Leveling Up The Podcast Game: Tips On How To Evaluate And Improve Your Show Every Year

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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.

Hey, everybody, Tom Hazard here. Tracy Hazzard here along with Tracy, together again, we are here to talk with you all about a subject that, unless you're a brand new podcaster, is going to be of interest to you. If you're a brand new podcaster, you're doing all these things, or we're doing all these things for you. Anyway, we're going to talk about today to set yourself up right for your show.

But if you're a new podcaster and as these things go live, these are the same things that you may want to check, you may want to audit for yourself and make sure that you're presenting yourself out there in the way that you intend. Because sometimes the technical execution of things don't always look as how we executed on our end as content creators, making sure that that's working for you, it could be really important at the start as well or as the time launch right. This is a time to make adjustments. So what we're going to talk about today is what I call my yearly maintenance list. It's my yearly maintenance and my audit list. It's the things that I check across my podcast, specifically, a few things are on the website, but it's this checklist of things that I have that will go through it and it will really check the way we're presenting ourselves out to the world. How does our brand look? Is the message coming across? Is everything as I intended it? Are things missing? Do things need to be changed like we're looking at for many, many things as we go forward as to what our new strategic plan might be. Because remember, since you started your podcast, a lot may have changed.

Well, Tracy, what is your first suggestion for something to really take stock of and review here about your podcast?

Well, the first thing I want to do is I want to look at my brand and I want to look at all my assets, all the things that I created, whether it's my social profiles, my website, my podcast. When I look at them, I want to look at them as someone who doesn't know me yet. Right? So in the case of a podcast, I want to search like a listener. I specifically am always searching like a binge listener. Like how one would go out there and search, because I know that those are my most valuable listeners at the end of the day. So I want to search for things that. The way that they would find me if they didn't already know me. They didn't know the name of my show, they didn't know my name or how to spell it properly. Right. So this is where I go. So I'm going to go and search in my favorite podcast player, and I'll do them all eventually, but I'll start in the one that. That's my favorite because it's my comfort zone. And most podcast listeners will start in their comfort zone. Right. So go to my favorite podcast player. In my case, that's Google Podcasts. That's the one I like. And I will go from there to. To be able to look at and search for the topic of my show. So in my case, it's like podcasting help, podcasting education, podcasting tips, whatever those terms are that might be useful. Podcasting success stories. Right. Whatever the terms that you think, make sure you're using terms that aren't your internal languaging. Right. We gotta get out of our own heads, get out of our industry terms. And if we don't know what they are, go ask a listener, go ask someone who isn't familiar with your industry what they would type in if they were looking for a show on your subject. That's what we're going to type in first.

And one of the things that's occurring to me, Tracy, that you should do, because I have done this with my own, is when you search on a term, if your own show doesn't come up, look at whose shows do come up.

Right?

Right. You can learn a bit about how others are doing it and also read their descriptions in their shows as you see what shows are coming up. Well, why, it's probably in their title or description of their show or an episode.

Right. So I just did a podcast episode on Giving and philanthropy podcast for Giving Tuesdays. It's what I did when I did that. I searched in that. In that sort of global search engine of Google Podcasts, of Stitcher, of Apple. I searched for giving, social good, philanthropy. Like, I searched for those terms to see what came up. And when I saw a repeat across three players, that's when I chose them. That's my methodology for doing it because it shows a consistency in search credibility. So that's the one thing that you're going to check each time you want to maybe take a screenshot or. Or jot a list down of the top five podcasts that show up and see if they're showing up consistently. Because if they're only showing up in one player but not in the others, there's something that just happens to work in that player. It's not something consistently that you may want to emulate. We like to look at it from that perspective. What I'm looking for, once I search and I find the shows and I see my show in the mix. Of course, once I get that dialed in and I see my show in the mix, I want to see how my cover art looks against the others. So again, I screenshot it, I take a look at it, and I think about, should I change the color of my cover art? So this happened to us. When we first started Feed, you'd brand the COVID art was black and green. And we did. It was black. It had green words because it was feed. Right. It was growth, like that was the plan for it. And it had a flower field and it had social media icons on the top of it. So that's what the COVID art looked like. We can share it for you on the blog post for this episode so you can take a look at the old OTT cover art.

I had almost forgotten about that cover art. It was so long ago. And we've pivoted a few times on that, right?

Because the first year that I went to review it, Libsyn came out with their podcast and basically copied our name so close that it was like, on top of us. And the COVID art was green and black. So I said, well, that's it. And we switched ours to blue, and we had this blue color styling going on. And now we're switching it for the next year to a white background, which we don't normally recommend for people, but we're doing it for a particular purpose, but it has a strike around it. And so that's part of what we're doing, because otherwise, white blends completely into the background of everything else that you do. And it can make your cover art actually look smaller than everybody else's. So we put a strike around it to make it look larger. And so anyway, we're changing that up because things change over time. New shows show up, and when you thought you had this high contrast, really standout cover art that you were really proud of, all of a sudden you find out it doesn't work anymore. And this also happened with our 3D print one and over time, we shifted the colors, too. We didn't really change a lot about the COVID art. We just changed the contrast to the color, brighten it up, refresh it, make it look more current. Because maybe the color got a little outdated. Right? These are the things that we're looking for. The other thing is we're looking for to see is the name of our show still working? If I were looking at those, at all of those shows out there, does this name still work for me by comparison? Am I compelled to choose my own show? Like, this is stuff we have to think about.

Very often. For podcasters, the idea of changing the name of your show is a really daunting one. And I think people tend to avoid. It's like, well, no, I started here. I need to keep my show name the same. And I want to make sure everybody really hears this from me and understands that's not necessarily true. I mean, just because you change the name of your show is not going to change everybody who's been listening for the last year. It's not going to change them, you know, or prevent them from getting your next episode. They're subscribed to your show listing, which you can change the name, the COVID art, the description, everything really, about your show listing after it's already been syndicated and published. You can change that stuff at any time, Right?

And don't think you have to go back and fix everything. Your subscribers are there. It's really for the people going forward who are finding you new that you may want to make these changes for. So the other thing that then I want to search for, the next thing is. So I searched like a listener. I was looking for it. I might check the categories, I might go within a category and search within a category. So those are other ways you can dial it in a little deeper if you're getting too broad results and your show's not coming up. And that may be likely because it's you're just in the general search area and you're not in the business search or the finance podcast search area. So you may want to dial a little deeper just to get more realistic results, because podcast listeners are smart enough to know how to get the best results for what they're looking for, because they're listeners, they understand how the engine works. But the next thing you want to do is type in your show name. And I had one happen at this past week where the show was called Give a Philanthropy Podcast. Like that's actually the title of it is Give Dash A Philanthropy Podcast. If I just type the word give, which was the way the COVID art looked. That was what you saw. You assumed that give was the title and the other part was the subtitle. So if I just type given, their show didn't show up at all, partially because it was too new and partially because it's too generic. Right. It's too general.

So give was on the COVID of his first word, but that wasn't actually a part of the podcast title.

No, it was a part, but it was. If you didn't put give and the word philanthropy, you couldn't get their show to show up. Okay, so thinking about that is sometimes your show doesn't show up. Sometimes there's an older show that has more hierarchy, that's a little closer to your name, that shows up before you, and so you don't get served up as well. So check your show name, see how it's showing up. It may be a strategy where you need to add a subtitle. You may need to add a qualifier onto your title. You may need to promote it differently than just calling your show Give. In this particular case out there, you may need to give them the words so that they can find your show when they're actually looking for it by name. The other part is that I then always look for my name, right, as the host. Like, am I showing up? And I try to misspell my name. So in my case, I'll put 1Z instead of 2Zs to see if I show up.

But you do that additionally, right?

I do that additionally.

Either or you put your name additionally in the description somewhere misspelled, right?

