Garrett Crowe writes: 

So Marc, I've been doing three podcasts. One is radio drama style actual play of a four year long Star Wars RPG campaign, one a celebration of various games I love with local specialists in each game providing news and advice, but mostly geeking out over the games… and the last being the live play vidcast of the Middle Earth game. The first two have remained at about 300 hits per episode, but I know these numbers can get higher. What's an effective podcast marketing plan I should adopt?

I release teaser promos complete with original artwork posters for each episode at appropriate facebook groups, enworld forums, google communities. Other gaming podcasts seem to take a spam the hell out of all gaming groups on the net, and that seems counter productive. What resources should I study to form a marketing plan.

I really want to make strides with this so I can establish myself as a professional game designer, in demand for projects and known by the industry.

Find out more about Garrett's podcasts at http://threat-detected.com

My Response:

It's all about Keyword Marketing; keywords about your podcast should be in the title, which'll help overcome the search engine hurdle. Don't make your show titles generic – make them specific so that they're easy to find. If you can add drama to your title while using they keywords, that'll drum up more excitement from potential listeners. Also, managing several podcasts at once is really tough – keeping focused while multi-tasking is key. A successful method for me has been focusing each show around something very specific in each market that you're angling for.

Doing offline promotion might be helpful for local advertising, like finding local gaming stores and posting flyers. This could work when you travel to other  areas, or also flyering at Cons. I'm not sure how effective it is to advertise through Facebook, but maybe creating original artwork that is related to your show and is attention grabbing, that  might make the social media outreach more successful.

If you want to broaden your repertoire, turning a podcast into a video podcast and posting to Youtube and Facebook is a great way to get advertising traffic. It's time-consuming, but really effective.

Using Google Analytics or the Traffic Tracking on your different distribution sites will allow you to see where people are that are listening to your shows, and may help narrow down what your core audience focus needs to be.

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