Hey, everyone. I'm Mike Dell, VP of customer
relations here at Blueberry.
And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist.
With the holidays approaching, we're talking about something
every creator faces at some point, podcast burnout.
You need to step back, recharge, and remember
why you started your podcast in the first
place.
Exactly.
Staying consistent doesn't mean pushing yourself to exhaustion.
It means finding a balance that keeps you
motivated and creative for, for the long haul.
You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike
Dell, Dave Clements, and Mackenzie Bennett from the
Blueberry team,
bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips
and tricks to help you start, grow, and
thrive through podcasting
with all the support of your team here
at Blueberry Podcasting.
Welcome. Let's dive in.
Yeah. This, this episode kinda hits me,
a little bit because I'm participating in NAPOD
promo, which is National Podcast Posting Month, and
I've been doing a daily show the whole
month.
And we're, what, eight nineteen days in? Yeah.
We are.
So I can I can appreciate burnout?
I don't know how these people do the
daily shows that they do for as long
as they do. But,
anyway Specifically, the people that do them by
themselves. You know? If you got a team,
it's easier, but it's still not easy to
do an everyday one.
You know, it's it's easy to just
start dreading
the recording and the editing and the publishing
and the show notes and and everything like
that, or you're just you're stuck and you're
like, I have nothing else in my brain
for this for this show. What do I
do? That does happen for sure. You know,
I get that,
you know, doing this this thirty days in
a row daily show.
No. It's, like, kinda hard to come up
with topics. Now I, ahead of time, went
through, and I mapped out all the topics
I was gonna talk about, but that's not
what we're here to talk about. Yeah. We're
we're here to talk about, you know, how
do you how do you spot
the signs of burnout before it becomes a
problem?
Right. And that's kind of where you figure
out, like,
take a minute.
What does your body feel like? What does
your brain telling you? Do you want to
record? Do you want to
edit? Do you feel like this is a
requirement and not
not a privilege or a joy,
something like that? Yeah. You know, there's there's
some bullet points here that you, you wrote
up on the notes, but, it it all
works. You know? If
you're you know, feel episodes feel like they're
forced or you just don't wanna do it,
you dread recording
or you dread the editing,
all that,
you know, if you're out of topics.
There's just a lot of things that can
tell you that, hey. Maybe, maybe I'm burning
out here.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's alright.
But if you do reach that point, you
know, you you gotta figure out a way
to,
stay creative. And there's a couple different ways
that you can do
that. So you should probably try to
change things up. Maybe do a shorter episode
or just do, like, a bonus one. I
mean, that sounds a little weird
doing doing an extra episode,
or something like that, but it's a little
out of the norm, and that could just
spike your interest.
Yeah. Yeah. It's and reruns, you know, if
you've been at it long enough, you know,
picking an episode from a couple years ago
and,
you know, just do a new intro to
it and send it. I I've done that
myself, and
that works for me. Yeah. We do it
on this show once in a while. You
know? If we just don't have the time
or the inclination to record, we we put
out something that, you know, evergreen content, something
that is still useful
even though it might have been two, three
years ago.
Yeah. Yeah. This is also a really good
time to ask your audience if there's anything
specific that they would like to hear.
You know, if it's especially if you're doing
something
creative,
fiction wise or anything like that, they might
say,
okay. You've done a lot on this topic.
This is a little too fantasy. Can you
go do
something else for a little bit? You know,
these are all
easy ways to
Be careful with that one, though, because, you
know, your audience might request something that's just
out of your wheelhouse.
Yeah.
Example, I I asked that question a couple
years ago on my show, and I said,
hey. What do you guys want me to
talk about? What do you you know, is
there something I haven't covered that you wanna
cover? And somebody asked me, yeah. I want
you to do a Star Trek episode review.
No. I'm not doing that. I'm not a
TV reviewer.
You know?
I mean, I like Star Trek. Do love
Star Trek. Yeah. I like Star Trek, but,
yeah, I'm not gonna
do a review. There's people who do that
on YouTube way better than I do.
You know what? I also I appreciate that
because
nowadays, anyone kinda just thinks they can, like,
get online and start critiquing things, and they
can, but that does not mean they are
good at it.
