How we got our podcast to rank #1 on Apple, and Is GenAI a fad?

All right, we're going to talk about how we got our podcast number 3 on marketing and number 21 on business.

And we'll talk about the stats and what it did for us too, because you were sharing that with me. So with podcasts, let's give some sort of context. When Eric and I first started this podcast, Marketing School, we shot up really fast to 100,000+ listeners. In our first month, we achieved over 100,000 listeners. And it was because Eric and I both had email lists and we were just running promos to our lists and it instantly got us subscribers and traction. Then we wanted to get to a million downloads. And do you remember what we did to hit a million downloads?

We said that if we hit a million, we're going to throw a live event for free.

So we're going to do an in-person conference for free with people talking. Plus we would record a podcast live during that event. And we did it in LA. Once we hit a million plus downloads, we were really thankful. We didn't charge for any of the tickets. How many people attended that event?

I think like, call it like 120.

Yeah. And we capped it. We could have had more people attend, but we provided free food and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, free food. Shout out to Daniel Shemtov. I think it was more than 120. I thought there was 200+ people, dude. It was 120. I think it was 120. I thought it was 200, but it's, I think it's 120, something like that.

I thought it was around 200.

Yeah, it felt like more.

It felt like more, yes. And it could be because you also had your staff.

People flew in from Hawaii, people flew in from like Minnesota, people flew in from a lot of places.

Yeah, it was really cool. So then we did that. And then we're just like, all right, we're climbing up the charts, but we're not really climbing. And what Eric and I mean by that is in the category of marketing, yeah, we've hovered in the top 5 for a long time, top 10, no problem. And in the business category, top Uh, this is like 150, 175. Okay, but we've been in top 100 and even top 50 before. And the model was we, at the end of every podcast episode, we would ask people, please review, uh, please leave a review and a rating, 5 stars. And we appreciate that. And if you guys want to do that, we really do appreciate it.

We'll take more.

Yeah. And specifically for this one, Eric and I are talking about rankings, which we're mainly talking about the Apple Podcast rankings. And what we found was Apple doesn't care if you're rated 5 stars or have 1,000 reviews or 200 reviews. What they care for, if you ever downloaded the Apple Podcast app and you like a podcast, you can click follow. That's their version of subscribe. That means you're following a podcast, you get notified when they have new episodes. The more people that click follow on your episode, the faster you climb. That's their algorithm. That's it in a nutshell, nothing else. So if you're going to send out an email blast and telling people to subscribe or follow, tell them to just click that button and that's it. If you're— don't tell them to leave a rating or a review. If you're going to run ads, get them to, you know, go to a page and ask them to click subscribe or follow. You don't have to get too much more complex than that. And if you do those things, or if you are promoting on your social channels, ask people to click follow. You'll climb up really fast in the rankings. And what spot did we end up getting to? It changes on a daily basis. It's so hard.

So yesterday I checked, it was 21. Day before it was like 27 for business. And we're hovering between number 3 and number 4 for marketing right now. Okay.

And then check this out. Before, Eric, out of all our listeners, how many of them were unique on a monthly basis percentage-wise?

Percentage-wise, it was like, it was low. It was like 12 to 14%. Now it's like 35 to 40%.

Yes. So our listener count has gone up, but what's gone up even more is the percentage of new listeners. So what we find that's really useful from running these campaigns is by ranking on Apple, and now we'll work on this for the Google version, we'll work on this for Spotify. I keep saying Shopify instead of Spotify, but we'll work on this for Spotify as well. Yes, you want more listeners, but the key is assuming the quality of your podcast is great, you want more new listeners.

Yep, 100%. And the other thing is you can't just say, okay, just because you get a lot of— let's say you start a new podcast and you got a bunch of subscribers and followers. You might rise to the top, but if you're not consistent and your quality is not good, it just doesn't matter. You still need to have a good product and good product brings people back. And you can actually check your retention inside tools like Chartable. And now we look at our retention, a lot more people come back because we're doing longer episodes. And we're still getting a lot of comments on our YouTube. People are like, oh my God, I don't know how this doesn't have more views. It doesn't have more views. It's like we just know it's going to compound eventually. So, you just keep going.

