When you are creating podcasts, you get exposed to a wide variety of audiences who have their own set of beliefs and opinions. Hence, you may encounter a few positive reviews or rants in your podcast’s comment section! Nonetheless, your podcast reviews are critical in your overall journey. On that note, we will talk about growing and managing the review section of your podcasts in the best way! Let’s get started!
Why Do Your Podcast Reviews Matter?
The importance of podcast reviews is priceless. Your podcast reviews are one of the first things that a potential listener checks out before tuning in to any of your episodes!
Hence, you must stay stringent with your efforts of creating good content and gathering maximum good reviews on your podcast.
Also, your podcast reviews help you rank higher in the search results of the podcast hosting platform. Your podcast can even make a place at the top podcasts of the week and other similar charts in the same podcast hosting platform, which will again give a massive boost of traction to your podcast!
Where to Find your Podcast Reviews on a Hosting Channel?
Be it any podcast hosting channel such as Podbean, Stitcher, Castbox, Apple Podcasts, etc. You can easily find reviews on your podcast within these podcast hosting platforms.
Your listeners can review your podcast on their preferred application to listen to podcasts. You just need to check out the specific application and spot all the reviews right below the podcasts!
Who Do You Want Reviews From?
The answer would be very evident here – Your audience!
Your audiences are your best critic. You can find the best or even the worst reviews from your audience and judge your performance accordingly.
However, many people tend to buy reviews or even take part in review swaps wherein podcasters exchange reviews to gain more reviews on their podcast, which is indeed biased.
Hence, you should always prefer to get reviews from your audience only!
Where and When to Ask for Reviews?
Firstly, if you plan to ask for reviews from your listeners, you can subtly nudge them to share their feedback or experience at the end of every episode. If your loyal listeners stick to you till the end, they will likely spend a few more minutes and give you an honest review of your podcast!
Don’t just ask for reviews right at the beginning of the podcast since that won’t give a good impression to your new listeners.
Hence, asking for an honest review or rating at the end of the episode can be your best shot!
While you ask for reviews from your listeners, explain to them how the reviews help you grow your audience even better or make the necessary changes to make the complete podcast experience better and many more.
Next, there could be chances that your listeners may not know the complete procedure of reviewing your podcast.
For example, if your listeners try to review your podcast using iTunes, they might struggle a bit with multiple pages before submitting the review if they are not aware of the complete procedure.
This way, you have a higher chance that they will leave before sharing their review on the podcast!
Therefore, always guide your listeners on the right way to submit the reviews. You can either create a video explaining the entire process or share screenshots on the page. Remember to keep it concise.
Likewise, suppose you are not comfortable creating a complete video about the podcast reviewing process for your listeners. In that case, you can also add a youtube link to other resources explaining the same!
How to Ask for Reviews?
There are many ways to get reviews on your podcasts. Here are a few of them:
- Ask your listeners generally to leave a review by the end of the episode about their experience.
- Host podcast review competitions wherein your listeners will get a gift or prize for sharing their reviews on your podcast, such as ebooks, course access, book, etc. The rules could be simple. By the end of the podcast, you can ask your listeners to share a review of your podcast and send a screenshot to you via email. Once you receive that, you can ask for their address and send out the prize for review!
- You can also offer incentives to your podcast listeners. Set milestones for your podcast. Keep reminding yourself about the milestone every time at the end of the podcast, such as “When we will have about 50 reviews in the podcast, I will share exclusive premium content with a top-tier guest or go live for a one-on-one conversation!”. The incentives depend on the topic and your audience. However, as simple as that may sound, you need to choose incentives to attract listeners and lure them into reviewing your podcasts!
- Give shoutouts to your listeners on every episode for leaving a valuable review on your podcast!
What to Do with Your Reviews?
While you gather podcast reviews, you may want to check them out and look for any suggestions or valuable words that can make your podcast even better!
Also, you can keep your podcast reviews as social proof for new listeners when they judge your podcast based on the reviews.
Lastly, when you already have a few good reviews, you can start by addressing those people at the end of every episode for acknowledging their time and effort in leaving a review for your podcast! This will also make your listeners feel more valued and appreciated. This will also encourage them to tune into the next episode since they can be a part of the next episode!
