AP 0903: How Do I Present Older Podcast Episodes to New Listeners?

AskPat 903 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 903 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me here today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question coming in today from Kurt, but before we get into that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, an awesome company that is serving millions of small businesses, including mine, with managing our books, our bookkeeping. Not only that, it also helps with invoicing. In less than thirty seconds you can create a professional-looking invoice. If you're a coach, or you do any consultation or freelancing and you bill people, you need to make that easy for yourself and easy for others to pay you too, and definitely FreshBooks is the number one way, I feel, to do it. I've been on both ends of it, as somebody who's created invoices and also have received invoices from FreshBooks; it's definitely the best way to go. If you want to check it out for thirty days for free, go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” Section. Thanks so much, and here's today's question from Kurt.

Kurt: Hey Pat, this is Kurt Francom with Leading LDS, and we are a non-profit organization help lay-leaders in the world to enhance their leadership capability. We have a podcast with over 200 episodes, which have been a lot of fun creating. My question is, when we gain a new listener 200 episodes in, how do we get the old, really good episodes in front of them so they can benefit from that? I notice as new people come on and listen to our podcast, they're rarely going back and listening to old episodes, because iTunes and other podcasting apps don't make those easily accessible. How can we get them to go back and really benefit from the old content from long ago that we recorded on the podcast? Thanks for all you're doing, Pat. Goodbye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Kurt, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it. The first thing I did when you shared this question with me was look into your podcast feed, and it does look like that you have all of your episodes there, which is great, and you have over 200, which is fantastic. Congrats on the success and the continuation of your show. What I was looking for was seeing if maybe you only show the latest fifty episodes, but you have them all, which is great. iTunes will only show you, at least at this point, up to 250, so you're going to get to a point where you're going to have Episode 251 show up, and then Episode 1 will disappear. Now, for those of you who may only be showing up to 50 or even 100 and you have more episodes than that, you're going to have to adjust the settings in your feed. Wherever your feed is hosted, you're potentially going to have to change the number of shows that you show in your feed, and it depends on where your feed is hosted, but that will allow you to show more. It's just more data that's being shared, and more episodes that are being shown to the directories that already have access. You don't need to go to iTunes and say, “Hey, iTunes, can you show more episodes?” That's based on where your feed is hosted.

That takes care of that, Kurt, but still, it's a great practice to have people get into your old content, and there's a number of different ways to do that. For any type of content platform you're on, whether it's podcast, blog, or video, a great way to go about it is to first get people on your email list, Kurt, and then you guide them from there. You can use your email list to help bring back older episodes, pull them out from the archive, and actually share them with your audience. That's a great way to go about it, and I often do that on the blog.

Also, having a Start Here page on your website is really smart, so that way people who listen to your show and find you for the first time, they come to your website, they see the Start Here page, and that is where you can direct people to certain episodes that you know are probably killer episodes that are going to be the most important for people to listen to first. You could even mention that Start Here page on your show so people will be directed to it, and they'll go from there. They'll be able to dig up older content that way too, because it's all in one spot. Another way you can go about it is actually to mention old episodes within current episodes. I do this quite often, and you probably notice the same thing Kurt. You'll remember certain episodes and their episode numbers, or the guests who were on the show, and you can direct people to there, or at least direct people to the show notes, where those links for those older episodes are. Typically, if they're relevant, you can mention them. For example, when I talk about just getting started and learning about all the different ways to generate passive income, I reference Episode 192, 193, and 194, which are episodes that will take you through all the different kinds of passive income that can be generated, and what it takes to start each of them, and what's entailed. I often reference that one, and that one actually gets quite a bit of downloads. It's also referenced on the Start Here page too, so as far as an older episode, it definitely gets much higher downloads, because I'm conscious about those episodes and I reference them.

Finally, the last strategy I wanted to share with you is don't under-utilize social media for sharing older episodes or older posts or older videos. I use social media, and probably once a day a link goes out for an older episode that I know, that I put in a queue. You can use tools like Edgar at MeetEdgar.com, or CoSchedule to schedule those to go out. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through the CoSchedule link.] Now, I will say that you need to be cautious about how often you do that and still be active on social media yourself. I mean, that's why it's called social media: You have to be social. I know a lot of people who do this strategy and pump out five to ten older episodes every single day without any conversations in and around them. These tools are—you know, you have to worry a little bit about them because they are third-party tools.

It's always best to natively post onto the different social media platforms, especially when you are trying to start a conversation. These older posts, they can be put into a library that then get pushed out automatically over time, which is fine, but you will see those numbers decline over time as the social media tools start to get more sophisticated and realize that . . . Not the tools, but as these social media platforms become more sophisticated and have algorithms, they're going to want more real-time stuff coming in. Just be wary about that particular strategy. It's still very useful, especially if you do it natively.

Thanks guys, I appreciate you for listening. Kurt, thank you for the question. I'm going to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show.

One more thing I want to mention. Every once in a while it's always good to do a recap episode, and by recap episode I mean, “Hey, here's a topic that I want to bring back.” You can actually pull audio files from your older episodes out and put them into a newer episode, and actually it becomes a great way to tease those older episodes. You can actually create a really nice little—almost kind of like a roundup post, but using your own stuff from the past. You have a ton of content, Kurt, it looks like. There might be a topic of interest that is current in your niche, and what you can do is find older episodes related to that and actually pull pieces of it out and sound bites out, and actually start talking and going more in-depth about them. I definitely think that that would be a great strategy for getting old content into the ears of your new listeners. There you go.

Thanks again for the question. And if you have any questions, anybody who's listening to this, if you have a question that you'd like to potentially get answered on this show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by—it's actually a German proverb, so I don't know who said it, but it's a German proverb, and that is: “Good things are not done in a hurry.” Hurry is not a good word, just in general. You feel rushed, you feel pressure; I think there is something to be said for doing things hastily, but not necessarily in a hurry. Anyway, just my thoughts.

Thanks guys, take care, I appreciate you, and nope, no clues in this episode for those of you who are following along. Go back to Episode 900; I'm kind of not going to always say, “Go back to Episode 900,” but just in this first week I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt in case you came in later. Starting in Episode 900, I gave the first clue of many that are going to happen between Episode 900 and 995 leading up to the five episodes that lead in to 1000, because we'll be giving away $1,000 per episode leading into Episode 1000 for those later five, and there are going to be clues along the way that are going to help you enter into that drawing. The first clue is at the end of Episode 900. If you haven't listened to that already, do it. Thank you for listening in, I appreciate you. Take care.