Getting New Listeners To Tune In: Leveraging Your Past Episodes To Drive Interest

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 feed Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Everyone, welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard with my co host Tracy, and today we're going to talk about how to boost your back episodes. Boost exposure using your back episodes. What else would you call it, Tracy?

Increasing listeners of those back episodes, right? I mean, that's what we really want. So, you know, the thing is, is that we're all about the new, right? We're all about the new guest we have on the new show, the new thing, right? We like to think about our new, but we forget that that back catalog is so valuable. Those back episodes are so useful to someone new who just found you. And so often that is an underserved market, right? We aren't really repurposing, reusing, aren't making mentions and throws to back episodes. We don't do that enough to be able to get more circulation to them. But what we do find is that our entire back catalog typically gets about 60% of our monthly listens every single month. So. Meaning that our most current episodes, so if you do one a week, that's four in that month. All the other episodes you have, but those four get about 60% of your listenership each month. That's huge. That's a huge amount of people that are just finding you, catching up on you, whatever that might be. But they're listening to these episodes that you consider old and not as important, but they just got to them. So what we want to do is talk about some ways that you can cross reference, that you can repromote, that you can do some things to boost even more back episode listenership.

So I'll kick it off with one. And I don't know if this is on your list, Tracy, because we've been so busy, we haven't had time to compare lists. I barely had time to make a list, I'll tell you. It's really more up here.

Yeah, I actually got a list.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got your list all right. But one of the ways is when you are planning a new episode, think about are there any episodes you did in the past that relate in any way to a portion of or even in its entirety, this episode you're about to record. And make sure you have either the title of that episode or if you do use episode numbers, the episode number and reference it when you're recording this new episode. And that, you know, you give people a reason to are listening to this one to go back and listen to an earlier one, because maybe they didn't binge through all your stuff.

So I have a thing that I do every time I'm recording a show because I very frequently refer to past podcast guests because my show is on the binge factor is interviewing successful podcasters. I reference their show, their name, something about them, and I remember the stories better than I remember the names. That's something that I'm not always really great at, like identifying their show name and remembering it exactly right. And I hate to get somebody's show name wrong. So here's what I do. I pull up my potatoes portal. I pull up my portal because it's the way I can see the list of shows really quickly. So that if I'm in it and I'm thinking through as someone's talking, I'm going to make a reference to Kim Seltzer's the Charisma Quotient. And I can't remember, and sometimes I mess it up what the Charisma Quotient name is like. I can't think of it. Then I can scroll through because I know about when I did it, I know when I mentioned to. And I can scroll through it really quickly and. And look at all of them. Another place is if you're using the Fuse Box archive player, which we provide for our clients. But if you've got that, which is a player that shows all the episodes, the latest one doesn't make you scroll from page to page. The old one used to, but this one allows you to kind of scroll just as if you would on a feed through your whole episodes. Another idea is just to have your phone and have your feed up and there, and you can scroll through it really quickly and identify the episode name. Don't use numbers, use the names. People remember the names much better than they'll remember the numbers.

We've had some people in the past who are really good at referencing older episodes actually use episode numbers. And I don't know how they remember the numbers, honestly, but that's been done a lot in the past. But episode numbers are really falling out of favor in general. And we've talked about why that is, and we don't have to Rehash it now, but definitely, I think the title or the guest name and something like that. And you're right, Tracy, good idea. On the poditized portal, we have a really good search function so you can search on the guest first name or last name or any keyword term that might be in the title if you don't remember roughly when it was. And you'll have that.

Or you just scroll really fast so you're not like. And that's what I do. So I'm not clicking or doing anything during the interview, but I can scroll really fast because I kind of remember, oh, it was in June of last year or when it was, and I can find it really quickly for myself and it'll stand out. So, like, I just recently did this, which is another one of my tips, is that I repurposed episodes in social media in an evergreen way, but I also bring them up relevance. So I have an article that I wrote in a couple interviews that I did that relate to Star wars. So every May 4, I bring those same articles back up there now some, after having done it for three years in a row now they are some of my most trafficked high value articles. So I do the same thing with episodes. And so my team recently said, okay, we're ready for the Mother's Day post. What do you want to post? And I said, well, I've got three really great shows that I really want to highlight. Let me bring up those for you. And Moms with Dreams is one of them. And then I thought, you know what, let's do the Not a Mama Life and get Raffi Wagner show. She was just a guest recently. So I brought a recent episode and said, let's provide the opposite for all those not moms out there. Let's have an episode for them as well. And so I'm highlighting all three of the top episodes that are shows about moms or being not a mom.

