93. How to rank in the Top 10 on Apple Podcasts with Luis Diaz

00:00:00
You may know that many of the guest episodes I have on this podcast are actually repurposed from mastermind sessions that we hold for our paying Capshovians. And I can tell you that this particular one was one of the most highly attended live masterminds that we've ever held. And no wonder, when the topic is all about how to get your podcast ranked in the top ten of Apple podcasts. And Luis Diaz did not disappoint. Nope.

00:00:28
He brought such a cool perspective to what it takes to rank in Apple's top ten that I could not wait to share it with you here, too. So if you've been wondering about how Apple's algorithms work and some super tangible actions you can take to swing it in your favor, then this is the episode for you. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho, the fastest way to repurpose and market your expert content. And this is the Grow my podcast show.

00:01:07
My goal today is simple. I want to help you rank, even if it's shortly lived. There are some ways you can leverage that. Okay? So let me just say that even if you get on there for a day, two days, three days, you can use that in your further marketing in a way to get better guests on to open doors for you.

00:01:22
Okay? That's something I tell clients all the time. There is ways to leverage it. It is PR, essentially, and we want to be able to use that to our advantage, even if it's for a short period of time. I have been doing this since 2017.

00:01:35
Long story short, I started a podcast as a health and fitness space. Failed, started another one, learned from my mistakes, and actually started to monetize that show and grew it to about 20,000 downloads a month and monetizing it through clients and affiliate products mainly. That was in 2017. And then I started to work with other people in my network. So I've worked with guys like Vince Del Monte, joel Marion, who runs 100 million dollar company called BioTrust in the supplement space, dati Bouch.

00:02:01
So any of you Olympic fans out there, or cyclists, you may know who she is, she was a silver medalist in the 2011 Olympic Games in London. Sharon Sharvatsa, real estate. So there's any people here in real estate space? He runs the publicly traded company called Real Brokerage. Let's see here.

00:02:16
For all my Giants fans, I'm a huge Giants fan, so this was a fun one. So Steve Weatherford, punter from the Giants, and Tony Robbins, top salesman. All of these guys, I think almost all of them, they were ranked at one point in time. They may not be ranked now, but every one of these clients we've mentioned are ranked or have been ranked in the past. Mainly, if you have a large audience, which I'm assuming most of you guys like me, you don't have a massive audience.

00:02:38
So we're in the same boat. It's not as easy as some of these guys are as it has been for some of these other characters. But what we're going to cover today, hopefully, is going to help you move the needle in a realistic way. All right, so what's actually working right now, right? Because there's a lot of things that have worked, I think, three, four, five years ago that don't work right now.

00:02:57
So we're going to cover what's working right now and also how it really works, how Apple podcasts is actually looking at rankings. So Apple is looking for what have you done for me, how many subscribers follow, et cetera, have you gotten the last 72, 24 to 72 hours? Really? So if maybe you've seen people where they spike and then they drop it's because they did good for that 72 hours period, and then they haven't got as many subscribers as it goes along. So as the days roll by, they're not getting the same amount of subscribers that they did that one day or that one week or whatever.

00:03:27
So that's typically why we see those massive spikes. It's great for visibility, but there are some ways to sustain it. But unless you have a massive audience, meaning you're getting thousands of people or hundreds of people pouring in and subscribing and listening to the show every single day, it is a hard game to stay on top of the charts. There are a few strategies we'll cover now that will help you do that if you want to go the route and build out some of the systems that we talk about today. All right, so cool.

00:03:52
Let's jump in. So, first things first. The thing that I found to move the needle the most is number of followers gained in a 24 to 72 hours period every time we rank a show. If you look at the analytics in the back end of Apple, you will see a spike in the number of followers gained. So how many people are tapping on that subscribe button?

00:04:16
That's the biggest needle mover that I've seen. The next is consumption rate. So if we go back to Eli Wilde, the Tony Robbins top salesman, when we launched his show, he didn't get a lot of subscribers. What we found was he actually had a lot of people consuming his content. So these people were listening to the entire podcast and going back and sharing it and listening to it twice or three times.

