Reenergize Your Episode Content | New Year Reset Series [Ep. 129]

 
 

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Here’s what to expect from this episode:

Welcome to the third episode of our New Year Reset series! In this series, we're looking at each piece of your podcast and determining how you can hit the reset button, tweak things for improvement, and head into the new year with a sense of renewed energy.

Today, we're diving into your episode content. I want you to consider how you feel about your content and what changes you may want to make, if any, to breathe new life into your podcast and get you fired up about your show in the new year.

I'm sharing the different areas of your podcast episode content to consider switching up, including your intro and outro, balancing guest and solo episodes, and creating your guest wishlist. And I'm even walking you through a mini-audit of your solo episode content.

In the first episode of this series (127), we reflected on your podcast progress and visualized your next steps. In the second episode (128), we reimagined your podcast routines using the "decide once" principle. So be sure to go back and listen if you haven't already!

Stay tuned for next week's episode, 130, where we'll cover your audience engagement.

Topics covered:

  • Starting with the basics: your intro, outro, and music

  • Balancing your guest and solo episodes

  • Creating a guest wishlist (and improving guest episodes)

  • Auditing your solo episode content

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

favorite podcasting resources:

  • Sara Whittaker 0:01

    Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners, and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whitaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager. And I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. All right, we are in the third episode of our new year reset series. In this series, we're looking at each piece of your podcast and determining how we can hit the reset button tweak things for improvement and head into the new year with a sense of renewed energy. In the first episode of this series, we reflected on our podcast progress and visualized our next steps. In the second episode, we reimagined our podcast routines using the decide once principle, those were episodes 126 and 127. In case you haven't already listened to them. Today, we are going to be diving into your episode content, I want you to consider how you're feeling about your content, and what changes you may want to make, if any, to really breathe some new life into your podcast and get you fired up about your show. So when it comes to re energizing our content, let's start with the basics. One really simple way that you could re energize your podcast content is to update your intro and outro. So if you have a formal intro and outro for your show, that's the first thing that people hear in the beginning of your episode usually has some music behind it. Same thing with the outro. Maybe you've had one for a while now. And maybe it's the same one that you had when you first launched your podcast. And now you're like two or three years into your podcast and you're realizing, oh, like maybe my messaging has changed a little bit. Or my offers have changed a lot of times in an outro. Especially, you can do this in your intro as well. But definitely in your outro you typically want to have some sort of CTA at the end. And maybe right now, your only CTA is to write a review for their podcast? Well, I think that there are some stronger CTAs that you could come up with, that would lead people maybe to your email list or to one of your paid offers that you could include in your outro. And sometimes it's just a nice to, to just give things a little makeover and choose some new music. Maybe your intro is really long, I really think that an intro shouldn't be any more than like 30 to 45 seconds. So if you're working with like a two minute intro, maybe it's time to tighten that up, shorten it and rerecord something new that's going to make you feel this new sense of energy around your podcast. Okay, next, I want to I want you to think about your actual episodes. If you do a mix of solo and guest episodes, are you happy with the balance that you have right now meaning Have you always wanted to incorporate more guests episodes than you currently have? Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe you've become kind of overloaded on guests, and you're realizing that you need more solo episodes. So doesn't have to be anything formal, just kind of make that mental note to yourself. Oh, I had told myself I was going to have one guests a month and I'm only having one guest like every three months, I really need to think about how I can fix that and put more emphasis on guest episodes. Or again, maybe it's the opposite. You maybe batched a bunch of guest episodes, that happens really easily sometimes. And you're realizing that you haven't been doing many solo episodes, and you really want to have that solo aspect to your podcast, too. Now is a really good time to create a 2024 guest wishlist if you haven't done that already. Who would be on that list for you? Who would really light you up if they said yes to coming on your show. I've talked to a lot of you in the past few months who have pitch some amazing