Yes, you would do that. It's very common for people to misspell your name. In my particular case, when we type it in, there aren't a lot of Tracey Hazards out there. So it serves me up either way. Just because there isn't another one with the misspelling. But if your name or the slight misspelling is a common use of your name, somebody else might be appearing in that. You may want to have both. You can add that into your description and just pretend it's a typo. Try to ignore it for those perfectionists out there, but it's there to help you show up in search engine. When people don't really understand how to spell your last name.

It's a pretty common thing. Like people having a website URL that might be hard to spell and they also get the misspelled URL and then forward that into the real one so that they try to Catch everybody, right?

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, and this is the thing, like I butchered someone's name because she didn't say her name on her show. The introduction didn't have her name on there and she didn't say it. She just went by her first name. So when I went to say the host of the show is so and so, like I had no place where I could find anyone who pronounced it. So if that's the case, and then just go by like your first name and your last initial, just go, I'm Tom H. Right. Like, you know, whatever that is, just go for it and live that on your cover art everywhere else. Because if that's where you are in the world, then go for that, see what happens and try that out instead. So that's another thing that we want to do. We want to make sure we're actually found when people are actually looking for us. So that's our purpose for doing it that way. Now, once we find our show, we checked out our show. We're going to check out the feed view. So that's the view of our icon for the COVID art. A little short description. Sometimes you have to hit the arrow down button to actually read it or even take a look at it. We want to look at the formatting of it, we want to look at the way it's phrased. I mean, sometimes it looks right when you put it into your podcast host feed. So when you put it in on our end, if you put it in potatoes, right, it looks correct there. But spaces or hard returns aren't being read properly on the feed side. And so these are some things to take a look at. You can get some help from our team. In our particular case, you can send a help ticket in or send a request and say, hey, this isn't looking right. Send a screenshot of what it looks like on Apple and here's what it looks like in my portal. How can you help me make this look right again? And Start Team will go in and fix it for you. So for others, you may have to experiment and try it, play with it in the feed side and then look at what it looks like on the directory side. Remember that there's a delay in it showing up. It may take an hour or so to display on the podcast player that you're looking for. So it's not an immediate thing. You may want to make a change and then later in the day check it out and see if it works right.

Doing this kind of thing may take you several days to Achieve what you want to, but you can definitely get there.

But you're checking the view, seeing how everything looks. Is it cutting off my cover art? Is my cover art grainy? Because I didn't put the good resolution size in to begin with? Like, these are things you want to check out. How well presented are you? Is this coming across the way that you intend it? And then scroll through your feed and check your episodes. A lot of times we find that other podcast hosts end up with putting the episodes out of order. And so even though you aired them in a specific order, they're not showing in that order, and it may not be what you want.

One of the most common mistakes lately is because Apple changed and made some new features about how episodes are displayed. They have, you know, you can display them in seasons. And the biggest mistake I see people making is they have their episodes or some of them classified in season one, others in season two. But then some episodes got published and they didn't choose a season. They didn't put anything in the season designation. And so it shows up in the Apple app as unknown season. And it can be out of order. You might think, hey, where's my latest episode? It hasn't shown up. And in fact, it has shown up. It's just that how Apple's displaying it is showing things in a certain order that maybe you didn't intend.

Right, which is why we want to. Now, once we've checked it in our favorite player, now we know what to look for, and we've made some adjustments in our favorite player because it's more likely to cascade and work in others as well. So correcting that the first time, right, getting it right once, is the best way to go about. Then once you have it right and it's appearing right and the way that you want it in that favorite player, now we're going to go check all the other players because sometimes there can be nuances and differences. So if we got it looking right in Apple and it doesn't look right in Google, we may need to make an adjustment. So Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, I Heart Tunein, and then of course, check your website, because there's also a player. For most of you, we use a Fusebox player. Like the fuse box player has a way that it displays, and it may not look right there either. So the other thing I want you to do is check your links that are showing up in your descriptions or in your episode descriptions. Right. So the little episode descriptions, sometimes we call them calls to action, sometimes they're Links about how to find me, where my website is, things like that. You're going to check all of that text and data, but you're also going to check your main links. Is it say website? It usually just says the word website. And when you click it, does it actually go to your website or does it go to your podcast host? Check that. Make sure that that's not wrong. That's a really common problem, Tom.

