Hi Rashmi,

Thanks for the questions.

1. We chose to host on SoundCloud simply because it was free to start (I think it costs money after you reach a certain amount of uploaded time) and I was familiar with the platform BUT it’s not a podcast hosting site. When I work with clients to build their podcasts I recommend Podbean because I find it user-friendly and relatively inexpensive. If you need to cut your costs completely, Anchor is what most of the podcasters I know use. I personally don’t have any experience with the platform and like any other program I hear both bad and good, but it’s 100% free which is great. I recommend looking for a host that provides comprehensive stats — though at this point there isn’t really an “industry standard.” With SoundCloud I have access for a whole array of stats right down to the most popular cities for the podcats which occasionally helps us pick episode topics. One other really important thing that most new podcasters don’t realize is that to get your podcast on all the podcatching feeds you have to manually connect it to platforms like iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify. It’s really easy to do yourself but a tad bit confusing, so I’ve actually got an article coming up in November about how to do it.
2. I think our early boost was a bit of a happy accident, but I was really keen at the time so I posted on all of our social channels a lot, which I found helped boost it. I also made some little videos using Adobe Spark about the episodes (they were super bad, you can check one out here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BgoLcgEnZV2/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link ) which helped gain a bit of traction — video is the best performing content on most social platforms. For podcasts, I recommend making little audio clips using Headliner to post on social media as it gives people a tad bit of a taste. If I could go back in time, I definitely would have made a dedicated podcast marketing plan. Nothing too complex, but something that I could measure against down the road.

Hopefully, that helps, but feel free to flip me any more questions you might have. And good luck!!