Wow. I like what you're doing with your episode references, Tracy. And you know, I have to say, May 4th, that's particularly geeky of you. You don't usually do that.

No, I'm pretty geeky.

I don't know. Not that much.

We're a Star wars family here. I have a Rey backpack.

You do?

I do. I have a Rebel Ray backpack. Yeah, it's a purse backpack. I do. Yeah, we're a little geeky here. And so. But, you know, tap into that and utilize that as a reason to reshare an old episode. Like, it doesn't matter. It's got a relevance right now because it's Mother's day, because it's May 4, because it's Father's Day, whatever that might be. Use it as an excuse to bring that back up. I'm not a big fan of holiday posts. Like, you know, I don't love those posts that say Happy Mother's Day. Like it's great. I look, I wish all the Mother's Day great, but I just want to like hide out and have a quiet Mother's Day. The last thing I want care about is what I'm posting on social media on that day for myself personally. So I feel like it's disingenuous in business to do it. But. But when I can make something useful and relevant and highlight a few great moms or a few not a mom like I would rather do that, that to me is a better service. And so that's how I like to use our social media evergreen posting. Trying to find relevant reasons to share them over time. And that's a great way to bring up and recycle the original posts you made. Like we don't make new posts. We might make a new caption to the post about Mother's Day that that's why we're sharing these new shows. But. But we don't make new graphics or anything like that. We're reusing what was done originally when that episode was posted. So we aren't making a lot more work for ourselves.

No. And the other great thing to do when you're doing this is not just refer to it in the audio, but definitely if you have a blog post for your episode and obviously if you're working with us, we do this for you. But for Those of you DIYers out there, you're not working with us yet. You got a blog post for your episode, you referenced an early episode in that blog post. You want to put a link in that post for the other hopefully blog post you have for that episode you referenced. And if you don't have a blog post, then at least reference the other episode and you could even embed the audio within the new post. So definitely want to reference.

Let me mention that while you've got one of those blog posts kind of ideas, this is another thing that tactic to use that's really great. So there are a lot of plugins for WordPress that utilize related posts that some of them use keywords as the way to do that. Some use tags, your choice categories tags. There's different types of plugins that utilize those different purposes so what you can do is instead of using. Because I'm not a big fan of Twitter, it's not something that we use a lot and it hasn't grown our business. So while we do tweet, I don't love the tweetables, and that's what a lot of people use within the blog post. And I was like, what are we going to replace tweetables with that would be useful otherwise, it's nice to highlight a quote and it looks pretty good, even if no one ever clicks it. But, you know, hey, I'll still use that. So I came up with some of these related posts, and what I found is sometimes the related posts pull up things that I forgot about. So I'll go to the blog post and I'll be like, it's showing me related posts. That I was like, that is related. I didn't realize that. That's a great episode to bring up next to this. And so depending on how you categorize yours, you, you can make it richer. If you use the keyword one, it's a little tighter. I have to say. If you can find one of the plugins that works with your theme and works with your blog post that does it based on keywords, it can be a little bit better. But if you're good about categorizing it, which I am, like, I categorize the different types of shows and the different types of reasons. If your categories are good to begin with, you can at least do that. And you can use that related post. You can use more than one. You can use the plugin more than once in a single page. So you could have a couple of related posts going through your very long tail blog post. And that's a, a really great way to tie that in. And you don't have to do any work because it's automatically choosing the other post to share. Now remember, it's sharing the blog post and not the audio file. They'd have to click through to that page to go to the audio file. But if they're already on your blog, they're already on a blog page, so it doesn't bother them.

Yeah, this makes so much sense, Tracy, because a lot of us have subjects we talk about where we have some bigger picture, more general, maybe introductory level discussions or episodes about certain topics. And then later on, we may take a deeper dive into a more tight niche within what was a bigger subject. And it's an opportunity for you to say, hey, we're going a little deep, more in depth. Here on this subject today. And if you're a new listener to the podcast, if you haven't heard our earlier discussion where we really cover the basics here, then definitely go back to this episode and listen to that one as well.

