Podcast marketing is a crucial part of your overall podcast strategy. Once you’ve developed the idea, bought the equipment, downloaded the software and created your podcast the next question is “how do I find an audience". Start with how the audience finds you as your premise and make sure you’re where they’re already looking.

There are a variety of ways you can promote your podcast. You could create a podcast blog, specifically the home of your podcast. Doing a custom WordPress podcast blog is a good solution for this one.

You can attach your podcast RSS feed and link to everything you send out – invoices, emails, etc. You can promote your podcast to internet radio stations and see if they’d be interested in running your podcast for free….or you can pay for time on a variety of systems.

You can set up your feeds to run through FeedBurner and manage your subscribers for both your podcasts and your email together. You can invite prominent people on as guests and beg for them to send out an email!

Regardless of how big or small your podcast marketing strategy is, you have to start somewhere.

The most cost effective podcast marketing begins with Podcast Directory Submissions.

Just like everything else these days there is a directory for podcasts. In fact there are hundreds of them. Podcast directories range from the big guys like iTunes to niche oriented directories and MySpace playlists.

Each directory has different requirements for getting listed, like show descriptions, keywords, etc. Some are free and some you pay a small or large advertising fee for regular or “featured" status.

Start with the free directories and work your way to the paid directories/paying for eyeballs advertising once you see how well the free ones are doing in terms of increasing your audience size, RSS subscribers and search engine optimization rankings.

You can submit to the directories manually if you have the time, or there are paid podcast submission services as well.