How To Reclaim The Spotlight: Ignite A powerful Return From A Podcast Break

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we're going to talk about how to reclaim the spotlight ignite a powerful return from a podcast summer break. I also want to say this could apply to another kind of a break. It could be a seasonal break, or for whatever reason, you're on a hiatus that's longer than a summer break and you're going to come back. So this would apply to all those situations.

Anytime you run seasonal shows, too. Like, you run a season of a show and you have a break in between your seasons. No matter when the season is, it doesn't have to be summer.

Right, Right. And I have to tell you, Tracy, this one I have trouble relating to. I mean, we do have a lot of good tips to provide people, and we're going to talk about that, but take a break.

Yeah, I mean, we were just commenting about this. Yeah, I was like, I don't understand the break because the content production machine, the algorithms that are everything, social media, everything, podcast, everything, YouTube, those machines run 24, 7, 52 weeks a year. They don't care about your summer break. They don't care about the weather. They don't care how beautiful it is. I mean, I remember when we used to live in Michigan and it would be like all of a sudden the sun would come out and the weather would be good and there would no more snow on the ground. And, like, people would just disappear. And I'd be like, where'd everybody in the office go? And I was like, I didn't understand it because it's never been in my vocabulary that you were allowed to take breaks even when it was summer break. And so I don't understand that. But definitely the machines do not. And that's what we have to remember. We're playing in a machine world.

That's true. I mean, regardless. And I know Americans get accused of not taking enough time off compared to other countries around the world, especially European countries, things like that, taking holiday, if not vacation. And I think a lot of Americans don't take as much of a break, and I'm guilty of that. I mean, I love what I do, and I work too much at it. And maybe you and I are a little unusual for the typical American, but still, you are right that regardless of what your personal goals are and habits are for taking vacations, taking a summer break, whatever it is you do in the world of podcasting and content creation, and this is probably going to be the big message that you and I recommend here in this episode, but we're going to come back to what you do after you come back from a break. So we're going to pay off on that. Hang on there, folks. But the big overall messages don't take a break. I mean, that's our real recommendation. You can take a break, but figure out a way to show up for your listeners on a consistent basis even though you're taking a break. Wouldn't you agree with that, Tracy? Yeah.

I mean, look, we've talked about all different ways we have. I don't know, I think we have probably four or five episodes about not doing something seasonally at least, doing something minimum, once a month. Like, we have all these things. And we're going to talk about the sort of tactical details of what this means. But the reality is, if you take a physical break in your show and you do not publish on a weekly basis, you are opening the door to diminishing returns on the effort that you've already put into your show. You're opening the door to someone new to come in and take your place. And you. You're not feeding the bot at the rate at which it wants, and you lose the authority with it. So that means that your search engine that serves you up, which is a bot, it's an algorithm, right? It decides you're not as credible as the person who showed up week after week. Even though your information might be better, it doesn't care. It cares that you showed up week over week over week. So if you notice, Tom and I don't ever take a break here, even if we show up, and we usually do this in the Christmas holiday between Christmas and New Year's, we show up for like, 10 minutes, and we say hi to everybody, Happy New Year, and we just do a little, like, live stream. But we show up because we do not want the algorithm to have a break on us, and we've at various times prerecorded something and streamed it when it was really physically impossible for us to be here, because we want to make sure that there's not a missing link there's no gap in our consistency because that's what people reward. So I don't know about you, Tom, but I grew up with this mentality like it was drilled into me by my grandmother and my mom and is that you pick up your socks every day because the effort it takes to clean your room at the end of a month is just too much. And that's this kind of same model. If you keep your content production at a simpler, easy to attain level, even if you have to make slight adjustments to it, keep it happening, then you don't have to dive back in and do a tremendous amount of work. And that's what we're going to tell you right now as we start to describe what it's like to come back from a break. The amount of work you have to do to come back from a break is almost as much as starting your show.

I agreed. It takes a big effort. You're going to need to make a, a big deal of it. A big PR splash, social media awareness. It's going to take a big effort. And you're going to have to do that because the algorithms and all the listening apps are working against you. And especially with Apple podcasts and how they change things, it's coming up pretty soon on a year ago, one or two more months here, but it's coming up soon on the iOS 17 changes, where if you haven't published anything in a while, when you come back, people haven't listened to your podcast within a certain recent period of time, Apple's not going to serve it up to them and say, hey, you have another one. Or people are going to have to, even if they get a notification, they're going to have to actually actively check that. Yep, they want to keep getting this sent to you. And what's the problem with that, Tracy? When your show's been out of their mind for a while and then there's a notification, hey, this one's back.