00:04:38
So consumption rate can also be a huge factor in that and is a huge factor in that as far as if people are staying longer and listening to your episodes, that signals to Apple that this show is quality and we're going to move it up the ranks. And then last to a lesser extent, is downloads. So I have moved the needle where we've driven a ton of downloads, but if you look at the back end, there's not that many subscribers that will move the needle less to a lesser extent than these other two. So this is why I put them like this. Because from what I've seen and all the things that we've tested, subscribers gained in a 24 to 22 hours period seems to move the needle the most when it comes to moving up the charts.

00:05:17
Man, oh, man. Okay, who's picking up what Luis is putting down? If you've ever wondered what it is that actually moved the dial for Apple, here it is. Luis just told you. One, the number of followers or subscribers gained in a 24 to 72 hours period.

00:05:34
I did not know that. Did you? Two, the consumption rate on your episodes. And three, the number of downloads. Isn't it telling that the main metric that we can sometimes obsess over the number of downloads is actually not the metric that will move the dial the most?

00:05:51
And why is that? Apple only cares about what you've done for them lately. So the name of the game, again, is pulling in as many subscribers and listeners as we can daily. There you have it. It will always come back to what it is the platform itself is trying to achieve.

00:06:06
And when we come back, Luis is going to share three strategies that have worked for him and his clients to get ranked in the top ten of Apple podcasts. Stick around, because I bet that these strategies are not what you've been thinking. If you've been wondering how in the world you can get your podcast ranked in the top ten for Apple podcasts, then you're in exactly the right place. Luis Diaz is going to break down three really effective strategies he's used and tested for his own and his clients podcasts so that you don't need to. Yep, he's just going to share everything he knows right here, the strategies he's seen to be the most effective to get that bump in subscribers, listeners, and downloads.

00:06:46
So let's get into that first strategy, shall we? And that is giveaways. So giveaways what they do and what I've seen, they create a surge of subscribers that go to your podcast. Again, this is one of those things that unless you keep doing I've seen people do monthly giveaways where they spike their downloads and their subscribers every single month, which is great, because over time, that'll create just more traction. But a lot of times, I think people do giveaways.

00:07:13
As a one off, my advice is to start there. And if you like it, if it works, then consider doing it monthly. All right? So first things first. Giveaways.

00:07:23
Best time you can do them. The easiest and best time to do is when you launch. Everyone here has probably already passed that phase. So the next best time to do it is when you have a holiday, something relative to your podcast. Maybe it's like the year anniversary of your podcast.

00:07:36
Maybe it is a significant month within your topic. For example, like May Mother's Day. It's a great time to do a giveaway for moms if you have a podcast about motherhood. And it's May because it just makes sense. So some ideas around there when you can do it.

00:07:51
I know there's a podcast called $100 MBA by Omar Zenholm. He does a weekly giveaway. He does it a little bit different from this. He's optimizing for reviews, and he gives away a free course to the best review every Friday. So it's super simple, but it's a way to incentivize his audience to keep listening and subscribing and doing what he's asking them to do.

00:08:14
All right, the best giveaway things to give away that I found that work best with our clients, number one would be physical products. So if you have a supplements or you can partner with a company that does have a physical product for you, that makes sense for your audience, those are really powerful. We had a client give away a stroller, a $500 stroller once, and it worked really well, to say the least. But it wasn't her stroller. It was a company that also sold to new moms and new parents, and they had a great relationship.

00:08:44
So it doesn't always have to be your product. It can also be an affiliate's product or a company you just randomly reach out to and say, hey, I want to do a giveaway. I'd love to feature you your product in the giveaway if you're willing to donate whatever it is they sell. And you can find some really cool products like that. But product samples probably the best way to do it.

00:09:04
I find that the more tangible the thing is, the better the giveaway, the better the results you're going to get typically, right? And it doesn't have to be your product, either. The three steps for a giveaway to make it really work. Number one, you want to collect their name and email. So you need to have a page set up.

00:09:17
That's a giveaway page. What we use is a software called Upviral. I know there's some other ones that you guys may be familiar with. There's King, Sumo. Two, either one of those softwares will work to create a little simple page that says, we're giving away $3,000 in prizes.

00:09:33
Enter your name here. All right, so step one, enter name and email. Step two, go and follow the podcast. This is super important, so it should be a mandatory step. It's not an optional step.

00:09:43
It's enter your name and email. Then on the next page, it will go to your podcast. And then last but not least, leave a review and tag and share. Even if you get the people just go through the first two steps, it will increase your subscribers. Hence, it will push you up the rankings.

