OUR 101 Questions

At the nexus how busy you are and how much content you are putting out is a difficult space where if anything happens your content will begin to take a dip. But with the adjustment to the platform that encourages more frequent content on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, you can’t really afford to miss a scheduled day of your podcast. In other words, your podcast workload is too high. Unfortunately, we have seen as much as a 200 rank drop in podcasts that miss an episode without educating their audience beforehand. That being said, there are a number of ways to release content without adding to all the things that you have to do, allowing you more bandwidth. 

Before we go into that, however, let’s talk about a media bank really quickly. A media bank is a collection of episodes that you keep in your back pocket in case you cannot post. These episodes can be stock episodes that can be inserted anywhere, or they can be a number of episodes that after scheduled ahead of time.

Back in the day, you used to have a minimum episode requirement to post your podcast to Spotify or iTunes aka Apple podcasts of the time. We used that time it took to make that stock minimum to also create a buffer, record a number of episodes beforehand, and keep our content scheduled out a month in advance. This lessened the stress on our hosts and content strategists and gives us a little leeway. Because of how effective this strategy is, we keep a running update for all our clients’ media bank, making sure we maintain at least 3 weeks of content made and prepped ahead of time. While this may seem like a natural thing, obvious to anyone who makes content for a living, but I cannot explain just how much this strategy has helped keep clients afloat with everything going on in the world.

Content Entropy, do more with less

One major factor that causes podcasts to not get posts, and podfade to take over, is the time it takes to make a podcast. When starting your show, people tend to overcommit, they get excited about the content they are creating and tend to think 45min could be better than a 25min show. While long-form and mid-form content is amazing and definitely has its place, but sometimes less is more. Moreover, time is can always be added, it’s much harder to cut contact down the road. However, if you have already started your podcast and you are just too busy to have time there are a couple of things that you can do. 

Step 1. The Trailer

The first is to launch a podcast trailer and announce a new season. The trailer is important because it acts as a bookmark when the content is changing and helps orient your audience base. This also gives you a chance to reframe the show, setting up a new expectation for the content that you will be providing. With this new season announce a time change and frequency adjustment. Inform your audience that you will be releasing more content and giving them a 'never before seen' glimpse into your arena of expertise. This transition will be the stepping stone to your new podcast workload which, if done correctly, will be significantly less. 

Step 2. The New Structure

Once the trailer is completed, the new method of distribution should follow. For the sake of the example, I will use the example of a 45min interview show that takes place once a week. From this set podcast frequency and duration we will heretofore divide and reorganize your podcast content.

From the original podcast episode, instruct your production team to divide your interview into 3 main sections. Each section should circle around 1 main idea or theme. Each should be lead by you or your interviewee and should transition fairly easily. Don't worry about context, focus them more on the center of the content and not the transitions themselves. Each theme should be broken up with a new intro and outro, as well as background music and potentially a quick narration from the production team member.

Here is an example of what this could sound like: *Theme Music* "this week on [Show Title] [Host] and [Guest] discuss exactly why young entrepreneurs miss the mark on marketing on Facebook" *transition sound* *podcast start*

Each episode combined should not equal the full duration of the original, this would defeat the purpose. Instead, allow the production team to take leeway with the podcast episode around its own theme. Then leave the main episode something that when the audience listens to it. In other words, something that helps them connect all the dots with some new content. This is the magic of this breakdown.

Step. 3 Adjusting Your Outreach

Decreasing your content after adjustment is also very important. Now that you have shifted from the model of 1 to distribution of 4, there are some other things that also should be adjusted. The least of which isn't your podcast marketing.

Once you have new content structure, share-ables, ad campaigns, and interview post-outreach should also shift. Each thematic episode should have's it's own platform specific ad. Instagram and Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn, each should have their own media and now their workload is going to increase.

Because of this shift of work, we recommend drip campaigns and influencer-centric marketing. Instead of telling a potential guest that you will be spending 1 episode or week on their content, you can now inform them that you will be focussing on their episode for twice as long and for 4 times as many episodes. Use this to capitalize on trying to capture sections of their audience and retarget them accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Podcasting takes a lot of time and effort, or it should if you are doing it correctly. A podcast is one of those things where you tend to get out of it when you put in. However, sometimes what you want to put in and what is actually feasible are two different things.

This methodology of decreasing podcast workload can be extremely beneficial to companies and other organizations that are strapped for time and money but don't always prove useful to the small-time podcaster. Yet, getting an editing team and having a podcasting agency at you back could potentially be worth investing in. While we have some reservations when it comes to getting a podcast agency, it is something worth looking into.