You can also read out any stories your listeners have shared in the review section on how your podcast helped them in their lives. This will again help you to connect more closely with your audience.
A great way to get updated about any new reviews on your podcast is to use platforms like My Podcast Reviews, wherein you get email notifications whenever a review gets posted on any podcast hosting platform!
Ways to Get Your Podcast Ranking Higher
Your podcast reviews and rankings are interlinked with each other. Both of them will help in your overall journey of podcasting. Hence, without any further ado, let’s check out some fantastic tips that will help grow your podcast rankings and review count real quickly!
Create Good Content
The success of your podcast has a lot to do with how you create your content and market it. Needless to say, the first part takes the lead here.
You consistently need to develop and deliver valuable content that will benefit your listeners to ensure that the same set of listeners come back to your podcast with good reviews or even with some of their friends too!
For example, the TedTalks have over 2,700 podcasts of educational content. They are consistently adding value to their listeners, which brings them to the list of the topmost downloaded shows available today!
Produce Quality Audio Without the Cost
If you focus more on the podcast content while overlooking the audio quality and other aspects while creating a podcast, rest assured that the efforts you add to create the content will go in vain!
If you want good reviews on your podcast, you need to ensure that your audio quality is top-notch with zero compromises in this sphere. It’s finally time to ditch your regular smartphone mic for recording your podcasts and invest in some good-quality podcast equipment that will help create high-quality podcasts and deliver them to your listeners.
Find the “Super Listeners”
With the significant hike in consuming content via podcasts, your listeners can even share your podcasts with their friends and consume twice the content of any average listener! Such listeners are the actual gem of your podcast.
You need to compel them to click on the subscribe button for your podcast to get valuable reviews and share your content with their friends and family! An effective way to achieve this is to either build up every episode to keep them coming back, wanting for more and more on the next episode!
Also, check out their needs and demands while creating the podcast content to match them and grow more!
Find Guests that Fit your Niche
Creating interview podcasts is one of the most popular podcasting formats of all time. However, when you are finally starting your podcast with zero to minimal reviews, you will have a tough time bringing any renowned names to your podcast.
With that being said, here are a few tips that can help you secure a few good names in your industry as your next podcast guest!
- Find authors or experts who have upcoming book releases scheduled and ask them to talk about their book in your podcast as their guests. Needless to say, they should be from the same niche as yours.
- You can also try out trade shows or conferences wherein you can book a few guests for your next podcast and even ask them for referrals for your next ones too!
The Brand with Clarity
Your podcast branding is the next big leap for your podcasting success. Most podcasters tend to have clumsy cover art or graphics on their podcast hosting platform, which can turn down your audience in no time!
You must take out time to create your cover art and other essential aspects of your podcast branding and make it crystal clear for your audience.
Also, create simple descriptive titles, clear categories, and no texting languages!
Unleash your creativity and make everything highly attractive yet clear when it comes to your podcast branding to stand out from the rest!
Be Everywhere Your Audience Downloads Content
Since podcasts are growing at a fast pace, you need to ensure that you are available on multiple platforms and that your podcasts are easily accessible to your audience.
Register your podcast to every podcast directory such as iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play, and others to get more downloads and podcast reviews on every other platform.
Monitor Episode’s Performance in Apple Podcasts Connect
When you are available at every podcast directory, including iTunes, you need to monitor your progress. Many podcast hosting platforms offer you a dashboard with the metrics of your podcast growth.
For example,
Podcasts Connect helps you manage and submit your podcasts to iTunes. You can also view your podcasts growth analytics on Podcasts Connect, such as the number of unique devices listed on your show, the average time spent on your podcast pr device, the total number of listeners who have tuned into your podcast, and many more for up to 90 days for every episode!
Apart from Podcasts Connect, you can also find similar metrics on other third-party tools such as Chartable, Podtrac, etc.
Apple’s “New & Noteworthy”
Apple’s New & Noteworthy List can give your podcasts a great headstart if you lack visibility. As a podcast, you typically have about 8 weeks to make your palace into the list.
To get featured on the list of Apple’s new & noteworthy, you need to have a full-fledged podcast launch plan, some 5-star ratings, and reviews!
You can initiate the podcast review journey by emailing your subscribers and inviting them to tune into your podcast if you have zero reviews.
