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Podcast Playbook: Helping Coaches & Advisors Convert Podcast Content into Clients
Strategic Podcasters Don’t Let Their Old Episodes Collect Dust (They Make 7 Small Tweaks)
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One of the best parts of podcasting is your episodes keep working long after they are published. Your back catalog can keep bringing in downloads and new fans months, even years later. Most podcasters just let this happen naturally. A listener binges a few old episodes, or someone stumbles across one in the search results. But smart podcasters know how to do this intentionally. In this episode, I'm sharing simple ways to get more downloads from your episodes you've already created, so your old content keeps working for you. Want even more ways to grow your podcast? I share extra tips and answer listener questions every week in our newsletter. In fact, today's episode about increasing old episode downloads came straight from one of those questions. Sign up@simplepodstudios.com newsletter or or just use the link in the show Notes okay, so you put a lot of effort into your podcast, and every episode takes real time and energy. So today I want to help that effort keep paying off by sharing seven practical ways to get more downloads from your older episodes. These are strategies that you can start using right away to bring new life into your back catalog. So, all right, let's get started with number one, which is to make episodes more searchable. Think this is really good practice to go back and review and update older episode titles to make them more keyword rich and clear? Listeners often find podcasts through search, you know, either via searching your actual feed for a specific topic or their preferred listening app itself. So descriptive titles are going to perform better than clever ones. This is a good practice to do at the start of every year where you go back and you look back on last year's episodes and update those titles. If you've never updated titles, start with your published episodes six months ago and then start working backwards from there. What you're looking for is replacing these vague titles with phrases that your ideal listener might actually type. And it's not to say that these vague titles, clever titles, or compelling titles weren't working at that certain time. Titling is really interesting because it's a balance of what the search engine needs to understand what your content is and a compelling enough title to get a listener to press play. And great titles, honestly can do both of these. But over time, and as your episode gets older and older, you want to start writing your titles in favor of the search engine versus making it compelling enough for someone to press play. Your older episodes are starting to get buried here, and the search algorithm can help bring these to the forefront. So I'll give you an example. A great title, potentially for a financial advising Podcast could be the move that saved my clients thousands. It's very intriguing. You're not exactly sure what it is. It kind of baits me into clicking on it, but there's not a ton of search volume in that episode title itself. So six months from now, you might want to update that title to something like how to Save Thousands on Taxes using a Donor advised Fund. Now all of a sudden, people that are looking to understand donor advised funds or to save money via their taxes, your episode is starting to appear higher in that search. All right, number two is to add older episodes to your email sequences. Your email subscribers are already warm leads for your show, and reintroducing them to older episodes gives you another touch point with this potential listener. I think there are a ton of different ideas for how you can incorporate this, but I'll share a few. One that I like to do with most of our clients is to add one or two of their evergreen episodes, especially those episodes that might share a little bit of their personality or their backstory or or answer a commonly asked question that they get. We like to add those episodes to their welcome sequence for new subscribers. So if you have set up a welcome sequence, someone subscribes to your email and over the course of two weeks they're going to get five separate emails. One of those emails can be Check out the podcast and here are two good places to start or get to know me more. Here's a podcast episode where I shared a little bit of my backstory or three of the most common questions that I hear from my clients, and a link to you answering each of those questions via a podcast episode. You can take that same concept and apply it to your sales funnels. If you built out funnels for certain products or courses or things like that, your podcast is a great primer and a great way to warm up a potential lead and get closer to making a sale. You can also include older episodes in your ongoing newsletter. You can either link out past episodes whenever there's a current theme or trend or question that is related to that episode. Or shoot, you could even have a section where you call it Blast from the Past and you share one of your favorite older episodes. One of the creative ideas that I saw one of my clients do was add a podcast episode to his automated email sequence whenever someone books a meeting with him. This is his one on one introduction meeting and he shared out an episode where he talked a little bit about himself and his background and how he helps people and it's been great driving people to his Podcast, allowing people to get to know him before he even has an introduction call with them. So that was number two. Number three is to mention episodes and your speaking engagements. This can be super powerful because whenever people hear you speak, they're already interested in your message. Sharing a related episode gives them an easy next step to interact with you. This has happened to me countless times. I've gone to a conference and I've heard someone speak. And when done right, if they share that they have a podcast, I almost immediately go to their podcast feed, download a couple episodes from my flight home. Actually, at the most recent podcast Movement conference, this happened to me too. I saw someone speak on stage. I really loved her messaging and what she was sharing and I went to her podcast and now I'm a super fan. Like, her podcast is in my top 10 rotation and I almost never miss one of her podcast episodes. So this is pretty easy to do. You can add specific podcast episodes to certain slides that they might be relevant on. You could have a QR code at the very end where you make a custom playlist for them. You can mention related episodes during your talks or your workshops, your webinars, and just share that you have this podcast. And if people want to dive deeper, they can go and check out your podcast. I think you can make this as tech heavy or