Your Podcast Episode Deserves More Than One Week of Promotion

You recorded the episode, you sent an email, you maybe promoted it on Instagram a couple of times. Done. On to the next one. But that episode you just moved past? It's still a perfectly good sales asset sitting in your Google Drive doing nothing.

For most podcasters, episodes aren't tied to a date or a news cycle. They're evergreen. And yet we treat them like they expire after release week. I took four months off the podcast and still converted leads from episodes that were six to eight months old, because those episodes were built to keep working long after they went live.

In this episode of The More Profitable Podcast, I'm walking through the production assets that give your episodes a longer shelf life, how to repurpose podcast episodes across social media, email sequences, and guest appearances, and why the fear of someone catching you sharing something twice is costing you reach you've already earned.

2:41 - The assets we build at production and why you might not be creating all of them yet

3:30 - How SEO at production drives leads months after an episode releases

5:24 - Why branded language in your podcast title hurts discoverability

6:39 - Marketing your episodes through social media, email, stages, and other people's podcasts

8:35 - How we strategically tie episodes to guest appearances and pitches

9:42 - Putting podcast episodes in your welcome sequence to train future clients

10:55 - The production assets that power long-term social sharing

12:11 - Why you need to share more than just this week's episode

16:58 - Repetition builds your brand and your audience isn't tracking what you post

Mentioned In Your Podcast Episode Deserves More Than One Week of Promotion

How Valerie McDonnell Launched Her Podcast With the Launch Accelerator

Podcast Housekeeping Series

Podcast Production with Uncommonly More

The Podcast Newsroom

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Transcript

You recorded the episode, you sent an email, you maybe promoted it on social a couple of times. That's done, right? It's on to the next. Not necessarily.

I want to talk about how we are leaving money on the table by leaving assets in folders. Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey, and this is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast.

My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team, because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it. Here's the deal.

Let's just right from the top. Here's the deal. You, like most podcasters, like even me sometimes, are leaving a lot of value on the table when you build assets but you don't promote them.

And so I want us to talk through what the assets are that we're actually building out and how we can be reusing them for much, much longer. Because for most of us, our episodes aren't tied to a specific date or a specific news, and yet we're almost treating them like breaking news where there's new information and new facts a week later. And so it's not worth sharing the thing we shared last week, which is so untrue.

It is an absolute fallacy. And so today we're going to take this fallacy head on and we're going to make some adjustments to how we're running things. All right.

Before we dig in a little bit of housekeeping, we do have one spot available for podcast production. So if you are an existing show and you are looking to get better traction with your episodes by building real sales assets, let's talk about what production can look like for you. If you want to learn more, you can do it at uncommonlymore.com/podcastproduction.

But honestly, today's conversation is a really good doorway in because one of the places we're going to start is sort of the framework, right? What assets are we actually creating so that we can use them as easily as possible when it comes to sharing them over the long run? Again, if you want to have a conversation about what production looks like for you, head over to uncommonlymore.com/podcastproduction, and you can book a call with me now, really. All right. I'll see you there.

I want to dig in by starting with the assets. Now, full disclosure, these are the assets we build for our clients. So if you're not currently working with a production partner, you may not be creating all of these things.

And therefore, you may not have them all right now. What I want you to be looking at as we move through this is where could some of these assets make things easier for you in the long run by creating them at production? Because ultimately, that's where this starts. And that's what I want to make really clear up front is the long tail lifespan of your podcast comes down to two things.

And both of those things are production issues. And so the first of them is your SEO. Is it optimized for search? I did an episode earlier this year where I talked about taking four months off the podcast and still generating leads.

And those leads came in via the podcast and generally from episodes that were six to eight months old. Let me say that again. I had leads that I converted while not releasing any fresh episode content, while not sending any emails, while not posting anything on social media, because I have assets built to drive traffic to me via search.

And those assets are my podcast episodes. And so that's the first sort of tentacle here is the SEO component. And that is done at production, right? So the episode itself is our anchor.

And that is the first tail of sort of our long, long life of discovery for the podcast. Now, when I think about search, I most often am thinking about search from like a website, like good old fashioned Google, right? Like I'm looking for, I'm looking at it from that primarily, but not exclusively. Because the other side of this, the other component of search is also the podcast platforms.

And so making sure that those are also set up for you to have some of that long tail discovery, that's going to mean doing things like your description, and your show title, and your name as the host, all of those need to be optimized for discovery, you need to be using the words, not that make you feel cool and official. But the words your clients are actually using to look for someone like you. A great example of this is I saw someone recently talking about a podcast title, and I'm not going to say what it was.

But the podcast title was really cool. And it used some of their specific language, some of their unique identifiers for the way they approach their work. And that's great.

After people know you and know what those things are. But that's going to hurt you from a discovery standpoint, because you're really speaking to people who already know who you are, who are already interested. Maybe they heard you on stage somewhere, or they heard you on somebody else's podcast, or they're already on your email list.

But that's going to make it difficult for you to find new leads and new people. And so instead, I'd recommend evolving that so that that unique branded language is in your episodes is in your content, you're training your listeners around what those things are and what they mean. Absolutely.