Yeah. I'm only good at what I'm good
at, and you're only good at what you're
good at. And that's, you know, stay in
your wheelhouse.
Yes. Stay yeah.
Yeah. I guess that's the thing. You know?
Tread that line of staying in your wheelhouse,
though.
You can take a look at your podcast
ads, whatever platform you're on, to see which
topics or which episodes
are are doing the best. And, you know,
take a look at that and
go in that direction.
That can probably be a good idea of
of what you should do. Yeah. And it
all depends on the goal of your podcast
as well because,
you know,
my podcast is simply just me
using the tools and, you know, just
I I like to get on and talk
about things. You know? Whether anybody listens to
it or not is not particularly important to
me.
You know? I know that sounds weird,
but, you know, my goal is this is
a hobby
for that particular show. Anyway, this show here,
we're trying to educate you. Mhmm. But, you
know, my goal of my own personal show
is not to get the biggest audience in
the world. It's to, you know, you know,
one thing is it really helps me
test out our tools.
So that's that's part of it. But, you
know, for the most part, it's a hobby.
And, you know, trying
to do something else that's not within your
goal
is not a good way to avoid burnout.
Yeah. Yeah. But you're you're not alone in
that sense of where you're like, I don't
really care if people listen to this. If
they do, that's great. You know, like, if
if I have a little community, that's wonderful.
But
you're you're kinda doing it for
yourself in that sense, and that's very popular
for people on YouTube, their own podcast,
you know, any type of social media. People
kinda treat it as their own
journaling nowadays.
Vlogging
became very popular very fast for a reason.
It's because people like to, you know, get
out their
stream of consciousness sometimes,
and, that can
definitely find people.
Yeah. We get this question once in a
while. You know, somebody will say, I wanna
start a podcast. What should it be about?
Well, that's really the first question you need
to ask is what you want it to
be about. Yeah. You know, don't just do
something because it's popular because
that will also you know, if you're doing
a subject you're not really that interested in,
you're not gonna be good at it. And
the audience is gonna hear that, and
you'll burn out. You will you will burn
out fast.
Yeah. Very fast.
Yeah. And I've seen that happen, you know,
whereas, well, it's really popular to do a
show about lost. That was the big thing
years ago.
So, you know, there was 20 shows,
doing aftershows about lost, and I know three
quarters of the people that were doing those
didn't really care about that show. They just
thought it was popular, so they're gonna jump
on the bandwagon.
Yeah. Yeah. They're not there anymore. Well, neither
is Lost. But Neither is Lost. And for
quite a while now, as a day one
Lost fan,
I somehow
missed all of those podcasts, but maybe that's
for the best.
Yeah. For the most part. There was a
couple really good ones, though, I have to
say.
Anyway Yeah. Just
there's your history lesson for today.
And so yeah. And another thing, you know,
take some time off. You know, we're coming
up on the holidays. You know? It's okay
to, you know, just let your audience know,
hey. You know, it's Thanksgiving weekend. I'm gonna
go do something else. So I have an
episode in two weeks. You know? Something like
that. Let them know.
Yeah. I mean, we're recording this the and
it's, yeah, a couple days before,
the week of Thanksgiving, and it'll go out
Monday, the week of Thanksgiving here in The
US. And,
I was like
and we need to get the next two
episodes figured out as well because
I'm not gonna be here the Monday after
Thanksgiving either. I'm like, it's we we gotta
plan these things out so that we get
them going, and so it's not like a
bummer or like a rush. You you and
Dave are slacking. You guys both gonna be
on Monday after, so
we'll have to record early on those. But,
you know, it there's nothing wrong with taking
time off.
You know, a lot of podcasters
will will just disappear for a while. I
I'm the king of that. You know, my
you know, I might do an episode a
month sometimes, and sometimes they'll do a whole
bunch in a row and then take another
month off. But, again, you know, my goal
is not to be consistent. Your goal should
be.
It was not what I do. Right. This
is a prime example of Mike's doing,
national podcast month, and then he's not gonna
podcast at all in December.
Probably not. That's probably what's gonna yeah. That's
that's probably what's gonna happen, which is totally
fine,
but also, like, not ideal if this is
something that you're trying to do to
build that community of listeners.