00:09:58
All right? Don't worry too much about having them do all of it. If you can at least get them to subscribe. That's a great thing. I find it hard to get people to do all three things because people just are busy and they get distracted.

00:10:11
But you will have a few. One thing to increase listeners, too, is tell them they're going to actually, the only way you're going to find out about this is if you actually listen to the podcast. So say, hey, we're going to announce our winners on episode 71. Make sure you listen to it. And now you're getting people to actually go back and listen to the episode to make sure they hear if they won or not.

00:10:31
All right. And this can be a rid to repeat thing if you wanted it to be, all right. So those are the rules. I would say keep it simple. Don't try and get them to do ten things.

00:10:41
I found where people want to go and add a fourth or fifth step. I would say don't do that. Just keep it really simple and focus on one goal only. If you're thinking like, hey, how do I promote this thing? There's so many ways you can promote it.

00:10:52
It's crazy. All of these work really, really well. And if you're thinking, hey, this is a lot of work, it is, I'm not going to lie to you there. But my advice would be to pick two or three things from here and really hammer them home. So some of the things I always do is I always send emails to my list.

00:11:10
And if you don't have a list, you can say, hey, maybe I'm just going to focus on posting on Facebook. Wherever it is that your audience hangs out, you want to get that in front of them. And then obviously, people who are listening to the podcast are your best people who are going to do this. So advertise it on your intros and outros. I wouldn't promote it more than 14 days, so leave it like 14 days would be the max length.

00:11:30
I would have it more ideally, maybe I would run it from like a Tuesday to a Tuesday so that it's just a one week long thing. You have the weekend there, and then you can kind of push hard on that last Monday to get people to sign up. Okay, wow. So Luis pretty much just laid out to you exactly how it is that you can start running giveaways to get those subscriber numbers on your podcast up. Because as we know now, that's the number one metric that Apple cares about.

00:11:55
And giveaways is a super effective strategy to help you do that. The second strategy existing assets. This is probably the thing I get the most jazzed up about most people I find in podcasts. I'm not saying you guys, but most of our clients, even I think we sometimes get lazy with the consistent stuff that doesn't move the needle a ton, but over time, it makes a massive impact. One of those things being regular emails to my email list, or outbound direct messaging to my guest's client, my guests followers, or our own audience.

00:12:30
And I'll show you how that works in a second. And then LinkedIn articles. The other thing here which I found helpful with Capsho is LinkedIn articles. So existing assets as in your email list, leveraging DMs, and then also LinkedIn articles, just literally popping your podcast stuff into Capsho, really, really powerful. We're going to break down how these work.

00:12:49
So people go to your LinkedIn profile, they can actually see your featured posts, and if those are posts that are basically repurposed podcast episodes that are really good, chances are people are going to click and read that. And so that's really the goal there. But I'll digress from that for a second. First one is email series. So I don't know how many people here have an email list, but no matter where you're at in your journey, I'd super highly recommend building an email list or just focusing.

00:13:16
You may have 100 or 50 emails right now, or 1000 or something, and maybe you're not focusing on it. I would say for me, emails drive subscribers every single week. Because the fact of the matter is maybe let's just say you have 5000 emails. I guarantee you only a small percentage of those people actually know you have a podcast, as weird as that seems, right? Because you're probably talking about all the time on other platforms and you're posting regular content.

00:13:43
The fact of the matter is, even me as a person who produces podcasts, people don't know I have a podcast. Like, I get this question all the time, so if I'm getting it, I'm sure you guys are getting it too. So regularly feeding your audience the actual content you come out with sounds super simple, but it actually really works. And I watch. Right now we're focusing on promoting YouTube.

00:14:04
So we're putting all our YouTube's YouTube links and turning them into emails. But every day, every week, we're getting subscribers. There's two ways to do this. Number one, you can do a kind of what Tim Ferriss does here, where he basically promotes all of his best podcasts on his welcome series. So if you see he's got like, welcome to my newsletter, and then here's my show, and here's all of the best episodes that you should check out.

00:14:28
Right? He does a ton of hyperlinking here. That's something you can definitely do once you've got maybe 50 or 60 episodes. And you can see like, here are my five most downloaded episodes. You can write a letter like this or a welcome series like this and literally just feed them your best content.

00:14:43
All right. The second way, which works really well, is creating episode specific emails. So this is an email to my list about how to use Chat TBT vidIQ. This is like a specific one that just goes to one episode. And I'm sure you guys have seen this, you probably have all clicked on these and listened to them.

