AP 0374: What Happens When New and Noteworthy Ends?

AskPat 374 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 374 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business-related questions five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Adrian.

Adrian: Hey, Pat. My name is Adrian Cook, and I've got a podcast which is called Your Daily Ten Minute Meditation Podcast. I've been a student and teacher of meditation for a number of years now, and I just want to firstly say thank you for all you do. It's so insightful and informative. My question to you is, I've been doing quite well in the downloads, but I'm halfway through I think what is my two-month New and Noteworthy section. What happens at the end of New and Noteworthy after you've gone past your two months? How do they categorize you on a permanent basis? Thanks, Pat. I think you're absolutely awesome.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Adrian. Thank you so much for the question, and I appreciate all the kind words. It's interesting; New and Noteworthy is an amazing opportunity for new podcasters. Most podcasts that come out that have decent quality audio and great cover art are featured in the New and Noteworthy section in iTunes for the category that they're in. If it's doing really well and the numbers are great, typically you'll get in the New and Noteworthy section at least for a brief period of time on the home page, or at least for the whole of iTunes, which is pretty cool. And that's happened for a couple of my podcasts. It definitely does give you a jump in the numbers, and it provides a great opportunity for new podcasts, even those who don't have an audience already, to get a lot of exposure, a lot of downloads, and a lot of great things can happen out of that.

However, as you've pointed out, and a lot of people know, New and Noteworthy only lasts so long. It is currently still an eight-week period when you are featured in New and Noteworthy, and within that eight weeks you are often featured on the home page or the front page or the top listings of New and Noteworthy for your category, or, like I said, potentially on the main podcasting general category or the overall category. But, then you fluctuate from being featured on the top or being featured on the lower lists, and on the desktop version people have to open to see all of New and Noteworthy to be able to find you sometimes if you're not featured on the first five or six, depending on the size of a person's screen. Or, on the iPhone, they'll have to scroll down a little bit further to find you if you're not on the top seven or eight.

But again, it's still a great opportunity, but it does end. It does end, and for a lot of people, it ends a lot of the happy feelings that they have during that period, because if things aren't put into place beforehand, most people will see a sudden drop in their numbers. Like, if you're looking at a line graph, it's a cliff. It just falls. Because there's no more exposure. If your show hasn't gone into any sort of rankings for particular categories, it's gonna be hard to find you. You could still be found through SEO, through the keywords related to your particular podcast show or your podcast episodes, I should say, and—or your podcast episodes.

But, that exposure that happens in New and Noteworthy, when that goes away, a lot of people are gonna have a hard time finding you unless you do a few things. For one, you should obviously start building your, hopefully, your email list in a way to be able to share with potential subscribers or new subscribers that new shows are coming out. Hopefully, you've had a lot of people subscribe to your show, so that even when you are out of New and Noteworthy, people who love your show can still continue to get it. You can remind them even further through something like an email list or something where they come back to your site. Hopefully, you have a site set up where you can then collect more information about them and deliver even more value to them. Like I said, that email list is very important, especially for podcasters, I feel. That's definitely underutilized for most podcasts—the email list, that is.

Another thing you could do is to make sure, especially when that eight-week period is coming to an end … And hopefully you'd be keeping track of that … Or around the time when you know it would potentially you'd be getting off of that feature, is to then really crank really hard on getting subscribers, rankings, ratings, and downloads all in that short period of time. So, obviously, you want all of that to happen as much as possible, but even more so when you are about to jump off of New and Noteworthy. Make a big deal out of it. I wouldn't say, “Oh, guys, I'm not gonna be in New and Noteworthy anymore.” I wouldn't say that, but I would say, “Hey, guys, we have a great episode coming up. This is Episode number 12 or whatever it might be, and you're gonna want to subscribe. You're going to want to download this, and we're actually running a little contest, and blah blah blah,” and doing all these incentives and giving as much attention to your audience as possible to take action on those things, because those are the factors: the ratings, the reviews, the downloads, and subscribes. Those are the factors that determine your ranking in your particular category.

