The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Solo And Topic-Driven Podcast Episodes

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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

Welcome back to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy Hazard and today we are going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of solo and topic driven podcast episodes. This is a really good subject to cover, Tracy, and I think the vast majority of our listeners will be interested in this or they certainly should be. I think.

Right. I do want to address it is that the point at which you are in your podcast also makes a difference here. So we're going to segregate the two pieces like within your first 50 episodes and 50 or more. Anything higher than that. Right. Because in your first year of podcasting and I'm going to assume you're at least doing weekly. If you're doing 50 episodes in two months, awesome for you. Great for you. That's okay too. It still applies. That's why I put the number at 50 episodes. Because it doesn't matter if you speed it up and do a more compressed it's still 50 episodes and it's still a tipping point for things because of how many episodes you've had, how many people have promoted and what you've done. There's an advantage to having guests in your first 50 episodes that may have diminishing returns later, but is significantly powerful in the growth of your show at the starting point. And so I do want to make that differentiation here. And if you're in that starting place, consider maybe a little more weighted on the guest episode side. And if you're past that starting point, we're going to look at stats, we're going to talk about some other things, but the topic may be coming up for you or time for you to test out topic episodes.

And Tracy, I just want to emphasize the advantage of and the sort of one of the good reasons why you're suggesting in those first 50 you might want to have guests is really selfishly for you, the podcaster, isn't it? It's more so that I think than it is for your listeners.

It's exposure to listeners. So at the end of the day, if your voice is being heard and your message is being received, then the listeners are benefiting. They're more likely to get access to you through somebody else recommending you through somebody else being a part of that, through that somebody else sharing your show. The more likely you are to get somebody to share your show in a larger quantity is to have somebody who's guesting on your show who's willing to promote it. Right. That's where the advantage lies. So if you're trying to grow an audience from nothing, which is where all of us start when we start a brand new show, we start at nothing. Then one of the big advantages to having guests on your show is the power of other people's audiences. That's what we call it when we talk about it. OPA so other people's money, you may have heard that before, right? In investing other people's audiences, their audience is valuable. Now the key is to make that a match to you. Because just going for somebody with a big audience doesn't always pay off if it's not in your niche or if it's not the right type of audience. If you've got high end consulting advice and you need CEOs of corporations and other things like that, and you got some kind of entrepreneurial like startup audience because of the guests you have, that might not be a great match for you. Really thinking about in those early days, if I have guests on my show, the best advantage for me is that audience growth and right fit matters most.

What host might you have on as a guest? You probably want to think about who's their audience and it's my message, a fit for their audience.

So that's why we say that's really powerful. Now there are certain cases where that's not the purpose of your show. The purpose of your show, like our purpose of our show here for feed you'd brand is to provide value first and foremost to our clients, our existing client base. And on the outside of that, if we track new through that process because we're adding value or providing some information that's useful to them and then they decide to come and do business with us, that's great. But aligning ourselves with outside people who don't have the same direction, who might give confusing messages, who are trying to sell them something else is not in our best interest. So we do not take guests here on feed your brand. There's a whole nother show for that. It's called the binge factor. I take guests over there, but we separated it and we only have episodes here. But we didn't have to worry about growing a listener base because we had all of you clients out there who were coming into our calls, who are live streaming with us, who are on zoom, who are enjoying the conversation and the Q and A sessions that come after it. That was our first and foremost. So the decision, because of its purpose, was to do solo episodes. In our case, co host, episode, co.

Host, but it's still a non guest episode. A topic based podcast. We come with a topic we want to share and discuss. But you're right, it is first and foremost supporting our existing community. And they get it first, right? Our existing customers get it first, get it live, and they're able to ask questions after, whereas the rest of the world has it weeks or a month later when it comes out as a podcast. And that serves them too. Sure, that's great, but it's definitely topic based and you really have to be, I think, comfortable. And I know you're probably thinking, we're going to get to this in a minute, Tracy, but you have to be really comfortable getting on a microphone and just speaking as if you're even at an event, speaking from the stage. It's a rhetorical situation where you're just have some important message in mind, you want to share some wisdom, some nugget, a story, whatever it is. You have to be comfortable speaking. And occasionally, Tracy, you and I are not always able to do this together. And we keep up the pace showing up for our community and either one or the other of us will do this alone. But then it's always more fun for us, I think, doing it together.

I think that there's a situation by which, when Tom and I first started our very first podcast in 3D printing, WTFF, which stands for fused filament fabrication. Geeky term for 3D printing and yeah, really geeky. We did five days a week, we had one guest and four topics. And we rotated the topics. We had business Mondays, tech Tuesdays. I didn't always do the tech ones. Tom did them alone. Sometimes we'd have educator Wednesdays. So it was focused on teaching 3D printing or anything that an educator might be interested in from a topic. Then on Thursdays we had our guest and on Fridays we would go over a fun project we were gonna try over the weekend, or we recommended trying over the weekend. So we had this kind of rotating format of topics. And it worked out really great for us because it got us to test what topics were playing and where we could go with it and what resonated the most to everyone. And between having that, we had the best of both worlds. We had guests helping to promote it and grow our aud. And we had topics which were really what the audience was there for. They were really there for what we had to share with them. But the guest was helping us promote it out. And actually it became interesting. New tools, new technology, new businesses that people didn't know about. We were able to expose that. And we didn't do it in an affiliate model. We did it in a straight, hey, we're curious, is this worth something? Is this worth exploring? And we would be exploring along with the audience. And so they loved it. And that format for us worked really great. And, and we did it that way for almost a year. And within that year we reached a hundred thousand listeners a month. And we could not have done it if we hadn't done that mix of both. And the topics got listened to more. But the guest episodes got us new listeners who then would binge on all the other shows. That's what worked for us. This is why I say there's an advantages and disadvantages to it is it could have been bad. We could have been associated with products and companies we didn't want to be associated with and that could have harmed our brand. But in our particular case, our brand was about seeking new ideas, seeking new information. It worked out great for us. So you've got to make that choice for yourself and for your purpose, your ultimate purpose of your podcast. And then say, is there a way for me to do this in a way that feels genuine to me and is worthwhile? And I point this podcast many times, the Charisma Quotient. One of my favorite podcasts, Kimmy Seltzer, she's an absolute amazing podcaster. She does a great show. One of the things that's powerful for her is to be associated with other coaches. So there's an authority raise that happens once a week. She does a debate, and that's what I'm going to call it. It's like they pick a topic and the two coaches talk about it from their perspectives. She's kept tight control over it, that other coach, even though they might be a competing style coach or they're selling them something else, they're selling their coaching services and she's selling coaching services. They could be competing, at least competing for dollars if not for the particular type of coaching. Right? They're not, because they're sitting there debating a topic, talking about something that's of value, something that's of interest to her community. And she keeps Tight control over that. And the way she builds that episode is brilliant. So definitely go and listen to that when she's got a guest on. Listen to those types of episodes. But that might be the way you go and approach it, where you're now getting your authority side by side with someone you need to be in the marketplace with. And it's okay if you are not presenting yourself as in full endorsement agreement because you set it up in a way that doesn't require that.

I think that's a fantastic example. I know that show, and that's a good one. People definitely should check it out. But Tracy, one of the things that I find people often say to me, especially new podcasters, when they're thinking about their topics, is how am I ever going to come up with something to talk about every week? They actually feel that that's a daunting task.

First off, I don't think you need to think it through to the, like, to the nth degree that you figure out an entire year's worth of episodes. You can, but I don't think you need to. You need to feel that it can be narrow but deep, and that's okay. Right? 3D printing, very narrow but deep. In terms of all the different things we could talk about, we could talk about filament, we could talk about metal, we could talk about software, we could talk about hardware, we could talk about teaching it. There were so many things that we could talk about in that we knew we could go for a while. I never in my wildest dreams imagined we could talk about 3D printing for 650 episodes. Like, just never thought that was going to happen. But it did because it built off of it. Because the more we did, the more people ask questions, the more things that came up for us. It feeds itself. Seriously, Tom, I don't even know. We're well over 200 episodes in future brand. I have no idea where we are with this.

Yeah, we actually pretty recently just took over 200.

Yeah, we just hit over 200 episodes. We don't repeat because I don't do that. We might repeat it, but take about a different tact on it. Take a different view on it.

I agree.

We don't really repeat our stuff. It's not redundant for us. It's new and exciting for us when we talk about it. I guarantee you we've talked about topics before, but we never talked about comparing and making a decision between topics and guests.

Sure. No, we didn't. And we didn't like, hey, we gotta have some guests. Because we need something new to talk about. We haven't really done that. But I would say this though. There are things that you and I certainly feel strongly about that we believe in that. I know we've repeated ourselves emphasizing those.

Things within an episode. Absolutely.

But within a different context usually. Or there's a good reason why it comes up again, but it's not repeating a specific topic. I agree.

Yeah. I think that, look, we have a whole training that we do that we've done it many times. I think I did it pretty recently. We just had a masterclass on it. And we'll make sure in the show notes for this episode that there's the masterclass link if you would like to take that again. But we really did a workshop for clients on topics and so I updated about once a year, maybe twice a year, where we just sit there and brainstorm and try to work through your own sticking points on brainstorming topic ideas and where do they come from and how do they do it. But we really have a process here. I think I gave. I dropped into our work chat that we have going on for everybody. I dropped in into the chat two topic ideas for coming up into April because we're that far out in our planning already for the topics that are come up. And sometimes it happens on a call with a client and I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. And I just immediately jot it down by sending it to a team member. I've like made it. I put it out there so that we all have it. And then once a month we meet and we go through and we make sure we've got our topics planned for a month ahead. The way our social media works, the way our planning for all of you is our client base works. We need to have it that we can orchestrate a really good title, make sure you're interested in it, make sure everybody knows about it. But I'd say almost all of them come from an interaction with someone who asked us a good question comes from a question that gets posed because of something we read. It's going on in the marketplace patterns that we see of things that shift, that changes all the time.

And the biggest contributor to topics recently is experiences that I have auditing existing podcasts people will who are already podcasting. And we offer a free audit of your show. So people don't always know, hey, am I doing this right? Am I getting everything I should out of the show? How do I compare to my competition in my niche? People don't often know, and we audit shows and I see some of the biggest mistakes people are making, especially rookie errors for new podcasts, things like that. Those have provided some good topics and reminders for people or for us to talk about to our community.

Well, and because I do, because I, I live in a point of curiosity all the time. When I'm doing my Binge factor episodes and I'm doing my interviews, always there, I'm asking questions of what was the biggest challenge for you? And what do other podcasters ask you about? And I'm also probing that at all times to get to great topic ideas. And I got one this week that I was interviewing a podcast manager who manages a more a meetup group, more of like a community. And she said that still the number one question she hear from people who haven't gotten started podcasting is how do I get my show up and published as a podcast? And I was like, aha. Like, syndication is like second nature to us. And my backup to that is, why should you know how to do it? But we've done a junk job. I'm trying not to swear on air here. We did a junk job of as a hosting company, all of us, if we've made it sound difficult, if we've.

Made it, if that is still difficult.

Sure, the industry as a whole, all those hosting companies, if we made it sound complicated, then we've done a bad job. And so that says we need an education piece on this, we need an episode on this. We need to really talk about this so that this isn't something that's holding you back from getting your show launched.

I think sometimes because at Potatoes we do it for you. You don't have to think about it. We think, what does it mean? Everybody knows that you have to do it. But you're right. I think it's important people know. Heck, if you want to do it yourself, by all means. But I think there's probably better things for you to do with your time, like recording another podcast episode, not worrying about the nitty gritty technical details of how to make sure it's on every app.

But my point to this is really is that if you're generating topics completely in your perspective and completely closed model, then you're not asking the right people, the people who need you next, those people who don't understand that they even need you yet, those are the people you need to be asking the questions of. And when you do that, your topics are just going to flow open for you. When you realize stuff that is second nature to you are the things that people really want to hear. That's going to open up all these topics you didn't imagine. Another one of Tom's and my favorite places to go for topics is Answer the public. Love answer the public because it presents it in such a visual way, number one. But it's like, how to do this, why I should do that, when to do this. It makes you think about the topic in a much more sense of, well.

From a lot of different perspectives too, really. It actually can be overwhelming how much information you get. But if you look, look at the way it's presented and some of the different perspectives, it helps you think about these things in a different way.

And from what I would say is a much more simplistic perspective. And that can really, by simplifying it down for yourself, breaking it into the basics, it starts to force your thinking in a different model. I think the biggest and most important part to all of this is thinking about those advantages and disadvantages to creating topics and or guests is again, making sure that they're aligned with what the audience needs, needs to hear and what they want to hear. Because a lot of times you mistake the two things, right? They think they want this, they're wrong, and they really need that. How do we bridge that gap? It doesn't come from telling them they need this. It comes from giving them what they want and then helping them see why the other option is a better path. In my example that I just gave before, if they really want to know how to get their show published, instead of me sitting back going, you don't need that. Let me teach them why they don't need that.

Sure. I think that always helps to give.

Them what they want and then show them why they don't need it. Right. That's a way to approach it, be thinking about those things. So let's talk about what happens after you hit a certain point. After that 50 episode mark, or 100 episode mark, whatever it is for you, you may feel like you need more than 50 pieces of content in that starter, or you want a bigger audience, you want to double the size of it. So maybe you want to go to 100 episodes or whatever that is, but at that point you want to start looking at your statistics, not from a discouraging way that, like, I'm not getting the downloads I want, I don't want you looking at it. It's not the scale Tom and I talk about that you're not getting on the scale every day. We want you to look at it from a trending pattern are specific type of topics coming up. If you haven't done any topic episodes, start adding them in once a month and see what happens to your numbers. Do those get double the amount of listens to the guest ones? What's going on with that? That could give you some indicators that your audience is ready for topics. If all you've been doing is guess or go the other way. If all you've been doing is topics, bring in a guest now and then see what's gonna happen and start to mix it up in that second set of 50 or second set of a hundred and really start to mix that up and start seeing as like is a patterning going on. And then when you get to another 50 or another batch of them where you feel like it's statistically significant. Right. It's really hard to tell if you only do this for one month, make changes. It's the change has a boost of its own. You need to see if it settles in and keeps going. And if every single topic episode month over month, if you did three guests and one topic and every single one has higher percentage of listens and or playthrough really matters playthrough, then we definitely want to start saying onto something. Let's see if I do this more. Let me do two a month, let me split it and see what happens. What you want to make sure is that what's not happening is that your listener growth curve. I'm going to say it's like a slight angle as it's going up and you should see small amounts of percentage of growth every single month in your listener base. And if you're not seeing that, if all of a sudden it flattens, then you have to have a mix of guests. And if that's the case, we recommend four episodes of topics and four episodes of guests. So you're actually doubling your episodes for the month, which seems like a lot of work. But you can do the topic ones could be under 10 minutes. They don't have to be super long. So you can balance it out and make it pretty easy on yourself. But if you do that now, you're keeping the best of I need the growth still. And I've got these topics that are resonating, keeping people coming and they're probably leading to clients.

Yeah, I agree with you, Tracy. The topic ones I find pretty easy to record and sitting down for a couple hours and bang out for five, six of them is pretty easy. It's the guest episodes that take more planning and really do take more time.

You can also do what we do is live stream them. So if you want to, like every Monday, get on and live stream for 10 minutes and give your topic now, you also have put it into your sort of your standard process for the week. You've put it into an expectation. So you show up, you get it done. It's all a part of the process. And you're live streaming it. So you're exposing yourself out to the LinkedIn community or wherever you're livestreaming to. Just like we are here. We're alive on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're in all those places at once. Right? And that helps us with our marketing for the week and creates these great topics and provides value to our client base. So we've managed to cover everything we need to do and still make sure we're getting our topics in.

So, Tracy, I've got a question for you. Because you listen to a huge amount of podcasts, what do you prefer listening to solo casts or guest interview episodes? Do you have a preference?

I do, actually.

I'm curious because I haven't asked you this before. I have a preference, too. I'm interested in hearing what yours is.

We.

And by the way, folks, we haven't. This is not a plant. We haven't talked about this ahead of time. I really want your candid answer.

Yeah, and this is the thing. Look, I don't want to offend anyone who's out there. I'm proud of you all for going out there and becoming podcasters. Like, it's a really hard job. But I don't like interviews as much as I like topics for two reasons. One is most people are not good interviewers. And because they're not great interviewers, the guest runs all over them and they give sound bites or the same answers. You hear everybody everywhere else and anyone who's a professional guest, you can tell, and they're just giving the same stuff everywhere. And I get really bored with that personally. Now, if it's a great interviewer and I have a few that I absolutely love and I would listen to them anywhere. Veronica Dagger, one of my favorite interviews and she's got a Women and wealth and a podcast and is just a fantastic show. But she's a Wall Street Journal interviewer journalist, she knows how to interview people and she interviewed some people who were like the hardest guests. I would have faltered and I've done over 3,000 interviews. I would have faltered with some of the guests she had on. And she pulls out a great Story like that skill. I can listen to it if it's really skill, but because of that. But too often, I hear a little bite of something you've got a perspective on and you've got an opinion on as you're setting up a question or as you're doing something. But I want more. That's the thing that I think when you start to do enough episodes and you hear people say, I'd like a topic, or I'd like to hear from you. That's why. Because you're giving them enough to intrigue them, but not enough to get them to buy from you, to get them to, like, binge every episode. So they're still picking and choosing based on the guests they like or don't like or the topics they think they like that the guest is going to cover, but they really want you. And so until you start bringing in some of those topic episodes, you don't know. But it's the number one thing I hear of someone who reaches over a hundred episodes is, I did topic episodes and all of a sudden my listening spiked. Or I did topic episodes and all of a sudden I got more clients. What the heck. Yeah, duh. Because they really wanted you.