It's not always like, look, the ego in you. As the podcast host says, oh, of course they're going to be so excited I'm back. Like, this is a notification. This is a good thing. But the reality is, is that what most listeners say in the back of their mind was, did I even miss them? If I didn't miss them, then I'm going to click unsubscribe because I need to cut things out of my life. I need to make my life easier. I didn't miss it. It couldn't have been valuable. That's what goes through Their mind when they make a decision. And decision means to cut away. And typically they decide to cut something out. Right? Like, this is, we all want to simplify our lives. We clean things up. It's like you pull something out of your closet and do, I love this? Right? Like, and if not, you toss it. Right? That's what happens in this process is now the invitation is to unsubscribe. It's not an invitation to re engage, it's an invitation to unsubscribe.

Apple would say it's an invitation to re engage and confirm that you, the listener, want to keep getting the podcast. But what it ends up being is a, oh, I have to click to keep getting it. Do I really want to get this one? And you're giving that listener an opportunity to think about it. And the more they think about it, the more likely it is that a lot of them are going to say, ah, it's all right, I don't need it.

And the worst part about this, Tom, is that they haven't listened to you come back before they make that choice. It's not like they got an episode. And then Apple says, yeah, do you want to keep listening? Like, they didn't give you anything. They gave you the choice before you even heard. And so that's kind of the issue of why it's an unsubscribe decision, not a re engagement decision is it's really in that place because you haven't received anything to make you decide it's worth engaging in again. The other side of this part is just to be thinking about this from the listener's perspective is also the listener saying, it's like, I was working my butt off all summer and you weren't coaching me. Oh, my gosh, I gave up and I found somebody else already. So they already may have replaced you. That's a big deal, too.

It is a big deal. And where I tend to see this in the analytics, just for our listeners to understand this, where I see the biggest disparity of followers to plays I see on the Spotify app. Now, that's the only reason I see it more there is, because Spotify actually, well, at Potter Ties. Anyway, I'll speak for us. I think there are other platforms that have Spotify stats also. But at Potatoes, we have a license and an integration with Spotify, and we provide not only your plays but or as they call them, streams in the world of Spotify. But they're still recorded, just like your episode downloads in other apps. They give us those. And Then they give us the number of people following the show. And when you look at the number of people following a show in Spotify, it's always a lot more people than the number of Spotify plays in it for a given episode or even for all the episodes over a period of a month. I mean, we have shows that have anywhere. I was just looking at some today that have anywhere between 6, 700 plus Spotify followers up to. I've seen over 7 to 10,000 Spotify followers on podcast shows. But when you look at the total plays coming from Spotify, it is always far, far less. So that tells me that there are more people following than actually listening.

More people subscribing on other platforms than are actually listening to those episodes. So that subscription part, the part where I hit subscribe, is somewhat passive because I haven't chosen to listen yet. It might sometimes it's like a favoriting placeholder. I do it all the time. I'll subscribe to something because I don't want to lose it in my list and I'll come back to it and then I listen to something and then I'll make a decision about whether or not I'm going to stay subscribed to it. That's a very. A common practice. So thinking about that is that it just also raises the awareness that I never listened to this thing, so it couldn't be that important and valuable to me. Unsubscribe, right? So we have to be really careful with this model of it. And that's one of the reasons why we do not recommend breaks. Right? Because you now put this at the forefront of it. But I think statistically, Tom, and correct me if I'm wrong, but statistically, in our platform over the years that we've been doing this, and we've been doing this for a decade, whenever you come back from a break, even before this algorithm shifted and before this process happened at Apple, it's you do not get back the listener pace that you had when you ended your season or when you ended and then took your break. We always see slow growth back up to getting to the listener level you had prior. And it can sometimes take the entire next season. Because I've seen people where they did a 20 episode season take a break and then come back and do another 20 episode season. And they don't even get back to where they left off the prior season till the end of the season. So you are constantly battling that traction lost and the residual value that you created because you're not staying consistent I.

Would agree with that statement, Tracy. That's the trend we usually see, is that it doesn't. And it used to. It used to be way back before Apple changed things, people subscribed, they rarely unsubscribed. And when you published a new episode, all those subscribers would get your episode downloaded to their Device within usually 12 hours or so from when you publish it. And that was a real boost. Now, the flip side of that is that, yeah, you'd get all those downloads pretty quickly, but not everybody was necessarily listening to it. And that's what Apple has changed to try to have the number of downloads more accurately reflect the number of real listeners. So that's not a bad thing either in the big picture. But the point is, yeah, it's harder to get people's attention and get them to listen again when you come back after a long break. Break.

