90: How to Make the Most of Landing a Dream Podcast Guest

This is Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmidland, I am your podcast growth coach, and today we are going to talk about how to republish past episodes of your podcast. Now, at the time of the publishing and the recording of this episode, we are in the holiday season, and so the holidays are coming up. And as podcasters, the holidays bring us weirdly conflicting energy. Because on one hand, we, like everybody else who celebrates holidays in December, are excited to take some time off, spend time with family and friends, recharge, celebrate the year, et cetera. But then also at the same time, there's this poll to get ahead because there's going to be some time off. Things for everybody else slows down. So a lot of us have an intuition to push harder and get more episodes done and maybe maybe your website or work, essentially work more on the podcast in the holiday season. But at the time of this recording, it is 2022. And so this is my fifth holiday season as a podcaster. And in my previous four, I have approached each one differently. So one holiday season, I powered through and changed nothing about my production and publishing schedule. So I didn't take any time off of the holidays. I hated that. It sucked. The next year, I took off from the podcast completely in December. I didn't even publish episodes. So just literally shut the show down for a whole month. I didn't like that either because it killed the momentum that I had with my podcast. The following year, my third holiday season in podcasting, I pushed harder over the holiday season where I decided I was going to use the time where everybody else slowed down to make more episodes and get ahead. That was the worst one of all of them because I was so burnt out. And when everybody came back in January, everybody else was refreshed and ready to get back to it. And I was burnt out. And then last year, the way that I approached it was to push a little bit harder in November, get a little bit ahead and then take some time off over the holidays, but I didn't stop publishing my podcast. So I kept publishing on the regular cadence. Although I was off, the show was still getting published on time. And happy to say that for me, that is the absolute sweet spot. That is my favorite way to approach it because I get the best of both worlds. I get to take some time off rest and recharge, which I know now is is crucial where I used to be like, ah, where everyone else is resting. I'm going to keep working. But now, I just see that this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. And so, you know, I also want to rest and relax at some point. And the best time to do that is probably when everybody else is doing that as well. But what's also key is that when you keep publishing, you still get to show up for your listeners over the holiday season. Now, the holiday season is super unpredictable from a listenership perspective. And so you may have seen your downloads drop in November. You may have seen them rise in November, basically over the holiday season. Some podcasts listeners stop listening because they're out of their routine, which is when they usually listen to their podcasts. And other podcast listeners listen more because they might be traveling on long road trips to visit family or just have some downtime where they get to catch up on their podcasts. So again, holiday season is super unpredictable when it comes to listener behavior. And so what I want to do is I want to show up and make sure that I have great and new episodes on top of the feed throughout the holiday season so that those people who are still listening and especially those folks who are catching up and re-engaging with podcasts have something there. So my favorite waiter approach to holidays is to get ahead a little bit in November. So that December, I can take some time off. But I'm still ahead in publishing and the show keeps publishing without me falling behind. Now this episode is being published in late December. And so it's probably too late for you to get ahead in November, right? So next year, maybe we'll publish something in early November to say, hey, now's the time to get ahead for the holidays. So what do you do? If you're not ahead or if you just weren't able to grind a little bit harder in November to get ahead? Well, that is what I'm going to talk about today, which is my favorite hack for buying extra time, for buying yourself in a snap, an extra week of publishing and getting yourself ahead. Now, you don't only have to do this during the holiday season. You can do this literally anytime of year, but the holiday season is my favorite time to do this. And that is to republish popular past episodes of the podcast. So that's what we're going to talk about today on Grow the Show, how you can publish past episodes of your show. We're speaking specifically over the holiday season, but just in general to buy yourself some time. And guess what? It is a value ad for your listeners as well, because you're going to be publishing your best episode. So those who have already heard that episode are not going to be angry. They're not going to be annoyed that you've published something that they've heard before. In fact, a lot of people will relisten to it and be glad to hear it again. And then the folks who haven't heard it before, even better, because there's somebody who has not gone deeper back into your catalog to hear this incredible episode. And they get to hear it for the first time. And so you get your entire current listenership to hear this amazing episode. And you don't have to make another one. You get a free week or whatever your cadence is. You get extra time where you don't have to go and publish a brand new episode. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guest's internet quality. But it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. Unlike Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer. And your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow that's GROW to get 63 minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. So the first question on republishing episodes. Again, we're speaking specifically to the holidays is what episodes do I choose to republish? Well, since it's the holiday season, I generally recommend picking one from the past year. So you can say like, oh, we're celebrating our best episodes of this year. And so here today we're going to publish XYZ. But you don't have to pick an episode that was published in the past year. If you're a podcaster who has been at it for several years, even better. Pick one that's two or three years old. That's definitely the people that are listening to you now haven't heard yet. But overall, how do you choose what episode is best to republish? I look at three things in order to decide what episodes to republish. The first thing I look at is quite simply in the past year or whatever your time horizon is for republishing could be 10 years if you're an OG podcaster. What episodes have the most downloads? Pretty obviously, which episodes got clicked on the most amount of time. Now remember, the episode that gets the most downloads does not correlate to the best episode by any means. It correlates to the best promoted episode. So it doesn't actually tell you if that episode itself was really, really good. If it was your audience's favorite episode, it just tells you it's the episode that was clicked on the most by people. That's it. So an episode that has really high downloads could have a really strong title. So it might be a sign that you wrote a really great title for that episode. It also might have gotten the best promotion. It might have been the episode that you promoted harder or if you have guests that your guests actually promoted. It also could have some solid word of mouth where listeners hear the episode and then they share it. So that is an indication of a really good episode. But you can't go by downloads alone to figure out which have been my best episodes for the past year. So in addition to that, you also want to look at what episodes that you published had the best completion rates. So hopefully you have looked at your episode's completion rates before you can find them on Apple podcasts and on Spotify, Connect. And basically a completion rate tells you how much of the episode that you published people actually listened to. It's actually a graph that shows you exactly where people dropped off. Sometimes you might have an episode that has tons and tons of downloads, but a really, really low completion rate. And what that means is the episode was promoted well. It might have a juicy catchy title or it got really, really good marketing, but it didn't hold people's attention. It didn't have a strong intro. It didn't stay focused. It might have not been what people thought it was when they pressed play or it might have been just totally boring. So your best episodes are actually the ones that have the highest completion rate because those are the ones generally that listeners listened to the most of. Now, the grain of salt there is if you are a podcaster who publishes episodes that are a varying length. So you might be like me where some of your episodes are, you know, 30, 45 minutes, others are as short as three minutes or six minutes. So the shorter ones are always going to have a much, much, much longer completion rate and longer episodes are always going to have a lower completion rate because like for some people, they might be listening to their favorite episode of your podcast ever released and it might be 45 minutes long and they might be listening on their way to work and they're commute to only 20 minutes. They get to work and they have to stop listening and start working. And so, you know, you get a 50% completion rate on that listener on that 45 minute episode, which isn't an indictment of your episode. But either way, you want to overall look at completion rates, keep the length of your podcast episode with a grain of salt. If all of your episodes are the same length, then you can totally go by completion rate as a steady metric to know how good you're doing. And then the third one is engagement. So which episodes got the most downloads, which episodes got the highest completion rate and which episodes and it totally got you the most engagement, meaning where you heard from your listeners, people took the time to reach out to you and find you on social media and DM you or email you or if you have a listener community, people were posting, Hey, this episode was really good. So thank you so much. This did so much for me. I really enjoyed it. To me, that is the biggest factor in the episodes that I republish because those are the episodes that really resonated with listeners so much so that they went out of their way to let me know that it resonated with them. And so those ones, the ones that have high engagement are the almost always the ones that I choose to republish. And then I also look at completion rates and downloads for those as well. So I actually go when I am trying to decide which episodes to republish, I go in the reverse order where first I think, okay, what episodes in