I tell new podcasters this a lot, especially if their intent is, oh, I just want to interview people. I don't want to speak alone on the microphone. And there's a way that you can still have guest episodes, interview episodes, discussions, whatever you want to call it. And they're not all the same, by the way. Those things happen in different kinds of podcast episodes in different ways. It's not just one way to do it. But I tell them, your listeners don't just want you to be a conduit to the guest. They want to know what you think, and you need to give that to them. So you can do that within an episode if you want to, within a guest episode. But having dedicated solo cast episodes that would be shorter, narrow topics is another really good way to do that. And you're just showing an example, Tracy, or we're talking about an example of where you can actually get a boost from. That can be very helpful. And I think that's very true.

So what's yours?

Interestingly, I also really, the podcasts that I have listened to the most don't have guests. That is true. Now, similar to you, there are some really people that really do a good job interviewing others. And I'm a fan of. In terms of podcasting in general, having guest interview strategy for your podcast, it's incredibly Valuable, I think oftentimes more to you, the podcaster than to the guest, especially if you're not as skilled in an interviewer. But I like solo casts, especially somebody who is really comfortable speaking on a topic and sharing their wisdom, and especially if they do it in a way where they're telling a story. An example, a case study, something based on some reality as a means to then communicate the topic that they're trying to. And one of my favorite podcasts that I used to listen to all the time and would binge when we drive to Las Vegas. I'd load up my phone with episodes and just listen back to back, no longer exists because unfortunately, the host was taken down by the SEC and his company went out of business. But that's unfortunate. But he was really good speaker because.

He told great stories. Right. And you could understand how that concept applied to it. Look, this is why we love. We grow to love our podcast hosts. Aaron Young and I became best friends. Consider him my big brother.

Right? Oh, we're very tight with Aaron over, gosh, how many years we've known him now? Eight years or something. Wonderful. But, yeah, I remember when I listened.

To his podcast first, and it was these folksy stories that I had no concept about. Like, I didn't grow up on a farm or anything like that. And he would tell these stories about baby goats and other things, but it was the way he told a story and the lesson that you got out of that that fascinated me. And I basically wanted to be his friend and then happened to be listening at an event to this MC who told another baby goat story. And I was like, how many people there are? And I went. And this is how old it was. Went on my ipod to look at the show that had been downloaded to my ipod, where I listened to my podcast, and I was like, oh, Aaron Scott Young, it was called the Lookout back then. It's now called Unshackled Owner, but. Or Unshackled.

It's a different podcast.

Yeah, it's a different podcast now, but back then, and I was like, I walked up to him like a fan girl and said, I've been listening to your podcast, and I love this story. And it wasn't until you just told that right now that I made the connection that you're the same host that I binged on my whole drive to this event. And then we became friends, right?

Yeah. It was the beginning of a journey in business and then in friendship, and it's a wonderful thing. So talk about the power of a podcast. Folks, there's a good little story right there. And I hear stories like that from others, especially when they get out into the world. They go to events and they know you have heard I've been to events.

Where they take pictures. They were like, can I take a picture? I need to send it to a friend to say that I met you. And I was like, that's just weird. But it does happen, because your advice had a ripple of effect for them. But if you're not giving them those topics, you're not giving them your perspectives, you're not sharing those things in that process, you're also not serving your audience in a way that they need. They want both.

And then since I shared sort of my favorite type, and like I said, look, I listen to podcasts of both types, interview guest episodes and solo casts. I tend to like the solo cast better, especially when it's a good speaker and they tell a good story. But there are people that tell great stories in interviews. But I also, I think I want to share the ones that I dislike the most. And you alluded to maybe one of these things. And I'm not going to call anyone out because that's just not who I am. I don't want to trash anybody on the podcast and try to hurt anybody. But podcasts that are very formulaic and I've been a guest on some where they ask the exact same questions to every single guest, and especially the ones that are shorter, really short, like seven minutes, 10 minutes. And it's just the same, really.

