Curating A Favorite List From Your Episodes That Helps Audience Pick Episodes

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. And Tracy, what are we gonna talk about today?

Well, you know, I was inspired by one of our podcasters who's both a client and I interviewed on the Binge Factor recently, Paul Higgins, and he has a favorites list. And so I thought I'd talk about the idea of a favorites list when you should have one. I thought maybe we could talk about the idea of maybe spinning it off into its own feed. Like, should you do those things? But really talking about this idea is how do we create a curated list, a special list that helps our audience, our members of our groups, navigate all the content we create? Because for you and I, it's a lot of content.

We do create a lot of content. And you know what? I can't think of a better time of year to kind of reflect on your episodes that you've been producing and publishing over the last year to maybe create a favorites list, even if you record enough episodes of what you've published this year. Although there may be some other kinds of favorites lists that you might consider as well.

Well, Paul did it, and this was really an interesting tactic. So Paul did it when he got to his hundredth episode. So he gets to his hundredth episode, and he gave a recap of his five favorites. So he also, you know, talked about his top episodes, which you can see based on the listenership. But sometimes those top episodes are not always the best episodes, because those top episodes can be, I'm going to say they can be skewed by the fact that you had a really great guest who shared it really well. But that wasn't maybe a really great one based on your topic or based on your audience. So we want to make sure that we're balancing that out by the ones that are the most useful, where people can get the most information. Maybe it's even a 101 list or a start here list that can be that as well. So I have a. I call it Masterclasses, which is my favorites video list. And I call it that. Because usually they're the longer videos where I'm teaching something, not just giving, you know, giving a brief topic or something like that. And definitely no interviews in there, but it's the ones like, where I do my interview tips, like on how to structure an interview. The. The ones that I do on how to create a content calendar, you know, different things like that. And I'm constantly sending them to people that I have strategy calls with. So I have a favorites technically playlist that's on YouTube. But there's no reason for you not to do something similar with your podcast, so creating it within your blog is easy. So what I did was I went through and found my 10 best interviews on the binge factor over the last year. And I picked them based on I think they have the most relevant content. I think you can learn the most from these podcast hosts. Plus they're pretty successful podcasters who've been doing it a while, so you can really trust what they say as well. And so I picked those and I put them into a favorites list, and all I did in the back end of my blog was tag them in a category called Favorites. So super simple. So then all I had to do was create a blog page with a feed that only pulled from the blogs that were related to the favorites list. So all of them show up on that one page. We made a link to it from the very front. You can see this@thebingefactor.com, you'll see the section for favorites. I created a scroll of them. And then you can also go through each one of them and just go into that list of favorites. So it helps you out to kind of get a visual for what that's working on. But you could turn it into a feed.

Yeah, you could turn it into its own podcast. Now, this is a technique that we've talked about at other times and is commonly used for some different purposes. Maybe you have a fundamental series of 10 episodes that, depending on your niche or your subject matter, are really sort of a 101 series, right. That, you know, if you have a very niche topic podcast in a certain field of practice or of study, and there are some basic fundamental ones that all your listeners would benefit from if they listen to them all, you can sort of separate them and make its own podcast. Or when you get over 300 episodes, and I know for some of you, it may be hard to imagine when you do get to that point, but it happened to us probably within two years because we were publishing so many episodes A week, I think five for the first couple years of our podcast. So we got there pretty quickly. And once you get to episode 301, then episode one is no longer available on all the podcasting apps. So we ended up creating a volume one of our first hundred episodes, and it eventually changes the first 200 episodes, and it keeps growing. It can only be 300. And then we had to create volume two. So there's another reason. You could create some additional shows that keep all your content alive in the podcast ecosystem, but I'm very much in favor of not just doing that, but highlighting certain episodes, collections of episodes, for a number of reasons. And one of them, I think it's brilliant to do it in a favorite. Tracy.