It is. And you know, not only the links within your description, but I just. Well, I guess we have that a little later down the list. But the description itself is really important. As long as we're there. Let's talk about that, because I just had this happen. Klein has been with us for about four years, and when he started with us, he was already a podcaster and he had his description. We were relatively young company at the time, so he had his show, it was established. He probably wasn't going to ask us what we thought of his description or even thought it was a big issue. And now all these years later, he's reached out to me and he's saying, hey, I'm noticing that a lot of your other shows have a much longer description than I have, and is that hurting me for SEO? And I'm like, well, yes, it is, as I took a look at it. So he has really done this type of an audit on his show already in the last month, and we've rewritten his entire description and wow, is that making a big difference for the show Coming up in search results within the podcast apps. So it's a good time to do that.

I want to remind you to get really picky with the first three sentences because that's what really shows to people, that's what really matters. That's what a listener is probably looking for. The remainder of the 4,000 characters that you have allotted to you is for the search engine. This is where you're going to bury in and drop in the wrong spelling of your name or the wrong spelling of your show, whatever that might be to be in those other places. But that's where the other search terms, the ones that we were talking about at the beginning, that we were using like a listener, this is the place to put those in. We don't want to cram them in. We want it to be like prose, right? We're trying to make a well written thing. On occasion, though, our phrasing is a little unusual and we don't want to get too editorial and nitpicky and too perfectionist about the writing. Here, because it's written for a bot and not for a human. Sentences are humans.

Yeah, we're trying to make sure you get found by the people you want to find you. So. And then just updating in general. I mean, look, things may have changed in your intent of your show. You've pivoted a little bit. You used to be more of an interview show and now not so much. Or you're providing a different kind of value, keeping that description up to date. And as you're evaluating your entire show, looking at on a yearly basis is a very good thing to do, right?

Absolutely. And your bio, that's one of the other things that we like to check at this time. Usually there's a section of your bio in there. I update our bios every single year, sometimes twice a year, but every single year for sure, I update our bios. That is on our website and other places. And so anywhere that it is, I need to update it. So if it's in our social profiles, I have to update it there. If it's here in our podcast description, I need to update it here as well. So if there's anything that's about the host, this is a time and a place to go and update that as well. So more important to read this at this time for yourself, also to look how it looks visually, because sometimes it's like too much words and they're not broken up with a little bit of space, you don't want to take up and waste space, but you also don't want it unreadable at the end of the day. So if someone actually does read it, you want to make sure they can read it. The other thing I want to do is check my episode list. So are they appearing in the right order we talked about? But is it time to get rid of some episodes? Are there people that we no longer want to be officially associated with anymore?

Oh, we had that happen.

Yeah, we do. So, you know, especially right now, people are going out of business, they're shifting their business, they're pivoting their business, and the episodes are not as relevant as they used to be for some shows. So going through and taking an opportunity at the end of a year to pull through those episodes and taking the time to do it at once rather than anytime you just randomly think about that is better. So doing that at this moment in time is a great time. So what we like to do is that we like to take out the episode from being live in our feed. So we remove it, we unpublish it from the feed, we leave the blog unnavigatable. So we remove it from categories. We do everything, we put it, we take it out of the list of blogs that show. But if someone had a link to the actual blog episode, it won't break. But once they find it, they'll head back into the normal blog, they'll head back into the website. So we still want to break that. Because if someone's coming randomly from somebody else's social post that happens to have your blog episode, even if you didn't like the episode, you still want to capture that reader, that listener, that viewer, right? So let's let that happen. So we do do it that way, but we do take it out of our audio feed. That's one of the most important things that we do. Copyrights, you guys should have copyrights in your. There's a spot for it, actually. There's a copyright line that's a part of the feed setup when you do it for Apple or forever. And so you do want to take that out and make sure that you've updated it for the current year. So if you haven't updated it now, here's the thing that most people don't do, and it's highly recommended to do, it is you should leave the range if available. So in other words, if you've had your podcast since 2015 and it's now going into 2021, you would say 2015 to 2021. So even though you've made changes to it, you've updated or whatever, you want to leave that range in there. Now a lot of the podcast players don't let you do that. It's just a one year date. You want to put it the most current date, right? So you just because your new content is coming out through that and all of the rest is still covered anyway. But from a legal standpoint, if you have a range, go ahead and put it in there from start date to current date. On our websites, we always do that. We do it from the start of the current version of the day we bought the URL and the website went live. Right like that. We start it from that year and we continue it through and going forward. Even though the style might have changed and the content actually changed. We just blanket protect it from a copyright standpoint.