And here's the real problem, because we used to talk about this, Tom, at the beginning of when we started this company, right? The speeches I used to give were about what I called the marketing roller coaster. And so that's part of the real big issue with taking a break. It's not just you taking a publication break. You're typically also taking a promotionary break. You are not promoting your show. And because you're not promoting your show, you're not getting new listeners, you're not getting listeners to engage with the content. You already. So subscribers you already have aren't saying, oh, I missed that episode. I better go back and catch that up. Like, because you're not doing promotion and marketing work, and you're not publishing and producing and doing all of those things that you should do, you're having a double whammy, right? You're hurting yourselves on both sides. And so we used to call it the marketing roller coaster is like. It's like you'd work really hard to launch your show, and you'd come up to the top of the marketing roller coaster to get, like, to the peak. And it's like, you super exciting and all that fun stuff, and you're at the peak of it, and then you say, okay, I've got too many clients, I've got too many episodes. I gotta take a break. I need some time. I have too much work, right? And then you go crashing back down, and it actually goes really quickly and you hit the rock bottom of that dip and you gotta start all over again. And it's just as much work to get back up to the top again. And so you're putting yourself in that constant cycle instead of being on a constant incline upwards and building up over time and building up that platform and that residual value again and week after week after week. And so that's what we're trying to get you to avoid here because it is hard work. But let's pay off and get them with some ideas, Tom, about how to come back from a break if it's happened. And we did it. Our daughter got married in 2017. Like losing my dates now in 2017. And we took a break on our 3D print podcast and we took a longer one than we expected. But we did pay off when we came back because we gave him a really cool 3D printed item that we used in the wedding. So, like, you need something to pay off your audience and get them to come back when they come.

Yeah, you gotta give them some kind of a reward. And yes, hopefully you just being back and your content is enough that people who really enjoyed it before are gonna be thrilled you're back. And that's great. I mean, a lot of us that like watching certain shows or whether it's certain late night TV shows or other things, you know, when they take a break in the summer or a two week break, it's like, oh, I really, I wish they would show up more for us. Right. And it's sort of the same thing with podcasting.

Right? Right. It is sort of the same thing. But the important part is, you know what, they have a marketing budget. They have a marketing budget to say, hey, we're back new. We just dropped eight new episodes.

Right.

Like Dom and I, what did we just binge this week in the Umbrella Academy final season. Right. And they told you they were coming back and they told you they dropped all those episodes. If you didn't get that message and you're just expecting the layer to do the work for you. We just told you that it's not going to. It might have the opposite effect.

So the point is you have to put extra effort. Now, one thing I do want to add, Tracy, that I think is a really good indicator in general of steady constant show growth. I do find, even though it's not the dominant listening app, but those Spotify followers, if you have those stats in your platform, and if you don't, I suggest you move to a platform that does. But if you see that constant graph going from lower left to upper right every month, it doesn't have to be a ton of people, but you see it constantly going up, that's a real measure of success of raising awareness. And of interest in your show that that slow and steady and constant showing up for them is working. So anyway, just one indicator, but yeah, let's talk about what now. Okay. Those of you that are now been listening to this and are like, oh, crap, I took a break. And I know there's some of you out there. Okay. Okay.

And even if you didn't take a break, but let's say you stopped your show for some reason and you want to restart it, you're feeling like the time is right. And we're getting a lot of people who are coming back from a year of not doing a show and coming back. Right now that happens every fall. I'm just going to say that it kind of happens every fall. Like they started get re engaged and like that was what I was missing over the last year. I did that last year and it was actually valuable. And now I see that and they come back. So if you're coming back from any kind of break of extended of more than 30 days, that's what I want you to realize. Any break that's more than 30 days, if it's less than 30 days, you are not having a problem with the apps. You're not going to have that hard pull up. Okay. But if you come from a break that long, then you have to do some of these re engagement ideas.

So what have you got, Tom? What are some of the ideas on your list?

Well, I do think that it's helpful to, and I don't always say this for regular podcasting, I don't agree with letting people know what's going to be coming soon because podcast listeners really want immediate satisfaction. And if you tell them you're back, you better be there. You better be somewhere they can already be back. Right. In general, on a regular basis. Now, when you've been gone for a while, I do think it can help to say have some engagement. Hey, I'm coming back with my podcast on this date. And but I think that you have to make it clear that there is some other reward for coming back and listening. There's going to be something special in that episode. Yeah. So that you build some anticipation and make people actually want to come back. Because otherwise, I mean, podcast listeners are not generally gonna put some notice on their calendar for this date when you're gonna be back and to make sure to go find it and listen. I mean, it's just not the normal behavior. Right.