the past year got me the most engagement where people really reached out and I heard from a lot of folks. For me over the past 12 months, it's been I published two episodes about time management and burnout, which are not super, super directly related to growing a podcast, but those are the ones that I heard from my listeners the most on. I guess we all as podcasters are super burned out and can manage all the things we have to do. So for me, as an example, I would say, okay, last December, I published an episode about burnout, about how to know if you're burnt out and how to actually get out of burnt out and the secret is not taking a break, it's something else. And so I published that episode last year and I got tons and tons of engagement from it. People DMing me texting me in fact saying, hey, thank you for publishing this, this really helped me see where I am with burnout right now. So I'm like, okay, I think that's one that I need to republish because I got a lot of good feedback from that. So I'm going to fire it up. I'm going to say, okay, how many downloads did that episode get and what was the completion rate? If the completion rate was solid, pretty much regardless of how many downloads it got, I will republish it. So pick the episodes that you got the best engagement rate on. If you haven't gotten any engagement on any of them, just look at the episodes that have the best completion rate and downloads combo. And so now you have your episode that you have chosen to republish. So the next question is, do you need to record anything new or do you need to update it or reedit it or make it better or anything like that? So this is where I see the biggest pitfall with podcasters who are looking to republish episodes. They overdue reworking the episode when they publish it. So they're like, okay, I'm going to republish this episode. But first, I want to reedit it to make it better, which completely defeats the purpose of republish in the episode. The whole point of republishing it is to buy yourself some time so you can get, you know, one episode's worth of work back, that time back so that you can relax or do something else. So really want to caution you against completely reworking the episode or even like putting together like a best of list. So I see that with podcasters too. They're like, oh, you know, I want to save time this holiday season by not making a new episode. So I'm going to make a best of episode that, you know, uses content from my best episodes. And my answer to that is that's going to take more work than your episodes. Now it's going to totally defeat the purpose. That's going to leave you worse off. So I would make sure that I don't do a lot of extra work on the episode. Unless I look at the completion rate and there's a clear point in the completion rate where people drop off because they're bored. I might open up Descript, put the episode in there, highlight the part that's boring deleted just so that, you know, we have a better completion rate this time around. But I just make sure that whatever it is, if I do any tweaking on the episode, it's just something really quick and easy like that. The one thing that I will do when republishing an episode is I will record a 90 second intro that talks about why this episode is being republished. I would tell the listener then that this is a republished episode. So you might have heard this before, but here's why we're republishing it now. And that's the key. You want to just write a very, very simple quick and easy blurb that says, Hey, Kevin here, what you're about to hear is an episode that we published on the Grow the Show feed just a few months ago is actually last December. And the reason why we're republishing it today is because it's super, super relevant to where we are right now. And if you've heard it before, I think it's time you heard it again. And if you haven't heard it before, it's really going to be beneficial to you because here's what you're going to learn. And so back to me now, what you are going to say after here's what you're going to learn or here's why it's good if you're an entertainment show is basically what makes that episode so great. And if it is an episode that you got a lot of engagement from, that's where you want to basically use the words that you got from your listeners. So for example, for the episode about burnout, if I were republishing that, I might say, the reason why I'm republishing this episode is because when we originally published it, I heard from tons of Grow the Show listeners who were feeling burnt out in making their podcast that it really helped them to see the forest from the trees and to escape burnout. So that's why we are re-sharing it with you here today because you might be feeling podcasts burn out yourself. And so I really think that it's going to help you right here and now in your podcast listening journey. So without further ado, please enjoy this episode of Grow the Show. Back to me now, that is how I would do it. Literally just wrote that on the fly. Just 60 seconds where I introduced the episode. Here's what we go over. Here's how popular it was. And here's why we're sharing it right now. Here's what you're going to get out of it. Please enjoy. And that's it. 90 seconds, two minutes, maybe three minutes. You don't want to ramble there, but just put that little intro at the beginning of the episode. And then you can literally just plop in the remainder of the old episode. Now the last thing that I would do is just take a glance at the old title of the episode because that's the only thing that I always look at to say, okay, do