Nidhi Bhavsar

“To review, or not to review”

Reviews are one of many elements that help you grow your podcast. They may seem unimportant, but reviews function as a certificate of commitment. Listeners want to know if a podcast will cater to their preferences, and will be worth following in the long run – reviews tell them if it will.

Here are 5 unique strategies to increase your reviews:

1. 1. Ask family and friends to start off – Ah yes, the go-to, guaranteed-to-work strategy. As is everything on the internet, podcasts take time to build the listenership required to have reviews pouring in. Ask family and friends to give quality reviews, something beyond 5 stars and a “Good Podcast!” comment. For all you know, a few quality reviews may prompt new listeners to commit.
   2. Incentives, Giveaways, Perks – Sometimes, incentives go a long way. Start off a giveaway – ask listeners to leave reviews and 5 random reviewers, or the 5 best reviewers get exclusive merchandise, a signed t-shirt of their favourite podcast, or an exclusive meet-and-greet. Or you can create content exclusive to reviewers. It could be a pdf doc with advice, or anything particularly special, made with some nice graphics. Or you could create some content – a special episode, a special guest or some behind-the-scenes footage blocked off to all listeners and use that as an incentive to get people to review.
   3. Review swaps – Take advantage of competition! After all, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or to put it lightly, ‘quid pro quo’ the situation – podcast reviews can be mutually beneficial. Contact some podcasters in the same topical area as you are and propose a quality review by you for another quality review for you. Or do this with podcasters who you don’t have anything similar with, guests who have their own audience base and content, or other types of content creators like Instagrammers, YouTubers etc.
   4. Make the process easy – Platforms like Spotify have few and simple steps to review, ask listeners for a quality review and add a line or two telling your listeners how to do it at the end of an episode. Consider diversifying your platform to YouTube as commenting on YouTube is easy and straightforward. If you have a review page, link it in your show notes (show notes being the description that comes with every episode of your podcast). The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to give reviews.
   5. Record a video, read reviews – People like knowing they are seen and heard. Having your review read, or at least the anticipation of the chance that your review may be read is sometimes incentive enough to drop in a nice quality review. Pick out specific reviews – the kind you want more people to leave – and record a video reading the comments, feedback or incorporate it as a Q&A.

Reviews are an excellent side strategy, but remember, good reviews come with good content. Focus on creating great content and the best possible podcast episode.

Cover Image by DilokaStudio on Freepik