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Republish your “Golden Oldies”

I often get asked how you take breaks as a podcaster when you’ve committed to a weekly schedule.

I have two answers.

If you are in your early days or your podcast is a hobby, just take a break. The world won’t end.

But if your podcast is a part of a business taking a week off is more problematic because of how it will impact your earnings.

And doing two weeks of work in one week isn’t really taking time off. Yes you get the time away from work but the amount of work you’ve done is still the same. So what to do?

Republish an episode from your back catalog.

How To Take a Comfortable Break From Podcasting

I talked previously in a newsletter about the 4 levels of listeners. And how most of your audience won’t listen to all of your episodes. Only your biggest fans will. That gives you a great opportunity to share some of the “golden oldies” from your podcast to new fans who are only listening to current episodes.

Find an episode that either you loved or was popular, record a fresh introduction talking about why you chose that episode, and you can publish it on your feed.

You can record over old ads with your news ads, and you’ve got a “new” episode ready to go.

It will be new to 80% of your audience and the 20% who have listened to every episode will quite happily relisten to an episode, and respect the fact you’re taking time off.

Rules for Republishing Episodes

There are a couple of rules I have in place for doing this.

Rule 1) Have at least 200 episodes

You can’t get away with sharing a “golden oldie” if it came out three months ago… Similarly, if you only have 30 episodes out, then a higher percentage of your audience will have listened to all the episodes.

I looked for around 200+ episodes before suggesting this tactic. If you release weekly, that’s about 4 years of content, and it's a big enough catalog for you to pick the gems from.

This is an interesting aside for people who are a long way from 200 episodes. When I see this tactic being used in the wild, no one shares an episode from their first 50 - sometimes not even their first 100 - so keep at it. Your best material is yet to come.

Rule 2) Be honest about why you’re doing it

Humans are natural lie detectors, if you lie about why you’re using this tactic, people will know. So be honest with your audience. Tell them If you’re going on holiday, if you’re sick, if your mental health needs some work, or if you simply need a break. Your audience respects you and doesn’t look to you to be a superhero.

Rule 3) Don’t overdo it

Take a few weeks off and enjoy the freedom from a weekly commitment. But don’t just republish for months on end. This is a great tactic to allow you to comfortably take a break, but you can’t stop your podcast for six months and replay the same back catalog over and over.

How To Present Your Republished Episode

You’re not trying to trick people here. So you don’t have to try and slide an old episode under the radar and hope no one notices.

Depending on how you write your episode titles, you can add an addition to the older episode title like:

• Replay
• Golden oldie
• From the vault
• (originally Ep.93)
• Fifth creative title idea because I can only think of four, but five looks better

And then a quick addition explaining it's an older episode at the top of your episode description, and you’re off to the races.

Hope this helps you take a break from your podcast if you need one.
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See you next week,

​Kieran MacRae​

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