Has anyone reached out to Apple to get your podcast promoted in iTunes?

[yakko]

Has anyone ever tried to get Apple to promote their show on the front page of iTunes? We've got a show coming out on Free Comic Book Day (May 5th) that has an interview with the creative team behind the IDW Publishing Transformers: Unicron #0 that's coming out that day. I just sent Apple an e-mail via their support address and was wondering if anyone had tried that before. I know if I was hosted with Libsyn or Blubrry I could work with them to try and get through to Apple, but I'm a self-hoster.

I figure the worst thing they can do is say no, and I'm where I started, but this show is pretty big for us so we're hoping to get some extra listeners through social media and flyers at some comic book stores as well.

[yakko]

As a response to my own post, Apple got back to me:

Thank you for reaching out to us about your podcast.
Please make sure your podcast meets the system, account, feed, image, and content requirements.

You can also give your podcast a better chance of being featured by including the elements of the "Feature your podcast" section of Podcasts Connect Help. iTunes Store specific tags are recommended, but not required.

You can increase your chances of becoming “featured” by including our new RSS tags to your feed.

We do not provide updates about whether podcasts will be featured in the iTunes Store. This decision is at the sole discretion of our Editorial team. For any other questions, visit the Contact Us page in Podcasts Connect.

Explore Resources and Help on Podcasts Connect to get answers to frequently asked questions, stay up to date with the latest news, and more.

I hope this information helps you. Should you need further assistance, you may reply to this email as I would be happy to assist you further.

So yeah...back to trying to figure out other ways to market this thing.

[yakko]

After replying with a question, they actually gave me more tips (like the new tags weren't on, when I thought they were) and said I could send in the following information and they would send it to their editorial team.

• Title:
• iTunes link:
• Country requested:
• Marketing Plan: (Example: Video / audio clips on social media, paid advertising, email newsletters (list # of recipients), TV appearances, sponsorships, guest appearances on podcasts / radio, etc.)
• Upcoming episode date:
• Upcoming episode details:
• Category:


so fingers crossed!

[StargatePioneer]

After replying with a question, they actually gave me more tips (like the new tags weren't on, when I thought they were) and said I could send in the following information and they would send it to their editorial team.

• Title:
• iTunes link:
• Country requested:
• Marketing Plan: (Example: Video / audio clips on social media, paid advertising, email newsletters (list # of recipients), TV appearances, sponsorships, guest appearances on podcasts / radio, etc.)
• Upcoming episode date:
• Upcoming episode details:
• Category:


so fingers crossed!

Any luck for May 2018?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[yakko]

They said that they won't let you know if they pick you. It'll just show up. We'll see on or after May 5th.

[yakko]

Interesting development, the writer of the comic we interviewed was just named the Editor-in-Chief at IDW Publishing. We're hoping to capitalize on that in our social media posts. If you're interested in checking out the show, it'll be out Saturday Morning. And get to a comic store (or some libraries) and get some free books!

[yakko]

So no Apple promotion (as expected, really). However we made a big push with flyers in multiple comic shops, asking for (and receiving) retweets and mentioned by fellow Transformers and comic book podcasts, and we got a front page post on one of the largest Transformers fan sites. All of this combined to downloads on the first two days equal to about a week of normal shows. We'll see where the numbers settle down on future shows, but I would suspect that we got a few new subscribers.

I also got a free $10 credit on Facebook to boost our post. That resulted in 1,675 People Reached and 12 clicks. Don't waste your money on Facebook. My next promotional experiment will be ads in Overcast, but will likely be over the summer sometime.

[StephenJondrew]

Sounds like the word of mouth promotion worked! Great job.