Bangalore Podcast Meetup

On the eve of International Podcast Day on 30th of September 2018, a bunch of Bangalore podcasters and podcast enthusiasts got together at a meetup organised by O2Pod, a collective formed by a bunch of Bangalore based podcasters namely The Musafir Stories, The Passion People Podcast and Writer & Geek Show. Thanks to LetsVenture for lending us their gorgeous office space for the meet-up.

O2Pod

As a collective, O2Pod aims to help introduce podcasts and podcasting to more people, make them aware about how one can consume or create podcasts and of course, explain that Podcasts is not the name of a band (yep, someone actually thought so!). O2Pod aims to do this through offline and online workshops, meetups, seminars and helping anyone get started with podcasts. We also guide aspiring podcasters go through the hoops and get them from zero to podcasting, at a pace of their choice. In the long-term, we hope to build a community of indie podcasters that can help each other.

This is the third edition of meetup organised by the Bangalore group, starting back in March in a coffee show with about 8 participants and moving through months. We are now 20 people strong, all who are passionate about the podcasting scene in India.

The programme kicked off with introductions and then a session on marketing podcasts by Suresh Babu, CEO of Web Marketing Academy which is a Digital Marketing Training Institute based in Bangalore.

Various marketing techniques were discussed among the group especially Dilip and Pooja from the Tastes of India Podcast, Nitesh Batra host of Mindful initiative podcast Pranay, the host of Puliyabaazi had some amazing insights on the subject.

Marketing tricks that worked

Paid Promotions like -

• Email Marketing
• Facebook Ads
• Pinterest (specifically for visual content)

Jugaad promotions like -

• Whatsapp broadcasts (to contacts but limited to 256 participants)
• Newsletters (utilizing existing newsletters to include links to the podcast) One may have to build a database of their listeners’ email addresses in order to facilitate this or begin collecting this data to leverage this medium. A lot of successful media professionals like Srini Rao from the Unmistakable Creative, Zat Rana from Design Luck and Maria Popova from Brain Pickings follow this as an effective way to grow their audience.
• Word of mouth by patrons of the mindful initiative yoga studio.
• Interviewing influencers and sharing with their followers
• Transcribing the podcast and making exhaustive show-notes to improve Google indexing.

This apart other aspects to improve audience engagement included:

• Using video content as a hook
• Ensuring keywords in title and description of the podcast
• Setting up Google My Business for the podcast to update location, add blog posts, videos,
• Creating a website for the podcast
• SEO for the website using keyword research, keyword planner (keyword anywhere plugin for chrome)
• ID3 tagging of metadata for the audio files of the podcast
• Alexa Skills
• Google Assistant skills
• Instagram stories (video making tools like Flimora, Camtasia; audio tools like headliner), — Instagram Live, Facebook Live Audio.

The second part of the session was lead by Rahul Nair, CEO of Storiyoh, who by the way has one of the most rad sneakers I’ve seen, see below.

Storiyoh is a podcasting social platform that helps in podcast discovery and developing podcasting communities. Rahul touched on the following points:

• The problem with podcast discovery. (There isn’t a podcasting platform that allows you to share what you’re listening on the same platform. Listeners generally fall back on social media or messaging apps)
• The importance of the “Audience of One”. If you aren’t satisfied with your podcast, don’t expect others to follow your work. Rahul was inspired by veteran podcaster Srini Rao’s book by the same name. Srini runs a the Unmistakable Creative Podcast and is a prolific blogger and public speaker.
• Storiyoh helps to connect podcast listeners and discover podcasts by looking at what others are listening to.
• It enables users who make podcast playlists and would help others find good content.
• It also facilitates curation in the form of collections for different categories. Eg: collections for lawyers, students, tech enthusiasts.
• It brings the social aspect to podcast listening.

Watch a short clip of Rahul’s insights here.

The meet-up enabled proactive dialogue between participants. Insights were shared on marketing and enabling a podcaster to better position his/her show for the listeners to be able to find and subscribe.

The quality of the attendees, insights shared and the community spirit that ensued made for a rather fulfilling and productive session. A special thanks to Faiza and Saif who carried some drool-worthy doughnuts and snacks!

It is humbling to see that more participants appear for these meet-ups since March. It is an indication (we hope) that we are headed on the right path. More meetups are planned in the coming months and we would love it if every podcast enthusiast comes over and attends.

Originally published at vishnupadmanabhan.com.