So
definitely one of the things that we wanna
remind everyone to do is just
keep people aware of what's going on on
your social media. That's a super, super easy
one. And especially if you don't wanna actually
record anything, that is just, like you know,
write 10 words.
Happy holidays. I'll be back in a couple
weeks. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that at
all. And, you know, and if you have
your own website, if you're using our PowerPress
plugin and doing it that way, put a
blog post up. Yeah. Just, you know, say,
hey. No episode this week. See you later.
You know? Or whatever your your schedule is.
That's an easy one.
And and, also,
this one might be
be good for people who are doing a
specific type of podcast, but seasons are really
good for not losing that momentum.
You know,
it's
you you get to plan all of your
time off because you're essentially just you got
all these episodes already
or, you know, at least, like, one or
two probably,
and you're only doing it for a certain
period of time.
There is an endpoint insight.
So that's that's kinda helpful.
Yeah. And, you know, seasons you know, generally,
it's not a good idea to take a
lot of time off between seasons.
You know, just
but you can, you know, well, as long
as you're communicating that to your listeners,
you can do whatever you want. There's no
rules in podcasting.
But There is. Yeah.
One of the things that I like about
people doing seasons is, like, it's it's like
a miniseries.
Mhmm. You know? I get I get this
clump of,
you know, three to 10 episodes, whatever it
is, and I really enjoyed this story or
learning about this, and then it's over.
And I I kinda like
I have I feel like I've been gravitating
more towards that, in the past couple years
where I'm like, okay. I wanna ingest
a lot of info about this one thing.
I wanna binge it
and and, you know, get all
get all the goodness out of it that
it has to offer,
and then it's over. And it's kinda nice.
You know, and it works, like, on Netflix
or whatever.
In my case, Star Trek. You know, they
they have seasons and, you know, all the
new ones coming out.
You know? There's maybe six months in between
seasons or a year even on some of
them, but, yeah, we keep coming back. So,
you know, your listeners may do the same
thing. Just, you know, I don't recommend six
months, but, you know, break it up. Yeah.
Exactly. With that. Nothing wrong with that at
all.
Exactly.
But I mean, it is it is the
holiday season overall for people
all over the world, and there's just a
lot going on, which means listenership can
go up and down.
It can be that some people are so
busy,
and they're on vacation, and
and, you know, seeing family, and go in
this
this place and over there, and they're just
so out of their schedule that they have
no time to listen to podcasts. Meanwhile,
I feel like in my day to day
life, I'm listening to less podcasts. And over
vacation,
I'll probably listen to a bunch.
And so You binge them. Yeah. Yeah. I
will. I'll binge them because I'm like, oh,
okay.
I have the next three days off. I'm
gonna go on a walk today and tomorrow
and another and another, and that's what I'm
gonna do. Yeah. I'm gonna listen to, you
know,
a backlog of different shows, and and that's
just one of the things that's, like, great
as a podcaster is you can you can
let people soak up those episodes if they
want. And if not, they'll be back later.
Yeah. We've noticed a trend over the years.
As far as podcast listening, you know, it
does slow down
through the holidays in general, but now certain
people do listen more because they're off work
or whatever. But, you know and then it
really picks up,
right after, you know, the first of the
year
because everybody got new devices maybe or, you
know, they they they get reinvigorated
to listen. So there's usually a bump in
in January.
You know? And that's in general because different
podcasts are different. You know? Yeah. That is
all for today. Anything else we we really
have? Any pearls of wisdom?
Not really.
You know, again, consistency
doesn't mean not taking a break. It just
means finding your rhythm and, you know, hey.
What works for you? That's that you know,
again, no rules in podcasting.
There are definitely no rules.
So that's all for today, and thanks for
joining us, and a happy Thanksgiving to those
in The US.
Okay. And, of course, we're here to help
you with anything,
podcast technical related or otherwise.
If you're recording
or resting or planning for next year, whatever
works, make sure you,
come look at the show notes over at
podcastinsider.com,
and we have a lot of other stuff
there too as well. So
happy Thanksgiving.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks for joining us. Come back next week.
And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com
for more information,
to subscribe,
share, and read our show notes.
To check out our latest suite of services
and learn how Blueberry
can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com.
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the e's.