by: AskPat Episode 139 Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 139. We have a great question today from Mary about podcasting and getting your podcast to be found more, but before we get to that, let's get to today's sponsor.
I want to thank Flippa.com. Flippa is a site you can go to to either sell your site or even buy existing sites. A lot of people don't want to work on their sites anymore or just aren't feeling them, and a lot of times, people come in, they buy sites, they take them to the next level, or they just continue on what's going on, and I've purchased a couple sites in the past myself, though I haven't really done much with them, unfortunately, because I just haven't had time. But I also know a lot of people who've purchased sites who have taken them to the next level and have turned them around and are really, have become their main sites now. Pretty cool, and even fun to just search around. You can go to Flippa.com/pat, find the best web businesses for you if you want to get started, and what's cool is you don't even have to start from scratch. You can just start from where somebody else left off. So make sure you do your due diligence though, I will say, before you make any big purchases, but check it out. Flippa.com/pat.
Now let's get to today's question from Mary.
Mary: Hi, Pat, this is Mary from The Living Reminders, a podcast dedicated to the show The Leftovers on HBO. We started our podcast before any of the other Leftover show podcasts started up and yet, there's about ten of us total. And for some reason, we're never easily displayed on iTunes' podcast section when you search “The Leftovers,” so we're searching just in our special niche, and yet we're always probably like number seven or eight of the ten different podcasts. We do have some reviews. We even have some reviews, more than some of the other ones that always show up on the front page. We just don't know how we can get more easily seen. Is it because we are new to podcasting in general? Is it keywords? We don't really know what it is, but we just want people to see us better. Thank you so much for all of your help, Pat, and thank you for your help with this question.
Pat Flynn: Mary, thank you so much for your question. First of all, I think it's really cool that you're doing a podcast for an existing television show. That's something I've always wanted to do. I've even wanted to do one for Back to the Future. A lot of people have been telling me I should do one, maybe. Maybe. I have enough things going on, but we'll see, or maybe if there's another show that comes out. You know, as a lot of people know, Cliff Ravenscraft from Podcast Answer Man, one of my good friends online and offline, and also he's helped me get into the podcasting world, that's how he got started, he started a fan show for Lost, which I was addicted to. And it did really well for him in the rest of his history as far as where that has taken him. Now there are lot of things you could do to give yourself a better chance to be found, to give yourself a better chance to rank higher than other people talking about the same topic as you. And I'm going to go a number of them right now.
So the first thing you want to do is yes, focus on keywords. So keywords are really important. They play a huge role in the search for particular things in iTunes. You want to make sure you have what you believe people are typing into iTunes to search for your content in the title of your show, so you want to make sure “The Leftovers” are in the title, you want to make sure you have it in the description as well, and if I were you, I would even have the different versions of the way to spell something in there as well. For instance, for Smart Passive Income, I have the whole thing connected as if it was my domain name, and then I have them all separated out, Smart, space, Passive, space, income. So you might be able to do “TheLeftovers,” like just one word, “The” and “Leftovers” is one word, or “The, Left, Overs.” Now that might not help very much, but it's just something you can do in the description to make sure that you rank higher when people mistype it. That's one sort of quick strategy. But that's not going to give you a huge bump.
What is going to give you a huge bump, however, is making sure you have that keyword in the show host name. So right now, you're currently using just your name and your co-host name. You want to put “colon” after it, or some sort of divider. And then you could put the name of the show and then, you know, “fans” or “huge fan” or “aficionados” of The Leftovers. That right there will give you a big edge. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com on, or even AskPat, on iTunes, you'll see how I do this, and it works out really well. Now you also want to make sure that you have the title of the show or the keyword that you're targeting in the title of the episode as well, which I don't think you're doing right now. I checked right before I recorded this for you. But that's where a lot of your competitors are having an edge over you. So the title of the show, your entire show, is really important. But the title of your episode is really important as well. So that will help boost your entire channel, which I think is really important.
