Hey friends, if you're anything like me, you are so curious about how Apple podcasts app works for creators like yourself. So in today's episode, I'm actually recapping everything I learned during the February 2024 webinar that they put on at Apple podcast app. And essentially everything from transcripts to the new iOS 17 features to marketing and growing your podcast within apple. So I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you want more like it, just let me know. Thanks. Hey, y'all, welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for podcasters entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world while building their own personal brand in the podcasting industry. I'm your host Haylee Gaffin, owner of Gaffin creative a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. If you're a podcaster, or even just dreaming about launching your own podcast someday, this show was built to help you merge your love of conversation, education and business. You can find resources, show notes and more for the clocking in podcast at Gap and creative.com. Today's episode is brought to you by MIC CHECK society, a community that was built for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great, scale your podcasts, improve your processes and connect with your listeners through our educational trainings, our private members only community and our monthly calls. If you're ready to join us, you can head over to Mic check society.com and enroll today. And you can get $10 off per month with the code podcast. Now let's clock in and get to work. Hey, friends, welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to share a little recap of the apple podcasts winter webinar that they hosted on February 27. Now, the first thing I want to highlight is a staggering detail that they shared that there are 2 billion active devices globally, Apple specific devices globally, which means there are 2 billion people that have the apple podcast app available to them, or at least 2 billion devices, because let's be honest, I own three of those devices. Anyway, I did want to note that because when they said that I was like wow, there's such an opportunity there that we don't think about have, we are accessible to so many people within our phones, or within their phones really. So that was the first staggering little stat that they shared. So let's dive into some of the updates they actually walked us through. The first one is the update with iOS 17. They have enhanced discoverability, especially within the artwork. So essentially what they highlighted was, they have created an opportunity for your artwork to be seen on more channels, more charts, more just discoverability within their app that they are creating. And we'll get to some of those features here soon. One of those features is the full screen art update. So iOS 17 allows when you click into an episode it takes the artwork takes up the whole screen. This is something I did not know existed. And what I will do is I will put the link to figuring out how you can access this in the iOS 17 features. In the show notes of today's episode, because this was brand new news to me, I had no idea that anyone could access this. I do believe though, that if you go through the full process, you have to actually do it through Apple and not through your hosting platform. So I still have a little bit more research to do on this myself. I just wanted to get this out here. And let y'all know these updates. Transcripts are the next thing I want to talk about. So you may have seen the apple is coming out with podcast transcripts. And these are transcripts that are auto generated by Apple, but there are some caveats to it. The first question I had was, can we see it now? Yes, you can. If you go to the if you sign up for the iOS beta, you can see the transcripts today. They will release like globally, I guess globally in the spring. Now, as a podcast creator, you can upload your own transcript if you would like with their transcripts, they do not show speaker names. So and they also are not like perfect. So they're very similar to like otter, where it's just auto generated. Now what is cool is if you wanted to go in, upload or update those include speaker names, all of that you can download their transcript, edit it if you want and then re upload it. I will say this is a very time and consuming thing. So you could just pay rev to produce you a transcript. And you can upload that instead, there's two caveats to that as well, it has to be a VTT, or an SRT format, which basically includes timestamps so that it can keep up with it, because it does play. Like, while it's playing. So like, it'll highlight the word that you're on, which is pretty cool. You can also use like descript, they provide a, I think it's an SRT format that they provide. In addition to that, you can download and upload your own. So you would have to do this through your RSS feed. I don't think that every podcast hosting platform allows for this yet. So I'm just gonna gonna keep my eyes out over the next few weeks as we roll into spring to see that but you can, if you want to see transcripts, in podcasts, apps, you can through signing up for the iOS beta. Now, the next thing they talked about was episode charts. These are newer, in this new update, where instead of it just being podcast, show charts, your episodes can also rank, I feel like this has been in the works for a little bit because I have seen on like chargeable certain episodes will rank in the like results that I get. But Apple is like officially making it a thing for their their episodes, to have charts. And you can see the top 200 shows and the top 200 episodes across each chart category. And then these are determined they basically, it was really funny, they were like, we can't give you the exact algorithm. But essentially, it is across listeners followers, and completion rate. So people who actually listened to your full episode. Those are what determines how you rank on the charts. Now, the next piece that they decided to highlight was growing your podcast specifically through Apple podcasts app. Now, they do have Apple's like marketing tools inside of podcast connect like podcasters dot apple, that I'll link all these links in the show notes. But they do have marketing tools that you can leverage. I personally did not think that they were like over the top, whoa, this is amazing. There are things that we can all do in Canva, in Riverside and all of our tools like nothing over the top amazing. If you're brand new to marketing a podcast, it's a great resource to have though. Now the thing that did interest me was link fire, I'm going to explore link fire a little bit more in depth test it out because something they mentioned was that you could use link fire to essentially track where you're sending people to Apple from and see their performance. So like if you're sending people from Pinterest to Apple, what is the performance? Like? Are they listening? Are they downloading? Are they completing your episodes, and these are all things I had no idea that Apple and link fire have like a partnership with so that they allow that data to be seen. And this was very interesting, in the sense of like, figuring out where your funnels are working and where they're not. So like, are you getting great funnels from your email marketing, and they're converting into subscribers, or I guess followers if you don't have a subscription, and then also Instagram, you know, all these things going into Apple? I am curious, because when I looked up on the website, I didn't like create an account yet. But when I was looking through the website, it did list other platforms. So I'm wondering if you can do the same across other platforms as well, that I will look into more and I will keep you all updated. All right, editorial support.