But I wouldn't be using those in your title, I wouldn't be using those in your primary description, without also pairing them with words that your prospective clients that those people who don't know you yet are using to describe that problem. So the episode itself, and the SEO and the search of it all is the one leg. The other leg is marketing the actual episodes.

And that comes down to what are the other assets being created. So we've got the episode itself. And that's giving us our first sort of stretch, our first sort of avenue towards long term discoverability.

The other component, like I said, is marketing. And so that's social media, that's your email lists, that's you being on other people's podcasts, that's you showing up on stages at events, or as part of virtual events. That's you going out and doing that visibility work, right? So how can we be using some of these other assets to create those things? Well, first and foremost, when we're talking about showing up on other people's podcasts, when we're talking about showing up on stage, I'm always, always before I go to the event, when I am planning my talk, when I am planning my interview, when I pitch to be on other people's podcasts, my pitches all tie back to stuff on my show.

So that I'm then able to say, I actually did a whole episode on this, if you want to check it out after this conversation, because there's no way we could dig into everything we want to talk about in this call, at any sort of depth. So if you want to learn more about this thing I'm talking about right now, I'll make sure hostname has the link so we can include it in the show notes. And so now we're giving them specific episodes to go listen to.

And I can do that because I thought about it ahead of time. And because at production, I am building episodes that have a lifespan that allows me to keep mentioning them. And so that's something that we're not necessarily creating from production point, but we are thinking about strategically.

If you heard the amount of times in planning calls with our production clients that I say something like, this will actually be a great episode to go on an email sequence. In fact, we just did a planning session with a client. And we were like, strategically tying episodes to pitches.

So we knew she was going to be on a certain show and what they were going to talk about. And we created an episode in her content plan that compliments that appearance that she has. She's already recorded it, but it's set to release around the same time.

And so we built complimentary content. And other ways we've done this is a client knows they're going to be on somebody else's podcast. And we go, cool, what does it look like for those two episodes to work together? So that both shows can drive traffic to the other show.

So that we're promoting two really great podcasts in putting out this episode. So that's where we're thinking about these things as assets from the beginning so that we can connect these dots. The other component of this is email.

When you're thinking about building episodes that train people to be your best clients, put those in your welcome sequence. When you've got episodes about your experience going, you know, struggling with visibility, I'm just making stuff up as I go here. But if you've got an episode where you're talking about struggling with visibility, and you are somebody who talks a lot about visibility with your clients, put that in a welcome sequence, tell the story in the email, and then give them an opportunity to go listen to it.

This is how we are driving traffic to the podcast in really intentional ways, because we've built assets that we can be pointing back to again and again. So that's sort of the mentioned side of things. Let's get back to the asset side of things, right? The things we're creating at less of a strategy and planning place, but more in our actual production cycle.

And we create a lot of assets, and I think every day about creating even more, because I want our clients to really easily be sharing this over the lifespan. And so we create audiograms and or short-form videos, depending on the client. We create a episode-specific graphic.

We create a quote graphic. And then, of course, we've got those show notes and the transcript that go along with our actual episode itself, our anchor, right? And so that helps us on the SEO side. But the audiogram, the graphic, the quote card, those kind of things, those are what's going to help us on the social media side of things.

And actually, if you heard my conversation last week with Valerie McDonald, who is a production client of ours and who started in our podcast Launch Accelerator, one of the things she was kind of surprised by was the social stuff, because social media is not her favorite. And so now she has this foundation of assets that she can be sharing, so she knows there are three posts a week here with the episode graphic, the quote graphic, and the audiogram. That's three posts that she can be sharing without too much difficulty.

Here's where I want you to think about this a little differently, though, because those three assets can feel like, okay, cool, that's the week the episode releases. That doesn't help me long term. And I'd argue that it actually does, because when we start sharing more than this week's episode, week to week, we don't have as many spots to be sharing this week's episode when we're talking about our overall content calendar.

And so those three assets now come out over a couple of weeks. And then we have the opportunity to start thinking about how do we stack them differently. I think one of the mistakes we make most often as business owners is we spend too much time worrying about someone noticing us reusing something.

When in reality, especially, especially, especially as the algorithm operates these days when it comes to social media, and it's so much less about who you're following and so much more about the topic and the content itself, your audience is not seeing everything you put out. You're lucky if they're seeing 50% of what you put out. And so don't be afraid to re-release the same things packaged differently.

For example, we can put an audiogram up as a reel on Instagram. We could also put it in our stories. We can also take that same short form video and put it in a carousel with the episode graphic and the quote card so that we've got all three of those assets together working to create a fourth piece of content.

Bonus points! The way Instagram works is they're going to share every bit of that carousel in the news feed, the timeline, so that you have three opportunities for that post to be seen. And that happens because these assets are not created when we start thinking about social, but are created right at production. That's huge because that means when you go to share, it's already there.

And I want to sort of take us back to something I sort of flew by, which is the idea that you might be sharing more than this week's episode this week. One of the things I want to really encourage you to do, especially for my friends who like threads as much as I do, especially for my friends who like Pinterest, if you're using those tools, you need to be sharing more than just what's happening right now. Sometimes that can mean responding to comments and sharing something.