tech not heavy as you want. My only suggestion is to keep the episode title short and memorable whenever you're referencing them live or just use your episode numbers. Even better, if you're going to be sending up a follow up email, maybe you've been invited to come speak to someone's mastermind and they are going to share the attendee list with you. You can just include a couple of links to your podcast in that follow up email as well. Okay. Number four is to link old episodes inside new ones. So whenever you're recording a new episode, mention an older episode that covers a related topic. Maybe you briefly mentioned something and you said, hey, guys, if you want to go deeper on that, check out episode 32. You can also make this a standard practice where you find a moment in every single one of your newer episodes to reference an older episode. Or just put it at the very end of every podcast episode where you're gonna share something. Like, if you've liked this episode, you probably will also like this episode. Go check it out. I've been doing that with my personal finance show and I've been getting some pretty good results. I've just been including a link in the show notes to two additional episodes that are related to the topic that we talked about that people might also like if they've listened to the full episode. I think it's well worth guiding current listeners to dive deeper into your back catalog. You know, these are people who are already listening, so they're the easiest source of extra downloads for you. So just make it easy, give them recommendations, and really start the binge ability of your podcast by. By doing this. Okay. Number five is to reshare older episodes on social media. As business owners, we're almost always needing additional content for our social media, so. So why are we only sharing clips from our latest episodes? You can recycle content that you've already created a year ago for an older episode and repost it. Or you can simply just promote an older episode, especially whenever it is relevant. Again, I have one client who reshares their open enrollment episode every single year whenever open enrollment season starts. I think it's a great idea. People are always looking to get educated before they have to make these decisions. And, and why not resurface a podcast episode where they went deep on open enrollment and choices and guide people to that episode via their social media? And I don't think you're really going to overwhelm people. First, if someone saw a post a year ago, they probably won't remember that they saw that same post. And also over the course of the last year, you've probably gained new followers. Your followers are always changing, so this might be a completely new piece of content for some followers that they're now seeing for the very first time. Also, if you're bi weekly from a publishing standpoint, it could be a great opportunity for you on your off weeks to promote an older episode. This kind of balances your posting schedule and allows you to stay relevant on your off weeks, which is great. Number six is to ask past guests to reshare their episodes. You've went out of your way, helped a guest promote or amplify their message, and if they were considerate, they probably shared the episode whenever it went live. And if you still have a great relationship with them, it's probably worth asking again. First of all, many of your guests may also need content. Just like I was talking about in the last point here, they also might need content at different moments. So resurfacing the clips or the graphics that you created for them whenever the episode first went live might give them an opportunity to take some of that content and reshare it back out to their social media accounts or their newsletter or maybe even their podcast and like we were talking about in the previous point as well, they also have new followers and subscribers that may have never even been introduced to this guest appearance. One thing that I did early on in my podcasting journey was on the one year anniversary of a episode being published, I went back and asked the guest if they would share the episode to celebrate the one year anniversary. You can also do this with big milestones like episode 50, 100 or 200. You can go back and ask all the former guests throughout that milestone if they would celebrate with you and share their guest appearance on your show. I think there's a couple of different ways where at different moments in time you can reach back out to former guests and ask them to share or promote the episode. Okay, finally, number seven is to bundle older episodes into a themed playlist. Why not make it easier for people to navigate your back catalog, especially if they're looking for a particular topic or trying to learn something specific? You can go ahead and you can bundle 5, 10, 15, 20 episodes all into one themed playlist and this is a perfect idea to help listeners start binging your content. This is definitely something that I'm going to do whenever I have a larger back catalog of episodes. I'll probably create a playlist like top 10 episodes on growing your show or the 15 must listen to Episodes. If you want to improve your podcast content, you can go ahead and pre select a bunch of the episodes that you think are worth bundling together and almost create like starter guides for either new listeners or even loyal fans that just haven't had the opportunity to fully go back and review all of your back catalog. Then you can take the playlist link and you can share it in your newsletter, on your website, on social media, or even in a new podcast episode. You can even have fun with it and ask a few of your other fellow content creators to contribute to the playlist and all of you guys can promote the playlist. Maybe each of you add in five episodes and create a playlist of 20 different episodes all on one specific topic. And then all four of you can go ahead and share that playlist with your guys audience and cross promote that way. So as we're wrapping up this episode, these aren't the only ways to revive your back catalog. I wasn't intending for this to be an exhaustive list, but really hoping that your wheels are now turning. You've already done the hard part, which is creating great content and great episodes, and now it's time to make them work for you again. Podcast episodes shouldn't just die on the vine 30 days after they've been released, there are plenty of opportunities for you Continue to resurface them and share them with your audience or your future audience. I did give you seven ideas here. My suggestion is to start small and choose maybe one or two of these ideas and see how much life that you can breathe back into your older episodes with this. And if you ever have questions or just need a brainstorming buddy, you can always email me@justinsimplepodstudios.com thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode.