How I Reached Top 3% Most Popular Podcasts with Evergreen Content SEO Strategy (For More High Ticket Sales)

What happens to your podcast rankings when you stop posting for 8 weeks? For me, the answer was surprising — my podcast climbed to the top 3% of most popular podcasts without a single new episode published!

In this episode, I'm sharing honest lessons from over five years of podcasting, what slow-build evergreen content strategy actually looks like in my coaching business, and how SEO-driven podcast content attracts dream clients into my high ticket offers priced at $5K–$10K+.

In this episode you'll discover:

• Why evergreen content keeps working long after you hit publish
• How I doubled my downloads with a slow and steady SEO content strategy
• How shifting to audio-only made podcasting sustainable when I got sick for months
• How podcast content accelerates trust and fast-tracks high ticket sales conversations
• Why your offer positioning and business astrology are the foundation of aligned client attraction
• The SEO keyword research tools I use to grow podcast downloads

This episode is for you if you're a coach, healer, or creative entrepreneur wondering whether starting a podcast is worth it, how to grow a podcast audience organically, or how long-form evergreen content can support high ticket sales without relying solely on social media.

When you book my Cosmic Sales Intensive, You’ll walk away with a full, clear, compelling, sales page for your high ticket offer that will attract ready to buy clients and that you can continue to make sales with for years to come. https://withsarahmac.com/cosmic-private-intensive/

