podcast traffic vs. niche traffic

[bramley]

In another thread, someone mentioned that they get more traffic from outside sources than through podcast directories. What's clear, though, is that many folks are consumed with the voting system, whether because they rely on it or because they want to **** those who care about popularity. And there's often a lot of twisted panties over the voting system. My own have felt a bit tight sometimes. So, I just raise a question/perspective for other podcasters.

Last week I realized I was spending too much mental energy caring about the listings. Simultaneously, I realized that sites related to my particular topic (food) were sending me as much traffic in four days as, say, podcastalley in one month. Now that of course could be because I have a kind of luddite topic.

I'm just wondering, with all this fuss about voting and rankings, how many other people get most of their traffic through podcast directories and how many through links from sites related to their topical niche?

[kris]

For myself on Croncast we rely almost solely on the directories and especially links from other podcasters.

But the other two shows that I produce get almost all of their traffic from forums and communites. The snowmobile show gets over 1500 unique referrals a day from one snowmobile fanatics site. When I saw the numbers I couldn't believe it. Compare those nubmers to the ones that we get when referring ourselves to other podcasts and there is no contest, the outside sources win.

Eventually our community will be that big but it will take a couple years to get us this kind of base, but we'll have it and probably a larger base than even the current outside sources that are (were - depending on the new system) feeding the voting frenzy.

So for now the directories will remain paramount to the success of those of us starting up with a listenership of zero, or one if you include the host.

[robulon]

As we're a new podcast, i think we get most our traffic from directories, and also from word of mouth on forums such as this one. as we're a music and chat show there's no particular niche we fit in, unless you count 'uk podcasts', and theres still quite a few of them around too :)

But your post made me think about the whole votes thing, I didnt want to start a podcast to be 'the best podcast' or top of the rankings, and while it may be nice for people to vote for you, the only reason i would like our show to be higher up the rankings, is so that more people can hear the music we play. The majority of what we play isnt mainstream, and if we could make just one person buy say, a do make say think album or something, then i'd feel good about what we're making.

thats just my 2p.

Rob