Secondly, you can reach out to the influencers or journalists within your niche and pitch to them for your podcast.
Thirdly, you can cross-promote with your fellow podcasters!
Lastly, share snippets of your podcasts on your social media channels and let them create the buzz for your podcast!
Friend of a Friend
Never forget to leverage the existing audiences of your podcast guests. Ensure that your podcast guest shares the episode with their email list and social networking handles to direct some of their audience to your podcasts! Similarly, this will also help in growing your authority in the industry!
Contribute to the Tribe
Apart from being consistent with your podcasts, you also need to be consistent with multiple communities or forums. If you are a valuable contributor to communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, or similar other digital platforms, you can easily attract a lot of traction to your podcasts!
Spend time analyzing what are the trending topics and add your valuable suggestions to the discussion.
Leverage your Social Network
One of the most evident yet overlooked aspects of your podcast marketing is your social media channels!
With people scrolling throughout their day and glued to their digital screens, social media networks are an Amazon way to bring traffic to your podcasts!
Some great social media platforms you should try advertising your podcast on include but are not limited to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Inspire your Audience to Take Action
As we said, you can either nudge them subtly to give out some reviews or host giveaways, incentives, or contests as a part of reviewing your podcast!
As simple as it may sound, you need to take out time into planning all of it and be consistent with it to gain some reviews with these procedures! These timely pop-ups will keep your audience engaged and encourage them to leave a review on your podcasts or every episode!
Show Up Again and Again and Again – Publish Regularly
Again, if you do not have a consistent schedule for publishing podcasts, you will lose out on your existing listeners quickly! Never leave the audience hanging or waiting! You need to get predictable here since your audience is already waiting for a specific day of the week just to tune into your next episode. In case you do not value your audience’s time and efforts, you can never gain success in your podcasting journey!
This can also result in more bad reviews on your podcasts which can harm your overall reputation!
Commit to a fixed schedule and deliver the content as you promised to your audience!
Improve your Interviewing Skills with Practice
Interview podcast formats require good skills and expertise. Otherwise, your podcast content can get dry and boring for your audience.
Interviewing is not something that you can learn overnight. You need to constantly practice interviewing different guests, gain experience, and get a better grasp of the process. Watch podcast interviews of some of the best names in the industry to gain more valuable insights on the art of hosting podcast interviews!
Interview Swap
Booking guests for your podcasts gets very challenging, especially when you are a new podcaster in the industry!
Fortunately, you can outsource the process to the professionals like Interview Valet or Interview Connections to help make the entire process of finding podcast guests simpler and easier for you! Even though these services come with a monetary investment, it is one of the wisest decisions since the ROI would be much higher when you finally get some good podcast guests for your podcast!
Get Ranked in Search – Podcast Search Engine Optimization
Podcast search engines are very similar to regular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Your ranking is driven by text search and the user’s reaction to your podcast.
To get higher rankings in the podcast search engine result pages, you need to focus more on your episode titles and match them with the queries that most people search for on the podcast directory.
For example, if you have a digital marketing podcast,
Start naming your episodes as “The ultimate way to run a successful PPC campaign” if you will talk about PPC campaigns in your episode.
The main concern here is to create titles that give a clear picture of the content of every episode right within the title.
Besides, you should not overlook your podcast description, too, since apart from the title, your podcast description is the next spot your potential listener will hover to! Ensure that you create an attractive and detailed description stating everything about the particular episode.
How to Deal with Bad Reviews of Your Podcast
Now when you follow these tips and finally start getting a few podcast reviews, you may encounter many bad reviews in your podcasting journey. Most people tend to get depressed and even consider quitting their podcasting career with such bad reviews. However, if you want to manage your podcast reviews the right way, here are a few tips you should consider whenever you get a bad review on your podcast!
Your Podcast May Not be Right for That Listener
Not every listener is meant for your podcast. This is why the term niche has evolved into the industry. Suppose you just got a bad review on your podcast.
In that case, there could be chances that the listener may not be associated with or interested in your podcast niche, resulting in misunderstanding the topic you just spoke about in your podcast. Let that not get to you since, as a podcaster, your main motto is to add value to listeners of your niche and not to everybody!
Bad Reviews are an Opportunity to Recover a Listener
There is always a good side to everything. Failures are a part of our lives. However, how we react to every negative review or failure in our lives carves out our personality and the future.