I want to redo this? Because you know, it only takes a certain amount of time to write a title for an episode. If when looking at the engagement, the completion rate and the downloads of the episode that I'm republishing, if it's an episode that has a high completion rate and has a high engagement rate but has weirdly low downloads, that usually means that I didn't do a proper job of marketing the episode. So I either didn't promote it well enough to my audience or I didn't write a good title. That was super, super compelling. And so as a reminder, you want your podcast title to satisfy as many of the four use as you possibly can. And the four use are the title makes the episode unique. It makes it urgent. It makes it ultra specific and it makes it useful in a perfect world. Your podcast title satisfies all four of those use, but if you can shoot for two of them, like maybe it's unique and urgent or maybe it's ultra specific and useful or any combination, then you'll be in great shape. So when republishing episodes, I'll evaluate the old title that I used, see if it was really effective, see if it got people to press play. And if it didn't, I might rewrite it. What I'm not going to do is put in the title that it's a republishing. So we used to do that, both at Grow the show and my older show, Philly Hu. I used to publish the year that it was published or I would say, like, rerun in the title. And what I learned is that people just don't click on that. So the human brain has a preference for things that are new. It's called recency bias. And so we tend to prefer things that are newer than to things that are older, even if the thing is exactly the same. And that's why you'll see, like if you ever search for something on YouTube or on Google, you'll see the things that show up first are the things that say, like, updated for 2022. And that's just because of the human brain's recency bias. It's just how it works. So recency bias works against you when you put in your podcast title that this is a rerun because people are going to look at it and be like, oh, I don't want to listen to a rerun. Even though it's the best episode you've ever published and it's going to be the best episode they've ever heard and they'll probably love it, they won't click on it just because it's older, just because it's not new. They will actively choose to click on an episode of a different podcast that they listen to that's new, rather than listening to an episode of your show that's older. So for that reason, I have stopped putting in my episode titles when there is a rerun when it's a republishing. I just use a great title that doesn't indicate at all that it's repurposing. And then when the listener presses play in that little intro that I just described to you, I'll say, hey, just so you know, this was published a year ago, but here's why you should stay and here's what you're going to get out of this episode. And here's why right now this is super important. So basically what I'm doing is I'm selling the listener on listening to this older episode and trying to combat that recency bias. And so you're going to get people who click on the episode who think it's a new one. And then they hear your little intro and they're like, oh, this is an older one, but it's okay because you are there to tell them why they should stick around and they've already pressed play. So you've already got them in the door. But if you put that it's a rerun or it's repurposed or the date that it was published in the title, there will be people who don't click on it only because it is a rerun. So for that reason, I don't recommend doing that. If you do decide to do that, if you're someone that's like, no, I want to put in my podcast episode title that it is a rerun, that's totally fine. There will be people who don't listen to it because of that. But you know, your show's not going to die. It's okay. It's fine. So do it everyone. All in all, as we head into the next couple weeks of holiday time, first of all, I really, really hope you enjoy. I hope you had a great year. If not, I hope, you know, this is a time of rest and relaxation. And hopefully the holidays brings you good things. But overall, if you do decide to republish episodes, which I hope you do decide to take some time off because again, this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. I'm not one of those online gurus who's telling you, you should always be grinding whenever it's also sleeping. You should be working. You're going to burn yourself out that way. I need you to be able to manage your energy so that you can keep publishing podcasts episodes and keep showing off your audience as long as possible. And so for that reason, I do hope you take some time off. I hope you have an incredible holiday season. And again, if you do decide to republish, please don't give yourself too much extra work and defeat the purpose of republishing. Just do what I recommend. Take your best episode, plop a little 30-second intro in front of it, publish it, and go have some egnogger, whatever you do to celebrate. So that is it for this one. Hopefully I really hope you have a great holiday season. I hope you have a happy holidays, a happy new year. Really excited for 2023 for Grow the Show. You're going to see some cool new stuff here on the feed. We're going to be publishing more. We've got some cool new content types that I think you're really going to like. So anyway, I'm excited, hopefully you're excited. Have a great year. Republish your episodes. I will see you in 2023. And that does it for this episode of Grow the Show. Thanks so much.