One thing I think it's important to understand here about the copyright line is that I don't really believe that if you don't update the date to be 2021 on January 1st, that somehow you're giving up Some copyright rights. I don't think that is.

She's not a lawyer, though.

I'm not a lawyer. That's just true. Okay, yes, very good point, Tracy. However, I do think, though, it makes an impression about your show. And if you haven't updated that and it says copyright 2017 and here we are in 2020, it says something about you're not paying attention to detail. Are you really serious about your show? I think it just makes an impression that is not that you're not up.

To date, that you're not tech savvy, that you don't care. And so if your business depends on that, then this is a place for you to show how your brand, how you treat your brand is going to be how I treat you as a client. Right. Like that's going to be an experience extension of that. So that's where we build a higher trust factor by making sure that these things are fixed. The last thing you might want to do is check your categories. Now, our clients have all known that there were lots more categories added and they were able to update them, and we allowed them opportunities to do that. Anyone who's new coming in has the longer list of categories. But if you set up your show a long time ago by yourself and you are not maintaining the categories or haven't looked at that, you need to double check because some new categories have come out that might be better for your show. Now's a good time to reselect those and change them out in the feed.

Some people have shows that it's not very clear what category is the best for you. There's not a very clear. Oh, that Obviously my show should be in that category. And you can be listed in several categories. So there's nothing wrong with, you know, at times, if you feel over time, well, I don't think I'm getting a lot of traction in that category. You can change a category, you can try another one, try a new one.

See if it's a better fit for you. Especially when you do that audit and check of the competitors. When you see a competitor that you think, wow, I want to be where they are, go check, take a look at their category and emulate that. That's a great way for you to go reposition yourself right next to them. Calls to action. This is a good time to update calls to action. We usually have a call to action at the end of every podcast episode. So basically, how to find us on social, where to go. We like to keep it really simple and generic and we don't put in really specific calls to action that aren't like poditize.com masterclasses or poditize.com resources. So it's always something where we can forward it to our latest classes, to our latest course, to our latest thing. We don't give complex URLs or very specific things that are set in time for promotion in that episode descriptions or blog post descriptions. We don't do it there. We try to keep it generic and the reason is because we don't want to update it. So if you did do that, maybe you want to start making a more generic option that allows you to do URL forwarding, move things around and be able to keep it so that you don't have to update this year over.

Year leaves you some flexibility to change it elsewhere.

But don't forget, if you don't have a call to action, add one People need to know how to find you. They need to be invited into your community. Don't assume that they will figure it out for themselves. Make it easy for them to find you. If you don't ask, right? If you don't invite, they won't come Trailers, trailers.

You know what? This is something that people often talk about their first episode and what should their first episode be and should it be a different format than the others? And you know what? There's not an absolute right or wrong question to our answer. Rather not an absolute right or wrong answer to that question. It is a preference and a choice. However, there have been some changes again over the years. Apple, who really does still lead the podcast industry, they invented it, after all, has made it so that you can classify an episode as a trailer episode, which to them means your preview of your show or your introductory episode of your show. And they also allow you to have a trailer episode for a season. So you can have a different trailer for each season if you want to.

So you can also select one of your episodes to be that trailer to be. So it's like pinning it to the top or something, right? So you don't have to have one. That's all only a trailer. But keep in mind, people want something shorter and sweeter for a trailer, right? So there's a lot of them that are 30 seconds, a minute and a half, and they're just this like power, like movie style, you know, trailer, right? That's great. But if you don't do that, at minimum do an intro, an intro episode, less than 10 minutes kind of thing about what my show's about, who I am why I'm here, why I care about you.

