Are you publishing your podcast on YouTube yet? As a podcaster, you want to reach as many people as possible and should have your podcast available on all directories. At the beginning of 2024, YouTube took over Spotify in the US as the most popular podcast consumption platform. With Google Podcasts shutting down, YouTube’s 2.7 billion monthly users offer a massive reach for podcasters without requiring video content creation. By converting audio to audiograms, podcasts can be seamlessly shared on YouTube and will also be available on YouTube music. Google Podcasts has started closing down so if you haven’t integrated your audio podcast yet, now is the time to do it.
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More about Podcasting Tips & Tricks
Podcasting Tips & Tricks is a show designed to share quick, actionable tips and tricks for launching and growing a successful podcast and is aimed at both new and seasoned podcasters. We’ll cover a range of topics from launching your podcast, editing, publishing, hosting, equipment, systems and processes, marketing, monetising, industry news and lots more.
Podcast awareness and listenership are growing year-on-year so it’s no surprise that it is still growing in 2024. And now is a great time for small business owners and entrepreneurs to launch a podcast to raise brand awareness and position their expertise whilst building authority and trust.
I’m Lyndal Harris, Podcast Consultant and founder of Podcast VA where my team and I simplify the podcasting journey. We offer a variety of done-for-support services, online and in-person training, as well as strategy sessions and health checks. At Podcast VA, we have launched hundreds of podcasts for both Australian and international clients, who collectively captivate millions of listeners worldwide. And quite a number of these shows have hit number 1 in the charts!
Transcript:
Maximising your podcast reach by publishing on YouTube
[0:14] Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode. I am your host, Lyndall Harris, a podcast consultant and the founder of Podcast VA.
My question today is, are you publishing your podcast on YouTube yet?
And I’m not talking about video shows, I’m talking about your audio podcast.
If you haven’t set up the integration with YouTube yet, it is something that you’ll need to get onto pretty quickly.
As I’m sure you will have heard by now, YouTube is the new podcasting platform for Google and that Google Podcasts is closing down.
And Google Podcasts has closed down already in the US from the beginning of April 2024, and that will soon be rolling out across all countries.
So if you haven’t submitted your show to YouTube yet, it’s really something that you want to get on to now.
[1:08] YouTube is a great way to promote your podcast and reach a new audience.
And here are some facts about YouTube that you might not know.
YouTube has 2.7 billion active monthly users and more than a quarter of the world’s population uses YouTube every month.
YouTube premium and and Music Together have more than 100 million subscribers in the world.
It attracts 47% of all music streaming listening around the world.
And YouTube recently beat Spotify to become the largest podcast consumption platform in the US.
[1:49] And people on YouTube might not know about podcasts.
So there might be that way of tapping into the audience there that you haven’t reached through the other directories.
[1:59] Now, I know a lot of people will have submitted their RSS feed by now, but I am doing this episode now because Google Podcasts is going to close.
And really, if you’re a podcaster and you’re looking to grow your show, you want your podcast to be on as many directories as it can be.
And so if you haven’t actually just taken those steps to submit your RSS feed to YouTube yet, now is the time.
So you may or may not see an increase in your listenership on YouTube straight away.
I know for me personally, I don’t get a lot of listens through YouTube, but I have got clients and I’ve spoken to other podcasters who saw an increase in their listenership as soon as they published it there.
[2:43] And when I talk to people about putting their podcast on YouTube, I get two common responses.
The first one is I don’t record video. I don’t have a video podcast.
[2:55] And the second one, I’m not active on YouTube and I don’t have a YouTube strategy.
And the good news to both of those is one, you don’t need to record video and two, you don’t need to have a separate YouTube strategy.
You don’t need to change anything that you’re doing.
So if you like recording an audio podcast because you don’t have to worry about what you’re wearing or what you look like or having the setup for a video,
[3:23] you don’t need to stress about that.
We are talking about submitting your audio podcast to YouTube and not changing any of your current process.
[3:32] How that works is it converts your audio to what we know as an audiogram using the cover art.
