Now that you’ve decided to invest your time, energy and budget into a podcast, with a goal of growing your business, it’s important you fall into the traps that are out there. Because while it’s easy as heck to start a podcast, it’s just as easy to start a podcast for the wrong reasons. Or even worse, not take full advantage of the benefits. Here are a few mistakes we, at PT Media, have helped others overcome when podcasting for business. They include:
- going after sponsors
- not taking video serious enough
- faking a podcast
- skimping on the show notes.
Let talk about them!
Going After Sponsors
A goal of many podcasts, whether they be hobbies or for business, is gaining sponsorships. If you have a corporate podcast, though, looking for sponsors should not be a priority. So this isn’t something that should sway your decision about starting a podcast for your business.
Why?
You are your sponsor!
The only business you should be focuses on promoting is your own. That is the whole goal of your podcast. You want to drive more traffic to your website, sell more books, grow your email list. The list goes on for all of the things you can do to grow your business with a podcast.
Don't Take Video Serious
Video podcasts are becoming more and more popular. And for good reason. Video is, hands down, the best marketing tool for any business. Combine that with what you get from consistent podcasting and you have potential to leverage any platform to grow your audience as well as your business.
But even with all of these benefits of video podcasts, it’s easy to miss out on opportunities with the video.
Social Media
From a single episode of a video podcast, you can squeeze out as many social media clips as you want. This is what most people want, and it probably where most people put too much energy.
Where should the focus be?
YouTube
For a podcast, most people would probably setting for just publishing the full episode on YouTube. Nothing wrong with that.
The bigger opportunity, though, comes with the shorter segments that can be created from the full episode. A 5-10 minute segment is more likely to be fully consumed, and/or shared, than a full episode. Especially if that segment is focused on a particular topic.
The full episode of a video podcast can be broken down into several 5-10 minute segments. Each with it’s own title, description and thumbnail. And each working to grow your YouTube channel.
Fake podcasting is becoming a thing on social media. But getting caught up in this trend may not be a good idea for you. The only thing worse than not having an actual podcast is pretending to have one in an attempt to go viral. Can it help you? Yes, but it can also cause your audience to lose trust in you.
If if you find yourself getting caught up in the trend of fake podcasting, it could be because you’re too reliant on social media for your marketing. Having a ton of followers on Instagram is cool, but it does nothing for your credibility, Google ranking or your authority within your industry.
Why?
Well, because that’s one platform that not everyone in the world uses. And none of the posting you do in Instagram, TikTok or other social media platforms is recognized by Google. When podcasting for your business the goal is to improve your Google rankings. To do this you’ll need SEO, YouTube videos and show notes for your podcast.
Not Creating Show Notes
When you’re podcasting to grow your business, show notes should be taken seriously. The reason being, Google crawls through podcast show notes. This means having show notes can help you be discovered on Google or other search engines. And with this you might find that better, or more qualified, leads start to come your way.
How many words or how long should they be?
Long enough to capture the keywords that will help you be discovered by your ideal clients or customers. There are many applications available today that use AI to help you transcribe your audio to add to your show notes. It may be easier to just type your episode description into ChatGPT and allow it to produce show notes for you. The point is, it’s too easy to have them.
Investing in Podcast for Your Business
It’s going to require an investment of your time and resources. Depending on how big you want to go you may consider hiring an outside company to help with this and handle the bulk of the work. At, PT Media, we work to make having a video podcast a hands-off experience for our clients. Everything from planning to filming to curating the content for distribution is handled by our team. We do everything we can to make sure our clients get a good return on their investment in the form of website visits and YouTube and social media growth.
