Want To Be Featured On Itunes?, and is it worth it Options

[Armchair Preside...]

I have heard that iTunes is the most important factor for good placement equating to traffic taking off on your podcast. With Mignon's new podcast grammar girl - I can absolutely attest to this as a fact. She didn't promote and still hasn't promoted this podcast yet in a month it's now rated in the top 40 of all podcasts at iTunes!

It was luck because the staff picked it as a new and notable feature in bothe the education section and on the front page of all podcasts - with that traffic flocked to the podcast.

So, is there a way to get recognized at iTunes? I have been corresponding with a member of the iTunes staff and he said get my subscribers and number of reviews up. Well the recent affiliate spam from them collaborates that this is a major factor for ranking podcasts highly at iTunes.

However, without sitting there and clicking the subscribe button hundreds and thousands of times (and getting in trouble for it), I started looking into this number of reviews aspect. This works. I wrote reviews for most of the people I have seen post here regularly and some of these people wrote reviews back for my show. I increased my reviews from 3 to 18 over a two to three week period and now my podcast is featured on the second page of the features (currently 1 spot shy of transitioning to the front page of news and politics).

So, I will trade iTunes reviews with anyone who wants to increase their feature positioning.

Now, the total number of reviews alone is not the only factor for getting featured. It plays a role in the staff noticing you and placing you there. Or possibly the number of reviews that a podcast receives within a certain period of time. The iTunes' ranking system is still not clear, but this makes it a little clearer.

My traffic has doubled by being on the second page of the news and politics feature page for about a week, so I think this is worth trying for anyone who wants to try to increase their exposure.