We are approaching the holidays and what better time to talk about planning for the holidays, then right before to have the mall really three of the biggest holidays that we hear in the US at least celebrate. And that is Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Because with these three holidays comes a lot of time off in our businesses and potentially in our podcasts. So I want to talk about how you can manage your podcast throughout the holiday season. Hey, y'all, welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for podcasters entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world while building their own personal brand in the podcasting industry. I'm your host Haylee Gaffin, owner of Gaffin creative a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. If you're a podcaster, or even just dreaming about launching your own podcast someday, this show was built to help you merge your love of conversation, education and business. You can find resources, show notes and more for the clocking in podcast at Gap and creative.com. Today's episode is brought to you by MIC CHECK society, a community that was built for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great, scale your podcasts, improve your processes and connect with your listeners through our educational trainings, our private members only community and our monthly calls. If you're ready to join us, you can head over to Mic check society.com and enroll today. And you can get $10 off per month with the code podcast. Now let's clock in and get to work. So maybe you are approaching the holiday season and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm overwhelmed. I have way too much going on. And I really need to think about cutting back somewhere. And a lot of times for podcasters that spot is within their podcast itself. That could mean that they want to take a break for a few weeks, they may want to scale back, they may want to get ahead. Whatever the case is, let's talk about managing your podcast, especially if you're a weekly podcast throughout the holiday season, because you may want to take a little extra time off. Now. You may be thinking like okay, well Haylee, you've talked about taking a break from your podcast in the past. And yes, I have. I will link to two episodes where we talk about what the benefits could be of taking a break in your podcast. I'll link to those in the show notes. But I also want you to consider what taking a break actually looks like and what impact it has on your podcast as a whole. And especially if you're using it for revenue or business or marketing. You want to consider those things too. So the number one thing is your audience consistency and retention for your audience is taking a break going to deter them from listening to your podcast and coming back. Like if they haven't heard from you in a while. Will they continue to come back. The way I've looked at taking breaks is when you come back from your podcast break, you essentially have to re launch your podcast. And when I say taking a break, I'm talking like four plus weeks. If you just need to take two weeks off, not a huge deal, your audience will still be there, you may have to work to get them back by saying like, Hey, if you're not seeing us pop up in your podcast app, make sure you go find it because it may not pop up because they haven't listened in a while. So if you do take a break that long, you need to treat coming back to your podcast as a another launch essentially. Now the second thing that I want to highlight is your marketing strategy. If you're using your podcast for marketing of your business, or marketing of your products, or whatever it is, you need to make sure that you're doing it strategically like that you're not just like dropping the ball on all of your marketing efforts, especially if it's pulling in consistent leads. Because if you do, you will see a drop in those leads. So that's another thing to consider. And this is why a lot of people do save their breaks for the holiday season though because they're going to expect that drop in leads anyway. But if you're staying consistent, you may get more leads than you would if you dropped your podcast.
Okay, and then the third thing with considering are considerations for not taking a break are your revenue opportunities. If you're a podcaster, who is running ads for other brands on your podcast and you take a break, you're missing out on our revenue opportunities. So make sure that you're considering that when you decide it's time to take a break. Now if you are like I absolutely do not want to take a break, let's talk about three tips for how you can approach it during this holiday season. So that you don't have to take a break and you don't have to scale back. The first tip is obviously work ahead, I Gaffin creative, we ask our clients towards the end of November, to give us their episodes in December. And like the early January episodes, we asked him to get those to us a little earlier. So that we can take off time for the holidays and spend time with our family. And that allows us to be ahead for our clients and not have to work the last like week and a half of of the year. So with that being said, if you're working ahead, consider the other people involved in your workflow because they may have to get you something early or they may have to adjust their schedules as well. The second tip is to be strategic and intentional, if you do have to take a break or scale back or any of those things. So when I say be strategic and intentional, this could mean saying like, Oh, it's the week of Thanksgiving, and I don't want to air an episode, because people may not listen to it like I err on Thursdays, I don't want an errand episode this Thursday. That's one way to be intentional about when you are making decisions on whether or not to break for the holidays and how to manage. The other thing would be being strategic in maybe instead of releasing that Thursday, your episode that week releases on Monday. Or same thing with Christmas. If your podcast airs on Mondays, maybe you want to release it a different day. Now, I will say that you may see a drop in downloads that final week of the year, because this