In the early days of your podcast, most of your learning will fit into two buckets:
How can I keep listeners engaged for my entire show?
How do I help potential listeners find my content?
Our first guide is largely focused on the first bucket. Popular podcasts are well-crafted. It’s quite a task to market a well-crafted podcast and impossible to grow a terrible one. Future guides will be focused on marketing and community-building. We’d like you to put the foundation in place first. Selecting the name of your show will impact how you are able to brand yourself and market your show. Choose wisely and consider best practices from top podcasts.
If you look at the top list of iTunes or Stitcher, you’ll notice that there are a wide variety of strategies hosts have used to name their podcasts. There are a diverse range of podcast titles that resonate with listeners. Take a look at the list of names below from top podcasts and radio shows. Think about why each name works.
Survey your field of competitors. Which show names tempted you to click? Which ones do you think your listeners would be interested in exploring?
At the end of the day, your title needs to distill your mission in very few words. Here are a few guidelines to help you select a name for your show:
Make sure the name is easy to say out loud and read in print.
The name should give potential listeners an idea of what they’ll hear if they press play. It’s possible to go too far with inside jokes.
Check to see if there are other podcasts or media properties that share the same name.
Make sure you can reserve social media properties (Twitter handle, Facebook page, Tumblr name, etc). You might also consider reserving a URL in the future - see if one is available with your desired name.
Case study
Ellen’s mission statement is “I want to help parents coach their child athletes”. She used the Google Keyword Planner and realized that “basketball moms”, “soccer moms”, and “softball moms” are all relatively popular search terms. After Googling to make sure “The Sports Mom Podcast” or a similar name wasn’t taken, she settled on it. The name has a clear link to parenting and fitness but leaves room for a wide variety of segments and topics.
Action items
Use your mission statement and listener persona to draft a list of possible podcast names.
Imagine someone interested in your show’s topic doing a Google search. Do you think that one day the title of your show could come up as a search result?
Make sure you can obtain relevant social media handles and URLs.
Celebrate! Coming up for an initial direction for a podcast isn’t easy. This is a major milestone :-)