Social media is a great thing for getting new listeners.

When I started out 3 years ago there weren't that many opportunities to engage with fans. Some key things that I think any podcaster should do ...

1. Connect with whatever community you're part of. For me it was the podcast fiction community. For you? You'll need to decide.

2. Have a website that includes a blog. In fact my website is ONLY blog, altho my fans asked for a forum where they could talk about me behind my back, so I started one for them as well.

3. Twitter. Too many people dismiss twitter and even more use it badly. It's a conversation, not a broadcast.

4. Keep going. This sounds like a no-brainer, but the surest way to get new listeners is to keep producing content.

The thing about the long-tail is not that it means the front people will be any smaller, but rather that the small people will have a piece of the action as well. Prior to the internet, the only way anybody had an audience was to convince the people who guarded the gates to access that they should be allowed. The tail was not long in those days. It was truncated. Once the available channels filled up, no more content. Now the number of channels is - for all intents and purposes - infinite. Everybody can have an audience. How big an audience and the degree to which your audience supports you is a function of a lot of things. Competition, message, size of the niche, production values, and promotional efforts to name a few.

Contests, give aways, all the superficial crap you hear about - they may gain you a few short term listens, but what will keep them -- and what will generate the critical word of mouth - is what you produce, how you produce it, and how you relate to the audience you have.

Great tips Nathan! I would like to expand on your point #2. A website is key while podcasting is (believe it or not) still unheard of by many people. People do know about websites, and blogs. By building up your virtual community, you can start introducing this audience to your "podcast".

Thanks.

Yes, website seems like it should be a no brainer. It's your virtual store front. A lot of people think that it takes a lot of work to get one going (not true) and more work to keep it up (well, partly true), but the reality is that - just like any other business activity - you need to have a strategy for how you're going to use it and what you hope to get out of it.

My purpose in having the blog is to create a place where my fans can find me, can contact me, can learn about whatever the last important thing is, and can get notified about when new content is available. Unlike many podcasters, i don't use my blog to distribute my podcast fiction, but instead use Podiobooks.com and their infrastructure for distribution. It's part of my marketing strategy and something I do on purpose (altho many people seem to think it's someting I'm doing in error).

There are several hosting companies that provide very good, reliable service for less than $100 a year and pretty much all of them have one (or two) click installations of Wordpress - which is really all you need to handle podcast support.