It is estimated that the number of podcast listeners worldwide will rise to over 424 million by the end of 2022; this makes podcasts one of the fastest-growing means of promoting your business.
When properly utilized, podcasts can reach out to more audiences worldwide and greatly impact organic search results because podcasts make listeners search for a person’s name or company, thus improving search suggestions and rankings on popular search engines. Also, podcasts can be available on several websites and directories, thus increasing backlinks.
This post will walk you through why and how to build backlinks for your podcast show in the most effective ways of going about it.
Why You Should Build a Backlink For Your Podcast Show
Podcasts are almost overtaking other marketing strategies as a viable means of reaching audiences worldwide with your products and services. Hence, you should build backlinks for your podcast for the following reasons.
1. Build a Reputation For Your Podcast
Incoming traffic from backlinks signifies that your podcast holds useful and informative content and can be recommended to others, thus improving your reputation. However, your backlink must come from credible and authoritative sources. If your podcast is integrated into your blog, traffic to your podcast from backlinks will also improve your domain authority.
Backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites help build your podcast reputation and improve your blog’s ranking on Search Engine Result Pages.
2. Creates Awareness For Your Brand
Successful backlinks promote your podcast and, ultimately, your brand. When you use podcasts as a marketing strategy, your brand reaches larger audiences, thus creating stronger brand awareness; hence, your audiences are likely to recognize your advert on TV, billboards, and other media sources, thus building a stronger customer relationship and loyalty.
Backlinks create stronger brand awareness and improve the relationship with your audiences.
3. Improves Web Traffic
A stronger online presence, improved brand awareness, and a successful backlink-building strategy attract more traffic to your podcast page. Also, your podcast page gets improved ranking to the top of Search Engine Result Pages of popular search engines.
Credible backlinks combined with other strategies generate tremendous traffic to your podcast from search engines, host websites, and social media handles.
4. The Effect is Long-Term
Building credible backlinks requires a high level of commitment, but the effect is long-lasting, driving a steady flow of organic traffic to your podcast, thus ensuring that your podcast stays at the top of SERPs.
Creating backlinks for your podcast establishes a long-term success, unlike other adverts and other campaign strategies whose success is short-lived.
5. Builds Relationships with Influencers and Brands
You create a relationship when you interact with individuals and businesses by building backlinks to your podcast. Such relationships are extremely beneficial to both parties for future collaboration, e.g., you can invite such individuals or brands with businesses to create new podcasts beneficial to your success and your partner’s.
Backlink building for your podcast is an extremely beneficial way of building relationships with individuals and businesses.
How to Build Backlinks for Your Podcast Show
The steps below will walk you through how to build a backlink for your podcast.
1. Start a Podcast Show.
Starting a podcast if you do not have one running is the first step to building a backlink. Here’s a concise step-by-step guide on how to start a podcast.
If you’re wondering, ‘How do I start a podcast,’ Investing in a podcast doesn’t cost much; all you need is a microphone, a pop filter, and podcast hosting. Other issues you should consider:
- What is your podcast topic? And what will it focus on?
- What is your podcast name?
- What type of audience are you targeting with your podcast?
- How often do you want to publish podcast shows?
- What will be the duration of each podcast show?
If you have your podcast already running, you should repurpose your podcast for backlink building by:
- adjusting your blog content to suit your podcast episodes
- requesting interviews with individuals and business representatives
- sharing your experiences and experts’ opinions.
If you have followed this guide on how to start a podcast, then you can set up your podcast equipment and proceed to record your first podcast episode, after which you will have to edit your podcast before uploading it.
2. Create a Backlink Target list
This is an important step where you highlight the backlinks you’re targeting to promote your podcast. There are several techniques for building a backlink target list, but the most commonly used technique is the skyscraper technique which involves the following steps.
- Make a list of credible websites you want to get backlinks from. you can find credible websites for your backlink by using the following queries in your search
- Keyword(s) +blog
- Keyword(s) + best blogs
- Keyword(s) + blogs to follow to follow
- Keyword(s) +blogs to read
- Keyword(s) + companies/agencies/tools
E.g., How to make money + blogs to read
- Install and activate an SEO toolbar and add only websites with high domain authority, usually having a domain rating of 70+. Popular SEO toolbars you can use include Ahrefs and Semrush.
- Organize your search result by creating a new tab and naming it ‘Backlink targets;’ the first five columns in your tab should follow the arrangement below.
- Website’s name
- URL
- Domain authority
- Manager’s name
- Email address
- Create a new tab named ‘Experts;’ add the following columns to your new tab.
- Names of Experts
- Website address
- Email address
- LinkedIn profile
- Social media accounts (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram)
If you have exhausted your expert list, you can search for experts in your niche by using the following queries:
- Keyword(s) + Experts
- Keyword(s) + Influencers
3. Find your Target list’s Email Addresses
Now that you have a list of the websites and businesses for your backlinks, your next step should focus on getting the email address of individuals associated with these websites and businesses. To do so;
- Search for the company’s LinkedIn page
- Open the employees’ page
- Filter your result using keywords like ‘Editor,’ ‘Content manager,’ or other keywords.
- Select the people associated with managing the company’s website or blog
- Add the selected names to the Manager name in the tab named ‘Backlink targets.’
- Use email-finding tools like ‘Hunter’ to find your targets’ email addresses.
4. Reach out to your contact list
Reach out to your target contacts with the use of email outreach tools like MailChimp, Netcore, HubSpot, Drib, etc., to send broadcast email using the steps highlighted below
- Add your contact’s name and email address.
- Prepare a custom template and upload it to MailChimp. Below is a sample template you can use.
Hi ABC,
I am XYZ from XYZ company, (Explain your company’s selling points briefly)
Our company now has a podcast channel named XYZ podcast, with a strong social media presence, and we will love to feature you in our podcast. You can check out our social media handle (attach proof of social media presence; add other social media proofs like the number of monthly visitors, email subscribers, domain authority, social media followers, and experts you have interviewed).
We hope you will be glad to feature in our 40-minute interview session with you titled (insert title).
Thank you for your warm response
Yours.
(Name)
If your contacts are interested, your interview questions should center around your interviewee’s background and achievements, jobs, challenges, work ethics, and opinions about their industry.
Rather than focusing on backlink building, you should focus on connecting with the interviewee by developing a good rapport.
5. Publish your Podcast Episode
Before publishing your podcast, you should:
- Edit the audio clip by adding an introduction, conclusion, and sound effects, and master your audio clip.
- Upload your podcast episode
- Get your RSS link and publish it in as many podcast directories as you can include on your list. Popular podcast directories include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.
- Create a blog post for your new podcast episode. Make sure to mention the name of the person you’re featuring, the main points of discussion, and a transcribed version of your podcast episode.
- Upload the podcast episode to your blog and share it with your contact list and social media handles.
- Share your blog link with your guest and other experts, and encourage them to share it with their audiences using social media platforms.
6. Ask for Backlinks from the experts you have interviewed
It’s not all about building backlinks; it is about building relationships; hence you should focus on a win-win situation for you and your interviewee. In return for promoting your expert’s business, you can:
- Ask to be a guest writer on your expert’s website
- Ask that your podcast episode be linked to a popular post on their website
- Ask that the podcast episode be shared with their contact list
Final Thoughts
Quality backlink building is instrumental to the success of your podcast channel, as I have outlined above. If you’re yet to start podcasting, follow the guide on how to start a podcast in this article which also outlines steps to increase your podcast’s visibility on search engines.
