Re-Releasing Content: Is It Taboo for Podcasts?

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Most podcast experts, including myself, will tell you it’s really important to release content on a regular basis. That’s true. When you’re consistent. You show people you’re serious about your podcast, but is it ever okay to re-release podcast episodes? Is it taboo for podcasts? That’s our hot button topic today! Take it away radio man! Podcast Your Business.

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Hello, hello! Welcome to Podcast Your Business. I’m Sunny Gault. I am a podcast coach and mentor and I’ve been podcasting for the last 17 years. I’m also the founder and CEO of Independent Podcast Network. And I’m here to help you create amazing podcasts for your business. And guys, I’m super excited. Because early tomorrow morning, I’m hopping on a plane. I’m leaving my family behind for a couple days. And I am going to Dallas, Texas for Podcast Movement. Now, if you haven’t heard of Podcast Movement before, that’s okay. You might be new to podcasting. This is the largest podcasting Expo slash conference in the United States. This year, it’s being held in Dallas, Texas. And so I’m excited I get to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a few months since I was at pod fest. And then there’s a lot of people that don’t go to pod fest that go to Podcast Movement. So it’s always good to reconnect with everyone in the industry highly recommended. If you get a chance, go to Podcast Movement. Let’s focus now on creating amazing podcasts for your business. We do this by mastering the Five Ps of Podcasting. If you’re new to my podcast, you may be wondering what in the world are the Five P’s of Podcasting? This is a concept that I talk about in my online podcasting course, which is called How to Launch Your Profitable Podcast in 30 days. And I like the five P’s because they’re manageable, right? We can understand things and you know, small group, so five is a good number. The five P’s are prep, plan, produce, promote, and profit. Mr. radio man, what are we focused on today? Plan. I have to be honest, it was hard to pick a P today say that five times fast. Pick a P. This falls under Plan. Okay, but I think it can also fall under produce depending on where you’re at with your show. Okay, so today we’re going to discuss rereleasing podcast episodes. And more specifically, as we dive into this, here’s what we’re going to focus on. We’re going to talk about why podcasters choose to rerelease their episodes, so why go through all of the drama, newness of it all. We’re going to talk about the type of podcasts that benefit most from RE releasing content, as well as some that you may not want to mess with. Okay, just being honest. And then we’ll discuss some strategies for re releasing episodes or content and mixed in there, I’m going to share with you my own personal experience, which pretty much flies in the face of what most experts are going to tell you. All right, well, we’ll get started on all that right after this quick break.

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Today, we’re talking about something considered kind of taboo, I think in the past, but I am seeing more and more podcasters doing it. And that is releasing your podcast episodes as you continue with your podcast. So after you launch and you’re in kind of the swing of things, and you keep releasing new episodes, the idea of releasing content may start to sound more and more appealing. So this is something that I want you guys to know more about now, so you know if that is going to be a good fit for your show, or if you need to make other plans. So why do some podcasters choose to rerelease their content? As I mentioned in the show, Intro consistency is extremely important in your podcast. It’s important when you launch your show. It is important throughout the production of your show. And when I say consistency, I’m talking about your release schedule. Now this is something that I got way too caught up in when I first started doing podcasts. I thought I had to have a brand new episode every time I release new content and I literally stressed myself out over this. Literally I think my hair was starting to come out of my head unnaturally, because there were just some weeks that I could not commit to it as much as I loved podcasting. Now you guys know I’ve talked about my parenting shows on this podcast quite a bit. And at one point, I was releasing five new episodes a week for five different podcasts. So they were all weekly shows, and each of them released a new episode every week. And what I started to do originally, this is kind of how I got into releasing podcast episodes, is I would take an episode from one of the sister shows that I was producing. And I would run it on one of my other shows, as long as it made sense, right, as long as the audience was similar. So for example, maybe for my breastfeeding podcast, I would take one of those episodes, and I would run it on a show for moms right after they had their babies, they would be interested in breastfeeding in theory, right. And it also gave me an opportunity to cross promote those shows, I would say something like today on Newbies, we’ve got a great episode for you, it’s actually from our sister show The Boob Group, which is all about breastfeeding, we think you’re gonna love it. So that’s how it started for me, because I knew releasing content was really important. Not only is it important for your listeners, so they know what to expect, but also for the distribution platforms that your podcast is going out on. Because a lot of those they’ll kind of ding you. If you’re not releasing content on a consistent schedule, if you just stop publishing for a while, they’re gonna think that you’re done, you’ve pod faded, right. And so releasing episodes on a consistent basis is super important for continuing to build your audience. Something else I discovered in producing podcasts for a long time, is your audience isn’t necessarily going to go back and listen to the very first episodes that you produced. In my case, what was happening is our audience was emailing us and asking us for episodes that we had released multiple years prior. So I learned pretty quickly. And maybe this has something to do with the demographic for the show, because parents are really busy. But I learned that my audience in particular was not doing a lot of digging, when it came to finding podcast content. So they may go back a month or so whatever shows up in their podcasting app, right. But if you produce something a long time ago, they may not even know that it even exists. So I took that information. And I went, Why am I always just busting my butt to create new episodes, why don’t I start re releasing this content, obviously, I’m gonna save a lot of money. When I do that. Plus, I’m helping my audience, because they don’t have time to go back into my library of content.