Editorial support was the next thing that they wanted to highlight. And this is something I knew existed. But they gave us a little bit more insight into what's considered so Apple has these basically features and promos that they offer. And it's their editorial team is doing the research finding these podcasts to feature well, you can actually submit a request to be featured. And here are the like stipulations slash rules that they tell you to use as guidelines. The first is you need to do it at least two weeks before you want to be featured. They do ask you when you would like to be featured. So I have submitted myself and other clients on through these things before and they basically said that if you don't get featured when you want to wait six, eight weeks and resubmit. So every six to eight weeks they essentially are encouraging you to submit your podcast. The other considerations were to consider like big cultural moments, big holidays. So think about your business. If you if your like industry has a particular holiday like for me international podcast day would be ideal for me to submit for because my podcast is about podcasting. And they do have they even have featured podcasts on their like back end of their the promotional marketing tools that I mentioned earlier. They have podcasts that they feature about podcasting. I'm not on it. But we'll see if that happens one day. All right now, the next thing that they talked about was monetizing through a subscription. So they did talk a little bit about Apple's subscription program, and how it's not exclusive, meaning you can still use platforms like Patreon. One thing they noted and I will share this here, I don't think any of my clients are interested in offering a subscription like this, like within Apple's platform. But the way that they found that you get the most people to subscribe is one offering free trials. They said the conversion rate of a listener into a subscriber is significantly higher if you offer a free trial for your listeners. And the other thing that they highlighted was, when you're creating this content, the things that subscribers are looking for as ad free content, bonus material, early access to episodes, and then a q&a session. So like if a an episode goes out, and it's an interview or something, and then they come back, like you ask your audience, hey, what questions do you have for this person, you can drop that q&a session inside of your subscription as a bonus piece of content where they're answering the questions. And that's just a really good way to pull people into the subscription side of your business, or your podcast, which they were calling podcast businesses in this particular section of the webinar. Now to wrap up, there were a few links that I did want to share here in the show notes of today's episode that they shared about. They have podcasters, that apple.com, which is for creators. And it's basically like highlighting a lot of what we talked about in today's episode and what they went over. I highly recommend that you don't overwhelm yourself with this information. But instead, take it in as you are like scaling your podcast, I guess I don't want you to get overwhelmed. Because I will say in the webinar, I did get a little bit overwhelmed. I will link everything that was mentioned in today's episode in the show notes of this episode. And if you are someone who is curious more about Apple and what they offer and the webinar that I attended, I would highly recommend that you sign up for Apple's newsletter, specifically the apple podcast newsletter, and you can do this within your podcast connect dashboard. If you have any questions about that, feel free to reach out. I will walk you through that process. If you want to be on the newsletter for Apple. This is not a paid partnership or anything. I just do. You know, a lot of times, see these webinars come up and I don't attend them. And I just happen to attend this one and thought that I would share some of the information with my audience. So all right, friends, I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you next week. Thank you so much for listening to clocking in with Haylee Gaffin for resources mentioned in today's episode head to Gaffin creative.com. If you're a podcaster looking for a community that will help you improve your podcast. Make sure you check out Mike check society, our community for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great enroll today at Mic check society.com and use code podcast for $10 off per month. If you love this episode, I'd be honored if you'd leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I'm your host Haylee Gaffin clocking out