Never get disheartened whenever you receive a bad review. Always find out the positive side of the review and use it to improve your podcasts even further! And when you finally rectify your podcasting mistake, you might find the same listener getting back to your podcast and turning into a loyal listener!
The Reviewer Could Just be a Troll
With internet plan prices getting more competitive over time, the number of trolls is getting higher! Be it a social media post or your podcast. You will encounter a few trolls who are only focused on bringing you down.
In such cases, you can either choose to reply to them(which you should but not aggressively) or ignore them and move on with your podcasting journey!
Bad Reviews Make Good Reviews Authentic
Not everybody will have the same choices and prefer the same thing! Suppose you look out for some popular eateries near you. If you check the reviews, you can find a mix of good and bad reviews. This is because not everybody loves Italian food or lasagna! However, if you only find the good reviews there, you may suspect that the owner is either buying the reviews or deleting the negative ones, which is simply unethical!
Similarly, when your podcast has a mix of good and bad reviews, this ensures that the reviews are completely authentic instead of purchased biased There are many listeners out there who consider this criterion before choosing a podcast to tune in to! Hence, you are not completely at a loss here!
How to Engage With the Listeners in Reviews
By now, you already know how to manage your emotions whenever you get a bad review on your podcast. However, you cannot just leave it to that. Since engagement is a major requirement for your podcast to flourish, you should equally engage with your bad reviewers and take things positively. Let’s discuss it more below.
Don’t Take Negative Comments Personally
Yes. Words can hurt. Nevertheless, don’t let those negative words stop you from continuing your podcasting journey.
You need to understand that your opinions and interests can differ from another person. In case somebody has different opinions about your podcast, embrace them and try getting better at it over time.
But, if you succumb to the depressional phase due to these negative chatters, your podcasting journey may result to a halt, and your dream of becoming a successful podcaster will never turn into a reality! Hence, never take those negative comments personally!
Respond to all the reviews – If possible:
We understand. The negative reviews can get overwhelming at times. There is no compulsion for you to reply to all the negative reviews on your podcast. You can assess and reply to the ones you are comfortable replying to, including the constrictive critics of your podcast who are focused on making your podcast better. You can choose to ignore the rest as your interests!
Apologize Where Appropriate
The last thing you should do in your podcast review section is pick a fight with your listener!
If you just read the negative review and are already upset about it, take a pause. Analyze what made them comment on that and identify anything that you can rectify in your podcasts.
A great way to respond to negative reviews is:
“Thank you, ___ for your feedback on the podcast. I understand your concern and genuinely appreciate the time and effort you spent writing the review. I am always open to every suggestion to improve the podcast and create a more fruitful experience for my listeners. Hence, I will surely consider your feedback and try to add this to the podcast to make it a better experience for my listeners.”
Tackling negative reviews respectfully will give an impression of maturity which will also attract new listeners to your podcast!
Thus, never lash out at them and respectfully reply to them, acknowledging everything they wrote in the review.
Don’t Feed the Trolls
As we said, the internet can be an ugly place at times! There could be many reasons for trolls to write a negative review on your podcast! They could be having a tough day at work or a completely wrong perspective. Either way, none of it is justifiable.
Never feed the trolls of the internet. They never deserve your time and attention ever since these people gain pleasure by being disrespectful and contentious to others. Since we can’t change their mindset, we can choose not to pay heed to them.
Learn from the Review – Improve from Criticism
You can find out a positive side to every negative review of your podcast, irrespective of how hateful it was! You just need to filter out the constructive criticism of the lot and gradually implement them into your podcast.
Drown Out the Bad Reviews Eventually
Lastly, never let those bad reviews get to you. You are here to make your mark in the industry to make lives better by educating or adding value to your listeners with your content. A negative review from an individual cannot limit or stop you from becoming a successful podcaster!
Instead, reply to them respectfully, as we just mentioned above, and move on with your life. Continue making new episodes, and you will witness the good reviews showering on your podcast in no time!
Final Thoughts
One of the main aspects of being successful in the podcasting industry is to gather as many reviews as you can in your podcasts. Be it good or bad. Keep the good reviews in your heart, embrace them, feel proud of your work, and learn from the bad reviews about how you can improve your podcasts in the future.
