Full Transcript: 7 Tips to Improve the Reach of Your Podcast – Neil Patel & Eric Siu

Full Transcript: 7 Tips to Improve the Reach of Your Podcast – Neil Patel & Eric Siu

: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

: And I’m Neil Patel.

: And today we're going to talk about seven tips to help improve the reach of your podcast. So,tip number one: if you have a social following, if you have an email list, this has been really effective for us. Push your content out to your channels.

: This seems very obvious, but a lot of people tend to forget this. So for us, we use a podcasting host called Libsyn, and this allows us to push to multiple social channels.

: We push to SoundCloud, we push to YouTube, we push to our Twitters, our Facebooks, and even LinkedIn, as well. That way, we’re covering more ground. And granted, the depots are not super optimized. But, you know, we're still in the early stages right now. We’re just trying to see how effective it is, and it is growing us across these different channels such as SoundCloud and Youtube.

: So try doing that. I mean, also, you know, email blasts have been effective for us, as well; Especially with Neil because he has such a big list. Don't forget about your channels. Don't forget about social N, don't forget about your email channels.

: Here's a simple tip: when Eric and I were doing podcasts, we found a browsing iTunes and it only showed the latest 100 episodes. I‘m like, “Why is it only limited to 100 episodes?” and then you're looking at some of the other podcasts in space and they all do the same thing. But then I found a few like Gary Vaynerchuk’s podcast, and he had 300 episodes and there is a few other people who also had 300 episodes. And I quickly learned that the max that they let you show is 300. I’m like, “Wait, why do we only show 100 when everyone has 300?” Or some other people have 300, right?

: Most people only show 100, and the old content isn't bad, it’s not outdated, so I’m like, “It should still show.” So I told Eric. He’s like, “Oh, it's the feed. The feed is just limited to 100." He's like, "I can change it to everything." And once we ended up doing that, download rate according to Lipsyn doubled in the next 24 hours. Now what ended up happening is it fell back down because it just showed that the- when you produce a ton of content and you index really quickly, they just give you more love on iTunes, you get so much more search traffic.

: And then of course it's going to go down again after that, but still you can get a really quick bump by just including all of your content. So don't just cap it at the last hundred episodes that you've done. Show every single one they you've recorded.

: One other thing that we do is because we don't have a time to always consistently promote the old episodes that we have and a lot of stuff that we're talking about is evergreen. So we use a tool called the Meet Edgar- that's Meetedgar.com, and from there you can schedule basically a consistent feed of posts over time so it might be, for example, my Twitter might say: OK for each day we're going to share like a random Marking School episode and we'll have a different category for that specific podcast.

: There might be a category for the growth everywhere podcast, one for the Marketing School podcast and we're just going to share content and you can share it more than one time per day. You can share even more if you want because Twitter, there's people that will share 10 to 15 times or so. So using a tool like that it makes our lives a lot easier so we don't have to constantly think about using a tool like Hoot Suite or Buffer to continue the schedule all the time because that just becomes a hassle.

: Number 4. When I look at the Lipsyn stats, the biggest thing that I know the difference between popular episodes versus non-popular episodes it really comes down to the headline.

: I know that sucks. Lipsyn doesn't give you stats on how far people listen in to your podcasts. So you don't know if people listen to the first 5 seconds or 10 seconds. So that doesn't really help you determine if the podcast episode is actually good or great. But it does show that the headline really impacts how many downloads a podcast gets. And we noticed that the attractive headlines do the best.

: So Google copy blogger headline formula and they'll give you templates to create really attractive headlines. So when Eric and I are coming up with headline ideas, a lot of the listeners – you guys – are giving us ideas. Then we also come up with out own. We also use the copy blogger headline formula to try to craft attractive headlines. You can also use Portent's headline generator tool.

: And then once you have a few finalized headlines, go to titlecapitalization.com and plug it in there. It will fix the capitalizations, the flow, etc. like the grammar- not really the flow but more so the grammar of your headline. And now you should have a finalized headline that you should be able to use for your podcast and it will do better than if you didn't use, let's say, the copy blogger headline formula.

: All right. Number 5. This one seems obvious but a lot of people aren't doing it. When you're doing a podcast. Also add a blog too. We also have a separate WordPress blog in addition to placing the podcast on our site with the smart passive player, but having a separate site like marketingschool.io, basically we have the show notes automatically published to this WordPress blog and everything's included.

: So Neil just talked about Lipsyn not being able to show you how far people are listening. At least with a blog you can see how engaged people are, how many page views, how long people are staying on a certain page, and things like that. So this is, I mean, this has been growing kind of in conjunction with what else we've been doing. But it's just good to have a separate- because the domain is- with a podcast called Marketing School, we have a marketingschool.io site. And, you know, that allows us to dig a little deeper as that continues to grow.

: Then number six. This seems really obvious as well, but I was looking at everyone who is doing well. Common element is they have a ton of ratings and reviews. So the more ratings and reviews that you have, the better off you're gonna be.

: Especially when it comes to iTunes rankings, the higher rankings you have, more people find you and you get a ton more views. When I look at our data and Lipsyn and what causes the spikes, it's not email blasts, it's none of that. Most of it actually comes from people searching on iTunes. So iTunes- think of it as your version of Google, right? for SEO. If you can do well on iTunes with your ratings and reviews, you're going to get way more traffic from the searches which will cause way more downloads and listens.

: So whenever you're publishing a podcast, make sure you mention- and we used to do this at the beginning when we didn't have a ton of ratings and reviews, we would ask at the end: "leave a rating and review." And Eric, if I'm not mistaken, I don't know whoever recorded our intro and outro, but did you have someone — I think you had someone add that to the outro, correct?

: Correct. So this is Tim Page from Lead Pages.

: So Tim Page from Lead Pages, I'm assuming, who recorded our outro — what he pretty much did was: at the end we directed him to say, like, "Hey, thank you for listening to Marketing School. If you like the episode, make sure you leave a rating and review," and whatever else is in the outro. But the most important part is just telling them to leave a rating and review. If you don't tell them to leave a rating and review, you will get very few of them. So the more people you tell, the better off you are.

: Number seven: cross promote. If you know people — let's say Neil and I are mentioning a specific tool or mentioning somebody's name, we're going to tell them that we mentioned them and hopefully they'll re-tweet. And sometimes you can also cross promote similar podcasts too.

: So a lot of different ideas here. You could think about the different influencers in your space and how you can take advantage of that. But also communities too. John Lee Dumas has a great community called Podcasters Paradise, and in here people are sharing different ideas on how to grow all the time and how to improve the reach. But also they do something on Fridays called — I think it's Pay It Forward Fridays or something like that. I forgot what it's called.

: But basically there, you know, if people are allowed to share their podcast and if it's actually good, you can leave a rating and a review. And this helps everyone in the podcasting community kind of move up there. So that's one way to, you know, one little known way of growing. But, yeah. You don't even need to go to that community. You can go to other communities, too, and just share your knowledge there. So that's number seven. I think we're all done. That's it for today's episode of Marketing School. We will see you tomorrow.

: The section of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.

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