Why people don’t subscribe to your podcast: because you didn’t make it easy. Don’t put in the hard up-front work to create a show then drop the ball when it comes to getting subscribers. Consider who your audience is, what platform they spend their time on, and how they may discover your show. Did you share an Apple Podcast link on LinkedIn and forget Android users can’t click it?
Understanding where your audience “lives” online and how they find you might actually be a really small fix that opens the listener floodgates.
Listeners find podcasts in various ways
Some people discover podcasts through YouTube. Some by searching for various topics within Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Some use search engines for various topics, find summaries, and subscribe via websites—that was my primary driver early on. That should be a wake-up call. How do your ideal listeners discover shows?
Many new podcasters make some dangerous discoverability assumptions when starting their show. They publish through Apple and Spotify, maybe iHeart and become frustrated no one downloads their show. Even the social media savvy podcasters who post about their new audio endeavor are confused when their quality show is met with crickets.
The problem might be this: you didn’t make it simple to find your show. Apple users might not click Spotify links. Android users most certainly won’t.
It’s important to go to every area someone may discover your show and ask yourself how easy it is to find your show. If they found your show on X, can they click a link somewhere to easily subscribe via Apple podcasts? What if they found it on LinkedIn? Is your website in your bio if they see a clip they like?
How to make your podcast discoverable
The most important tool in your arsenal for making it easy to subscribe to your show is to create a single page every show lives on. Every show, Episodes 1 – 1000 should have a single web page and unique URL associated. When you publish a new show, you should publish a new webpage for it to live.
When you do this, not only do you make your show easier to find but you make your show easier to share. Consider people can share a link-agnostic page with anyone vs a platform-specific link that not everyone can click. That’s big!
Here’s what should be included on each podcast webpage.
- Embedded player widget from your host
- Embedded YouTube video
- A title (H1) that aligns with the show title on your server
- A similar image or the same image from your podcast episode
- A summary of 300 words or more.
- Links referenced in the show
- Links to all podcast apps you support. These links should point directly to the specific show represented on that page.
This makes it far easier to share your podcast, but it also does something else—it makes your podcast indexable by Google vs locking it into YouTube, Apple, X, or Spotify.
Getting your podcast in search engines, ChatGPT, Grok, and other LLMs
By going through the list above, creating a rich web page for each show, every podcast you publish becomes searchable and indexable in search engines like Bing, Google, Duck Duck Go, and AI search and research tools like ChatGPT, Grok and other LLMs. That’s important.
As people start to get their information from LLMs and AI search tools vs search engines keeping your podcast locked into podcast apps will greatly limit the incredible amounts of content you collect. But building a summary and single web page for every show to live fixes this issue. Perhaps even uploading a full transcript.
