Dust-Off the Archive: It’s Time to Play It Again
During a recent consultation with a client, let’s call her Myrtle, our conversation ventured into discussing archived episodes. Myrtle was feeling some frustration when she shared this,
“Darlene, my team and I put a huge amount of
time into producing and marketing each episode
and then after it’s published, it just seems
to sit in the podcast archive. It seems like episodes
should have a longer life span.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. If this describes what you’ve been doing, we need to stop right here because, yes, there is so much more that can be done to breathe new life into older episodes.
Your episodes (or whole series) don’t need to stay one hit wonders.
New listeners will always continue to discover your show when you continue to make on-going marketing a priority.
What Myrtle was missing is an Episode Relaunch Strategy. Here’s how it works:
Choose a relaunch date.
Choose a grouping of episodes (or a whole series) you want to highlight.
Give it a catchy name. Such as Interviews with Dog Trainers or Training Your Dog as if the Trainer were Whispering in Your Ear. Or, you can group these by Top Favorites or Most Downloads. You decide.
Create social media posts/graphics around these episodes (or series). (Or, if you’re following my tips and hacks for repurposing your content that I shared in the last newsletter (click here to read that article on my blog), go to your file archive, and reuse what you’ve already created. See, how handy repurposing can be.)
Create email marketing messages. Hint: These may also be in your repurposing files.
Create a lead magnet from the resources written in the show notes for each of these episodes. Listeners can opt-in and get everything in one handy PDF. Hint: This is another thing which may be found your repurposing files. Just give what you created the catchy name and update the cover image or perhaps use other colors from your branding to make this feel fresh. For instance, if you usually use blue but green is one of your brand colors, go with green for this relaunch.
If you did interview guests, contact your guests and ask them to join you in highlighting to their list that their episode is getting featured in this collection named [insert the catchy name]. Also send some of the social media posts/graphics to this guest to share on their social media channels.
Before relaunching double-check all resources and links, especially if you were using an affiliate link, to make certain nothing leads to a broken link.
A relaunch can be done at any time. It’s a fantastic way to breath new life into something you did a year ago or even 6 months ago. There are no hard rules which say you can’t share your episodes more than once.
Now, go take a peek inside your podcast archive listing (or ask your virtual assistant) for a hand and make some plans to relaunch some of your oldies but goodies.