LoudCity - Getting Listeners

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  Growing Your Station

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Growing Your Station
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It takes time to build a station. Many new broadcasters only see one or two listeners during their first couple of weeks. But in time, if you offer a reliable stream and good content, word will spread and your station will grow. Patience and perseverance will help.

Here are some great tips to help you get established, and grow...

The Basics

Don't be a part time station. To have any hope of building an audience, you need to be on the air 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Use a good host. If your station buffers, or is down, you lose listeners. And they don't come back.

Make sure you are pleasing the listeners you already have. Even if that's just one or two on a good day. People will usually give you one try. If they don't like what they hear, they might not return.

So before you mount a massive campaign to attract new listeners, evaluate your stats to see if the ones you have - however few - are sticking around for a while. The best test is to look at your connected listeners at around 4pm on a weekday. How many of those connected have been there for four hours or more? How many do you recognize from the day before? The week before?

If those numbers don't look good, attracting more of the same will simply increase your tune-ins. But not truly the number of listeners. Things to potentially tweak include audio processing and general stream quality, crossfading, playlists, sweepers, transitions, hosting (Yes, hosting - nobody stays connected to a stream that rebuffers all the time), and overall music selection.

Talk to your listeners. Don't be a 24/7 jukebox. You've just lumped yourself in with Pandora and other 24/7 music services. Give your station some personality - yours! Invest in a mixer, a good mic, and go on the air every now and then. That's why you got into this, right? So give your station some flavor... Make it different.

Make it Easy to Listen!

You would be amazed at how many station sites we visit where we can't find the link to tune in! Or sites that offer a format of audio that iTunes or Windows Media player don't support.

Holy cow... Your "Tune In" link should be in the visitor's face the instant they hit your site. It should reach out from the monitor and slap them! "Look here", it should scream, "CLICK ME RIGHT NOW!!!". If you have a site for your station, its number one purpose should be to guide weary travelers to your stream! (Via your LoudCity launch page, of course)

Don't make your listeners download plugins or special software to tune in. In this day and age, people have been conditioned not to download stuff from the Internet.

Bottom line - remove as many barriers as you can so that tuning into your station is like falling off a log.

Market your station

So you have a solid host, you're up 24/7, you have good content... now it's time to spread the word! Here are some ideas for you to achieve growth.

1) If your programming is local-oriented, put up flyers in nightclubs and bars, or bulletin boards at local colleges, stores, laundromats and schools.
3) Run sweepers and IDs on your station encouraging listeners to "Spread the word" about it. Make sure you run IDs frequently to "brand" your station so people can remember it, and tell their friends about it.
4) Seek a listing on the Windows Media Radio Tuner and iTunes (Be prepared for major expenses though)
5) Get friends and family to also pass the word about your station to others.
6) Always make it sound as if you have hundreds tuned in even if you have only one listener at the moment. Sound big, become big.

Remember, getting listeners is only part of the fight. Keeping them... well, that's another story. For every person who listens to radio at home, there are 4 or 5 tuned in from work. Those folks listen for 9 hours a day, Monday through Friday.
Could you listen to your station for 45 hours a week and not get sick of it after a month? Keep the content fresh, rotate, and add new content on a regular basis. Give people a reason to keep listening, and many of them will.