When you put your podcast on YouTube, you can face a lot of hurdles. There
are so many videos on the video platform that it can seem hard to compete,
especially with such an audio-centric project. Luckily, there is a path
to success for video podcasters who put their podcast in YouTube Studio.
You just have to focus on increasing your podcast’s visibility, and before
you know it you’ll have an active and engaged audience on your hands. Here
are our top 7 tips on optimizing your podcast for YouTube.
Tip 1: Optimize Your Podcast for YouTube with Channel Branding
Think of your channel’s brand like your channel’s personality. Your channel’s
personality is how your audience thinks of you. Having a consistent brand
is key, or else your audience won’t know what to think. If an audience
sees an episode about your top five sugar cookie recipes followed by an
episode where you interview a video game designer, they won’t know what
your overall podcast topic is.
The baking audience and the video game audience will both feel like they
don’t belong in your audience because they’re not interested in everything
you are.
Sticking to a niche for
your channel is how you develop a consistent brand. Become the authority
on baking recipes, and YouTube will start recommending your podcast episodes
to baking fans. Having a consistent channel brand doesn’t mean that you
have to lock yourself into one niche. You can create podcasts about baking
and video games as long as you put them into separate YouTube channels.
That allows you to develop a brand for each channel without forcing two
distinct topics into one channel personality.
Tip 2: Leverage Playlists for YouTube Search
Playlists are a handy way to make sure that your content is organized
for new listeners. Once you’ve built up your content, a channel homepage
can be overwhelming for a potential audience member. The “Playlists” section
gives your audience a starting point. A clearly labeled “Season One Podcast”
playlist tells your audience “Start here!” and they can be confident they
won’t miss any moment of your content. Playlists are also useful for showing
up on YouTube searches. If you have a podcast all about cooking tips, you
probably won’t title each episode just “Cooking Tips”. Each full-length
episode will have a title related to the specific topic, like “How to Never
Overcook Your Pasta Again”. Those individual episode titles will be helpful
for audience members looking for specific pasta cooking advice, but what
about an audience member who just wants to learn more about cooking and
doesn’t know where to start? Audience members interested in learning more
about a topic, in general, will just type the general search keywords into
YouTube. For those audience members, finding a clearly-labeled playlist
and podcast title in the search results will be helpful. They’ll see how
you’ve broken up the massive topic of “Cooking Tips for Beginners” into
bite-size episodes, and start learning at their own pace.
Tip 3: Use Eye-Catching Thumbnails for Your YouTube Podcast Episode
Just because podcasts are an audio-only medium doesn’t mean that you have
to limit yourself to audio-only skills. Visuals are still an important
part of your podcast’s advertising, especially in a very visual medium
like YouTube. Your podcast’s thumbnail is the first thing people see in
a search, and much like books and covers, people do judge a podcast by
its thumbnail. Let your thumbnail capture your podcast’s brand personality.
No matter what, make sure your thumbnail catches the eye while also presenting
your podcast’s tone in a visual language.
Tip 4: Optimize Your Podcast for YouTube with a Keyword-Strong Title & Description
The best way to get your podcast onto people’s home pages is by following SEO
best practices for the title and description. Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) is the technique of choosing the right keywords to put into your
titles and descriptions that will make your video climb to the top of your
audience’s search results. Clarity and consistency are the best ways to
improve your optimization. Your videos should have thorough descriptions
that include the common keywords surrounding your topic. Your podcast about
pet care should include the description words “dog,” “cat,” and “caring
for your dog”, for example. Likewise, your episode title should contain
the most important keywords that tell your audience exactly what this episode
is about.
Tip 5: Promote Your YouTube Podcast Episode on Social Media
YouTube alone can’t get your podcast in front of listeners. You need to
be your own marketing team to get viewers for each new episode as they
come out. No matter what podcast platform you
use, social media matters. Social media is how you drum up excitement in
the days before you post new content, and excitement means viewers. The
more viewers your video has, the more YouTube will recommend your YouTube
videos to potential audience members. In order to get this process started,
you need to get listeners interested, and that means social media. You
can generate social media interest in a variety of ways: post an intriguing
or funny snippet from an upcoming episode in an Instagram reel, or post
a humorous screenshot of a transcript to
Twitter. Start a countdown to each new episode, or tease your audience
about an unexpected conversation you had because of the podcast. No matter
what, use your social media platform as a method to further demonstrate
your brand’s personality and engage with your audience.
Tip 6: Engage With Your YouTube Audience
You can engage with your audience in a variety of ways on YouTube, but
the most common way is in the comments of videos. You can make your audience
feel appreciated by thanking them for a compliment, or help them out by
answering a question.
Managing comments can take some
time to learn to do effectively, but once you’ve started the habit of “hearting”
a thoughtful response or replying to a suggestion, you’ll have an audience
eager to interact with the next episode.
Tip 7: Add Podcast Captions to Optimize Your Podcast on YouTube
In order to keep your podcast accessible and engaging for every member
of your audience, you need captions. Captions allow your podcast content
to reach even further than it could alone. For hard-of-hearing audience
members, captions can be the difference between an enjoyable episode and
a confusing one. For audience members who speak a different language, captions
that can be translated let them consume your content without a language
barrier. In order for your podcast to be truly optimized to take YouTube
by storm, you need to generate captions quickly and accurately. Maestra
can automatically generate captions for
your podcast YouTube episodes in minutes, letting you save time and grow
your audience.
Maestra is Here to Help You Optimize Your Podcast on YouTube
Skyrocket your podcast to YouTube success with Maestra’s automatic caption
generator. Maestra can translate your captions into over 80 languages,
will expand your newly-optimized podcast’s reach far beyond just one language.
If automatic captions in minutes isn’t enough, Maestra can also generate
full podcast transcripts for you to post to social media and link to. You
can let your audience read along with ease no matter what format you choose.
Maestra’s AI-powered text-to-speech solution does accurate work in minutes.
Try out our automatic caption generator or
podcast transcript generator today!