Now, what category are you in after that? It's based on the category that you chose for your podcast. So, if you used something like FeedBurner, you would see that you'd be able to choose a primary category, business, and sub-categories, marketing and management, careers, whatever sub-category that is. That's the one that you'd be more prominent in and be in the rankings for. Although, you can, on your sub-categories, be able to rank on those as well. So, that's where you would be categorized. Now, there is also another section called “What's Hot?” Or “Hot Podcasts” or “What's Hot?” Those are ones that seem to be getting a lot of legs during that period of time. Nobody knows exactly how that's calculated. I pop in there every once in a while and there's no particular reason. It could potentially be just more downloads than other shows in a certain time period, or it could be more subscribers or ratings. Whatever the case may be, you should always be trying to get as many ratings, reviews, subscribes, and downloads as much as possible.

But, like I said, before you get off of New and Noteworthy, make big deal out of it. Make an event. Give incentive. Run a little contest if you want to get as many of those as possible. That works really well to increase your rankings. That's obviously something you should be doing when you launch, but even when you get out of New and Noteworthy, you could do that too. You could do that anytime, really. If you've been out of New and Noteworthy for ages, you can continue to do that. I do that every once in a while: when I have a special guest coming on, I make a big deal out of it. Somebody who's well known like Tim Ferriss or Gary Vaynerchuk, I'll make a big deal out of it, and I'll make sure people subscribe, and maybe have a few bonuses that people can get—a bonus video that people can download if they subscribe, or some incentive, a contest. One thing that me and Chris Ducker did when we launched our 1-Day Business Breakthrough Podcasts, is for a week we gave away a t-shirt every day to a random reviewer who would review the show. We would give away a t-shirt. We would have them take a screenshot of their review and rating before they hit publish or submit, because it takes a while for those to get up there. Plus, it makes it easier, depending on what people's countries they're from, it's easy for you to track if you have people take a screenshot and then send a tweet to you using a particular hashtag for the contest. That's what we did. It made it easier to track, no matter what country people were from. Also was able to create a list in Tweet Tech with that hashtag and then be able to just find somebody at random, use a random number generator to do that. You could do that. That worked really well to get us literally close to the top 10 in all podcasts, let alone one of the top business podcasts at the time. It works. It works really well.

At the end of New and Noteworthy, you're gonna lose a lot of exposure, so do your best to get exposure. The “What's Hot,” that's kind of up to Apple, but just focus on those ratings, reviews, subscribers, and downloads in a short period of time to launch above everybody else who's in those rankings and try to get in the top 10, hopefully even higher, top five for those particular categories that you have set yourself, depending on what podcast hosts or service you're using or plugin or what have you. Everybody has a different way of doing it. So, check out to see what category you're in. See what other shows are there you're competing with, and do your best to rank above them. Then you'll get that exposure. Honestly, the exposure you get from the rankings is even better than the New and Noteworthy, because it's social proof. If you're the fifth-ranked meditation podcast, that's amazing. Or, self help podcast. That says a lot. It means people are consuming it, and people are leaving ratings and reviews, and people see that.

I would also make sure that you have all the other foundational parts in place. Like, good cover art. Your show name is intriguing. Your cover art does stand out amongst all the other people in that particular ranking and the space that you're in. Your description is not only keyword filled, but also written for humans and very enticing and very compelling for people to subscribe. Also some of your shows, make sure you hook people in in that first minute and the calls to action at the end. You keep them to a minimum of one of two, or excuse me, a maximum of two. But also, having that call to action to take action and leave those ratings and reviews to get that exposure on those category rankings, which is really, really important. And then again, like I said, having that email list to increase those is just going to help you even more.

So, Adrian, I hope that helps you out and gives you some actionable tips for you as you approach the end of New and Noteworthy. Hopefully, I caught you in time, and if not, you can always just have an upcoming episode be a big deal and get that rankings and those ratings and reviews in time for that. So, wishing you all the best, and thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I'll have to check out your podcast, because meditation has been something that's been on my mind. See what I did there? That was dumb. But, it's something that I've been doing a lot over the last six months, and it's been life-changing for me, and hopefully other people will check it out too. So, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. We're gonna send an AskPat t-shirt your way for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much for your time and attention today. I really appreciate it, and I love serving you guys through this episode or through this show. To finish off as we always do, here's a quote from Richard Branson, who was our quote from yesterday as well, but one more to finish off the week. He said in this one, “A business has to be involving. It has to be fun. It has to exercise your creative instincts.” That's why I love podcasts. It allows you to do that. You can do whatever you want for your podcasts. So, with your podcast, wishing you the best of luck. Check out the Smart Podcast Player at SmartPodcastPlayer.com. Love you guys. Cheers. Bye.