00:15:01
They work. Quite simply, they just work. Again, this is something Cap Show can help you with when it comes to writing emails. This is basically what I've had my team doing. I'll have them create the first draft with a software and AI like Capsho, or in some cases it is Capsho.

00:15:17
And then I'll go through it and write it like a second time and kind of touch it up so it takes a lot less time. So that's another piece for it that works as far as existing assets. So we've covered emails. The second thing I will cover here is more of an outbound approach, which is something we're testing now. And I'm really excited because we've got some great results with it so far with the little testing that we've done.

00:15:38
This one is going to be around outbound promotions. This was for me, a huge game changer. Because think about it, somebody comes in your podcast, well, maybe they'll share it with their audience and that's great. But very few times do those people, actually, people on their list, actually see it. So one of the things I actually learned is from this client here, Brian Mark, who used to do it when he had a bunch of DMs from Instagram, he had a team in there that they were sending podcast links to their prospects, which is great.

00:16:09
And I learned this from him, actually. And then finally I was like, let's give it a shot. But this helped him scale from $40,000 a month to month. A big part of that was using him using those podcast episodes to actually warm up his prospects. And I know this isn't about making more money with your podcast, but it goes to show that you can actually do more of a manual outreach approach, so where you're pushing and promoting content kind of one to one.

00:16:35
All right, so this is an example of this little one on the left. Here is one I did recently. So every day I have my assistant doing 20 to 30 outbound messages to an audience member from my guest. So I did an interview with a woman named Angie Griffith. She's great, she's amazing with sponsors.

00:16:54
What we found is that she had about 3300 people on Instagram. So not all those people are good fits, but all the people that we deemed who would be great as great listener for the episode, we sent them this personal message. All right? And for me, what I found is, based on this episode, we didn't do any other promotion for this episode either. This is strictly just outbound promotion.

00:17:18
20 to 30 email or messages a day for about two or three weeks. We doubled our watch time and we also doubled our average Uteration. So we did 10.2 hours of watch time versus 4.2 and then six minutes and 28 seconds worth of average view duration versus 3.2. Even though I have a small channel, YouTube channel, this was really interesting to see. So you could do the same thing here for Apple if you wanted to push more subscribers or any other channel if you wanted to.

00:17:47
If we're talking ranking, then your best bet is going to be send them the Apple link, right? But I found this to be really helpful. Over the next couple of weeks, what we'll be doing here is we're going to be actually scaling this up with automation. So right now we're only doing this on Instagram and we're going to be actually doing this, moving this into LinkedIn and actually promoting doing automation for LinkedIn. So I'm not a huge proponent of automation, but if we're going to scale it, I know I'm going to have to use some kind of automation, right?

00:18:15
Ideally, start with a human, start with an assistant. That way you can actually monitor it better and not have it just kind of go crazy. And then if you want to do automation, you totally can later. And you know what's awesome? Luis actually breaks down how he does his outbound strategy, what he says, how he says it, and how he has trained his VA to take the process over.

00:18:37
I've included that as a bonus clip. So head over to the show notes for this episode and you can grab the bonus clip there because now we're going to head into Luis's third and last strategy in how to get ranked in Apple's top ten podcasts. Paid traffic. Okay, so there's really only one thing for paid traffic that I found working when it comes to specifically growing your rankings, right? So this is something that I've used before and we're currently using a lot of for clients, this is by far the hardest.

00:19:10
And I would say for most people, it doesn't make sense to spend the money to do this because it will cost anywhere from like $8,000, right? But if you've got a sponsor, if you've got sponsors, or if you have a company backing you, I have seen instances where this does make sense for some people and then they can leverage it to get on other shows. They can leverage it to get on to get other bigger guests on their podcasts and things like that. So I want to preface this with that first of all. All right?

00:19:37
And then I think that was it. I have one other trick here to help you guys hopefully execute this on your own without spending that kind of money. All right? So when it comes to ranking and then this here on the right is one of our clients who invested in doing this. If you've ever seen best selling authors or people who get best selling campaigns, sometimes what they do to get those rankings on Amazon Bestseller or New York Times or whatever is they will go to somebody with a massive email list or database, and they will get them to sell the book to that database.