But if they were following you on social and they see this post out there that says we're coming back and we'll be back in one week when we publish our new episodes and we start republishing our new episodes. And we've got a really great tip for you to that we learned over our break, or like we did. We've got this really cool project that we did while we were on break, and we're going to share that with you. How we did it, what the reaction to it is, and you don't want to miss it. So when you share it in that way, it makes them want to listen to it. So now when the Apple app, if that's what they're using, pops up this like, hey, they're back. They're going to go, oh, yeah, I got to click that because I want to see what it is. And so there's no hesitation to. To unsubscribing. They already want to get back in.

That's right. You were already on their mind because you reached out another way. Now, there are some things you can do within the podcasting ecosystem that again, I don't always recommend. I see some people doing it for every episode where they almost have an episode trailer, like coming up next on the next episode in a few days or in a week. And I don't always think that works well for most podcasts, but in this case, if you just you have one, you're going to be coming back and you could do a little teaser that you publish as a podcast. There may be a point to that. But other means of when you have an email list or social media following or however it is that you have engaged with your audience in the past to re engage there, let them know you're coming. And yeah, let's talk about some different kinds of rewards, I think, Tracy, because it could be, oh my gosh, I have to tell you about the story which caused me to take a break for so long and why I'm back now. I mean, there could be. It's as simple as that, right? Is that the really good story, which is what podcast listeners I think get hooked on a lot of the time, is a really good story. But there could also be a different kind of reward, which is you're going to invite them to help to steer the future direction of the podcast. And you want to take a poll and invite people to answer a couple of quick questions about what they're looking for going forward out of your show. I mean, there are many things you could do, but you want to do something that's going to engage people and have them hopefully take some action. That engage with you.

I just want to be really careful here, Tom, though. This is not an opportunity for you to just immediately hit them with something that they have to enroll in, subscribe to pay for. It is not a sales. You owe them for missing out, for leaving them for months or however long you delete them. Right. You owe them something to engage their trust back again, to rebuild that trust. So if you go in there with some kind of call to action, you're going to sign up for my list, I'm going to give you this stuff. No, you got to make this so simple, so easy, so free. And you need to make that give you giving first here.

I agree. I was trying to do that.

Yeah.

I want to be. I wasn't trying to suggest you sell something or even get somebody to sign up for a list. I was thinking of a call to action, maybe to answer a yes or no question or two, three radio buttons. This, this or this. What have you missed most from my show? And or I am looking at providing you this type of content going forward. And maybe you really do have a dilemma where you're considering do I go more this way or that way? And to ask for your audience's buy in, it's a little bit like asking permission to come back into their lives, really. A bit. But not so literally.

Yeah. I think the better way to go and a more effective way over time is for you to say, I learned something while I was on my break and you're going to want to hear about it. I think that that's probably that if you don't come back from that period with a reflection on the way that you should take things, then did you really take advantage of that break? The rest of us are in the midst of all the stuff going on in our lives and we haven't taken time to reflect. You did what you gained from that. That's something that I could really buy into and want to listen to and value. And so I think that one may be a little bit better strategy for most people too, especially if you've taken a long break. It's like they don't want to hear what you're up to. Like, let's not be clear, let's be clear about this. You took a break and they didn't get one. Like, so that's not a great strategy to be like, look what you missed out on. Like, that's not going to work. You've got to have a payout for them. Your listeners need a payout from you. You owe them Something for them to come back.

And I'll tell you this, even if you're gonna do this anyway, you're gonna come back and you're gonna tell this story, okay? You're not really gonna not tell the story if more than half the people come back and say, no, I'm not interested in hearing the story. But even if you just ask, like in social media, maybe you go live on video, kind of like we are right now, and say, hey, everybody, I've been gone for a while and you know what? It's been quite a trying experience. The reason why I haven't been podcasting regularly and I wanted to talk to you all and see if it would be all right with you if I come back and share my story as to why I've been on hiatus before I resume with maybe my normal type of episode, you ask permission and it's a rhetorical ask, right?

Because they can't answer back on the podcast.

They can't answer, but in their minds you'll say, oh, sure. I mean, they'll even you ask, they'll answer in their heads.

