AP 0703: How Do You Rebrand a Podcast?

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AskPat 703 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, guys? Pat Flynn, here. Welcome to Episode 703 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.

All right, now here's today's questions from Tim.

Tim: Hi, Pat. This is Tim Hammerich with AgGrad.com. We connect college students and young professionals to agra businesses that want to hire them. I created a podcast along with my website as a good way to reach my audience. What I'm finding is that with my very narrow niche only centered around agriculture jobs for that demographic, I feel like I'm running out of value to provide. I don't just want to keep interviewing people for the sake of interviewing them.

I've thought that maybe I want to rebrand my podcast to the future of agriculture podcast. I could cover not only jobs for those individuals, but also just cool ideas considering the future of agriculture. I think I'll hit a wider audience. I'm concerned, two things. I don't know how to rebrand a podcast. Then also, is that a bad idea because it's a separate brand from my core business, which is AgGrad? Any help you could give me would be very much appreciated. I listen to every episode and I really appreciate everything you do. Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Tim. What's up? Thank you so much for the question. Rebranding, I'll talk about it in two ways. First, the technical aspect on how to do it. There's a couple of different options that you have. Then I'll talk about the pros and cons of doing it to finish off. Technically, it's actually not very difficult to do. Like I said, you have a couple of options. You can turn the existing show that you have into a brand new show. Keep all of your old episode, which I would recommend doing, those are going to be findable. I wouldn't worry about actually going and rerecording those, and adding a new title or tagline at the top, or worrying about that. I wouldn't worry about that. It's actually kind of cool that people can go back into time and see how it's progressed. I think that adds a lot of value and shows that you are forward thinking, and you are somebody who is paying attention to the podcast, and keeping it active, staying true with the times.

That's if you keep the same feed, which is what I would, again, recommend doing. Other people, they branch out and create a band new podcast. They keep the old one there. Sometimes they'll record a final episode that says, “Hey guys, this is what I'm doing.” They point people to the new episode. I would actually record an episode talking about the rebrand anyway, no matter which way you choose. Then they just leave that episode there. That's the first one that people see because it's in reverse chronological order. Then the new podcast starts and it becomes a whole separate channel. A brand new podcast rebranded, sort of from scratch if you will.

It's a lot easier to rebrand the first way I talked about. Just all you have to do is change the artwork, of course. Then you change the metadata, the title, and the description, all that stuff. You just update that information. Wherever your RSS feed is hosted, you just change the title, and the name, and all that related stuff. Boom, you're good to go. I've seen a number of people do that before. I've seen people do it, again, for the same exact feed and show. They've rebranded several times, four or five times, and it's for similar reasons to you. They want to expand out. Or maybe they go a completely different direction. Or one thing that they talked about just seemed to take off more than others and they go that direction instead. That's something you could do. Like I said, it's not going to be very difficult to do that.

I don't know exactly how your podcast is set up, but it's very easy to change that information with your host if you choose to use the RSS feed from your host like Libsyn, or Buzzsprout, or any of the other ones. Or if you use PowerPress with Blubrry, then you update it on the backend of your website in WordPress. However you do it, iTunes will eventually pick up on the new rebrand. Give it some time once you change it. iTunes take a little bit of time to update a lot of those things. Don't freak out if it doesn't happen right away. Like I said, I would record an episode talking about the rebrand, why you're doing it, so that when people come across the history of your episodes and they see that there's a change there, they'll immediately go to an episode that kind of explains that for them. Or if they ask you, you can just point them to that episode if you like. It doesn't necessarily have to be its own episode, it can be the first of the brand new brand. You can just point people to that one. At the top of the show, it doesn't even have to be that long, just a few minutes, you can explain yourself and what the new direction is.

As far as pros and cons, rebranding I feel like is a great idea for some and not so great for others. Some people go into a rebranding because they didn't give enough time for their initial show to take off. That's not what I feel like the case is for you, Tim. I feel like you have a good knack on just how much reach you have with the current kinds of content that you're providing. You're looking to add more ears to your podcast and listenership. You want to brand out. You want to broaden your horizon a little bit. I think that's a smart thing to do for you, Tim. Based on what you told me I think the rebranding is a smart thing to do. It could still live on the same website. Just make sure that when you change the brand of the podcast, even though it might live on the same website, you can still tell people and include a description so that people know that it is something related to it. I think they would assume that anyway. Obviously, in the description you would include keywords like agricultural graduate, and those kinds of things, so that people know that they're in the right spot.

Plus, people are going to be in your archives. They might find an older episode with that old title and they might come to your website and wonder what happened. If you have any sort of description that says, “The rebranded podcast, formerly known as this and that,” that typically will just be a quick and easy way to get people to understand that there has been a change, and that they're in the right spot. I don't think it's a bad idea for you, Tim. I just hesitate to tell everybody that it's a great idea because for some they have an amazing podcast, they're just not patient enough. They haven't given themselves enough time to actually reach that inflection point where things begin to take off and potentially in an exponential way.

Tim, I want to wish you all the best of luck and send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. 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.

Lastly, here's a quote to finish off the day like I always provide. This is by Gurbaksh Chahal. “If you genuinely want something, don't wait for it. Teach yourself to be impatient.”

Cool. Cheers. See you guys later. I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye for now.