By the way, when you look at the follow, I never looked at this from an analysis perspective because we haven't done it long enough. I'm curious. I don't know and I don't have the answer. I don't know if you have the answer. Maybe you do. Do they care about how many people follow in total or how many new people are following on a weekly basis?

I have no idea. I have no idea.

Yeah, we'll actually do some fun experiments with that.

We've seen some people hold at the top of the charts for a while, so who knows what they're doing.

But yeah, it could just be they're naturally getting followers. Another thing that you looked at too, you showed me, I don't know what it was. It was like some note thing or some saving thing. And a lot of podcasts have that. And that shows signs that it's a really high quality podcast. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to climb the charts. It just means it's a high quality podcast.

So I just showed you an app that I use. So I use this app called Snipd. It's S-N-I-P-D. And it allows you to bookmark and allows you to save like a lot of sections. And then you can, you can see how many times a podcast has been snipped. That to me is like a signal. So I was just thinking that's an interesting product feature. 'Cause then you would, if I were the owner of Snipped, I would just take the most snipped ones and automatically create AI summaries and then just publish it on the web and then I get a lot more traffic that way. So yeah.

So they're snipping audio pieces and then creating content around it.

Yeah, it's like if I listen to something from Andrew Huberman or Dr. Peter Attia, then like it might be something really helpful. And these gets like thousands of snips. That's what I would say.

Dude, speaking of snipping content, just creating content, I have 2 interesting stats for you. 94.29% of the webpages got zero traffic from Google in the last 30 days. And the other one was, we analyzed 5,204,391 social media posts over the last 30 days. Guess how many had no engagement? No comments, no likes, no shares.

99%? 99.5%?

59.41%.

Okay, I was going to ask.

Because even one like is considered engagement, right? But it just goes to show that creating content, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a blog post, whether it's social content, It doesn't guarantee success. And I think there's this big misconception that content is king. And I do still think content is king, but that doesn't mean you can just create content. People assume that if you create content, you're doing a good job, you're doing marketing, and you're going to get eyeballs and you're going to get more sales. That's not true. If people don't read your content, consume your content, convert from your content, then you're losing. And if you look at the first 2, read and consume, It's hard to get people to do that, but there's a lot of people that get people to consume their content and read it or like it or engage with it. But if you don't get the third one of them converting into a customer or generating revenue eventually over time, it's useless as well. You're spending all this time and effort, you're building your brand, but if it doesn't generate revenue, who cares?

You know what's interesting? Maybe it's not that interesting, but if you're creating content and if you're not learning, you're not getting better, your content's going to suck. You have to keep getting better whether you're doing things or learning things, and that's why We did a collaboration with the Perpetual Traffic Podcast a week ago.

That was fun, by the way.

It was fun. So it was Ralph Burns and Qasim Aslam, I believe is his last name. And they're 2 paid media guys, we're 2 SEO guys, and we went for about 90 minutes. And I believe by now or maybe afterwards, you'll get this on the Marketing School Podcast, we're probably going to be doing more collabs. But the fact of the matter is like those 2 guys are really smart. They're actively learning on paid. We've learned from them. They've learned from us as well. And so that's why like people listen to podcasts because they're actually getting better.

Yes. And funny enough, with that episode, Eric and I both do paid as well and sold. And they have done SEO and other channels as well. And I remember when we were recording and my internet just kept going down. So I had to actually do it on my phone.

Oh, yeah.

You're like, download Riverside app, it'll work on your phone.

I was like, huh. You're like, I will try. I was like, oh, he's not showing up. So I didn't think you're gonna show up. And he showed up literally like a minute after.

Yeah, it worked. And the reason I said I would try is I'm not good with technology. So the moment someone has me like download apps and stuff like that, I'm like, oh my God, this is This is gonna be hard.

By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Here, I'll give you a stat over here. So first, here's a question for you. Here's the hook. Is Gen AI a fad? Generative AI, is it a fad?

No.