It's a funnel machine, and everybody knows it.

Funnel machine. I don't think it really provides enough value. It leaves listeners wanting more. And you're really communicating as a host, if you do that kind of show, that you don't care enough to spend some time and to have a meaningful, deep conversation and to provide more value, you're basically leaning on your guest to provide all the value. And in that case, as a host, what I said earlier in this episode, you're nothing more than a conduit to the guest. And then it's kind of random for that show. Is this guest good? Have something good to say? Is this guest not. You're sort of. It's random. What you're getting value out of that show or not. Anyway, that's the kind I dislike the most. And I won't do them. I won't be a guest on them anymore.

No, I think they're disrespectful to your audience if they're not done properly. And look I've seen short shows and I get it. That's okay. If it's like I always say, marketers have the attention span of a gnat. So if you're going to do a show on marketing, don't expect them to listen for a long time. So it's okay to make it short, but maybe you want to be respectful of the guest and break it into pieces if that's what you want to do. Because you're not being respectful to your guests, getting to know them enough to be able to build a relationship with them. And that's part of the amazing part about having guest interviews is getting this beautiful network going. And if you do 7 minutes, 10 minutes, it's not enough.

No.

And so you don't get that it's just a production machine for publicity and they know it. It's just. And no relationship gets built that way. So it's also then coming through to the audience in that formulaic machine type way. And I guarantee you there's probably not a lot of binge listening going on in those shows you're picking and choosing, if you're listening at all.

Yeah. You're probably surgically looking at the topic or the guest. Which ones do I want to listen to? These other ones? Yeah. I'm not interested in, but I am.

A fan of taking them apart and using them in social media, like using short clips and doing all those things. But has build a relationship, have good, decent interview, even if some of it ends up on the cutting room floor.

Absolutely.

In the social media only pile. Right.

Part of the fun of podcasting is having that conversation. It's actually part of why I enjoy doing the podcast audits, because I get to meet so many different people, look at their podcast, learn about it, and provide them some value for free. Whether they're gonna work with us or not, I'm providing them some value for free. Hopefully that builds some credibility and either they're a good fit to work with us or they're not.

And.

But they may send someone else because, hey, you know what? Might want to talk to those folks.

So anyway, I mean, look, I love interviewing. I can say I don't like listening to them, but I love interviewing. And probably that's part of the effect of it, because I love interviewing. When the host doesn't ask the question that I want to hear the answer to, I'm more critical of it. And that's just of part. My personal listening pleasure has nothing to do with highly value guest interviews for all of you out there. This Is a podcast builder for you guest topic, maybe both. Depends on where you are in your podcasting journey. But think them through. And think through what's right for you, what's right for your audience, and what's right for the stage of your podcast at this moment in time.

Boy, that last part I always want to put a little emphasis on. Tracy. At this moment in time, everybody. Ding, ding, ding. Seriously, Listen, you can make a different choice tomorrow because you really can pivot. It may work for you for a time, and then either if you're not feeling it, you need to change it up to keep it interesting and fun for you, or you're responding to what those analytics you're tracking. Like Tracy said, don't stand on the scale every day, but month over month or quarter after quarter. And hey, and flatlining a little bit. Look, you absolutely can pivot. And gosh, we've each done that multiple times on our shows, Tracy. And don't be afraid to do that. So it's just.

And I've had recently interviewed a few people who pivoted and then pivoted right back. Cause it wasn't working for em. And they realized relatively quickly within a couple of months it wasn't for them. And it wasn't even so much that it wasn't working out. It just didn't fit their style and they lost their excitement for their podcast. You can always make a different choice. Your audience is gonna come along with you. Don't worry about that.

Absolutely. All right, Tracy. I think that's a great place to wrap this one up. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with hopefully another engaging topic for you.

Oh, no, Hope we're gonna have it right. Cause we got this topic stuffed down.

You're right. I really don't know why I said hope. Cause I don't believe in hope in these situations. I really don't. That's always my mantra. Hope is not a strategy. We definitely are more strategic in this.

So we will have another great topic.

For you next time. We will have another great topic for you. All right. Until then, thanks so much for listening, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazzard on feed.

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