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Now, all podcasts are a little bit different. And I want to put this disclaimer out there because I don’t necessarily think that this process of releasing podcast episodes works for all shows. I don’t think it works if you have some sort of timely show, or like a daily show where you’re putting out fresh content. And it really depends on that day. That really doesn’t make sense if you’ve got a new show or sports show. I mean, it really doesn’t work unless you’re doing some sort of highlights or your grouping things, you know, according to theme or something like that, maybe you might be able to pull that off. But that’s not exactly what I mean, by re-releasing content, I’m talking about pretty much re releasing it in its entirety and not just taking bits and pieces and creating, you know, a new episode from content that you previously recorded and compiling it in a different way that’s totally different. But if you have evergreen content, Evergreen means it’s always green, it’s always good to go, then this can work. And again, in my shows, we were talking about pretty general topics, right regarding pregnancy and birthing and caring for your baby and caring for mom and dad and the whole process. This kind of stuff doesn’t really change year after year. I mean, some things kind of change. And there’s there’s new things to discuss, of course, but for the most part, this is evergreen content. So worked really well for my shows. I also think that if you have a show where your audience stays the same, so like a comedy show, maybe even like a true crime show something like that where the audience is going to be pretty consistent. There’s no real reason for them to leave your show unless they don’t like you anymore. This may not be a good fit. But if you have a podcast where your audience is always changing, this is something you should really consider. In my case, again, my podcasts were focused on a very specific stage of life. Most people are not going to listen to a pregnancy podcast if they’re not pregnant or planning to become pregnant. So, the downside is I have a lot of turnover for my shows. And thank goodness, I’ve managed to keep my numbers up. The plus side of that is they’re only with me for a certain period of time. So unless that’s all they did is listen to new mommy media content day in and day out, they’re not going to hear all of our stuff. And that’s kind of the audience that you want, you want your audience to be changing. So they don’t feel like everything’s just on repeat.

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How do you go about re releasing your content? Well, you have to consider where your content is at. For me personally, I don’t do anything on social media, it’s just too much work wasn’t getting enough out of it. So I focus on my website. And I focus on where I’m uploading my episodes to, which is my podcast host provider. If I’m going to rerelease my content, I’ve got to change that content in both of those places. And if you are going to rerelease your content through your podcast host provider, you do have to create a brand new post, you can’t just go in there and change the date. For the release. I’ve tried to do that before, the systems are smarter than that. So you have to create a new post and I literally guys, I literally copy everything over from the previous episode, I copy and paste, I re upload the exact same episode. And then I take my embed code is gonna give you a new embed code, new links, things like that. And those are the things that need to be swapped out. For me, it’s really easy. The only other place that I promote my podcast episodes are on my website. So each podcast episode has its own WordPress post that goes along with it has a very special URL, right? All the URLs are unique, which is good for SEO purposes. Now for that, I don’t have to create a brand new post, because it’s just on my site. So for that, I will just go in and change the date of the WordPress post, I swap out the embed code. And that’s it guys. That is the magic. And I have been doing this for the last seven years. Except when a sponsor wants me to do a new episode, then I will do a new episode because sometimes they want to, you know, be part of the content. And you know, I interview one of their experts or something like that. So lately, I have been doing more new episodes simply because the sponsor wanted some fresh content because they wanted to be part of it. But I’ve never ever, ever had an advertiser come to me and say, Oh, you’re just re releasing your content. No, thanks. Nobody says that because what they’re most interested in is people listening period because they want those people to hear their ad. Do they care if it’s fresh content? Do they care if it’s been around for 10 years? No, they care that they’re listening. So the advertiser benefits my audience benefits because most of them didn’t even realize that I’d ever produced that episode before. And I benefit because I have more hair. Do you want more awesome podcasting hacks like this one. Learn more about my online podcasting course on the other side of this break.

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Thanks for listening to today’s episode, everyone. If you are new to podcasting, maybe you haven’t even launched your show yet. I highly encourage you to take my online course it is called How to Launch Your Profitable Podcast (emphasis on profitable) in 30 days. I’ve got a lot more honesty, a lot of funny stories of what I have learned over the last 17 years in podcasting. Sometimes I made big, huge, costly mistakes. And my goal with this is to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. It doesn’t have to right? So check out my online course the link is in the description. Until next week, remember, you should start a podcast!