I do this a ton. I have a series of great episodes, a bunch of great episodes about launching. That's sort of our primary sales focus right now, right, is our launch accelerator and our production services.

Those are the only two things we're really forward-facing selling right now, in an additional bit of transparency there. And so when I see somebody asking a launch question, I'll go in and I'll answer it and I'll say, hey, I talked more about this in this episode, if it's helpful. I'm still answering the question there, but I'm giving them a road out.

And I can see the spike that happens in downloads every time I do this. And so one of the things I've been doing is making an effort to do that more often. These are almost never episodes that have come out recently.

They're generally older episodes. Sometimes they're more recent episodes. I think the most recent one that I've been doing, not in significant amounts, is the Do You Need Video episode.

And that's because, guess what, it's a hot topic, especially as Apple Podcasts has rolled out videos, etc, etc. I've been talking a lot about video with our production clients. And so it's a really easy one for me to pop out there and put in a reply.

I also know that these are conversations I'm having a lot. And so when I go to plan my social media, I'm going to be well served by making sure I'm talking about those things, even if I didn't talk about them on the podcast this week. So I want to encourage you, as your sort of action for this episode, I want to encourage you to share the episode you released this week.

But also find somewhere in your content calendar to share in some way an episode you've done recently, or an episode from deep in the archive that you know gets a lot of traction that people ask you about, or response to something you've been talking about with clients all week. This is a huge one, especially for things like threads, to just say or popping into your Instagram stories to just say, this has come up on every call this week. So let me address the class.

Insert promo for episode, here's a link to the episode. Easy breezy, find opportunities to do that. And guess what, when you start looking for them, you will find them again and again and again.

All right. I understand that there's always this objection to repetition. But repetition is how you build a brand.

Repetition is how you build a relationship with your audience that has them parroting you back to you. You do not need something different for every piece, because almost no one and frankly, I'm only saying almost because I don't want to speak in absolute absolutes. But almost no one is seeing everything you're doing.

The only person aware of everything you post is you and whoever may be helping you with posting. But I'd be willing to bet even they don't know everything that's going out. So let go of this idea that someone's going to catch you leveraging the assets you've intentionally built.

I don't know about you, but do you remember anything anybody posted a month ago? Six months ago? I don't. I don't even remember what I posted a month ago, much less six months ago. And so pull up these things that have done well and do them again.

Repurpose some of your best of episodes from the quarter and put a carousel together of audiograms from that episode. One of my favorite ways to do this is like at the end of the year, as sort of a like top downloaded episodes from this year and sometimes it'll be audiograms and sometimes it'll be the episode graphics or you could do like a quarterly recap of like hot takes I had on the podcast and it's just quote graphics from your episodes those quarter. There are a lot of ways to do this, but you have to let go of the fear that someone's going to catch you using something again.

No one remembers. And when you are consistent with content, guess what? There's lots of stuff that has come out between then and now. And because you have well-branded graphics and a cohesive visual look anyways, it should all look like it goes together anyways.

Give yourself permission to leverage the assets you are working so hard to build. Because right now you're working a lot harder than you need to. Because you have this whole library of assets that you could be leveraging.

Because I want you to notice that at no point today did I talk about one of my favorite ways to get more life out of these assets and that's repurposing. Re-releasing. Sharing episodes more than once.

We're coming up hot and fast on August which means guess what? We will once again be releasing the podcast housekeeping series every year. It does a little bit better than it did the year before. And I am I think pretty transparent about the fact that those are just re-released.

We do it every year. Start thinking about this as a way you better serve your community. Instead of judging yourself for never doing enough.

Because we are almost always holding ourselves to a much higher bar than we need to be. I find that most of the people I work with tend to hold it just above where they can reach. Right? We tend to hold ourselves to almost superhuman standards that no one else is going to.

So let's let let's let that go in pursuit of actually serving the people who need to hear from us. Because that whole library of content, all of those assets you've built over the years, they're not doing you any good in the depths of your Google Drive account. All right? I really appreciate you taking the time to sit with me today.

I want to really encourage you to take me up on my challenge. Share some content from an old episode. Share it on socials.

Mention it in a podcast interview. Include it in an email sequence. But find a way to reuse, to re-promote, to re-share some of the incredible value you've already created.

And remember, if you want somebody helping you build assets like these so that you have assets worth pointing back to time and time again, or ways you can be better integrating your content into your email list, or your social media strategy, we do have room for a production client and I would love it to be filled by you. Head on over to uncommonlymore.com/podcastproduction, submit the form, book a time to talk to me, and we will get you on the calendar. I can't wait to chat.

See you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes.

So commit to doing something from today's episode. Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about podcast strategy intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team.

All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com. And if you haven't yet signed up for the podcast newsroom, I want to remind you that is a great next step. If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there, get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. And the last favor I will ask because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating or review for this show.

If you go to ratethispodcast.com/more, that's the easiest way to do it. But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you.

So this is just the start of the conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.