Yeah, you know, I think it gives you more flexibility for how you use it. You can drop an episode in and take it out. So when you're not using the feed, but you're inviting your listeners to come to the blog for your website, or come to your website and go to the favorites list, it's also a way to draw people in, because you know what? I want the short list. I'm busy right now. I love that someone has 150 episodes. I know that they've got rich content in there, but for me to take the time to dive through and figure out which ones I should start with, it can be overwhelming. And if I start from the beginning of a show, and this can be a, you know, a place where you lose listeners. When you start from the beginning of a show, when those episodes, you know, you were kind of green, you weren't as good at it, you know, maybe not all those episodes are relevant anymore. Maybe some of your guests are not even doing those businesses anymore because business has changed over the last year. You know, this can be a place where we need to be more highly curated with how we're guiding the audience and what we're offering them and start to, you know, not have them go from the beginning all the way through and have to fend for themselves. Right. We want to guide them in the process. We're curators. That's our job. And so let's curate a great list so you can have lists for different reasons. So I may have mentioned before on the show that we're going to be breaking the feed. You'd brand podcast into five feeds. It may have already happened by the time this episode airs, or it may not have. It just depends on when this is, when it's going to air. But we're breaking it into five different feeds with Five different topic basis. This main feed, your brand feed, is still going to exist, so it will still have all of the episodes in it. So if somebody subscribed to it, they're going to get it. But I'm creating a new feed in case Your goal is to increase everything you want to know about guesting, Guest tactics will have its own category or you're still launching your show. So launch tactics will be its own category. So this is kind of how we're. How we're breaking it out to make it easier also for someone new who comes in, because we're hitting up close to 200 episodes right now, and that's a lot to sift through. So when you get into that place where you're trying to sift through that, that's a really hard time. And while I'm doing that, I just want to mention this, Tom. While I'm doing that, I'm fixing my episodes too. I'm retitling them. If I thought the titles needed a refresh because maybe they need a new context, I am deleting out anyone I don't want to be associated with. So if the guest isn't there now, I don't take it off the blog. This is my trick. I leave the blog page up, but I remove them from the navigation and from all the categories. This if that guest ever were to has a link back to the page, it doesn't break, but I do remove it from the feed and I do remove it from the navigation within the site so somebody wouldn't stumble on it. You'd have to have the link only. So it's just my trick for trying to disassociate but not break your website in the process.

That sounds fantastic. I can also imagine if you and I know some of our listeners and certainly some of our customers have interview format podcasts where they're interviewing very high profile guests. Right. But not all your guests are probably that high profile. What I like about this idea of a favorites list is, you know, somebody new who comes to your show and you've been publishing for several years wants to know, all right, what are the best ones that I really should listen to? Who are those the best guests? And creating a favorites list of those, highlighting the ones that you can look and see which ones were more popular from a listening perspective, you know, because some episodes get listened to more than others, that may have a lot to do with the guest, but also maybe it's just who you want to feature. And another good reason to do this, to highlight Your. Your highest profile guests or, you know, the ones that you're most proud of is that when you are trying to pitch new people to be guests on your show, maybe people that are harder to get, you can give them a link to just that feed and maybe it's a page on your website, or maybe it's a link to the feed within a common podcast app like Apple or Spotify, and you can let them listen to the top four or six interviews you've ever done and it kind of becomes a bit of an ego play. Like, don't you want to be like these people and highlighted on my show?

Don't you want to make my favorites list?

Yeah, but then they don't have to. They're not just left to go and explore your show on their own and try to sift through hundreds of episodes, which ones are the best, you know, so there's so many good reasons, it seems that. And I'm sure for those of you that are just new and starting out and maybe you haven't recorded, you know, six or ten episodes total yet. Fair enough.

You could pick your one favorite, though.

Fair enough.

You could really highlight and say, this is my new, you know, my new favorite.

Right.

And so you could actually rotate that as a feature on your website.

But you can also plan ahead and think about as you're recording your first episodes, which ones do you want to sort of put in the parking lot for later and say, hey, this is one I want to note. And remember I'm going to come back to and add it to the favorites list when I have enough.

Right. And this is the other reason we tell you guys again and again that we don't recommend episode numbers being in your titles of your show because you might want to do something like this. And when you add the episode numbers in there, it's going to skip around. And it's very disconcerting to people. They get frustrated when the numbers don't match up to the numbers that itunes gives it on the side. And they get really frustrated when they're skip. You're skipping around numbers even though they know this is a special list. So I highly recommend, you know, if you're going to do this list, if you have numbers in them, to remove them at least from those episodes before you put them in a special list.

Well, and I also think, Tracy, what you mentioned about considering retitling them, you know, there's one perspective of a title that you put out there that you want to cast a very wide net for as many people as you think might be interested in this subject as possible. But if you are going to segregate an episode and put it in a favorites list in a special category, this is the 101 series. Or, you know, we have some people have travel podcasts. You know, you could have all the episodes that are for South America and all the episodes that are for Europe and things like that. That you may want to change the title when it's within a group to be more relevant within that favorites group. Right. And so the same title may not apply. You can retitle it.