Okay, here's the— here's— I got some numbers for you. So Bill McDermott, Who is the ServiceNow CEO. You know ServiceNow, right?

Yeah, massive company.

Yep. So he did 186 CEO meetings in the last 6 months. This is a quote, by the way. There's real appetite to invest in GenAI, and there's no— there is no price sensitivity around it because the business cases are so unbelievable. When you're improving productivity by 40-50%, the product just sells itself. Tied to this as well, separately, one theme that we had from our founders retreat is how do we bring costs down? How do we bring costs down? And you know who's bringing up these conversations. How do we bring costs down?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, tell me more. But, um, but I mean, this just goes to show you that this stuff is just starting right now. And a lot of people have cut their support staffs and they're looking at cutting, they're looking at cutting on the sales side. It's not because they want to cut people. It's more so like, hey, this is what the unit economics are. And when you— 186 CEOs and they're all price insensitive, that says a lot.

Yes. But going back to his message that he put out, he's pretty much saying it's not a fad.

Not a fad. Because yeah, when you're improving productivity 40-50%, you're down to pay a lot of money. Okay, even if you're paying like $100 grand a year for something like this, if you're saving like $3, $4, $5, $6 million a year, you do it all day.

Dude, businesses will invest billions because if you invest a billion dollars and it can save you $400 million a year, be like, cool. my time to recuperate my cash is amazing.

Yep.

Even if it took you 5 years, you're like, I'm not making 20% on my money in a bank account.

Yep.

It's a great return. And then on the flip side, what I'm seeing a lot with generative AI, it's not that it's not a— it's a— I don't believe it's a fad. It's you're seeing a lot of people using generative AI and it's not great use cases. That's what I believe is a fad in which, just like the dot-com boom, You had a lot of people creating internet businesses that weren't really meant to be real businesses. That's a fad. Or you have people leveraging generative AI in places it doesn't need to be leveraged. That kind of stuff, you'll end up seeing a fad. But the overall technology, just like blockchain, sure, certain cryptocurrencies may be fad or trying to make money from speculation may be a fad. But the technology and the underlying benefit of it, there will be use cases where it won't be a fad.

Yep. Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, it's more so you either adapt to it or you can just, you know, cry wolf about it. But technology is just going to roll. So you either go with it or you, yeah, you get left behind.

Dude, on a side note, before I came down here today, I was looking at all my social posts that did really well.

What do you find really well?

Really well was over 100,000 views.

Okay, on Twitter?

On either Twitter or Instagram. We looked at each channel separately because some of them were misses on one channel but hits on another. But you want to guess what they all had in common?

What? AI?

Nope. Take another guess.

Stats?

Stats, sure. But there was some that didn't do well that didn't have stats. The biggest takeaway was when we talked about something that's new that no one else is talking about, it did really well. So if we talk about AI and we tested this like 5 AI marketing trends, well, AI is new, but everyone's already talking about that. It didn't do well. But if I talk about something that's really specific and I'll give you a great example of this, You know, here's how we use Bard to help us with our SEO specifically, and we show the prompts. People aren't talking about that. They'll talk about like, oh yeah, here's how you use Bard to create content. All right, whoop-de-doo. But we're actually giving real-life examples or like even more specific, here's how we use AI to do keyword research for SEO.

When you give the prompts, those do really well.

Yes, but not just give the prompts, but the explanation on why you need to ask certain things. Like that did really well. Or when we talked about, hey, everyone wants to be in influencer marketing, but they're going to have a rude awakening this year. And we had survey data on how much influencers are making based on their follower count between 0 and 100,000 followers, 100,000 to 1 million and above 1 million. That did extremely well because people are like, oh, everyone talks about influencer marketing, how it's big, it's huge, it's trending, but no one's really talking about how much people are really making and sharing the data. And we had a good amount of survey data. I believe it was over 5,000+ respondents.

Yeah.

That kind of stuff just does so well because it's new and fresh and no one's talking about this kind of stuff.

It's novel. That's what it is at the end of the day. So anyway, we're going to leave some time over here for Neil. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow and we'll see you tomorrow.