Transcript

Welcome Back After A Break

Rankings Rise Without New Episodes

Five Years Of Slow-Build Growth

Audio-Only, Bandwidth, And Conversion

SEO Hooks And Keyword Research

High-Ticket Positioning With Astrology

Listener Questions And Next Steps

Sarah Mac 1:54

Create Magic Club. What's up? This is Sarah Mack and welcome to Creative Magic Club. Together we'll discover inspirational stories of creative entrepreneurs living out their dreams, doing the work they are most passionate about, and building wealth in magical and fun ways. While building a six-figure income as a writer and coach, helping other women to launch their dream businesses. I've connected with so many incredible people and seen it proven again and again that you can thrive financially doing whatever it is you are passionate about. I'm here to share life-changing strategies for mindset, making money, and reaching more people with your work in a business and life filled with creativity, freedom, and fun. Creative Magic Club. And this is my first episode I have recorded in more than eight weeks. And this is the longest break I have taken since starting my podcast back in the good old days of 2020. And everything has been changing, and also nothing has changed. Do you ever feel like that in your business? Like everything is changing so much, and yet you're still here doing the same work, you know, walking the same mission. Um I didn't intend to take this much of a break, but everything has been changing in my life because I'm 30 weeks pregnant tomorrow. I'm growing a human life inside of my body. And so I've been making a lot of changes in my business. And maybe that will be the topic of my next podcast to go into some of that. Because obviously, my life is about to be hugely restructured. And so I have really felt the need to do a lot of restructuring in my business. And podcast just took a little bit of a backburner over the past few weeks. But something really surprising happened while I wasn't publishing for the first time. Because, you know, I know the rules in online marketing, right? I know the rules with podcasting. And I have followed those rules like a good girl in business. And I have published extremely consistently every single week for more than five years, bar the occasional one or two weeks where I didn't get to it. And okay, I was having a conversation with a friend who celebrated that her podcast had increased in the rankings. And I was like, oh, I wonder what's happened to my podcast rankings since I haven't been posting for eight weeks. So I went on to listennotes.com, where usually I'm a top 5% podcast. And I had no, I've grown, this podcast has grown to a top 3% podcast, which as you can imagine, I was pretty surprised about considering I hadn't posted for eight weeks. And this is just the beauty of evergreen content, like having a podcast. And now I love it more than ever to know that all of these episodes that I have put out, they're still reaching people, they're still serving people, even when I'm not producing new and consistent content, which was really, you know, my main motivation for moving over to podcasting from having experienced so many um different eras of frustration with social media, as I'm sure you can all relate. So I hadn't been monitoring my downloads or my stats too closely, but I went to check and on some of my weekly update emails, you know, I was still getting three to four hundred downloads a month, having not posted any any new content for weeks. And I've had close to a thousand downloads in the last 30 days without a single new episode posted. That's a lot of freaking people. That's a lot of listens. And that's so awesome. So I wanted to share a little bit about my experience podcasting and what it's been like for me having a podcast for more than five years. It'll be our six-year anniversary in October this year of 2026. And to give you some insights of some of the things that I've learned, for those of you who are interested in taking on podcasting as a marketing medium for your message, for your brand, and for your business. I actually wasn't super into listening to podcasts when I first started mine. It kind of just came up as an inspired idea. You know, I was in COVID and I'd had this idea for a long time. I knew that I wanted to use my voice in a way that would get my message out more consistently. I knew I wanted an evergreen channel. And, you know, COVID was one of those times where it just gave us so much space to work on those projects that had kind of been on the back burner for a while. So I remember I was standing in a park, I think it might have even been Washington Square Park in New York, where I was living at the time, with my partner Alborz, and we were brainstorming titles, and he helped me pick the title, and I started, and I just never stopped since then. And obviously, so much has happened in the last five, six years, but I've been posting consistently weekly. I started out just as an interview series because I was doing interview series in my Facebook group, and I was like, I might as well turn this into evergreen content. I was loving that, connecting with other entrepreneurs, having really interesting conversations. And back then, my focus was, you know, a lot more on money mindset for creatives and less on brand and content strategy. And I hadn't yet niche down to high-ticket sales, and astrology wasn't even really a part of the conversation back then, I don't think. So I have evolved a lot in the topics that I focused on, but the intention of the podcast has remained the same. I haven't even changed my intro, you know, and I've thought about doing it, I've thought about rebranding and repositioning a couple times along this journey. And I think I did a really good job, you know, knowing myself as a manifesting generator, that I need diversity and that I need freedom to evolve. And that was always an intention with my brand. And I knew branding around my own name. So choosing with Ceramac as my website title and choosing Creative Magic Club, choosing keywords that I knew would speak very specifically to the people that were my people that I wanted to call in as clients. But also, you know, and I didn't know too much about how to use SEO to rank as a podcast back then. And that's definitely been something