They call it a video, but it’s what we know as an audiogram.
And then that is not only available on YouTube, it’s also available on YouTube Music as an audio file.
The second response of, I don’t have a YouTube strategy.
Do not stress. You can literally just be submitting your RSS feed and pushing your podcast across to YouTube so it plays exactly the same way it does with Apple Podcasts and Spotify and other directories.
[4:10] Now, I have heard that there are podcasters who are pushing it across to YouTube and then editing the titles so that they are doing a few little steps to optimize it for YouTube, but you don’t have to if that’s not something that you want to do at this point just push it across there so that it’s just available on another platform but if you do make those edits whether it be to the title of the episodes or anything in the show notes in the description area be mindful that if you make those edits in YouTube the link back to the hosting platform is broken, so then if you go and update anything in the hosting platform for example if you wanted to update the audio file or make any changes to your show notes in the hosting platform.
Those changes will not automatically update in YouTube and you’ll need to just jump in there and edit them there as well.
[5:03] Something you might want to think about if you’re already creating reels and video snippets though, are you putting them onto YouTube?
Because you could actually put them there as shorts or as a teaser to the whole episode as well.
So let’s say you’ve got a piece of the content that would work really well as a standalone piece.
You could put the shorter version of the video on YouTube and your call to action could direct them to listen to the whole audio podcast.
[5:33] If you’re already publishing to YouTube, you probably don’t need to do anything at all.
If you’ve got a video podcast that you’ve already got going on there, just keep doing it the same way you’re doing it.
If you’re already pushing it to YouTube directly from your hosting platform, just continue doing it as you’ve done it that way. You don’t need to change anything.
And a note there is if your hosting provider does have its own tool to publish to YouTube, YouTube, it’s probably better to do it that way than to go and submit your RSS feed to YouTube through your YouTube channel.
For example, I know Libsyn do that. So have a look in the back end of your podcast hosting provider and see if it publishes to YouTube.
[6:16] I have heard that if you’re running dynamic ads in your podcast, it can be a little bit tricky to get your show onto YouTube, but it has been a few months since we’ve been able to submit our audio podcast there.
So So hopefully all of the different hosting platforms will have worked through some of those issues by now.
So if you do run dynamic ads, you might want to have a look at your hosts support or help section or contact them to see if they have any systems in place when you’re submitting your RSS feed.
Generally, the issue has been that YouTube don’t allow you to run your dynamic ads in YouTube, and that is because they have their own monetization platform.
Platform now I believe some of the hosts will actually strip the ads out and sometimes YouTube will even be able to drop their ads into that same space so if you are running dynamic ads just have a look and see what your host has to say about there and also just make sure you read the terms of service before you submit your show to YouTube so that you’re really clear on what you can and can’t do.
[7:21] It’s a really straightforward process. Now you will need to have a YouTube channel to set this up.
But once you’re in there, you go into the YouTube studio and then you want to click on the create button in the top right-hand corner.
And in the drop down there will be new podcast.
Now you might have to step through some verification process that doesn’t take too long.
Just step through there. And then it’s a case of importing your RSS feed the same way you have for Apple podcasts and Spotify and other directories.
It will give you some different options there, particularly if you’ve had your show for a little while, it can give you the options of whether you bring all of your episodes across or just some of your episodes, but it’s a pretty intuitive step-by-step process from there.
As I mentioned, I do have a video that will actually show you through the steps on how to do this, and I’ll pop a link to that in the show notes.
[8:16] Are you on my mailing list? If not, you might want to jump on there and join.
This is something I sent out to my list about six weeks ago, showing people how to submit their podcast to YouTube.
So often I will send emails that might be a little bit more timely than a podcast episode.
So if you’d like to join my email list, I will pop a link in the show notes to that as well.
And you can also jump onto my website and find a link to that in the footer.
[8:43] If you have any questions or if you want to start the conversation in the Australian podcast Podcasters Collaborative group about other people’s experience with podcasting on YouTube, jump in there and start a conversation.
See you in the next episode.