Voiceover: 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.

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

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: ... and today we're going to talk about how to increase your iTunes podcast ranking. So, Neil and I have been doing this one for about a little over a year ...

Neil Patel: Yeah, over a year.

Eric Siu: Yeah, over a year. We get about $550,000 a month. Now, we're talking in this case about the ranking itself, so when you actually go into iTunes and you look at where you're ranked at. What I can say is when you're looking to get your ranking up, especially when you're starting out, you have to make sure that you get in a new and noteworthy section. This is getting people to help kind of spread the word around your podcast. Getting a lot of ratings and reviews in the beginning, that's going to help you increase your podcast ranking.
You can join communities such as Podcasters' Paradise, which is John Lee Dumas' podcast community, and they can help you out as well, right? But you've got to make sure you get that initial bump. It's like when you think about PR, when you have all this news flying in, you're going to get that initial bump and then that's going to help you boost your ranking, at least in the very beginning.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and when it comes to your podcast and your iTunes rankings, everyone says, "Go ask for more reviews and ratings," and we've tried that, and Eric and I have put benefits at the end, it hasn't really increased our numbers at all. We're looking at our numbers, they've been flat, and we've tested that out. So, it's like you can try that, maybe it'll help you, but it didn't help us.
What we did find that works really well is just doing email blasts, so taking your email list or your existing audiences, and sending them over to iTunes works 'cause then they're seeing more views, but if you just get more listens on your website, we found that it doesn't really help your iTunes rankings. More so, you need to get people over to iTunes, and you have to convince them to subscribe.
The next thing we're going to end up testing out on, my buddy gave me this idea, he has a site called [Sematics 00:02:08], and his name's Steven. He was like, "Dude, what you should do ..." and they tested this out with YouTube, he was like, "Just say, "Hey, we're going to get a really big bonus, or you're going to get this, but all you have to do to receive this bonus is to subscribe to our iTunes channel or YouTube channel."" It's a great way to get a ton of subscribers really fast, and, by doing that, what you'll notice is, when your subscriber count goes up, your rankings will go up on iTunes, more people see it and your view count should just go, or listen count, should go through the roof.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and iTunes podcasting is really, right, 'cause I'd assume with $550,000, you know, we at least would be ahead of most people. I think we are, but rankings wise, sometimes ... We got as high as number eight on their business podcast, and then right now I think, you know, sometimes we hover around 50 to 100 or so. There's mass kind of fluctuations whenever I check it. I don't know, Neil, what you've seen.

Neil Patel: Yeah. I see crazy fluctuations. Like, right now, we're probably in the 20s or 30s, or something like that, but it's funny when I talk to some of the other people who are higher than us, 'cause they're buddies and we just share our podcast sets, we're getting at least a few hundred thousand more listens to them. But, again, iTunes is separate, they're only looking at what you get in total, just from iTunes. Yep.

Eric Siu: So, the example I keep coming back to is the example of Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels. He has a podcast called Marketing Secrets, right? Which is really good by the way, you should listen. What I'll say is this: he was basically running Facebook traffic to a giveaway that he had around this MP3 stick, which I finally got my hands on, Neil. I have the MP3 stick for Marketing School.
By the way, if you guys actually want the MP3 stick, Tweet at us, Tweet at myself or Neil. Let us know that you'd actually be interested in something like this, 'cause we are actually thinking about doing something exactly like this where he drives traffic to a landing page saying, "Hey, if you want a MP3 stick with all of the Marketing Secrets episodes on it, all you have to do, it's free, you just have to pay $9 for shipping." What happens afterwards is there's a one time upsell, right? He has like an upsell, maybe offering some funnels or whatever, it might be like $30 or something. After that, there's another upsell on top, right?
He drove Facebook traffic to this thing. To my knowledge, he would spend about $15 acquiring a new purchase for the MP3 stick. He would actually make $32 on the front end, so this is not including all the stuff that he sells in the back end where he has his $25,000 Mastermind, duh duh duh, like all this other stuff where he sells for a lot more, right? So, if you're making $32 on $15 cost per acquisition in the very beginning, that's actually really good. A lot of people, marketers especially, are happy with breaking even.
So, also keep in mind, he was, every time he got one sale, he would get five subscribers as well, right? I don't know how he was attracting that, don't ask me, that's what he said, but what I do know is when I was looking at it, I think he might have gotten suspended on iTunes 'cause I can't find him right now.

Neil Patel: Yeah.

Eric Siu: I think he might have gotten suspended, so I don't know if he got in trouble for doing this, but he was hovering at like number one on business podcast, between number one and number ten or so, and he was really high up. Neil and I were wondering how he got there, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah. It was crazy 'cause I'm on iTunes right now trying to find him. I'm like, "Wait, where is he?" 'cause he's usually at the top.

Eric Siu: If you use command F, he's not there?

Neil Patel: No, I tried doing a search.

Eric Siu: Wow.

Neil Patel: Which means they probably pulled him for some reason. Yeah, so maybe we won't do that, but let us know if you want it anyway. So, the other thing too is just like, it's being consistent. A lot of people think, oh, you need to go out there, and you should just produce podcasts and you'll be popular if you market it. If you look at what Eric and I are doing, we're doing this every single day. Sure, we're not recording every day, we do it in batches of 20, but, still, if you're not consistent and you're not continually putting out new content, you're not going to get popular.
We saw a little simple hack on iTunes. Normally, they only show like your top 100 or your latest 100 episodes. At one time, we were like, "Oh wait. Why is it only the last 100?" We ended up just showing all of them, and what we've found is our traffic just went through the roof 'cause then iTunes started ranking us higher for every little thing. That was really helpful. When you're also picking topics, people do search to try to find podcasts that are relevant to them, so make sure you're using things like Google Keyword Planner, or Ubersuggest, or any other tools out there, SEMrush or Buzzsumo, whatever it may be to get ideas for topics. Look for ones that are popular in search volume, 'cause the more popular they are, the chances are more hits you'll also get.

Eric Siu: The final thing I'll add from my side is, I'm looking at our iTunes page right now, just make sure that your formatting looks good too. The last thing you want is a bunch of brackets and a bunch of like episode 5000 whatever, and then you can't even see the title there. If you make it a little easier in terms of the title ... We make ours really simple, right? How to learn copywriting, for example. From there, it's very easy for someone to just pick it and then add it, 'cause you don't want to make people do extra work. You don't want to make people think, which is a really good book, Don't Make Me Think, so just keep that in mind. Neil, anything else to add?

Neil Patel: No. That's pretty much it. So, you're good to go, release your podcast, and if you don't rank higher on iTunes right away, it's okay, you can still get traffic from other sources. It's not just all about iTunes.

Eric Siu: Great. So, before we go, we have a cool podcast we want to tell you about called Problem Solver. If you're into entrepreneurship and marketing, and obviously you are, you're listening to this, there's a really cool episode on Burrow, which is the Dollar Shave Club for Couches, and how they launched and ran a ton of pricing experiments to ultimately win market share. You can just go and listen at singlegrain.com/solve, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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