I've brought more into my strategy in recent years. And I've just seen a very, very slow and gradual increase in listenership in my podcast. And it's still not a crazy big podcast. So I went from, you know, getting maybe 20 to 30 downloads a week for the first year, maybe even two years, to now I get maybe 70 to 100. Occasionally I'll get over a hundred downloads per episode. And we've had over 23,000 downloads, all-time downloads. So, you know, and I think when we think about social media and we think about numbers, it's so easy to compare ourselves to the big dogs and be like, oh, this is tiny, right? But I always like to remind people imagine that number of people in a room. You know, imagine 70 people sitting in a room listening to you talk. Even 30 people, even 25 people, that is a lot of people. And every podcast is different too, right? Like some people just go viral and they explode. And it's a huge audience builder and they launch and fill offers easily and quickly. But for the most part, this is a slow build strategy. And it's a long-term strategy, just like so much in business. You know, I had a lot of success in growing my income quickly in the first years of my business. But it's so important to remind ourselves that yes, there are skills and strategies that we can absolutely prioritize to get cash in the door quickly, which we need as entrepreneurs, especially for the most part, you know, women entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, spiritual soulpreneurs who are maybe coming from freelancing and we're self-funded, we're not raising capital for the most part. Um, it is really important for us to be financially self-sustaining as quickly as possible. And, you know, obviously, you can listen to other episodes to hear more of my backstory. Um it took me a few years of being an entrepreneur before I had my first six-figure gear. I had a business, uh, copywriting agency before I launched my coaching business. Um, but I knew that I wanted to diversify. I knew I wanted an evergreen content channel where that content could be found consistently a long time after publishing it. And this is really true of platforms like podcasting and platforms like YouTube. So you might witness more and more entrepreneurs foraying into these platforms beyond social media, which I think is just really, really smart. And, you know, yes, it's long-term strategy. Yes, you're not necessarily going to get as fast a turnaround in finding and signing new clients as you can through the fast-paced connection that you create through social media, but it can add another dimension that does actually speed up your relationship with new clients. That works really, really well in tandem with, you know, like a social media um and an email strategy. So podcasting, I think, is a lot less work than a YouTube channel because you don't have to have the visual element, even though that is obviously becoming more and more popular. And I did actually publish videos for the first few years, and I noticed that it didn't make that much difference for me when I switched to audio only, which I did when I was diagnosed with long COVID, and I had very limited bandwidth. And I was like, what can I do to just make my business easier and more streamlined? And that was a really simple shift that I made. And then it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I started integrating an SEO strategy, a search engine optimization strategy for the titles and for the descriptions. So what I want to get across is there's no magic pill when it comes to audience growth, when it comes to building community, when it comes to long-form or even evergreen content. Um, it's a very long-term strategy. And if you want to ask me about my conversions, I don't know, honestly. I've definitely started to have people who find me directly through searching for my podcast. And I've had people email me and be like, oh, it's so great that I found you and I'm not even on social media. So that's amazing. And they come into my world and they listen to my podcast and they read my emails. But for the most part, I've seen conversions happen from people who are following me on social media and then they listen to my podcast, and that just fast tracks our relationship. They get to know my work, they get to know me, they build trust, they build connection, and then they buy my high-ticket offers. So seeing those two pieces work in tandem, I that's what I have the most evidence around. Um so far, the people who have listened to who have who are just podcast listeners haven't actually ended up working with me yet. But again, my audience is still very, very small. Um, I do also get random sales from my mini course, How to Raise Your Prices Using Astrology, which I include the link to in my description. And there are a few episodes where I'm explicitly pitching that. And that's really fun to come in, obviously. And I definitely, definitely see a pattern in my business of people opting in to either a free or a low-paid offer. And then sometimes within quite a short time, from a matter of weeks passing, they can become a paying client in, you know, my higher ticket offers, which are priced five to$10,000 plus. And sometimes it takes someone in my audience many, many, many years before they buy one of my high-ticket offers. And that is also true. So the most valuable aspect for me for having my podcast is that it's a place where I get to create long-form content. And I really enjoy creating it because long-form content, it does lead to faster, deeper relationship building than you can achieve on a carousel graphic on Instagram, or even, you know, a three-minute Instagram story talking head video, or even a 10-minute Instagram live, which, you know, are my main other ways that I build connection and trust through my brand. And another really, really valuable aspect around having a podcast is just simply as a networking tool to grow my network. And I've had guests who have come on that I've interviewed who have gone on to become clients because they connected with me. They learned more about me during the interview. And, you know, once people are in my world, if obviously my services can be of value to them, they now they know about it. So more people end up buying them. And this all happens through genuine relationship