Speaker 0: Welcome back to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell.

Speaker 1: And I'm Mackenzie Bennett. Today, we're talking about something a lot of podcasters forget they already have, their back catalog.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Everyone's focused on their next episode or the next big ideas. And there's a ton of value sitting right there in your older episodes that can still help you grow or even monetize.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So today, we're gonna talk about why your back catalog matters, how to bring those episodes back into the spotlight, and some easy ways that you can get more life out of your previous content.

Speaker 0: If you've ever felt the pressure to constantly create something new, this one's for you. 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. The back catalog of a podcast can be very powerful.

Now it depends you know, if you're doing a news show, a lot of that back catalog is not really relevant, only because, you know, the the information is no longer viable. You know? If you're talking about something that happened topically or, you know, something happened that really nobody needs to know about, that's different. But if you're doing something that is just general information, interesting conversations, all that stuff, your back catalog can still get a lot of traffic.

Speaker 1: Definitely. Once it's been published, that doesn't mean it's only useful for that week. I mean, Podcast Insider, the way that we've been doing it for the past year, so, like, they these are evergreen topics. This is stuff that people can come back to or listen to years after it's been published. I mean, obviously, things change.

But, overall, there's a lot of episodes from, you know, a year or so out that we could air now and would still be of interest to people.

Speaker 0: You know, and we do that once in a while if we don't feel like putting out an episode that week. You know, we'll throw a rerun in. But be careful when you do reruns. Hate to get technical and geeky, but if you're gonna do a rerun, reedit the file or at least resave it under a different file name, the MP three or the media file if you're doing video. You know, and maybe record a little something saying, hey.

You know, this is a rerun, but it's not relevant information. And then, you know, just make it a little bit different. Otherwise, this is all technical, but Apple won't take it if it has the same file name. And Spotify won't take it if it's the same post. Be careful with that.

You know, retitle it, you know, rerun or something. That's another way to bring them back. Another thing is is go back yourself and listen to an old episode that might be relevant now. And instead of replaying that episode, revisit it. You know, if there's some sort of an update to the subject you're talking about or something more you wanna say about it, You know, add that to it and put that out as a new episode that doesn't take nearly as much work as starting from scratch.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's also good for updating your show notes as well because that's gonna bring people in if you are, you know, updating something to be more relevant to SEO or just something that people are searching nowadays. That'll bring people to your episode as well when they're searching for whatever topic it is. It's a great way to say, hey. We have episodes about this from two months ago.

If this episode is something that you like, go check out a couple more from that month or something like that. It's definitely good. I think a lot of people utilize this around the holidays, which I see nothing wrong with.

Speaker 0: Even, like, in a new episode, you know, I listen to a lot of aviation podcasts, and they'll talk about, you know, the the one that I listen to interviews people. And they'll bring up something about that person. And he said, and if you wanna listen to it, go back to episode blah blah blah. So you're mentioning the the old episode and the new episode, and that can drive traffic.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Definitely.

Speaker 0: You know, it just keeps everything sorta cohesive and, running together. You know, so many times I do the same thing, you know. I know I talked about this before, then I'll go back and listen to that old episode and decide whether I wanna do a new episode about that, rerun that one, or, you know, something of that sort. It's a wealth of information for you even because, you know, well, you know, if you've already covered that subject and you wanted to cover it a little deeper or update or whatever, it gives you a resource to, utilize that back catalog.

Speaker 1: One of the ways that you can do this is by building a playlist of of these old episodes that you think, deserve a little bit more love. I think that's a really cool way to utilize your time as a podcaster saying, like, hey. These are ones I'm really proud of and think are really important for listeners to get to because it's also really good for, like, new listeners, new subscribers, followers, whatever you wanna call them. And it just takes some pressure off of you to put out, you know, a new episode every once in a while.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, you know, I mentioned in the intro there that, there's ways to monetize your back catalog. And, you know, some of them are are easy, some of them not so easy, but, you know, just ways that you could put all that information to use. One of them is write a book.

I know several people that do this where they've got evergreen content. And what they'll do is they'll get transcripts of all their old episodes, put them together, edit them into a sending kind of a book form. And

Speaker 1: Right. That seems kind of intimidating for a lot of people, I think.

Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Very much. Very much. So, you know, I'm not saying it's easy, but that's the way to do it. It's, you know, I I think of, Grammar Girl as a good example.

She's written several books, and they're mostly based on the topic she's covered in her podcast. But she's actually a writer, so she probably started from scratch on a lot of that. But, you know, it was all motivated by her back catalog. And then I know another one that, every year he puts out a pretty much a book about compilation of everything he covered that year.

Speaker 1: That's pretty cool.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And, you know, and then, you know, sell it for $5 on Amazon or whatever and then get you a little, money in your pocket. Plus, it's a great archive for that information.

Speaker 1: I mean, even if you don't share it with people, it might just be fun to have for yourself.

Speaker 0: Sure. Sure. And, you know, and it's not a word for word transcript thing. He goes through and rewrites the sections, but, you know, he starts with the transcript. And, you know, now that transcripting isn't that hard to do anymore, at least a decent transcript, you've gotta edit.

You know? But that's a possibility. Another one is, and we have this on Blueberry, Blueberry premium. So what you could do if you wanted, limit your public feed to whatever number of episodes you wanna give out for free for however long, and then all the old ones republish in a premium feed and then charge for that. You know, for the longest time, Libsyn was doing that as a feature where, you know, you'd say, okay.

The latest 20 episodes are available to everybody. After that, you have to buy the archive. And, you know, you could do the same thing with now now Blueberry premium. Now you'd have to republish those episodes, I believe, but, I don't think it would be all that hard to do. And you might make a little money on that.

Again, you know, none of these are gonna make you rich.

Speaker 1: Right. And, you know, one of these things are none of them are really a a one one shot that's gonna change the game for you. But if you do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, I think it it tends to add up over the year, you know, so that there's there's less of that podcaster burnout, I think.

Speaker 0: Yeah. It's also good just to leave them public and, you'll get some traffic to certain episodes. Just all depends on your subject matter. And, again, you know, let's say you did an episode five years ago that's relevant to something going on, promote that episode. You don't don't republish it or anything.

Just promote it. It's available. Get it out there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially if, you know, you have advertising on that episode or something like that, like, depending on how you're doing your sponsorships and how that is all set up, just promote the old episode. You don't have to republish it or anything like that. There is generally enough social media stuff going on that people will, you know, pick it up. They'll that old episode that you said give this a shot and word-of-mouth, and and things will go from there.

Speaker 0: Right. You know, the longer you do it, the more you got to choose from.

Speaker 1: Also true.

Speaker 0: You know, we've we're we're up to, what, 470 official episodes of this That is program. And, you know, there's probably more in the feed or in at least on the website that we didn't count as an official episode, in the number. And so, you know, and a lot of that is evergreen. You know, some of the earlier shows were more topical. Yeah.

But, you know, they might be fun to listen to what was going on ten years ago in podcasting.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, one of the like, an example of the way that we have republished or just promoted an episode when we don't necessarily have time to put out a new one is, like, if we featured a tool that we have saying, you know, hey. We have Vidapod. This can make your life a lot easier if you're doing any type of, you know, video and YouTube content as a podcaster. And if we see that that is popular right now or, you know, we have a lot of people signing up for Vidapod, maybe we just rerelease that episode.

It's not a bad thing to, to bring back up.

Speaker 0: Yeah. There's a lot of creative ways of, using your back catalog. It's not just old content. It's an opportunity with a little intention. It can save you time, grow your audience, maybe make you a little bit of money, help new listeners, you know, that may not have gone back into your catalog, learn more about your show and fall in love with it.

Speaker 1: So if you take anything away from this episode today, it's that your back catalog isn't old content. It is an opportunity.

Speaker 0: Exactly. You know, you already done all the hard work. Little small tweaks these past episodes can keep working for you. You know, bringing in new listeners, keeping people engaged longer.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. So we hope that you use your back catalog to good use. If there's an older episode that you're really proud of, definitely give that episode another moment in the spotlight.

Speaker 0: As always, if you need any help with hosting, stats, growing your show, Blueberry team is here for you.

Speaker 1: Thanks, everyone. You can find all of our old episodes for Podcast Insider on podcastinsider.com.

Speaker 0: Yep. Keep scrolling and scrolling. See you next week. 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. That's blueberry without the e's. We couldn't afford the e's.