But keep in mind they don't want to see a slideshow of your entire vacation. Right? This is like, right? It has to be have a valuable lesson. A valuable. Has to be related. I was like, I went on vacation and here's the slides of everything I did and all the food I ate. And like, nobody cares about that. They care about you jumping back in and supporting them if they're going to stay a part of it. And this is specifically for your business. Podcasters out there, obviously, like, the ones who are celebrities, they can go and talk about all the places they visited. And that's a totally different model, that influencer, celebrity model of podcasting. We're talking about the ones who are truly like, serving their audience right? And they are in it for themselves. You want them to devote their time back to listening to you, then you've got to give them something worth listening to for them. So those are some of the things that I'm going to just say, like, we've had so many episodes on this over the years about seasonal breaks and what to do and how not to take a seasonal break. Like, so those are some of the things. So there are three things that I just want to remind you of that we recommend doing. One is posting at least one episode every three weeks, even if it's like a ten minute check in. Like, just check it, do a little live stream, publish it. So if you're using production services and just publish this yourself. It doesn't have to be fancy.

You can.

It doesn't have to follow models. It doesn't even need intro outros. You just check in and say, hey, listeners, I have been taking a much needed break. Here's where I am with things. And I'm thinking of you. You do that once every three weeks. You keep your algorithm shifting and you make sure you don't go more than 30 days. So you're keeping on that failure to push out, that happens. That's not gonna happen. So do that. The second thing that we recommend doing is do something promotional during that time period. Whether it is just schedule out your entire social media so that old episodes are being circulated in there. And reminding people of what you're missing is like of what they're missing and things that could be valuable to them that week. So making sure that you're sharing your episodes regularly and you didn't just take an entire marketing hiatus for your show completely. Just stop talking about it because nothing's new, right? Talk about the old stuff. I can't even tell you. 60% of our listeners on average are listening to older episodes. So if you put them into circulation and remind them that you could increase that all the way up and you could keep your listener base on some shows, you could keep your listener base all summer long while you're on break. And then the third thing that I is that there are promotional tools we use promo, cast and other things that just work for us and just are sharing our episodes and growing our audience because new subscribers are listening and they don't fall into the algorithm. So if you're doing something where you're getting new listeners every single week, getting new clicks, and they're joining it, and then they're listening to all your episodes and they're binging on it, they have time to binge because you're not publishing new stuff. So for those people, make sure you're really clear that you're on a hiatus, but that there are new episodes coming soon. So, you know when you go into Netflix and it says up the top new season dropping on this date, go ahead and change your description and add that right into the top. Small break. Listen to these episodes and I'll be back on this date.

You know, Tracy, that's a very good idea, especially what it's going to do, because here's the thing. If your podcast listing is properly optimized and I'm going to put a very big pair of air quotes around that, if. Okay, holy mackerel.

Because there's a lot of you out.

There who are not, oh, every single day. And some of you are probably tired of hearing me say this, but, yeah, the biggest rookie error in podcasting is having a show description that's just a couple sentences long when it's the very most important part of your listing to get people to find your show. But all right, without going off on that for a long tangent, if your podcast listing is optimized, the point is new people are finding your show every day while you're on this hiatus. So if you set that expectation for when you're coming back, people who find it might subscribe to your show while you're on hiatus because you've told them when you're coming back. Otherwise, it just looks like you've POD faded you. You're dead, you're never coming back. So you missed that opportunity to capture them. Missed opportunity. So that. This is more of a. I mean, it's. I know it's not one of your three tips, Tracy, for what to do when coming back, because really, this is more of a tip. If you're already on hiatus or you know you're going on hiatus, set the intention, set the vision, set the expectation for when you're coming back. Don't leave people hanging. If you really don't know, I would recommend you actually choose a date and hold yourself accountable for coming back. Unless you're really sure you're done and then stick a bullet in your show and be done, I guess.

Well, no, that's the problem with POD fading. Like, all of you out there, it's like they don't tell people they're done. So if you did end up podfating, do a final episode. Just do it.

Yeah, yeah. Put. Put. Tie it up with a little bow at the end and make it clear. I mean, there's still maybe value, depending on your show and the subject matter for people to listen. And that's why a lot of POD faded shows are still available, and people are leaving them out there on all the apps because people are listening. And we see that happen all the time, too. But set that expectation.