building. And it can be a really great way to get a foot in the door with a connection that you're really excited to make is by inviting peers and you know, leaders in your industry onto your podcast, having incredible conversations. And that is an amazing connection that you never know where that is gonna lead, you know? And the more people know about your work, the more they can talk about you and refer you out. And it's also really valuable for me to sit down and create really rich content that then can become content that I can repurpose for social media. It can become different angles that I can then go on to talk about more about in my other channels. And I will be honest with you, the clips from my podcast don't usually perform amazingly for me on social media. But it does drive people from the short form content on social to long form. So that act alone is just letting people know there's a new podcast episode. It'll remind my listeners, okay, go listen to the episode. And by engaging in that longer form piece of content, it just takes our relationship to the next level so much faster. And that is really the purpose and the intention of all brand content is to just continue to obviously attract new relationships, nurture existing relationships, and then to serve them through our offers and to solve their problems for them through our business. And I've definitely had clients who have joined my high-ticket offers that tell me they have binged my podcast. And I think it's a really, really valuable asset. That's the most valuable aspect of having a podcast for me in my business, is that it's a place where people can go to get a sense of who I am, to learn about my values, to get an experience of my teaching style, you know, to have their curiosity and their interest piqued by what I'm able to cover in these longer-form pieces of content, which are still nowhere near the depth that they're going to experience when they work with me as a client. Not only does it build trust and it builds a genuine relationship where someone can see, like, okay, I can tell from the stories that she shares, from the angles that she talks about, from the way that she teaches, that we have enough of a values alignment that I am able to trust this person with my business, with my life, with my work. And that's the most important thing that leads to sales. And people can safely feel if I love the content on the podcast and it helps me and it supports me. Imagine what it's like inside her paid container where I get her feedback on my specific questions, my specific business. And I get her eyes and her expertise and her strategy and her support in my day-to-day business building. So that is the most valuable aspect for somebody with a business model like mine, which is centered around high-ticket offers and really intimate client relationships. Um, because that compatibility is so, so, so much, so important. So let's just go over what I have found to be the most important elements of my podcast that have allowed this to be an asset that has helped me to grow my impact and serve more clients through my business. So definitely having SEO-driven hooks. So choosing search terms that people are using that is going to get attention. That's what's allowed me to reach new people through my podcast. I still don't know, you know, how effective that is compared to driving audience to my podcast from my existing channels. But I've seen my downloads consistently increase since implementing this strategy. So that's a good sign for me. And it's also been a useful process to think through because hooks are important no matter what channel, whether you're sending an email, whether you're creating a piece of content on social media, it's being able to talk in language that your clients instantly recognize and identify with and are actually searching for. So speaking in language that they would want to click on. And that all it also helps to niche and categorize your podcast with the keywords that you have chosen to list it with. So I went through that process using keywords everywhere. I've actually heard that Cord is now also good for keyword research. I haven't explored that yet, but I'm it's I'm like, I have it open on my tab, and that's one of the next things that I'm gonna dive into. And Ask the Public is another platform, and I'll give you a top tip if you want to use Ask the Public, and it's literally a survey of search terms that people have been using. I think their price has gone up recently. But when I went to cancel my subscription and they gave me the option to get lifetime access for the same price as a year subscription, I was like, oh, well, of course I'm gonna do that. You know, sometimes when you go to quit software, they'll give you a crazy discount either to keep going or they'll give you a free trial. But I was like, oh, lifetime access to this? I think I paid 50 bucks. It's probably more than that now. But just a hot tip for you if you decide that you like that platform. And yeah, so that is obviously a very small part of the strategy, but learning to integrate that, I've definitely seen increases in downloads. The most important part is talking about what you're passionate about. So the focus of my podcast has definitely evolved. It began in interview style to then bringing in more solo podcasting. I was niching on, you know, money mindset, content strategy, and now more high-ticket sales and business astrology in recent years. And this has, I believe, limited my audience size due to the specificity of my niching. But it has meant that the people who are attracted to my work are an amazing fit for my offers. And I love the clients that I work with. And quality is so, so, so much more important than quantity. So, one thing that I have seen is, you know, when you dial in your branding in this way, it just makes sales so much freaking easier. Pretty much everyone in my world at this point. Is a dream client for my offers. To the point that since leveraging a DM sales strategy to my warm audience on my social channels this year, it has converted at very, very, very high rates. And I have not had one conversation with someone who maybe I could help, but isn't quite the right fit for my offer. My brand positioning is so dialed in and it's so aligned with my main high-ticket