Another thing you want to think about is your artwork. So now that you know who your competitors are, does your artwork stand out amongst everybody else's? And we could always use improvement on our artwork, but we gotta make sure and realize that a lot of people are subscribing to our podcast, not on our desktop computers, but on our mobile phones. So how does your artwork look on a really tiny little screen? And you might play around with the fonts a little bit more. That's one thing I would recommend for you and your co-host specifically, Mary, is play around with your fonts, and even put somewhere the logo for your show or mention the show that people are looking for on your artwork too, which I don't believe is there. I think that's important, to make that connection between that search when people do find it through search, to then click over, knowing that your show is the one that's more specifically relevant to that. Maybe that's where other shows are getting more leverage, as they have The Leftovers in their title, so people make the connection from when they search, so when they click and sort of . . . I'm guessing that iTunes sort of reads that and will rank the other ones higher. So that's another thing.
Now let's talk about the algorithm and what really ranks the big sort of equation here. Now nobody knows what the formula is like exactly, but the one thing that people do know is that ratings and rankings and reviews and subscribers, you know, getting all those things in a shorter period of time, will help you boost your rankings over the other guys. And I see this change daily, almost, for my shows. You know, the more reviews and the more subscribers I get every day, and I don't know exactly how many, but you know, the more I get in a short period of time, the higher I rank. And you know, it's interesting, because when I come out with a new show and I get calls to actions on my blog show notes, or on the podcast episode itself, “Please subscribe,” “Please leave a rating,” I notice that when I come out with new episodes, I'm always ranking higher than when I'm not coming out with new episodes. So I do see a drip sort of at the end of the week in terms of rankings, and then I come back up once I post a new episode. So you want to focus on making sure you get ratings and reviews and subscribers for your show, of course, and hopefully you're doing that through the call to actions that you have in your episode, and it looks like you're doing that already. You have a number of people who have left reviews and they're amazing reviews, actually, so this is good, that means you got a good show, validated the content.
Now what you want to do, and here's the big strategy for everybody out there, try to create an event. An event that will get people to subscribe to leave rating and review all around the same period. So maybe it's, I don't know what episode you're on now, but maybe it's a milestone episode like episode ten, and you do some big celebration. You hype it up on your blog, and you hype it up on your podcast. Maybe you do a giveaway or a contest of some kind, and you say, “Hey, guys, we're running this thing and we're at episode ten. Here's what I need you to do to either enter or to help out the show. We're all doing this together on this date.” Again, on this day, that will help with the rankings because you're creating this event, and people are doing those call to actions at the same time, and that will help give you a boost. And then hopefully from there, with the artwork and with the key words in place and those things, you will be sort of sitting in a higher position.
So those are the strategies I would give you right now, or those are the strategies I know of to give you a higher ranking, especially when you already have existing shows out there. I would actually listen to some of them, if I were you, if you haven't already, and see what they're doing to increase their engagement and sort of get inspiration from that, or just do it better than them. I think would be really cool. So yeah. So one thing you could do also to increase the ratings and reviews and subscribers, and I know a lot of shows that do this, although I don't do it myself just because my shows are already much longer, this is for my Smart Passive Income Podcast, is actually mention the people who leave reviews and say thank you to them. I think when people understand that their reviews are being read, more people are going to leave reviews. And when you can thank them, it gets them all jazzed, and they share the show, and then cool things happen from that.
So those I think are the big strategies. The key words, yes. Artwork, of course. The ratings and reviews and subscribers around a specific date, and you can do this like every ten episodes or every once in a while if you feel like you're dropping again. You can just create another sort of “event” around all these call to actions, and then saying thanks to some of the people who have already left reviews and ratings so that people will subscribe. You know, that's social proof, and it'll get them to leave . . . more likely to leave ratings and reviews because they know they're being read.
So Mary, thank you very much for your question. Best of luck to you. I can't wait to hear the results of the action that you're going to take after listening to this episode. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like to potentially future hear on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that webpage.
Snd of course I want to thank today's sponsor which is Flippa, which is the number one marketplace to buy and sell websites. And actually, since it's been up, over $125 million have been traded on the market place. It's pretty crazy. So people across the world turn to Flippa to purchase and sell websites. A lot of people generate extra cash that way, so check it out, you can head on over to Flippa.com/Pat to find the best websites for you, or maybe perhaps you're selling, you're thinking of selling a website. Best tip I can give you is, use one of your passions or interests if you want to start from there, or make sure you just do your due diligence and do your research before committing to anything, but it's a great place to get a head start, for sure. Flippa.com/Pat.
Of course, I always end with a quote, and today's quote is from Gail Goodman, and she says, “What makes content engaging is relevancy. You need to connect the contact information with the content information.”
Cheers, thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.