00:20:09
All right? So they run like a 99 cent promotion and they say, hey, the book is $0.99 for the next 24 to 48 hours. And then typically all the people on that list will go in, or most people on that list will go and buy that book at that cheap price before it goes up. So what I found is that works really well with podcasting. However, it is not cheap because advertising on these databases is not cheap.

00:20:30
All right? But it does get the ranking, it does get a ton of new subscribers, but for most people, I always tell them this, I don't think it makes sense. I think you got to create really good content first, see if your organic marketing is working, and then if you want to add gasoline to the fire when it makes the financial sense to you to do that, by all means, right? If you wanted to try this, like marketing to an email list that is not your own, on your own, there is a list. I think you guys may have heard of this before, but it's called Tink Media.

00:20:59
So I just pulled up their database here. They have a huge database of email lists or newsletters that you can't really most of these aren't pay to play, right? These are more along the lines of we'll feature your podcast on an email list or on an email, and that's how you'll get subscribers or people if they like the show, right. It's a little bit of a different play, but if you wanted to try doing email marketing to other newsletters, then this is a great place to start. They have dozens and dozens of newsletters here that you can check out.

00:21:30
Just depends on what industry you're in or what vertical you're in. What does Luis think about running Facebook ads? Facebook ads, in my experience, haven't worked. They're great at getting people to listen to a clip or a reel. But as far as moving people off the platform to go and listen to the podcast, I haven't found them effective.

00:21:51
When other people I've talked to who have ran ads for that find the same thing, they're great for sales. They're great for if you're running paying money to get people to go book a call with you, that'll work, but not for podcast growth. No. All right, last one. So, just like I showed the swap database or the database before for these email lists, I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with Tink media, but they also have a database where you can look at, like, podcast.

00:22:17
Swaps where if you wanted to promote if you wanted to cross promote with another podcaster, these are all shows that allow you to do that. So I found some pretty cool shows on here for clients and the hard part about this though, is that it does take it's a little bit of back and forth to set up the swap, like what dates we're doing it, how long is it going to be, where is it going to be in the episode. So there's a lot of little logistical things you have to cover. But if you do want to try this, and I suggest you do, if it makes sense for you, then definitely, definitely try it out. You're going to want to try and go after podcasts that have similar episodes or downloads per episode because that is definitely and I had to ask Luis.

00:22:55
One final thing because we are now armed with the three top metrics that actually move the dial for Apple to rank you. We're now also armed with Luis's top three strategies to move those metrics. But how much time does this take? How long might it actually generally take for us to rank? Yeah, so I don't think it's a time thing for me, I think it's more of like a blitz where it's like all the people that we've seen rank is because they found a way to push a ton of traffic to their podcast all at once and keep it there.

00:23:33
So for me, the ads at any time, if you can do the list promo on a massive database, kind of similar to what we're talking about with the best seller campaigns, you can do that pretty much any time of year. And it doesn't take long. It just takes money. And that's the thing. So that's the biggest thing.

00:23:49
If you're doing giveaways, then you're going to want to give yourself a month or two because planning the giveaway, building the page, there's a lot of little things, little steps along with that. So you want to give yourself a month or two lead time and then obviously you got to promote it so that's the I would say probably the lead time you need. It depends on the strategy. Like, for example, if I'm doing the outbound, focusing really heavily on the outbound right now to send links to our guest followers, for me, I think that's going to be a six month ramp up time until we have the systems in place. We're sending out 1000 plus messages a day and it's actually starting to because it's starting to create like a snowball effect.

00:24:26
Yeah, if you're doing like cold outbound, I'm thinking six months for it to start to compound. So depending on the strategy, the time frame is definitely going to vary. Love that. So many cool things we covered in this episode. Let me know which one is your favorite.

00:24:40
Have you tried any of them? If so, what results have you seen? Or if you haven't tried any of them, then which one are you going to start doing now? Let me know through the link in the show notes. And while you're there, don't forget.

00:24:52
To grab your bonus clip, too, where Luis dives into what he says for his outbound DM strategy, how he says it, and how he has trained his VA to take the process over. And if you'd like to thank Luis. And help him out, I am focusing and going all in on podcasting on YouTube. So just type in Luis Ryan Diaz on YouTube. My goal is to get to a thousand subscribers yep.

00:25:13
Go and subscribe to his channel on YouTube. That's it for me for now. This is Deirdre Tshien. Stay awesome.