Growing the audience of your podcast can be tricky. Simply posting audio files and providing an RSS feed won’t guarantee you hundreds or thousands of subscribers. Listing your podcast in all the known directories, like Yahoo! and iTunes is certainly a good start (Robin Good offers a great list of places to submit your podcast).

Directory listings are not enough to guarantee success. Like anything, promoting your podcast takes time and effort. To be successful, you need to draw on the large segment of the population that has never heard of podcasting and might not know your podcast is something they should want to hear. To reach beyond those in the know about podcasting, traditional Internet promotion techniques, like search engine optimization, e-mail newsletters and press releases, coupled with newer tricks like tagging your posts and using social bookmarks to accurately catalog your podcast across a variety of services.

To get you started down the path to podcast superstardom, here’s a list of 12 ways to promote your podcast.

[tags]podcast,search engine optimization,audience,e-mail newsletter,promotion[/tags]