Positive reviews in iTunes are important for getting increased exposure and attracting more subscribers from their directory. How would you like to get some more?
From my experience, positive reviews appear to contribute to increasing:
- The rank of your podcast
- How high up you appear in search results and featured podcast listings
- Your popularity rating in search listings
- The chance that you will be noticed by the iTunes podcast editorial team to get featured
For Internet Business Mastery we ran a campaign over a month (through two episodes and an issue of our email newsletter) where we asked our listeners to review us in iTunes if they found the our content helpful. We also told them we had a goal to achieve fifty reviews.
Over the next few weeks we went from under ten reviews to almost fifty. Our placement in the rankings for the Marketing and Management category also increased. It’s known that the number of new subscribers in iTunes (over the last day or two) heavily determine this ranking. But it appears that the number of reviews may also be figured into their algorithms.
To get more reviews for your podcast in iTunes, list it at the new ReviewItForward wiki. Post your podcast and then go review ten others. This was conceived at PodCamp Boston by Mitch Joel and CC Chapman and then implemented by Kathryn Jones.
Note: the wiki password is podcampboston.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Jason I believe that you got the results you say you did. But that said, I don’t believe the opposite is true, i.e., that negative reviews hurt your podcast in iTunes. Most of my shows have been heavily negatively reviewed in iTunes (typically by my competition or their agents) and in every case, the show is in the top 25 in iTines in its category. So while positive reviews may indeed provide a bigger audience, just wanted to chime in and say in my experience, negative reviews don’t have the opposite impact.
October 30th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Scott,
Are your negative reviews offset by lots of positive reviews? I’ve seen where a podcast with mostly negative reviews has a hard time getting exposure in iTunes. I think the negative and positive are weighed against each other. They are also probably just one part of the algorithm. But I don’t think negative reviews are totally ignored by iTunes.