One of the things that I learned from working for Inc. Magazine and writing my column for so long was that they have a policy that within the first two paragraphs of any article, that you need to refer to three past articles. So they have the rule of three. So you must link back to another article within the first three. So in the early days when I didn't have a lot of articles, that was kind of difficult because it didn't always, you know, I was writing a broader genre, so I would have to refer out to somebody else's column or somebody else's set of articles. But I learned to do this really simply. And so for our purposes, when we were writing those things, I would have a list of all the past articles. And it was so hard because I would have to keep a spreadsheet. Now it's so easy with the podcast, with having your feet in one place, like you'd have everything you need, need all right there. And that's also why I choose to use the portal as a way to look at that. Because if I've got my feed that's within the portal, I also have all the links to all the episodes and everything that I would need in one place if I was doing it myself. Of course I'm not, but you know that it's all in one place. So that's why I. That rule of three is kind of what has led me to making a concerted effort to try to do that. So I try to do two related posts and one direct mention in every single episode that I do. So I'm always looking for an opportunity, whether it's at the end of my show, so a post commentary, or it's during the show where I'm mentioning another episode or another article or another podcast host that I want to make sure that I highlight in that.

All right, what other good tips you got?

What other good tips do I got? How about doing an update interview? So Tom and I found that doing reruns was an absolute bad user experience. And we got nasty emails and messages from our subscribers.

And we did this back. Gosh, I wanna say it's 2017. That was one time we did it because our daughter got married and we were really busy. We were overwhelmed, and we couldn't publish regularly. So we decided, hey, let's take some older episodes and run them again, really hoping it would work. But as I'm always fond of saying, hope is not a strategy.

And it really didn't. Cause we got some messages back that said, you know, because it comes up new in their feed and there was nothing new about it. They'd already heard about it. And so what was really the thing, eye opening and ear opening for us is that our listeners were listeners, like they didn't miss an episode. So that these were truly repeats. So if you think that you're bringing back your old volume one and you know, that's okay, it's not okay. So one of the things that we did, we did this both for Hewlett Packard. When we did this series on for 3D printing on our WTFF show, we did this where we basically taking some older episodes that had high Google ranking value as blog posts. So they were already ranking up on the first page, usually within the first five options on, you know, definitely within the first 10, but probably usually within the first three to five. So we wanted to make sure that the audio got new listenership to it again and we wanted to bring it back. So what Tom and I did was we recorded a brand new introduction to the show and then re aired an edited version. Because sometimes we would take a few things out or things that might not have been relevant anymore. Maybe some mentions to older episodes that weren't as relevant to how we were trying to refocus it. So we did one specifically on like 3D print careers. And it was really relevant because, you know, this was at the start of the pandemic and people were thinking about like, my resume, like, you know, should I level up my skillset? And there was a really great episode and an interview with someone how you can beef up your resume to be better at presenting yourself for a 3D print career. And that was this sort of new framing focus. So we presented it as, hey, for those of you longtime listeners, yes, this is a replay of it, but here's why we're doing it, which that makes.

A lot of sense. Now the difference is you're replaying it now so you're not going to send people to go back and listen to an older episode, but you're repurposing an old episode, making it more relevant today, putting some current context on it, and you get a longer piece of content without having to do as much new recording.

Right. And so by doing that new introduction on it, it's really important. Another time we did it where we couldn't do an interview with a new interview with the guest we had on. And it was because they were 3D printing resources and parts out in the world where there were national disasters. So they really needed to raise awareness to the episode we did with them because they needed more funds, and they came from a lot of private funds, but they were out in the field because there was a title, wasn't it?

The one of them was the Hurricane in Haiti or something, or the Earthquake in Haiti.

Right, the earthquake in Haiti had happened. But when they talked to us the first time, there wasn't a national disaster they were serving right at that moment. And so it was a longer interview. So what we were able to do was to get an update on what they were doing in Haiti and then be able to add that to the longer interview episode, which was an ability for us to go say, hey, donate to this worthwhile 3D print. Cause that is doing good around the world. But it gave a framework for why we were putting that on, and that was really important. Another idea is to bring back an old guest, do a new interview, and reference the old interview in it. So why not bring back somebody new and have them tell you what's going on in the world, what's happening, what's changed.

Another one I like to do after you've hit, like, a milestone of episodes, like 50 or 100 or 150 episodes, is to do a highlight episode with sort of some key sound bites from some old interviews or some old episodes. And it could be anything from really great quotes to maybe you have a podcast where at the end of an interview, you ask each guest the same question about something and getting their take on the one same question you ask everybody. Or some people ask three questions that are the same every time. You can do a highlight episode of those segments and not air the whole old interview. You do a highlight section, and that references. It could be 8, it could be 10, it could be 6 past episodes, and breathes a little new life into them and gets people to go back to them.

