7 Ways to Optimize Your Podcast for YouTube
Oct 10, 2023
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!
Oct 10, 2023