So the three things that get you to kind of not lose the momentum right now, you've lost the momentum. So what are you going to do when you come back? And let's really just kind of dial into some of those things. So Tom gave you some ideas about things that you could do on the episode itself. And so we really want to have a good payout on the episode itself. You want to have a preview week, think of it like that, as like a teaser, like lead up, an anticipation that you're creating again, just like you did when you started your podcast. And then the third thing that you really want to do is devote yourself to heavy promotion in the first month when you're back, because the faster you hit the ground running, not only promoting the new episodes, but cross promoting guests and other things to re engage that guest community, if you had them to help to re engage the sort of people mentioning your show and reminding them of your show and all of those shares and comments and the things that were going, make sure you've got that hefty. So if you really only post on social media once a day, go to three times a day for 30 days, like, you're going to have to triple your efforts to make sure that you are getting yourself back as quickly as possible to where you left off. And I'm gonna tell you, it takes at least three times the amount of effort to come back from a break than it did to get to where you left off.

Always harder to come back than it is to maintain and keep showing up on a regular basis. And even though we took hiatus, like you said, Tracy, those years ago, I wished we could have kept recording enough episodes that we could have kept showing up regularly. We would have been better off because it was a hard. It was hard to come back from that.

And then this is the kind of the major thing, if you're doing business, podcasting, if you are a coach, if you are a consultant, if you are providing mentorship of any kind, any one of those kinds of things, where you're in that position where you're helping people grow, it's on their pace, not on yours. And so when you take a break, you say, I'm more important than you. And when you do that, that means that somebody else who says you're more important than me has an opportunity to slip in there and take over your client base, to take over your coaching base, to take over that position of showing up for them. Because most of what we do in this world is how we show up in this world. It has not as much to do, unfortunately, as the quality of what we're delivering. And so making sure that you've got something that is still showing up and serving them, that's going to be the critical place. So reminding them that you're coming back, that you've got something more valuable for them, is critically important. So getting that across to make sure that you come back with power to Reclaim your place. Right. Because that's what this episode was all about was how do you reclaim that position? Because you have to claim it again. You have to prove that you were worth that.

Great point, Tracy.

Yep. The one final thing I want to say to everyone is remember that the marketplace changed while you were gone. You may not have even been paying attention to it while you were going, but it happens. Every summer, lots of podcasts leave and they don't come back. And every fall, lots more new ones start up. Same thing. At the beginning and end of each year, the marketplace has shifted. And if you are not going out there and taking a look at who came in while you were gone, you don't know what you're competing against. You don't know what your new messages have. This is a great opportunity for you to show how much more valuable your back catalog is, how much more valuable what you have to offer is because you've been doing this longer. And now that you're back and you're re engaged and you've got energy again because you took a break, how much more valuable that is going to be for that audience than that new guy who just slipped in there. Right. But you got to know who they are. So take the time to also do a little bit of research.

And to add to that, Tracy, it also might be a time not in any way to encourage anyone to slow down in the process of returning, but depending on what other people have showed up on the scene, what other shows are out there, and how does your show look compared to theirs, Your show artwork, how does it. Does it pop off the page compared to those other tight competitors there?

And we've always done that. We always, like, at some point we'll take a little refresh, and it's like, we don't make it complicated. We don't go through a rebrand. We just change the color of the COVID art. Like, that's what we did with the 3D print. It's essentially the same all the time. There's just slight little shifts of color over various periods of time and even feed your brand.

If you look over the history, there's been at least three or four different iterations of the COVID art. The name of the show didn't change. The podcast description might have been enhanced.

Oh, no, I did them every time.

Every time. Yeah. But the color. The color gets people's attention. And especially if we had our show, the colors primarily were black and green and white at one point. Then a competitor came on the scene with a cover art. That was black and green and white and was like, okay, time to.

And practically a name knockoff, too.

Right. But we changed it up and we went more into the white and blue and black color range and changed up the logo at the same time. I mean, the. Just the presentation of the name, but it just refreshes it a bit. And that is not a requirement. Okay. And I know if that's going to slow you down, then don't do it, because the most important thing is for you to get back to publishing and showing up for your listeners as quick as you can. But if you can multitask and do both at the same time, might be a good time to change it up a bit.

Absolutely. Let everybody know you're back, you're refreshed, you're new. Right. And you're engaged in serving them once again. That's how you're going to reclaim your position and your podcast after summer break.

All right, so you can find the blog post for this episode and links to everything we talked about. And also watch the video if you're listening to the podcast on podcastersunited.org, which is the home for this podcast.

It's the nonprofit home base for this podcast. We actually donated our podcast to Podcasters United, as we so believe in the mission we do.

All right, well, thanks so much for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with another great episode on feed.

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