Right, right. And you know when you're doing that, if you're recording this yourself and you don't. And you're doing it yourself, and you don't have the capability of, like, adding in sound bites and doing all the pieces, that's a heavy editing job for you, and that's a little too much stress and work. You can just do a discussion of your favorite episodes. At minimum, do that, and you can physically quote and say, this is what that person said. Now go listen to that episode. They'll all be linked in the blog post for this episode at my website. Right. So you're giving them a place to still go, but you're talking about it with the passion of these are my favorite episodes, or these are some of the best of what we did in the last series. I have interviewed a few podcasters who do it every 25 episodes.

Wow.

Because that's a series. So it's like 24 episodes and then a compilation. That means one will always appear in the short version view of the feed of what shows up on Apple.

Hmm.

Now, most of the apps are now doing longer feeds, so you can really scroll through all the episodes without having to add more. But you know, 25 is kind of like if you quickly span through it, you'll hit 25 and you'll see these episode points. And for binge listeners finding your show for the first time, those episodes help catch them up. It can also say, I'm only going to listen to the catch up once. So you don't want to do full recaps. You want to tease them enough to make them want to go and listen to those episodes. But over time, you'll find if you do these compilation style episodes, you'll find that those episodes that you've mentioned on the shows are like the first five episodes of your show. They will be the most trafficked and the most listened to over time. So you may want to really rotate your catalog and make sure that you're rotating enough to be able to hit enough episodes. And that's why I think these podcasters are choosing to do it every 25 so that they don't have to reference a ton of episodes each time, but they can pick the five best from each back catalog and they're really still getting enough listenership on their overall episodes. If you only do it every hundred, you really can't mention more than 10 episodes total without overwhelming your listener. So now we used to do this, Tom, when we did our 3D print show, or we would do, we would kind of do a best of like, we would talk about our favorite episodes and you can do something like that or you know, we would do a best of catalog and kind of review that and you would have your top five and I would have my top five. And that would work really well for us in terms of a, you know, an interchange between the two of us. And then we have a debate and discussion is like, oh, that's so interesting on why you liked that one best. And it didn't make my list at all. And we would compare notes to make sure we weren't overlapping in our choice. Or if we did, we'd do that, save that one for the very end and say this is the only one that made both our lists and we would highlight that episode.

The other great thing about doing that, especially if you're doing a lot of interview episodes and you're highlighting like your top five interviews you've done in your guests, I mean, the benefit of doing that is that you now have one episode that you can reach out to all those top guests that you highlighted again and say, hey, I made a new episode highlighting my favorite episodes of the last year or whatever time period it is, and you made the list and then you can get them to share that again. And that helps boost, you know, your podcast, get you more exposure, raise awareness for your show. The downside is you have some guests who won't be highlighted and then they may not be too thrilled, but they.

Might get jealous and, you know, want to and reach out to you for a new interview. So there you go. You might create this competition going in there, making sure that you do send the email out to the entire to everyone who's mentioned just because they weren't a guest on the show, making sure that you do send your guest notification, that's what we call it in our system here at Potatoes. But making sure that everyone's email address is included and they actually all know that they're, you know, they're mentioned in that episode is a great way for you to kind of also circulate and get them connected to each other as well and cross sharing between each other. So tagging, emailing and doing all of those things. It's really important if you're going to do one of these types of episodes and getting the search. Did you have anything else on your list?

Time for the back episodes. You know, I guess I have a tip, which, yes, is related. We encounter a lot of podcasters who come to us looking for support and they're already podcasting. They've already got 50, 100, 150 or 200 episodes or more done, but they have not published any blog posts for them. And actually one of the best opportunities to get the best, best return on the time you've already invested in your podcast. Creating a real long form blog post, what we call verbal SEO for those past episodes can accelerate your keyword ranking and traffic to your website, really help raise awareness for your show. But in this sense, what I'm about to say is it's also an opportunity for you. Just like we were talking about highlighting the best of and some of these guests you're highlighting again and getting them to share it. Well, you already aired the podcast. You had a guest, you provided them a link to your audio and ask them to share it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't once you now have a blog post maybe with a unique graphic at the top for that episode and you do this for your past episodes, reach out to that guest. And when you say, hey, I've got this new blog post that features the episode you were in and I've got this new graphic, here are some links to it. You may want to share that with, you know, your followers and you know you have a new piece of media for them to share. It's something new for them to talk about and it highlights them so you can get them to reshare your show. Even if you haven't re aired the show. It's not a highlight show. You've just created more material for that episode. And really especially because they're your guests. If you gear that material so it really helps show the guest off in a good way, in a flattering way, they'll probably share it. So that's a related tip, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And don't underestimate also if you've never done video before, of doing audiograms and even full length ones so that you add it to a YouTube channel and that adding listenership and adding views and adding traffic back to your website for all of that. So that can be repurposing in different media types is extremely valuable for you.