guests, specifically people who are some big names in your niche. Lots of authors, for example. So I want all of you to take their advice. Don't limit yourself. Think about your audience, who would they love to hear from? Who would you love to talk to who would be able to add a lot of value, and maybe they are kind of a bigger name, but you would be surprised who would be more than happy to come and talk with you on your podcast. And just uh, just to kind of backtrack to what I was talking about a minute ago. Just some more thoughts on guest episodes in general. Usually, not always, but usually, guest episodes are longer than solo episodes. So when it comes to the actual content of these guests episodes, ask yourself, is there anything that you can do to tighten up these episodes, because these tend to be the episodes that are often some of your best episodes. But they also tend to go on and on and on and on. And what happens when we go on and on and on and on, people drop off before the end of the episode. So think about moving forward, maybe you want to structure your guests episodes a little bit differently. To tighten things up. One big change that I have made personally, this year is to not ask the guest at the beginning of our interview, to tell us about themselves. So back when I first started my podcast, that used to be the first question I would ask people and I hear this all the time on podcasts, because it just seems like the natural thing to do is to you know, welcome the guest on and say, let's start off with you telling us a little bit about yourself or a little bit about your background in X, Y, and Z. What led you to where you are today, something along those lines. We hear this all the time in podcast episodes. But do you know what I found myself doing as a listener, I found myself fast forwarding through that part when I was a listener on other podcasts because usually guests are coming on to be a guest expert in some way, or share their story about a specific topic. And I want to get to that I want to get to the meat of the episode. I don't need to sit and listen to the guest. Tell me about the million things that happen to them growing up and how it led them to where they are today. Obviously, there's some episodes where that would make sense, but in most it doesn't. And so I realized, I don't want to listen to this as a listener, why am I asking my guests this? So now when I do guest episodes, we just jump right into the content. And that has been a really simple tweak that I've made. And it's made a really big difference. And I even talked about this on my Instagram once I had an Instagram post about this. And it got so many comments of you all saying yes, I love when people just jump right in. And they skip that question because you're going to read their bio, or their bio is going to be in their shownotes. You don't need to sit and talk on and on and on about their background. Okay, so think about how that applies to you. And your guests episodes, is there anything that you can do to kind of change the structure of those episodes. And when you look at the balance of like that ratio of guests and solo episodes, if you are a business owner using your podcast as a business tool to lead to email list growth and sales, then I would really, really recommend that you have more solo episodes than you do guest episodes. You want to establish yourself as the authority figure as the host of your podcast. And it's much harder to do that in a guest episode, unless you're doing some sort of testimonial style episode. But if you're having a guest expert, come on who's doing the teaching, then you are kind of taking the backseat as that authority figure. And there's space for that. I think that that's important. I think that guests do a great job of filling the gaps that we can't fill. And I think that guest episodes are great, I love them. But they shouldn't be the bulk of your show. If you are trying to convert people, convert your listeners, from listener to buyer, or from listener to email subscriber. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about your solo episode content. We're gonna do a super quick little mini audit here. Number one length, do your solos feel long? Something common that I see especially especially in the education space because we are natural born teachers we want to teach. That's what we do. I have done this so many times myself, I see my clients do it, I see so many podcasters in the education space doing this is that we often will create an episode on a topic that really could be broken up into multiple episodes. Like in one episode, there's six to 10 talking points, or six to 10 things that you want to cover in that episode. And that becomes really long really, really quickly. And it really becomes a lot of information for people. So think about how you might be able, if you haven't done this already to break your solo episodes down to be a little bit more bite sized, so that they are a little bit more consumable for your listeners. And like I said, I'm guilty of this all the time. Sometimes I finished a solo episode. It's like 30 minutes and I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's actually it's kind of long for a solo episode. I really like to try and stay under 20 minutes for a solo episode. Okay, so consider your length number two,

    Sara Whittaker 9:57

    consider do your episodes alone. Hang with your business goals? In other words, are you centering your episodes around topics of your freebies of your paid resources or services? Are you setting up your content in a way that is funneling your listeners into that thing that you want them to buy or subscribe to? Or are you kind of just throwing content out there without intentionality behind it, I could do an entire do multiple episodes just on this topic. And shameless plug, I go into how to do this, how to really align your episode content to your offers and my audio course podcasts like you mean it. So if this is something that you struggle with, I would definitely go and check that out. But the big point is that we really want to be intentional about the content that we are centering our episodes around the topics that we're centering our episodes around to make sure that they are organically making sense with what we're promoting that they are connected in some way. All right. So let's recap so far, for this mini audit of our solo episodes, we're looking at length, we're looking at whether or not our episodes are aligning with what we're promoting. Number three, does your content feel fun for you right now? Or are you feeling kind of blah about it? Are you in that phase of your podcasting journey that we all hit at one point or another, when you're just kind of like, Look, I just like, is used to feel fun, I kind of feel like I don't even really want to go record an episode. I know, for me, I love switching things up from time to time just to have a change just to have that little new spark of energy. It's just like when you get that urge to rearrange your furniture in a room in your house, or, you know, during the different seasons of the year you take down decorations and put up new ones, it feels good, it brings a completely new energy to your house. So if you are feeling that need to re energize things, when it comes to your episode content, take some time to brainstorm how you could do this. And this is not black or white, I cannot sit here and tell you exactly what this would look like for you. So I really encourage you to sit on this and think about how can you make your content feel more fun for you. Some examples of this would be creating a new segment for your show. Maybe you're going to have a question that you pose to your audience on social media, and then you're going to share those results. At the beginning or at the end of every single episode. Maybe in your episodes, you're going to share what you're reading or listening to. Maybe you're going to share your top three favorites of the week, maybe you'll feature a listener question at the end of every episode, maybe we'll highlight a TPT resource at the end of each episode. Maybe you start sprinkling in some bonus episodes here and there. You could invite listeners on or start highlighting your listeners in some new way you could do a monthly giveaway, you could completely change how you structure your episodes. I mean, you can truly do anything you want. There's so many ways that you could bring some new energy into your episode content. And this is really the fun part. And I think we forget that sometimes you aren't locked into anything that you do with your podcast, you can try something new. And if it doesn't work or doesn't feel good, you don't have to continue with it. You can stop it at any time. So think what is something new that you could try with your podcast content in the new year? Okay, so again, that little mini audit of your solo episode content is about your length of your episodes. Whether or not your episodes align with your business goals or what you're selling. Whether or not your content feels good for you. And if not how you could really change things up so that it does feel fun for you. Consider what we've talked about today. I want you after listening to brainstorm one thing, just start with one thing. Maybe it's something that we talked about today, or maybe something that I mentioned today sparked a new idea in you. But what is one thing that you could try that would bring some new energy to your podcast content. During this reset series, I am ending all of the episodes by referring you back to a few episodes that you might want to revisit or listen to for the first time that are related to today's topic. So some episodes that you might find helpful after listening to this episode are Episode 94, which was a guest episode with Christina Welty, where we talked about whether or not it's possible to give away too much on your podcast. So we talked a lot about actual episode content. Episode 92 Why your podcast needs a content pillar strategy, Episode 29. I talked with Deanna Pittenger about repurposing your podcast content on YouTube. Maybe that's something if you've been wanting to try video, that might be a good episode for you to refer back to Episode 22 proactive podcast planning summer content addition, linking this episode because if you've been around for a while, you've probably heard me talk about how in the education space, summer tends to be a really hot time for your podcast, it's a great time to try new things. Try bonus episodes, things like that. So it's never too early to start brainstorming what you want to do for your podcast when it comes to your summer content. Those episodes will all be linked in the episode description. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that you are enjoying this series so far. If you are I would love for you to head to Apple podcasts and write me a review. If you're not sure what to write in your review. You can use the content from this episode and respond to me in your review by telling me one thing new that you are going to try with your podcast. I'll see you here next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.

More about Podcasting for Educators:

Podcasting for Educators is the podcast for TpT authors and other online educators. It's a show that will help you get your podcast in front of those who need it most - teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, SLPs, parents, and more! Each week, Sara Whittaker and her guests will share top tips and actionable strategies that you will need in order to launch, manage, and grow your podcast. You’ll learn how to leverage your show to build long-lasting relationships with your audience and promote your TpT resources, courses, and memberships, all while providing valuable and accessible content!

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Sara Whittaker