Right.

Like, you know, we're setting ourselves up. We use that to write the description. So why not record it and make it a great episode? That's a great way to do it. I like to update it. I like to update it. Sometimes I do it every hundred episodes. So it's not a set in time of the year that I update it, but I like to update it because things change in my show. Like, I add new features, I've gotten some great guests, and I might want to refer them to some of the best episodes to go back through and check out if you're new to the show. So you want to do this for people who are new to the show, not for your existing subscribers. So think about that when you're in the mode of recording. That's why it might be a little bit different than you normally would do it.

Well, here's one of my pet peeves, this next one. Listen, especially if it's been a while, if your show has been around for a year or more, listen to your own intro and outro and think about what it's like for a listener to listen to it over and over when they're on a long drive and listening to a number of your episodes back to back. I just did this today from when we're recording this this morning. We have a relatively new client who is just doing a refresh, a time for a new intro and outro, new theme music, the whole thing. So we've been working on that and actually performed this person's recording his own intro and outro, which is fine. That's a choice. He's got a great voice. I listened to it, the recording of it, and I'm listening to it, and it was about 35 seconds long. Right. And there was a portion of what he said that was not absolutely repeating himself, but a little bit redundant. I want you to think about this. Think about somebody listening to this multiple times within a couple hours, because listening to a few episodes, and would you really feel that, hey, that intro. Okay. Yep, that's the show. Gets me in the mood. Okay, get on with the show. Or would you be sitting there thinking, oh, my gosh, come on, get on with the show already? And that's all too often how a lot of listeners feel about it. So we tend to subscribe to less is more, 15, 20 seconds, say what you gotta say, announce the show, get people upbeat, in the right mood, and boom, move on.

It's okay to have a longer one on that trailer we were talking about, about that might be ideal because that's that first episode, that place for the first people to find you. So you may want a longer one there. That's okay there. But the other thing that I want you to do is listen to your outro going into your intro. So you want to go. You want to have it autoplay from one episode to the next so that you can hear that length because that's where it can be repetitive and way too long. And it gets people to not then listen to the next episode. They think, oh, I don't have time for this, and they crash out before they get into the next episode.

I often find Tracy, I want to see if you agree with this because you're a binge listener. You know, if you're listening to an episode over and over again, or a number of episodes rather in a row, and you've heard the outro, once you get to the outro, can't you just skip to the next episode?

That assumes that you have your hands available to do that. And many, many people don't. Also because I listen on double speed and you know, I listen to it faster, which many people do. And you may want to check out your show at that time speed to see what it's like. That I don't always have the ability to do that. And so just keep that in mind. That that's a, that can be a frustration point for binge listeners. And we definitely want to be binge listener friendly, right? That's one of our goals here. So the other thing is that go and spot listen to at least three of your episodes. So go listen to an early one and you're going to cringe because, you know, your sound maybe wasn't as good, you were a little stiffer and rougher. But I want you to listen to it because it's a frame of reference for improvement. Right? So if we don't hear how we improve, we don't feel good about our recent episodes either. We need to put it in context for ourselves. And also because that's the way new listeners do, they come to an early episode, check it out, then they'll go to someone in the middle that they just find an interesting topic or an interesting guest, and then they will listen to the most recent. So they will do a three show check. They may not listen all the way through to all of them till they get to the most recent one because they want to be on that or, you know, and then they'll work their way backwards later. But that's kind of a model for it. So if I am a new listener to your show and I listened to the early one and the audio was a little rough and echoey and, you know, other things, I'm going to go, oh, okay, they're new to this. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt. I will give you the benefit of the doubt if I think your show sounds interesting still, like, now I've listened enough to know the topics interesting to me. And so I'll go on to the next one. I'll pick one that interests me, and I'll go to the most recent one. When I hear audio improvement, that says a lot about the care you've put into your show when it goes 100 episodes and you haven't improved at all in that it shows that you didn't listen to your own show and you didn't care and you didn't put in improvement in the process. And I'm not so sure I'm going to stick around. So we want to demonstrate that improvement over time. And so you want to check it out and listen. And then I have had a few people who ended up going from their office to their home office because of the pandemic, and they didn't realize that their audio had problems and shifted. So this is a good time for you to audit that and check on that.