And along with audiograms, if you're actually recording video and publishing real video in any way. Or maybe you have the zoom video from recording an episode or a streamyard video and you have not published that video in its entirety on YouTube. You can take little pieces, sound bites and make a video mean. You know, we do that as well with for some of our shows and video memes as well as audiograms help get a lot of traction.

I take it one step further too. I also repurpose my episodes into articles. So I write articles from the binge factor and I turn them into articles in Authority magazine. And at the bottom I'm not able to add the audio file, but I'm able to add the video. So I utilize the video there as a way for people to check out the episode. So I write the short article and check out the full interview here. I get a lot of traction from doing that and repurposing that it's moving into a different format. And so if that's a really useful way for us to do that as well. So, you know, if you're not a writer, this may not be ideal for you, but if you are, then it's a great way to add that on. You can also do mention articles. I do sometimes some mentions in buzzfeed, whether you end up with like the highlights from that single question you ask. I asked five things, and I'll sometimes pull together different mentions of who said, who said what, on how to increase listeners or get great guests. And I'll bring out quotes and things referencing the original episode. So that's also a great way, if you have any way to have an outreach, you have any reach in terms of any other publications, newsletters, or other things, please do that and make sure that you do do that. Add your episode back into those newsletters, into those articles, into other places, because it's a great way for you to get traction to that single episode of or that larger group of people that you're mentioning over there. The last thing I have, Tom, was a great mention, and I was just on his show today, so it's a really good time. Thrive Loud with Lou diamond, one of the most recent episodes I've done on the Binge Factor just came out recently, but I was on his show. They won't air for a while, but I was on his LinkedIn live today. And so we did a live stream out to all the different places, and we had a lot of fun with that. But doing an update interview or a second interview or a short interview, some kind of thing out. And so what Lou does that's really great is Lou brings together a grouping of a panel of a couple of different people from his interviews, because he does a lot of different shows, and so he does a lot of different interviews. He has a lot of content. So he might bring three people together and pull together a clubhouse room. Obviously now you could do a Facebook room, because we just discovered that today.

And everybody's trying to jump on the clubhouse bandwagon. Every different platform is trying to make their own.

So you could create a panel discussion with three of your guests into a room that then sends out to those three episodes. So if you want to group your guests together into a panel on health and wellness or a panel on a specific aspect of business that you want to talk about, then now you can group your podcast episodes by gathering the guests together on episodes. And I think that's a great strategy so you can create a clubhouse room to it. You could do a single Facebook Live bringing them back, just do a teaser, that kind of thing out to try to help to circulate back to those older episodes, that back catalog. And that's what we're talking about boosting today. So that's a great way to do it. You're utilizing a new media type, something new that you're trying to grow like a clubhouse room. And you're being able to also, though, get traction back to your existing network of people, all those guests that you've interviewed, and utilizing that and adding value to all of them in that process, but also really getting a boost in listenership to all of your back episodes, which is really the important part of what we're talking about today.

It sure is.

That's right.

Awesome.

So lots of ideas here, lots of different places at which you could utilize back episodes. You could repurpose them, you can mention them, lots of different places to squeeze them in. But I think the biggest message that I just want to close with today is that those back episodes aren't old. I mean, don't get me wrong, sometimes some are outdated and we are going to stop mentioning it. But then most of your catalog is great content that you should be using again and again, and it's not old to someone who just found you. So if they're just finding you, but they're having trouble navigating because now you have so much content, you have hundreds of episodes. It's our job to make sure that we're circulating through that, providing them features, providing them ideas, providing them ways to get to a best of, to get to some of these really great, relevant episodes to me, your new listener.

I love it, Tracy. All right, let's leave it there. I hope you found this valuable and useful. I'll tell you, it's the most underutilized aspect of podcasts that have been out there for a while. Like you said, they're new to whoever's listening to them now, so check it out and take advantage of it. All right, so that'll wrap it for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. It's been Tom and Tracy Hazard on feed your brand.

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