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The YouTube Podcast Playbook (from a channel with 1M+ views per month)

plus an invitation to an all-access webinar 💌

Author

Trent Anderson
February 08, 2025

Today's Lineup 🎙️

YouTube Podcast Strategy from Someone Who Knows

Most advice on how to leverage YouTube for podcast growth sucks. Huge claims, shallow promises, and “exclusive offers” to join high-ticket masterminds or threadbare courses. Lots of noise, not much signal.

But there’s one fella we’ve followed who consistently puts out high-quality YouTube Podcast content. And he does it for free. No strings attached.

His name is Chris Stone and he’s the Head of Podcasts and Video at The New Statesman, a 100+ year old British news, politics, and culture publisher.

Chris publishes a weekly Substack on podcast strategy. His back catalog is well worth digging into. But his most recent editions completely demystify the process of building a podcast’s YouTube presence. Here’s what you need to know:

How the YouTube Algo Works

Before you begin your YouTube podcast journey, you need to understand how YouTube’s algorithm works. Chris explains:

The YouTube algorithm exists to help YouTube users discover videos that they will enjoy.

Note I didn’t say ‘to find an audience for your video’

YouTube’s first priority is to the user.

Understanding that means you can work with the algorithm to achieve the mutually beneficial goal of serving your audience with video that will delight them.

To do this, YouTube needs to understand two things:

1. What each user wants
2. What your video is about

If it knows these two things, it can get to work serving each user with videos they will enjoy.

Sounds simple, right? But simple hardly ever equates to “easy.” While the quality of your content obviously matters, Chris opines your adherence to YouTube’s meticulous ranking criteria can make or break your channel.

First focus on metadata: titles, descriptions, and tags. Chris describes:

My general approach is this:

The title includes the focus keyword or key phrase for the video, clearly describing what the viewer will see, arranged in an enticing sentence.

The description includes the focus key word or key phrase, as well as a number of related key words or key phrases.

The tags include the focus key word or key phrase, related key words or key phrases plus common mis-spellings of the key word (for search) and additional related key words or phrases.

Now, there exists a smattering of tools (free and paid) to aid your keyword research. The paid tools like TubeBuddy and VidIQ will help you find trending keywords and provide estimates as to how difficult they’ll be to rank for. Understanding the trending to volume to difficulty ratio can be especially helpful as you aim for quick and early wins.

Once you’ve gathered keyword intel, you need to work them into the aforementioned title, description, and tags.

Chris provides an example:

The focus keyword appears in the title, with repeated appearances in the description and tags, as well as related keywords and other phrases relevant to the discussion in both description and tags.

The tags here are taken directly from the trending search terms in Google Trends, to help the algorithm understand that this video is relevant to any or all of those terms.

Next, we’ll preview the advanced version of YouTube podcast growth: The Rule of 3 for YouTube metadata.

How to Get Your YouTube Podcast in Front of More People

The previous section provided foundation-level keys to success. But how can you level-up your YouTube podcast even further? Chris posits you’ll need to build a three tier system, comprising of:

  1. Channel-level metadata

  2. Category-level metadata

  3. Video-level metadata

We’ve basked in Chris’s brilliance enough already. To get his advanced YouTube Podcast growth playbook, continue on here 👇️ and be sure to follow Chris on LinkedIn, where he regularly shares useful advice.

From Pushback to Payoff: Building Buy-In for Niche Podcast Placements [webinar invite 💌 ]

You’ve probably heard that bigger is always better, right? Well, guess what: your clients are missing out on a hidden goldmine by ignoring niche podcasts.

In this webinar (Friday 2/14 at 12p CST), we’ll show you how to flip their mindset faster than you can say ‘ROI.’

You’ll learn to go beyond old-school metrics like download counts and discover the real fit factors:

  • audience alignment

  • previous guest credentials

  • conversation depth

  • and chart positions

that make these so-called ‘smaller’ podcasts worth your time (and your clients’ money).

If you’re ready to turn client pushback into a straight-up ‘Yes, please!’ for targeted shows, then this is where you’ll level up.

See you inside!👇️ 

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