We have some people that actually have, you know, more than one residence, and they'll record half the year they'll be in one residence and half the year at another. And they don't, you know, realize, I think, that there's quite a big difference in the environment.

Well, and I just had that today, and that's the benefit of the doubt. So I was doing a coaching call today, and that just happened was like, her audio was really, really good for a. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't in more recent episodes. And I realized she was in a different country, so she was in a different location. And I thought maybe it's the environment there. And so when we got on the call, the first thing I did was, let's fix your sound right now. And it turns out she wasn't even using her microphone properly. So it was a whole, like, tech fail. It wasn't the environment. And we got it quickly fixed, and her sound is now great. So, like, it's an easy fix. If you need help with that, there's lots of people out there who are willing to go on the other end of Zoom and check it out for you. And we're here for you too. Right? There's always a team here for you. So this listening experience is really important, though, to keeping those listeners coming back for more. Right. So we need to do a benefit. And the other thing is, like, look, if you want to make some great improvements in your show, listen to how you are in the show. Do you talk too fast? Do you talk too slow? Do you say so all the time? Do you say all the time? Right. There's ways to improve that and some coaching and some help that you can get if you're interested in making an improvement in to how you perform and present as a part of. As a podcast host.

If you're a new podcaster, I don't want you to obsess over this. I would much rather you get going and record than try to be perfect and waiting until you're perfect to do it. Don't get stuck in this area of permanent potential and not actually put your content out there, because people are going to value the content more than your perfection as a speaker.

Absolutely. And you know, this is the thing. It's like sometimes we'll get a new client and we'll listen to them at their first few episodes and I'll want to say something, but we don't because we know that 10 episodes in, 15 episodes in, they're going to naturally improve. It happens. You get more comfortable in the space. If you were relying on notes, you realize it's too much work and you'll stop doing it. You know, so there's a whole process by which we see a shift happen naturally. You will hear that if you check out your show. So that's why I want you to hear the contrast between all the pieces. So the last thing I want you to do is plan. Start a list. So as you're checking out those competitor shows, as you found some of them, go back to them and make a list of their guests that you think, gosh, they should be on my show. If they were on that show, they should totally be on my show. I'm going to make that happen. I'm going to reach out to them. And so there's a lot of opportunities for topics as well. And remember, you don't have to listen to their show. You see how they title it, you see the topic that they took, and do your own take on it. Make it original, make it you. You don't need to do it because they did it. Do it because they did it. And you believe you have something more important to say about it. So that's a great way for you to plan your topics for the next year and just get a jump start on who to invite for your next guest.

Well, I'll tell you, that's a really good list of things that people can do to sort of take stock on their show.

One more thing.

Oh, you got another?

Yeah, one more thing I just thought of that you should do is as you're checking out those competitive shows and all those other shows that are in the topic area, maybe there's a lot of them that aren't competitive, but they're in the genre of what you want to be. These are guests you want to invite on your show and do a podcast host swap and get some publicity because they obviously have a similar audience and interest that you do. This is a great way for you to have a publicity swap going on and for you to get introduced to their listeners and them to get introduced to yours.

Okay, good. Thanks for adding that point, Tracy. That's great. All right, so hey, hope you find these tips helpful as we're coming into the Whether you're at the end of a year or it's just like you said, Tracy, your 50th episode, hundredth episode. It's just good at least once a year to review your show, do some maintenance, make sure you don't have any cobwebs in there that need to be cleaned out. Stay current and fresh and maybe pivot.

A little bit and make sure your brand is being presented how you intend it to. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening to Feed you'd brand. We'll be back with more topics, more interesting subjects, more interesting tips and tools, and success stories from other podcasters and other shows.

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