want to talk about my app or something like that let's say I was doing an interview with Sam Altman, the guy who built Chad GBT and all that stuff Right, one of the guys I don't want to discredit anybody, but let's say I'm interviewing him, I was interviewing him.

08:59
The headline would be something like the pod central podcast or the startup founder podcast is unveiling this thing. Right, ai uses unveil a lot. I don't know why, um, and I'm so used to using it now because I use all the time in AI, I just end up saying it's part of my vocabulary a lot more than it was truly is just there now. And the subheading it could say episode explores this new crazy AI thing. Right, like simple, with just that good headline of the Starter Founder Roadmap Podcast. Reveals blank thing with Sam Altman Great headline. Then we take it a step further with the subheading the episode explores the future of AI, blah, blah, blah. Like those, the headline and the sub headline.

09:47
I would grab the attention of a lot of people from just having Sam's name in there and then mentioning AI, just that part alone. So then we get to who, what, when, where, why. You want to keep that simple. Who was the interview with? What are we talking about? When is it going to be released? Where are we releasing it at? Where can people listen to it and why should they go and tune in? It's that easy. It's that easy.

10:13
And this again, people might not know your podcast exists, right, but if this is their first impression of your show, think about how easy it would be to like grab their attention. Think about how easy it would be to like grab their attention. Like I'm one of the people and I talk about this a lot a lot of podcasters still think that they can interview this big celebrity and then it helped grow their show. It doesn't work like that, because the celebrities or whoever it is, they don't go and market the show like you would, so it just doesn't go anywhere. This is a way you can market the episode with that celebrity guest where it could benefit you for a long time. Like this is how you do it if you get a big, high level celebrity, even if it's somebody that's like a A-list celebrity just in your market. You know what I'm saying.

10:56
Like in music, I think there are a lot of songwriters, producers and a lot of people behind the scenes that don't get a lot of attention. It's the same thing in pretty much any art field, to be honest, whether we're talking music, movies, any of it there are a lot of people who do a lot of great work, who are famous just in the space, but outside of that space they're not famous. If you get one of those people that's famous in your space, run a damn press release, I'm telling you it'll blow up your show because all the other people that feel like they're on the same level as that person, who believe that, okay, we're the same, you're gonna get those people too. That's what you want. You want those people tuning into your show, to check it out, and you build like a, like a cult following that way, to be honest. Um, so then, with the body, you want to have the support and details, like what can people expect when they listen and why is it relevant right now? And you want to mention any other big accomplishments that person has or that you have right, mention all of that stuff. That's what makes people tune in.

11:56
They just have a simple call to action where people can listen. I always say this when you have a call to action on any kind of blog post or anything like that, have them go to an episode page where they can choose where they listen. Don't force people to listen where you want them to listen. Put a. I have a landing page set up now. I think that's just the best way to do it. Give people a way that they can choose where they listen.

12:22
If you just send them straight to Apple or to Spotify, you lose out a lot of people and I don't think on that page you should be linking it out in that way. You know like that's just sloppy. It should be one link that says go and listen here and then, like I use transistor fm and on there they have, we have like a social media page which is, once they land on that episode specific page, they can click a button and then go to that listening platform and it takes them directly to that episode. So don't have to go and look for it Because again, let's say, somebody finds the post and you know two months later after it goes live, you've already put out a bunch of episodes. When they go and click that button, if you send them straight to Apple, they could just end up on your podcast page and have to look for the episode you lost out. But if you make it easy and they can go to one page where all the episodes are linked. That's going to make it a lot easier, man, and then you will have an about section.

13:16
Make sure you have a breakdown of who you are and there's a bio like this so I am, this is what's going on. This is what the show is about about. This is what people get when they listen to it. Always add that in. Always that's just your like elevator pitch for your show. Always have that ready, you know, and then some contact information.

13:35
Um. A few tips here on a press release, the ones I've gotten the best results from. Number one is to have it short, make it like a page. Don't make it longer than a page. It doesn't need to be, it just doesn't need to be. And make sure you use active language where it's like punchy and engaging and people want to listen to it. Right, people want to read. They're like man, this is interesting. Don't make it boring, like hey, that's episode coming out.

14:01
You probably should check it out like no, yo, we got so-and-so coming on the show. This is what we're talking about. You gotta check this out. This is gonna be amazing. That's what you want. You want to have that kind of excited presentation, um, and make sure you proofread. You know, I think this is where you lean on ai. Let's send it up into ai, upload it and all that. Let it review everything. So there you go. You should be writing a press release for your show.

14:25
I'm pretty sure every podcaster could do one right now on something, on somebody, and if you can't, we got some work to do. But if you got any questions, hit me up on instagram or twitter at chris podcasting. I'm also excited about this book. Launch will be out january 1st and that's when the community doors will be open. I'm just setting up a simple community where I can go live every week to answer questions, so you can just join the space and be a part of what we're building. Ask your questions. You'll have access to a bunch of other content, all that stuff, but for me, it's really about talking to more podcasters like you. So thanks for tuning in. I will see you next time.