offers that pretty much everyone who is following me at this point is a potential dream client. Because why would they follow me otherwise? It's so clear what problem I solve for people on my channels and in all of my positioning and content. And that just makes life so much easier when it comes to sales. Because what can happen when you get people reaching out who aren't actually quite the right fit? Obviously, we always want to make the sale and we always want to help people. And often we can help people along a pretty diverse spectrum. But when they when you don't really lean in on specific positioning for your offer, and you get people reaching out who aren't quite the right fit for your best, for your very, very, very best work, it can lead to questioning yourself. It can lead to you twisting yourself into a pretzel. It can lead to you putting together a million custom packages or even ending up having conversations or doing client work that doesn't actually light you up or that you're not as good at, which is really dissipating your energy from focusing your brand, your mission, your work, your offers, and your content on what you are best at, what is truly in alignment. And this is why I love using client astrology charts for offer positioning and setting that as the foundation for all the conversations you're having in your content so that you get rid of all of that distraction. And you're going to have so much more ease in the client attraction and sales in your business. So this is really the power of clear offer positioning around your really highest value, unique genius, which, you know, it took me a while to learn this as a multi-passionate, creative entrepreneur, manny gen, healer, creative, multi-hyphener. There's many things I could do or I could offer that I like that I'm good at that can genuinely really help people. But when I package what I was truly best at into my highest value, highest ticket offer, that's when things got so much easier for me to sign those clients into five 10K plus packages. So offer positioning is absolutely everything. It's really the foundation of your entire brand and messaging strategy. And when that is in alignment and in alignment with your astrology chart, which is just such a great way to anchor us into confidence in what we're best at because we so often question that, right? It's going to really ignite a next level of ease in your business and your sales process. That's just gonna work. You attract incredible clients, sales become easy conversations with besties you have genuine resonance with. And client work is a dream come true because of that compatibility. So my podcast might not be getting a squallion download, but it does work to attract dream clients easily into my high-ticket offers. And do I love to create it? Yes. And is it well positioned while also giving me creative freedom to talk about topics that light me up most and evolve as a human and an entrepreneur? Yes. So that's why I love my title, Creative Magic Club. It has just stayed relevant over six years and given me room to evolve, which is the perfect setup for a manny gem. So if you're thinking about starting a podcast, you do not have to do it in a strategically perfect way. You can just get started. And so many of my clients who come to work with me, you know, maybe strategically it doesn't make sense for them to start a podcast right away, but they just have to do it. I've heard that from so many clients. They're like, yeah, but I want to. Like, I just, I know I have to do this. And my ideal client planet is Jupiter, which is in the fifth house in Aquarius, which means that my ideal clients are big picture, visionary creatives who value self-expression and joy and pleasure in the way that they impact others through their business. And they are here to do things differently and march to the beat of their own drum, just like me. So that's why I don't pedal out cookie cutter strategies and I use astrology to tailor strategy to my clients because every business, every client, every strategy, it's gonna be unique. So even if one strategist might tell you, now is not the time to start your podcast, we can look to your chart and find confirmation if it is a good strategy and vehicle for self-expression for you. But if you feel that creative urge to share your story in long form over a podcast, that is reason enough. If you are feeling the call to share your voice and connect and impact people in this way, you can trust that. Because when we are creatively activated, our client magnetism is through the roof versus trying to dry hump our way through a logical strategy that you're not going to want to stay consistent with. And that is not gonna be sustainable. So did this conversation resonate with you? What landed? What was surprising? Do you have any questions? I would love to hear if you do have follow-up questions. I'm happy to make follow-up episodes to anything else that you want to hear me talk more about on this podcast. So send me a DM on Instagram at ZeramacMagic. I'm gonna be batching content to cover my maternity leave over the coming weeks. So I would love to hear from you on topics that you want to hear more on. And if you're feeling the pull to leverage your unique astrology, to build a business with aligned strategy that works for you and that you love and that makes you lots of money working with dreamy, highly compatible clients through sales systems that are fun and sustainable because they're uniquely tailored to you and your unique genius and strengths. That's exactly what we do inside the Cosmic Freedom Lab for visionary creators, which is the place to build a brand that feels like home and sells like magic. So if you know that filling a high-ticket offer and having so much fun doing it is your goal this year, click the link in the bio for more information on how you can join us. It's so good to be back. Thank you so much for being here. And if you know anyone who would love this content, please, please, please share it with them. And if you haven't already, please support the show and go and leave a review on iTunes so more people can find us here at Creative Magic Club and make more money doing their soul work and having so much fun doing it and making impact in your communities. And I'll see you next week. Bye.