And that's fine as long as you're creating a separated feed. Because remember, when you keep a single feed, you're messing with the titles that are in that. So that's a fine strategy if you're doing that or if it's okay with. And it's not okay with some of them. Some of you. But if it's okay if your blog title and your episode title and your feed are not the same thing. Exactly. So sometimes I'll start with a title that's a shorter title in my episode that's in the feed for what goes out to itunes or Apple and Spotify and all of those places. And my blog will have an extension on it. So it will be longer for my blog. It'll have the added piece to it. So that's a strategy you can utilize as well. So thinking the titling does matter. So one of the other things I want to mention, because we did do this when we created the special series for HP and on our 3D print podcast was we actually did take our favorite episodes, our favorite and most relevant to current times, to things that were going on in the 3D printing world at this moment. And so we took them and we actually updated them. We created a new introduction on them, and we did edit out a few things that were no longer. They were two times standard time set in time, so they weren't as evergreen as they could be. So we did make an edit of it, and we made that in its own special list. That's something you can do as well. So if you're creating this special list and a separate feed, this is certainly something where you can do a new intro on something, especially if It's. You've got 600. We had 600 episodes. So, you know, it's like, you know, these things were like from 2017. It was time to bring them up, you know, and move them through. So that's why you can do this update. And the great part is is that gets updated, tit goes and gets re indexed by Google and it comes back up to the forefront of your list of podcasts and episodes and Google ranking anyway. So it's a great way to utilize that.

All right, well, what else do we have? Favorites list.

Yeah. The only thing that I want to mention, the last thing I want to mention about a favorites list and all those things is that make whatever you do flexible because your favorites today could be different tomorrow. So create a flexible system for yourself for like with the cat category tags where I can take that, I can just delete that really easily. I don't have to move anything around. They just will stop showing up in that blog section. Or I can like the feed part. It's just it still exists in the main feed. I didn't get rid of it over there. If it's in the new feed, I just, I can just remove it from that. That feed it specifically. So curating a system for yourself of where you can be really flexible and this can be a dynamic list because you know your new favorites are yet to be recorded a lot of times. So you never know when that's gonna happen. So that's my only suggestion on the end of it is like, oh, I always try to think of something that's.

Flexible that makes a lot of sense. I agree with the flexibility. And I had another really good thought on that that has escaped me at the moment, which is that's cause you.

Were getting distracted by Facebook Live.

I did. I was keeping an eye on comments there. But yeah, no, the flexibility. Oh yes, I remember. So I actually have. And this is not meant to be a downer. Okay. But had a discussion with a customer just yesterday from recording this that illustrates the need for flexibility. And he has an episode that was published only two weeks ago, but it was recorded a couple of months ago. And that often happens with podcasters. And he asked us to make an adjustment to an episode, especially in their blog post and contact information for the guest, which is always there because his guest actually passed away. So quite unfortunate. Very sorry to hear that. But there's a reason you may want to adjust something and especially if that episode, let's say it was in a favorites list and you're talking about this person and you're talking about, you know, they can get their contact info on your website and maybe their own website or something like that. There's an episode that may need some editing and adjustment if you're going to continue to put it out there.

But another idea is if you Are one of our clients in the Paditai system is to drop it in a special ad. We did this one for some of our clients who were who had prerecorded episodes in the music industry, for example, and they were prerecorded before COVID started. So they were talking about concerts and lives and, you know, none of that was happening. So she went back specifically and put a special ad spot in. And the ad spot allowed her to say, you know, hey, this is happening right now. And this episode was prerecorded, but I don't want you to miss it, even though some of these things have changed at this moment in time. And I'll try to get you an update next year as we find out what's going on. And you could do an ad spot that's the same kind of idea, and you could do that in your favorites list. So you could create your favorites list and you could put a special ad that's in there that tells you, hey, just letting you know that this is my favorite, or just letting you know that this person that although this was in my favorites list and it is truly my favorite, this person passed away. And I am putting this episode in memory of him. So you can really put a personal touch on it and do it in that way without having to edit in case that's not in the box ballpark for you, because you're not having a producer or someone or you don't normally produce your episodes like that. So that's a possibility as well. So, you know, I want to always try to think again, of flexibility as we were pointing out that being able to drop these ads and drop these things in at the right places where you can say something like that really gives you a lot of opportunity to both make sure that they're highly relevant to the user today, and also so that you have the flexibility to correct things as things move forward. Companies, name changes and all those kinds of things happen. Right.

I have one person I communicate with a lot. His company's changed like five times in two years. It's crazy. So, yeah, a lot of those things happen. That makes a lot of sense. Tracy, I want to just be clear for those people listening who may not be familiar when you're referring, Tracy, to the ad system. Basically, this is a system on Poditized and it allows you to insert audio clips. They can be ads, they could be promotions. Or like Tracy suggested, it can just be, hey, a relevant update.

Special message.

Special message to put a little current context on an episode that might otherwise not make as much sense today if somebody's listening to it. So it doesn't have to be an ad per se, that's all.

So I think we've kind of roughed out the idea here for you to be thinking about something to think about at the start of a new year, at the start of whenever you pass 100 episodes or anything like that. These are great times for you to do that. And as always, it's great to be able to shift this, to be able to make your website easy to navigate and demonstrate that you're highly curating for your specific audience within that website.

All right, well, hey, hope you've enjoyed this episode. We have to think about what favorites list this one's going into. But hey, we'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazzard on Feed.

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