AP 0646: Should I Delete or Update My Old Podcasts?

AskPat 646 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 646 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from John but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is: FreshBooks. FreshBooks is one of my favorite companies. They help me manage my stress. No, they're not a stress tool, but they help me manage my finances which helps me stay stress free and I recommend you check them out, especially if you do any invoicing. They make invoicing super simple. If you have any students or clients or you do any consulting and you do any billing of any kind, they make it so quick for you to send a very professional looking invoice. So, you can get paid quicker. I've been on both ends of the spectrum there, creating invoices, sending it to others and also receiving an invoice. And by far, you know there's other ones out there, like Harvest and whatnot but I love the way FreshBooks does it. It makes it very easy for me to pay if I'm getting served a FreshBooks invoice too. And plus, they just help you keep track of your finances overall. And plus, you could even connect so that, you could even connect third-party companies to it. So you can, for example, whenever you spend money on your business, it'll keep track of that automatically for you so that it's all in there and again you can just focus on your business too. I highly recommend checking it out. Go to freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter askpat in the “how did you hear about us” section. And that's how you can get 30 days for free. So, again, freshbooks.com/askpat.

All right, now here's today's question from John.

John: Hey, Pat. John Wilkerson from The Wired Homeschool over at thewiredhomeschool.com. You recently had Tom Tresidder on about consolidating old content and deleting old content on a blog. I was wondering what your strategy has been or was on your website, I don't know, maybe you're gonna talk about this later, on your podcast posts. Do you just wanna delete them so your old episodes aren't available for listeners anymore, or do you wanna go through and look at the posts and clean them up and make them more relevant and put your latest calls to action in each of those posts that are associated with the podcast? Thanks a lot. Appreciate everything you're doing and look forward to having my question answered. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, John. Thank you so much for the question. You had mentioned Todd Tresidder's podcast that we did together and that was Episode 200 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. I remember, because everybody was like, what are you gonna do for Episode 200? And I was like, I got this amazing show which is gonna be different and provide a lot of value. And I think a lot of people expected something different but were quite surprised that it was very actionable. And I've seen a lot of results from Todd's strategy. A lot of other people have seen results too. And what this is, is actually auditing your blog, taking old stuff out, redirecting old stuff to new stuff and that sort of thing. So, that again, is that smartpassiveincome/session 200.

Now, this is an interesting question, John, related to your podcast. Can you, or should you do the same thing with your podcast? I wouldn't necessarily delete old podcasts. A lot of people love to, with podcasts more than blog posts, actually, go through the entire archive one by one and listen to them in chronological order, which, if I'm a podcast listener, I actually wouldn't recommend because there may be some more relevant content that is in the archives somewhere. So, I prefer to listen based on whatever it is that I'm working on next, not necessarily the order that somebody else has done something. So, that's just a small side note there.

But with your podcast, and we did this too, you can update it. You can do things for older posts and update them. I would recommend doing an audit every year or two and going back into the posts for your podcast that you've put out there, that you published and just making sure all the links are still good. You know, you don't want any broken links and that sometimes happens. You don't want people clicking on your resource links and then having them go nowhere, so that's the first thing. Secondly, there might be some updated content or resources that you can add that have come about since that particular podcast episode has come out. So you can add those too. And there might be things that have been updated with new follow-up content.

So, you might've talked about a particular topic a year ago, maybe you talked about it again because something has changed or something newsworthy happened. You can go back into your old posts for those podcast episodes and similar to what I said with the resources, you can link to those new pieces of content. And if it's quite important that people do that, because you don't actually want people to listen those old episodes because that content is out of date, again I wouldn't delete those episodes. But I would recommend putting a really important note at the top of the show notes to say that, hey, we've recently recorded a new podcast episode about this or we talked about this again and I recommend you click here to visit the latest and greatest episode about this topic. That way, you don't upset people who listen to the content, visit your blog, see the content there from your archive and then listen to it and then be like, oh, well this isn't out of date anymore. You don't wanna waste their time. And so that's what you're doing there.

Now, you had just mentioned your written posts, related to your blog posts. So, of course, for those of you out there who don't know, in order to publish a podcast episode, you need to publish a blog post that has that podcast episode embedded. And on that blog post you'd have: show notes and resource links and all that kind of stuff. But what about the audio? Should you update the audio? And I would say, yes. Now, you don't necessarily need to replace audio files but you can do that, in its entirety. What I mean is, you don't wanna record an entirely new episode about a particular topic that maybe has changed or like I said, something has happened since and just replace the old episode with that new one.

What I would do is, I would replace the old file with a new one that has the exact same audio except for maybe a minute or two at the top of that particular episode, that you've added in, that says, “Hey guys. Thank you for listening to this. This is actually content that is out of date or this is older content, I've actually talked about this in a newer episode.” And you give 'em a quick little nice easy link to that new episode or tell them to visit the show notes to get access to the link to go to the new one. That way, when people are listening, they'll know right away that this is actually out of date and it's their choice then, to continue to listen to it or not. And many will. You can just mention that there's still some great content in there. Maybe there's one thing.

I mean, maybe it's not a huge thing but we've done this too. There might be a part of the show where you talk about a particular resource that no longer exists or maybe they changed their name. I had to do this a couple times because Elance changed its name to Upwork. And so, in some episodes I actually mention that at the top of the show. We actually spent a little bit of time to record, just a little snippet of audio, that then was put at the beginning of each of those older podcast episodes. Then, those files were just replaced on Libsyn or whatever server that you have. You could do that. So, when you replace the older files, people will then listen to the new one. There might be instances where you need to update just a certain segment of it, in which case you should be doing that.

Obviously, the big overall theme here is, you wanna make sure that the experience that people have through your content is great, is up to date, and with podcast episodes it can be very easy to forget the fact that people are going back and listening to your older stuff. Sometimes those are where people find you for the first time, is your older stuff. And it would be bad if somebody were to listen to an episode and then figure out later that they just wasted their time because it was out of date. That's how I would clean up my old podcast material. I would set a date every year, at least some sort of rhythm where you're doing it once a year. I wouldn't delete it, I would just make sure that you're always keeping people informed of what's new and what has changed, that way they know that you're actually up to date and that they're in the right place for the content that you have to offer.

So there you go. John, thank you so much for the question. We appreciate it so much, all of us out there listening because this is really important stuff. Thank you. We're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

I also want to thank, once again, FreshBooks.com and if you wanna get a 30-day free trial of this amazing piece of software to help you manage your business finances, check 'em out at freshbooks.com/askpat. Make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “how did you hear about us” section.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off today by Kim Garst. She says, “Legendary service is one of the criteria that sets one company apart from its competitors. It's the mark of a truly authentic company. You just can't fake caring.”

I care about you guys. I appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.