year, Christmas Day falls on Monday. And that means that New Year's Day also falls on Monday. Now, after doing this for so many years and doing and seeing the numbers around New Year's, I can guarantee you that most especially if you are in the entrepreneurship space. And your listeners are entrepreneurs, you will not be getting as many downloads as you would like you may get the automatic downloads. But if people if a lot of your audience are the people that are going in and listening, as you're marketing it to them those weeks, they are busy with their family, they have taken that time off. So this is the one time of year that I do tell clients like you know what, if you don't want to release an episode on that week, that's the week of the year not to do it. So for example, the week of the 25th of December this year, maybe don't release an episode. I personally am. But I'm releasing a bonus episode, not necessarily a regular episode, and I'll get into what that looks like in just a little bit. Now my third tip for approaching your podcast and managing it through the holidays is to approach your content with ease simplicity and strategy. Because you like I just mentioned, you may not get as many downloads as you want. And so if you have like a really big launch coming out, I don't, unless you have a really big launch coming out, I don't really recommend putting your best episode out in December. Like it doesn't mean don't release any content. I'm just saying it's should not be your like, Whoa, this is the biggest thing that I've ever done the best thing I've ever done. I would say that for the new year, I honest I really, really would, because you will get more traction on it at launch. But I will also clarify that with even if you release an episode every week of December, and you don't see the numbers you want, you can push to that content in your January marketing. So push to it on social media, push to it in your newsletters, but also in your episodes in January, you can reference those episodes as well. So at the beginning of this episode, I referenced an episode that came out in November and December of last year. So it's been a very long time since that episode came out. But you may have thought oh, I never heard that episode, I'm gonna go back and listen to it because I am considering taking a break from my podcast. So that's episode 84. Now when it comes to content, this is where strategy comes to play specifically for when you are not necessarily trying to create the best content, but you want to create good content that's still valuable to your audience. So let's talk about a few types of content to consider. So I'm gonna give you three examples. The first one is end of year wrap up themes, or goal setting and planning for the new year that is specific for your audience. Now I have a lot of clients that do these, and they're hardly ever the same. And that's what I love about is they are customizing it to how they approach it. What their clients are doing what they're teaching their audience. So for me podcasters, I'm, I'm similarly doing a end of year themed episode where you are planning for the holidays. So you could do some sort of end of year wrap up or theme. Now the second type of content to consider. And it could also go along with the first piece is case studies or showcasing of your clients with sourced audio. So what that could mean is asking clients of yours, or students of yours, or even just like friends of yours to answer a handful of questions, and you can source that audio together. Now, this takes a little bit of organizing, it takes a bit of work, because you do have to actually ask them follow up with him. So in one of the episodes I mentioned, I recorded my own experience with taking a break from my podcast. Well, then in the second episode that I mentioned, I actually asked three of my podcasts, friends and clients, if they would share their own experience in taking a break from their podcast. So I didn't necessarily have to write out a whole outline and plan out a full episode, it was, hey, last week, I shared my experience. And now I want to give you insight into three other podcasters who have done this and have and what they learned from it. So essentially, I just asked them the questions had them record, they sent me the audio, and I put it together and release the episode. So that's a second type of content that you could consider doing, as you are trying to take a little bit of work off of your own plate in like creating brand new fresh content. Another way you could do that is like asking them to share their experience in your coaching program for the year or share how your services have changed their outlook on life, or Outlook in business, or, you know, whatever it is that people want to hear from your clients to decide whether or not they want to work with you. Or if it's like a piece of education you're trying to offer, or an idea you're trying to get across. If someone else has done it like I did. That episode for me wasn't necessarily driving people to sign up to work with me. That episode was trying to tell podcasters it is okay to take a break. If you need to take a break. Like don't let that don't let the fear of
you know losing out on your podcast or growth or whatever holds you back from doing what you need to do so does not necessarily have to drive people to your business. But it does need to serve your audience still. Now, the third type of content and we have talked about this in quite a few recent episodes is a repurposing content. And I want to walk through some of those ideas because I have done a couple of them now for myself for clients. And I'm testing even more in the coming weeks, which we'll talk about. So repurposing ideas that you could implement into your own podcast. Now the ideas that I'm about to share our ideas that clients have brought to me that I've seen other podcasters do I've done on my own podcast. And I truly believe that if you put in the effort to your podcast, and share the same enthusiasm on these repurposed episodes, as you do a brand new fresh piece of content, people will enjoy them. So repurposing idea number one is re airing an older episode of yours, but including a