Word of mouth is the most powerful and sought after type of marketing. If your people are referring you to to their friends and family, who in turn refer to their friends and family, your likely-hood of closing is much, much higher – and its free!

There have been numerous studies done that found other customer’s testimonials are much more believable than shout advertising. WOM is so powerful there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) that meets every year.

Why is it so powerful? Its trusted, its self-reinforcing (here it from many personal sources and its got to be true), and its self-perpetuating (the viral effect of others spreading it).

What are some technologies that employ WOM?
Community forums and ratings & reviews. Forums allow the product enthusiasts to discuss with each other your product. Check to see if a forum about your product or service already exists. If not, you can easily start one and kick off the forum which relevant questions. Let your lead customers drive WOM inside the forum to other spectators.

Ratings and reviews are huge. If you saw 30 Five-star ratings for a podcast with 30 positive reviews in iTunes on a topic you’re considering learning about (i.e. the stock market, real estate) and the other podcast had little or no activity, which you would consider downloading and listening to? iTunes’ ratings and review section is a huge initiator of downloads and subscriptions. Utilizing these features can add big-time listenership to your podcast.

Jonathan

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I recently listened to a great podcast episode by one of the premier podcasting experts, about showing up in search results within iTunes. I’ll link to that episode at the end of this post, but its worth distilling the message here first.

Results whether they be in Google or iTunes are based on Relevancy and Authority. Within iTunes, relevancy works much the same way as in other search engines – how relevant is your content to the searched keyword. Using your keywords in your title, name, summary, and keyword tags make you relevant. All of these are indexed and searchable by iTunes.

Authority is based on how popular a podcast is. This is measured primarily by how many daily new subscribers a podcast has. That is, how many new people click the subscribe button on a daily basis for a podcast. This is how iTunes “ranks” a podcast. It is not based on how many total subscribers or how many unique downloads a podcast has and certainly doesn’t include how much of any of this occurs outside of the iTunes directory.

The other component to authority is ratings and reviews. The amount of positive “star” ratings, is an easy and great way to increase authority and search results when keyword searching within iTunes

Thanks Jason for that great bit!

iTunes SEO Podcast

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