Pause Like A Pro: A Strategic Guide To Taking A Podcast Break

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazzard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. Today we're going to talk about our podcast Reset because we've reached some level of maturity of our podcast, and we are taking a little pause to reassess and make sure we're producing the right content creat going forward. And that's what we want to share with you today. Because, you know, we'll be dark for a couple weeks, not too long as we prepare this reset to come back even better.

Yeah. So it's not just a rebrand, Tom. That's what I want everybody to understand. This is like bigger than a rebrand. And it's coming to this point because we have over 300 episodes of this show. We have 300 plus episodes of the binge factor, and we have a couple of hundred tips like tutorials and tips all contained on the same website in the same YouTube channel, and not quite in the same playlist on the YouTube channel, but that's part of the issue. So when you hit this critical mass of tipping over, I'd say about 500 episodes, when you start to really tip over 500, you have to have another conversation. And the conversation is, how am I going to organize things so that my listeners, my potential clients. Right, the people I would like to convert, how do I get them to not feel overwhelmed and confused? Because as our good friend and podcaster John Livesay says, a confused mind doesn't buy.

And buy could mean listen. Right. Not just actually buy at the register, if you will, but that both do apply. Sure. We are trying to provide a lot of very real value to those of you listening to this show. We want to continue to do that. We also want to make sure it continues to be relevant. And we're trying to bring more people in to really benefit and participate in a lot of ways. Right, Tracy?

Yeah. Before we go too far into it, I want to already share the poll. Right. We have a survey. We have a poll. I want to share it right now at this moment in time, because I want to make sure that everyone has some input. So now we've shared this with our client base because that's predominantly who feed your brand is focused on. But that doesn't mean that you listeners out there don't have a say in this. And so we want to understand what would bring you more value, what would get you to actually start your podcast if you haven't already. What would get you to show up on a live coaching call? What would get you to really find greater value in how we are structuring and bringing you new topics and new pieces of information about podcasting and about how you're podcasting could be more successful?

Well, and that is wonderful. I mean, if I were a listener, I would want that as well. So. All right.

And it's only four questions. So it's like not a big. Like, this is not a heavy lift. If it took you a minute, I'd be shocked.

Yeah, no. Oh, my gosh. Actually, we were supporting somebody recently who had an assessment on their website that had like 119 questions. I'm like, oh, my gosh, who the heck's ever gonna complete this whole thing? Four really quick questions that if you would not mind taking just a little time to complete it, whether you are a productized customer or not, even if you're just a listener, this can help inform what we record in the future.

And how we record it, maybe whether we're going to continue to do live. So that's the question I set out to. And normally, Tom, we make running changes, right? We don't usually. I mean, we might do a rebrand, but we keep the old brand and then all of a sudden the rebrand happens, right? Like, and running changes is kind of the old products. The product person in me, the product designer in me, where that's what you do when you're running a consistent. No matter what it is, and you make new packaging or you make new. A chemical change or a substance or.

Add a feature to something, right?

Or some kind of color change or whatever it might be. You do that on a running change and the new one's available. But we didn't want to do that here because we're creating an absolute structural shift in it. And the reason this came about was because I brought some nice young interns in, a couple of cheerleaders. One of them's our daughter, but the other one is one of her good friends who took a marketing class from Vogue this past summer, and she brought some really great new perspectives to it. And that's what we're looking to. We're looking at. I think predominantly our support has been sort of the non techies of the world, which I'm happy to continue to support in whatever way we can. But there also is a generation of podcasting going on who feels pretty social media and tech savvy, and we want to be able to support them, too. So that's why I brought in their perspective and I added that to our team's perspective. And so we have a seasoned social media expert on our team. We have a YouTube, I'm going to call it listing optimization expert. We have a expert in promotions and what you would do on the sort of ad side of things or landing page side of things. And we have an expert in SEO, search engine optimization and website. And then of course we have you and I who are experts in the content itself and what we've done in the past. Right? And then on my team I have one person who is an absolute expert in every blog and tip we've ever produced and just remembers them all. And that's always fantastic to have because did we record this before? Is a question I ask all the time. And lately I have been able to ask my clone. So we have Tracy too T o o and I just ask her, did we do an episode on this? And she answers me really fast and.

It'S awesome, which is excellent. That's obviously the new modern wave. Some people that don't have that but have another tool though available in our poditized player when they have the embed code on their. There's a new search feature though that will go through all your episodes so you can ask questions like that there too and say, hey, did we do this topic? We recently did the one about your show maybe getting taken down by Spotify. You could search on Spotify and every episode would come up that we've talked about right in the player that we talked about Spotify. So anyway, a few different ways to do that, right?

But making that AI optimization and an organizing that clone into the website like this is where it got to this fundamental question. And the fundamental question was, are we a website first, a YouTube first, or a podcast first organization? That was the fundamental question I asked. And do we want to be that like, because we may be that now, but do we want to be that going forward? And so we are, when we did the assessment and evaluation, we are a YouTube live or a live stream first. And we live stream in more places than YouTube. But everything's optimized for how it lists on YouTube. So it technically becomes a YouTube live stream first model. And that's what we've been doing because we record our episodes live on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, not on Instagram anymore. We stopped doing that a year ago. We were on Instagram. But it gets a little more complicated over there in terms of format. And we are also on rumble and oh, LinkedIn. I almost forgot LinkedIn.

Oh, my gosh. LinkedIn is one of the biggest, most important ones for us. And I think a lot of podcasters, especially when you're in business in some way.

Yeah. So that's what we'd been practicing for almost two years now, this livestream first model. And so I sat back and said, is this working? And is this worth it? Because as I shared, and this is how this, like, light bulb kind of went off about, like, now's the time. And not to wait till the end of the year, which is normally when I would do the evaluation was when I shared the workflow in our recent episode this past summer, I shared our.

Livestream workflow, which is intensive, Right.

It is like I showed you exactly what we do. I took all the steps with you on air, and the answer I got back from most of our client base was like, what the are you doing?

Well, to quote our first podcast, wtf? Wtf? Although in a different way.

Sff.

Yeah. Like, what the hell are you doing? Right. It was just like, why are you doing this? And it was a really good question because as I was. I mean, it's second nature to me. I do it every single week for us. Like, it still takes the amount of time it takes. Right?

It takes a lot of your time. And quite honestly, you complain about it every week, especially to me, because you.

Do it because you should be participating. You're a co host. Right. So it should be split between the two of us. And it is not.

And it's not easy. You have the technical experience with that, whereas I have technical experience with other things. And even just learning to do what you do, I mean, it would take a long time for me to get up to speed, to take it over, and you probably still would think I wasn't doing it. Right.

Right. And that's why it has never been handed over to a team, because it's so integrated with what we're gonna talk about, how we're gonna talk about it, like, what our angle and direction is, and then how it is promoted out there ahead of the live stream. And so the marketing is in it as well. And so when I looked at all of that effort, it was like, is this worth it? Is the question that I then went in to ask and is certainly not worth it on YouTube. YouTube is not giving us any live stream power. That is worth it. In fact, it's damaging. And this is the analysis we came to. It's damaging the replays of the video later, because what you have to do to optimize for an event. If you want to think of it like that, a live event is very different than what you might do when you optimize afterwards. And because it's already published as the video, going in and making the changes to it are almost too little too late to make it optimized for now that the video's live, adding your chapters and doing all the things that you might do to retitle it and do all of that you've already published. So it's. You've already lost the momentum of it being brand new at that publishing Optimized is lost in the process. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. It's pretty illuminating. I mean, you're saying there's a big difference in what you should do is what I'm hearing to configure a video that's prerecorded, you're putting up on YouTube versus one that you're live streaming because they have, I guess, different characteristics and different. There are things you cannot do until it's done up there as a video and you can't do as a live stream, if I'm hearing you correctly. Is that right?

Right. I can't. I don't know what we're going to say. We're not scripting it. So I can't put chapters in. Makes sense till the video's done and then I can run the chapters after the fact. We title it to attract people to come to an event and hit the subscribe button. So we aren't optimizing it for being searchable in YouTube.

Yeah, we're not optimizing for discoverability when people are searching for their needs in YouTube as related to what we talk about around podcasting. Right?

Right. It's an event. So it's more like webinar. It's a little more marketing advertising. Right. It's just a little bit different model of how you do it because you have to market it to get somebody to hit the subscribe button or be notified when it got when we go live. Right. So it's a bit different in how you title it and what you do versus what you would do to optimize a video title of what was in the video and making sure that that's discoverable within the YouTube space. So again, different. And there is absolutely zero benefit to live podcasting on YouTube music. So you don't get any benefit from being live over on YouTube music like you would hope you would. Right? You'd hope, like, oh, I'm live podcasting a video is Live podcasting at this moment in time, and there's zero extra benefit to it.

Boy, I'm in the back of my mind remembering when we were experimenting with Clubhouse, when that became new, and that was all about the live. And there were benefits to being live within that platform at the time. But, gosh, we stopped doing that a long time ago. So I can understand how there's limited benefits, right?

So this is gotten to the point where you're just like, okay, so if we're not going to be a live stream first, then the next question is, should we be live coaching every week? Like, is there any benefit in that? Is, like, is. Should we even be an hour? Should we be third? Like, there's a whole bunch of questions around how we coach. We have a topic. Should we just do a Q and A? What should we do with our coaching side of things if we're not live streaming the topic? And there's no marketing benefit to that live streaming of that topic at that time? And so that brings another question. And then because we donate our show to Podcasters United and Podcasters United as a nonprofit with a membership group, that adds to the mix of, like, are we benefiting the membership group there and helping them with their shows and getting them launched, Are we being a service to that organization as well? So, like, it's a complication of things. And then because of the content all being in one big place on their website, its organizational structure needed to be redone. It needed to be redone with search engine optimization in place, YouTube playlisting and categorization in place. And then there was the question about, does everything belong on Podcasters United? Just because it's a feed your brand topic doesn't mean it belongs there. Same question with, does it all belong on Podcasters United's YouTube channel, or does some of it belong on potatoes YouTube channel? And so this is where we started to look at everything and at a granular level, start to categorize it, group it, build pillar content. Like, if you've ever heard that term before, I'm going to go into that stuff. Like, when we show you what we've done, I will share how we did it. But there's just a whole bunch of questions that all of these things raise. And really, who are we here for? Is the number one question I think you have to ask yourself. And I get too often back from our podcasters. Tom. Oh, I'm the podcast for everyone interested in anyone. Everyone, all ages, like, all demographics, all psychographics, like, all of this stuff. Right. I'm in it for everyone. And that makes for an extremely confusing channel, an extremely confusing website, and an extremely unfocused podcast.

Yeah, it's hard to be specific and focused when you're trying to be everything to all people or. So this is a process that we're going through and trying to decide what the best fit is and who we want to serve, who's there to serve. And so, again, you all can be a part of this process by completing that little. What do we call it? Not survey.

Yeah, it's a survey. It's technically a zoom survey.

Zoom survey, but we called it something else. Poll. Thank you. Gosh, that word was missing in my brain right there.

I know. Poll sounds a little more political than it actually is. It's just a little survey of what you think.

It's just. Yeah, four questions. So really we are request, if you are willing, all of you that are listening to this is to go complete that. Where are they going to find that, Tracy?

So there will be a link in the episode description, if you're just listening to this as a podcast. If you are watching this on YouTube, there's a link right in the description right below. And if you're on the website, there's a QR code in addition to a link, and that makes it so much easier on podcastersunited.org and you'll just be able to go straight to that survey and you'll be able to give us your feedback. We will close the survey at the end of October 2025. So if you're listening to this way after the fact, wondering what's happening to the show, you can jump ahead.

Right.

And you're a little late to giving your input. However, I do want you to reach out to us because there's always an email, there's always a form, there's always a way for you to get in touch with us, direct message us on social media, let us know what you think of the change that we created for you, and maybe it'll be time. When you're listening to this some point in the future, maybe it's time for yet another change and you'd like to suggest one. And so we're always open to that. So just because the survey is closed, those doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you.

Yeah, feedback's always welcome. Although it's interesting, Tracy, I'm realizing as we're recording this, one of the ironies is this will be a podcast. Living in the future that really is a Function of the fact that we have been going live in the past. And it may not be tremendously relevant going forward, except for people that maybe listen to earlier episodes and listen to new ones, and they see the format change. When they hear this episode or watch this episode on YouTube, they'll understand why we made that shift. And so that's helpful, right?

And that's my reasoning. Remember, we always talk about this. It's like when you head into Pod Fade, you should come back and tell people why. Right? So if there's ever a pause in your show, tell people why. And that's what we're here doing. We're telling you why we're taking this pause.

But this is a brief pause of all the pauses we've ever taken where we've intentionally mentioned it to our audiences. And not just in this podcast. Actually, I don't think we've done it in this podcast before, but in the other ones we've done in the past, a pause was like a two, three month pause. So it was a real big break. This is a short break, folks.

Right. However, if you're on the podcast, it'll probably be one week longer than it will be if you were in the coaching. So we're only taking a coaching pause till the beginning of October. But if our coaching is no longer live, and I'm not telling you what it is at this point, because I'd like you to show up to that point first coaching call, which you can. Whether we're live or not, all you have to do is be a Podcasters United member and the newsletter will come out with the link to the zoom. And that's free, by the way, and that's absolutely free. And so whether you are a Potatoes client or not, as long as you're a Podcasters United member, all you have to do is click the Zoom link in the newsletter, and you do have to receive the newsletter for that to happen. And then you click the link in the newsletter on October. What is the last Wednesday in October? Because we will still run it on Wednesday then.

Okay, because you said October 1st, and I wasn't sure if you really meant that.

No, this episode is going to air on October.

Oh, on October 1st. So the last Wednesday in October is the 29th.

Okay. So on the 29th of October, we will run a live stream or a zoom call, and we're not going to tell you which it is. So we may not be live, which is why you're incentivized to click the link to come to the Zoom all you have to do is go to podcasters united.org join. That's it, join. And you'll automatically get the first newsletter. And when you get the newsletter, it'll tell you what the zoom link is the day of. So. And that's it. It's super simple. On the day of, you click the link, you'll come and find out what happened to the show. We'll tell you exactly what happened on that day. That is when we were gonna reveal what's going on. If you listen to the podcast, though, it'll be a week later and we're.

Going to share the results of the polls. A part of this, I would imagine. Right. So if you really want to find out what you thought and you filled out, how does that compare to what others did and what. And inform what we're doing, that's how you're going to find out.

Exactly. So I just want to tell you the last bit of input that my wonderful interns, our wonderful interns gave us, and that is what you're going to see next. Is this Taylor Swift inspired Blackout or orange out? She oranged out. Orange out. I don't know what color we're going to do, but you'll see where we're going to actually, like, make the channels. The website, like, everything in those areas that we're working on are essentially going to go to a. Hey, we're on a pause. Stay tuned, and a clock ticking clock. Although you can't do that live on YouTube, so we'll have to keep updating it. But it will tell you when we'll be back. So you will be able to check into all our channels, all our socials, our website, podcasters united.org and you'll be able to find out when we'll be back and get a little sneak peek and hint at what's coming.

All right, well, we'll see you then.

Heard something valuable today, but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities.

Us.

While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social @United Wepod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.