new introduction to explain that it is an older episode, because you may reference things in it that are outdated. You may your audience may recognize it and be like, Oh, she's I've heard this before, haven't I? But that will not deter people from listening to it. So I've done this on my own podcast where I've re aired an old episode. It was actually this year, I repurposed an episode where I talked about cheering women on and celebrating women, and setting your own goals and your own definition of success. And that was actually one of the very first episodes I aired over two years ago. And what I did was I just brought it back for International Women's Day because that was the day aired two years ago. I brought it back this year for it. And I explained why I was doing it. Why I love that episode, and it's one of my favorites. And I just wanted people to remember that message because it had been two years since I talked about it. Now the second repurposing idea is airing a podcast episode where you were a guest on someone else's. So this is repurposing a podcast interview from someone else's podcast. And this is something brand new to your audience brand new to your your podcast feed. So your audience may not have heard it at all. But I would also include an introduction explaining that there are a lot of different ways you can approach this, whether you decide to leave in the intro and outro of the original podcaster, or you decide not to, there are a dozen ways. I don't think that there is a right way. There's a way I've done it, but I've done it different for a ton of different guests. So I think it's one thing like, maybe have that conversation with the podcast host if you're worried about what they might think. But definitely, definitely include an introduction pointing people to go listen to that podcast, because they are allowing you to air something that, oh, I don't think I said that get permission, you have to get permission to do this. And most podcasters will say yes, because it exposes them to a brand new audience. But when you get permission, make sure that you're introducing the podcast host in their podcast to your audience in that introduction, because if you don't, it's going to be very confusing for them to, to jump into the episode and like, you're not interviewing, you're being interviewed. If you're not explaining like, oh, this was pulled from my friends podcast. And you can hear or learn more about them over in their feed, make sure you check them out and subscribe. That's what I like to do. So I did this with actually one last episode, Episode 103 is should you start a podcast for your blog, and it was on my friend Bree pairs podcast for bloggers. And so I kind of explained what the episode was about what we recorded it for. And just go straight into the podcast from there. Now, the third repurposing idea I want to talk to you about is one that is one that I first heard about at Podcast Movement. And it is a like a feed drop. And this is dropping an episode in your feed from a podcaster. Who their podcast is like the episode has nothing to do with you. So you can be strategic about this. And I want to share why. I personally am toying with the idea of airing my clients podcast episodes. So when I come across a podcast episode that I'm like, Oh, I wish this had been my idea. I wish I had dropped this episode. I am now pitching clients to aired on my show. So the first one will happen, I believe the week of Christmas, because it is going to air as a bonus episode. So that was what I mentioned earlier is I am still going to be airing the week of Christmas. And it'll come out the day after Christmas. But it will be an episode from one of my clients podcasts. And the reason I'm doing this is two things. One, I want to shed light on my clients podcast and like, what they're doing, how cool these podcasts are, because I, I am so bad about it. I do not talk about my clients enough. And that is something I'm working really, really hard on this year. But that's one reason I'm doing it. And then the second reason I'm doing it is that I want to kind of showcase what we do as a podcast agency. Now the ways that you could do this for your audience is if you are a coach, and you have a student who has a podcast, you could do that. And to be more intentional about it, if it's an episode where they talk about your services, or your coaching, and something in your business that has changed their life. Perfect. Like, this is not something you can just ask a client to create, they have to naturally create it, and then you ask if you can use it. But this is something I really want to play more with in the new year, and almost encouraged that, you know, like community of podcasters learning more about other podcasters because it is so easy to get like sucked into Oh, I just listened to these, you know, two, three podcasts. And that's it and I don't venture out and listen to others. But as podcasters we should be you know, staying in the loop and listening to other podcasts, see what they're doing. And so yeah, that's why I wanted to say in as far as repurposing and being strategic in that idea. Now the fourth repurposing idea would be to do a look inside or behind the scenes of something you do in your business. So whether this is like a coaching call, obviously you have to get permission for those. But you could do a live coaching call or repurpose a coaching call or if you are someone who has a Facebook group and you go live in that Facebook group, you can also do that I have bonus episodes, where I have recorded a Facebook Live and then repurposed it for the podcast. and I'll link to those in the show notes as well. But doing something that shows like,
an exclusive look at something you offer, really can push people to go into whatever that program is. So that's something that I really like to see done. And this could be something that you've recorded months and months and months ago, I've had clients do this, I've had them where they have recorded like a special training for their, you know, membership or, or their coaching students or their program. And then, you know, eight months later, they're like, that was really good, I probably should have used that for something else. And they'll re aired on their podcasts because it has made its impact on the people that were paying at the time. And now they can re air it. Sometimes we are asked to take special things out like it's like the first 15 minutes. And then at the end, they record a clip that's like if you want to hear the second half of this training, like it's enough to get away with airing it as an episode, but not enough to be like, Oh, she just gave away the information I paid for. That's when you can say like, if you want to hear part two of this training, make sure you head over to insert URL with coaching information here. And then they can decide if they want to listen to the second half of it. Now the last idea for repurposing does take a little bit more work mostly on the production side, and the collecting side. But if you have now if you have a big library of guests episodes, one thing you can do is take like really valuable clips from each of those episodes and put them into almost like a montage or a collection of responses. So for example, say you have a particular question that you ask every single one of your guests. And it's like a signature question essentially. Or even a segment if you do a segment and you're like, Oh, I really love like a game I play or rapid fire questions or you know, you can go through and pull some of your favorites from that year, and then compile them and just like do as a short intro and say, Here's five of my favorite answers to my signature question, blah, blah, blah. And then it goes in. And it's like, let's hear from Haylee with Gaffin. Creative and then it plays my audio. And then let's hear from so and so from this brand plays. And then the way that you would approach this with like a producer is depending on the level of service that you're paying for, either you pull those timestamps or you request them to, that may come with an extra fee, because it isn't, it is extra work on their behalf if they're not like doing that production research for you. So those are five repurposing ideas if you're looking to repurpose so, really quickly, I want to recap what we went over. The first thing we chatted about was considerations for not taking a break. And this would be like consistency and audience retention. Number two, marketing strategy number three revenue opportunities. We also talked about three tips for approaching the holidays and managing your podcast through the holidays. And number one is work ahead. Two is be strategic and intentional. And number three is approach your content with ease, simplicity and strategy. And then we chatted about three types of content to consider one end of your wrap up themes. Number two is case studies or showcasing your clients. And then number three is repurposed content. And those repurpose ideas were airing older episodes airing a podcast episode where you were a guest airing episodes that you really have nothing to do with but it's more of a feed drop, and then also doing a look inside or behind the scenes of repurposing content you've recorded in the past. And then number five would be a collection of responses from others in whatever capacity you wanted to get creative in. So that is today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I also wanted to give you a little inside scoop because I have not mentioned this I don't think on Instagram and I've only told the waitlist that has signed up this year. But Mike check society is back open for enrollment. We have not done a big launch or a big push or anything like that. But I did want to let you know that you can enroll in the new and improved MIC CHECK society. At Mic check society.com And when I say new and improved I want to highlight the pricing has improved. I After running my Czech society for a year, I realized the things I wanted it to be. And we'll talk you'd probably record a whole episode on that in the new year, maybe, about what that looks like what you can expect from my Czech society. But if you go there now, I don't know when I'm going to close out this code, but there is a code on the sales page, right where you go to sign up, that says, save $10. So Mike, check society is now $19 a month, you can get it for $9 a month. For I don't have a date. I can't tell you a date. It's gonna be there for a bit. So I'll say a bit it will not be there next year. So Ron, snag your seat in my check society for $9 a month, where we do trainings, q&a calls, we have a Facebook community that is probably my favorite part of it. As a podcast, I just really enjoy it. We do Facebook Lives. And I'm just I'm really, really excited for what's to come with Mike tech society now that we have officially, we've cracked the door open. We've not fully opened enrollment, but we've cracked the door open so you can get in if you want. If you're you know, like in my brand, and you are listening to the podcast and all those things. But yeah, head over to Mic check society.com You can snag that code and get in for $9 a month. Every link that we mentioned in today's episode will be linked in the show notes at within your podcast player and then also on the website. If you have any questions about repurposing, managing your podcast, my check society any of that, feel free to reach out to me over on Instagram. My handle is at Haylee Gaffin I'll have that linked as well. And if you're enjoying this episode, I would truly appreciate it if you'd leave a rating and review on whichever podcast app allows you to do it these days because there are a number of them now but if you are loving it, I would so appreciate that. Anyway, I'll see you all next week. Thank you so much for listening to clocking in with Haylee Gaffin for resources mentioned in today's episode head to Gaffin creative.com. If you're a podcaster looking for community that will help you improve your podcast. Make sure you check out Mike check society, our community for podcasters who are looking to take their podcast from good to great enroll today at Mic check society.com and use code podcast for $10 off per month. If you love this episode, I'd be honored if you'd leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I'm your host Haylee Gaffin clocking out
