If you google “Top Podcast Apps” your results will include:
Best Podcast Apps of 2020
The Definitive List of Top 10 Podcast Apps
and
The Top 27 Podcast Apps
Rather than simply providing you with another list of podcast apps that you can find anywhere on the internet, we would like to offer a list that is a little more unconventional.
Below is a short list of the podcast apps you should recommend to your friends, family and audience along with rationale for how these recommendations benefit you, the podcaster.
Top 3 Podcast App Recommendations:
- Apple Podcasts App: The benefit of having your listeners use the Apple Podcasts app is you can learn your audience’s listening behavior via your Podcasts Connect dashboard. This will help you better plan your show. Imagine how you could improve your show if you knew your audience stopped listening after your warm-up banter, or current events discussion, or every time you made a funny voice that might not be so funny after all. You would stretch out the banter, focus on current events and/or stop the impressions of Rick and Morty. That is just one example of the actions you can take by reviewing your Podcasts Connect dashboard. Because it is only available to your listeners who listen to your show via Apple Podcasts, the portion of your audience who do not own anything from Apple will not be able to use the app. That presents another opportunity. You can join Amazon’s Affiliate or Influencer’s Program and suggest your listeners buy an Apple device through your link, and earn a small commission on a significant purchase.
- Your website: This recommendation for listening is actually a cheat (since it is not really an app), but you could recommend that your audience listen to your show from your website. This will get at least some of your listeners to your site to consume your show, and you can offer interactive quizzes, supplemental videos, entice them to join your mailing list, or just monetize your website with Google Ads. This helps you control their experience more fully than on any podcast app. Hosting with Blubrry and using the PowerPress Plugin makes it easy for your website to be an in-demand destination for your podcast listeners. Easily embedding Blubrry’s podcast players on your site and then comparing your web traffic to your per-episode podcast stats offers you a wealth of actionable insights regarding the effectiveness of your podcasting efforts.
- Choose an app, any app: You as a podcast producer are presumed to be an expert both on the topic of your show and, like it or not, an expert in podcasting. So often podcast hosts lose their credibility as a podcast expert by recommending that their listeners, “subscribe to the show anywhere you listen to podcasts”. WHAT A WIMPY RECOMMENDATION! Consider choosing a podcast app, any podcast app, and recommend that one app (maybe the one you are using right now). Become an expert in the use and customization of that app and you maintain and even grow your podcast-expert status. And who knows, you may be able to develop a beneficial relationship with that application’s developers.
What podcast app do you use? Do you have your podcast episodes available for streaming on your website? Have you checked your Podcasts Connect dashboard recently? What do you think of these recommendations? Let us know in the comments below.