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No, Podcast Repeats are NOT Lazy · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Once upon a time when I was on the radio, I used to replay my favorite phoners.
• 0:05
  Phone calls.
• 0:06
  Okay?
• 0:08
  Same bits.
• 0:09
  Word for word.
• 0:10
  A month later, different day, different hour, and hardly anyone ever said anything, much less complained.
• 0:18
  Most people never even really noticed.
• 0:20
  And the ones who did, well, they got a second laugh because it turns out we love a good rerun.
• 0:28
  So why does a podcast host feel guilty hitting republish on an episode that already worked?
• 0:34
  Today, we're raising the debt.
• 0:42
  Welcome back to your mic.
• 0:43
  My name is Freddy Cruz, founder of Speak Podcasting.
• 0:46
  This is a show for new and aspiring podcast hosts.
• 0:50
  If you'd like to have a show or if you've got one and you want to resurrect it, hit me up, freddyatspeakpodcasting.com.
• 1:00
  We're deep into the Halloween season, so let's talk about bringing something back from the dead, your episodes.
• 1:06
  Now, for context, I spent 26 years in broadcast radio.
• 1:10
  So long before I ever launched my company, I was doing one of the oldest tricks that the radio business had.
• 1:19
  repeats.
• 1:20
  Now we call them phoners, all right?
• 1:22
  Phoners, phone call.
• 1:24
  A great call-in bit where a listener would say something hilarious or unhinged or hilariously unhinged or just absolutely chef's kiss perfect.
• 1:34
  And such a phoner would get timestamped and saved.
• 1:39
  If a phoner killed at 1015 on a Monday morning in February, I was not going to be done with it.
• 1:45
  No, no, no.
• 1:47
  I'd pull it back out about a month later, different day, different hour, maybe a Tuesday at noon instead of a Monday morning.
• 1:54
  Same bit, more often than not, word for word.
• 1:59
  Chances were good the people who heard it the first time were not going to be the same people listening the second time.
• 2:06
  And if a few of the same people caught it twice, if I'd done my job right the first time, you know they'd enjoy it again.
• 2:15
  And this isn't just theory.
• 2:17
  Some of our biggest clients, our legacy clients, are already doing this.
• 2:22
  Because I don't just tell podcasters this works.
• 2:25
  We have actually built this into workflows that we use for our clients every week.
• 2:30
  Take, for instance, Dr. Angela Sturm's show, Beauty Unveiled.
• 2:35
  This year, we launched her new season with not just four new episodes a month, which is what she was doing, but four episodes a month and two repeats.
• 2:44
  We called the repeats aesthetic moments.
• 2:47
  Yeah, we gave them a name.
• 2:49
  All right.
• 2:49
  We didn't hide behind them.
• 2:51
  We weren't afraid of running repeats.
• 2:55
  And then if there was a clip of Dr. Sturm guesting on another show, it would get repackaged with a distinct cold open that this is an aesthetic moment.
• 3:04
  And then here's my episode with Dr. Sturm.
• 3:06
  Dorothy Gibbons on Let's Talk About Your Breasts or whatever the podcast would be, okay?
• 3:11
  And that would do the disclosure work for us.
• 3:14
  It's branded.
• 3:14
  It's expected.
• 3:15
  Her audience knows exactly what they're getting.
• 3:17
  So when they hear a voice that's not hers, they know what they were already primed and warmed up, okay?
• 3:23
  And then we have another client, the Crow Means Law Firm, founded by Carolyn Crow Means, a construction lawyer.
• 3:30
  Her show is called The Construction Legal Made Easy Podcast.
• 3:35
  Different format, same instinct.
• 3:38
  Just recently, we added from the toolbox, which we preempt in the episode title.
• 3:44
  So from the toolbox, reasons why you should blankety, blankety, blank.
• 3:48
  And then there's the additional disclaimer in the show notes.
• 3:53
  No new cold open required, no elaborate re-recording, no apology tour, two different clients to speak podcasting, two different industries, two different solutions to the exact same problem.
• 4:06
  A plastic surgeon gets a branded moment.
• 4:09
  A construction lawyer gets a clean show notes line.
• 4:12
  Both work and neither required surgery.
• 4:26
  Now, some people who run podcast production agencies, people who do what we do for a living, right?
• 4:33
  They'll tell you that if you're going to rerun an episode, you need to record a brand new cold open explaining yourself every single time.
• 4:41
  Hey, everybody, this is a rerun.
• 4:43
  We're taking a
• 4:49
  I think it's optional, not gospel.
• 4:52
  Here's my logic.
• 4:53
  When you watch Friends or The Office, my grown daughters are infatuated with vampire diaries after about three years, and nobody interrupts the episode to remind you that you've seen it before.
• 5:08
  You already know, or you don't quite place it, but something feels familiar.
• 5:13
  And you press play anyway because you trust the show.
• 5:18
  Halfway through, you go, oh yeah, I remember this one.
• 5:22
  And you keep watching.
• 5:24
  ESPN runs entire Super Bowls.
• 5:27
  And people watch them again knowing exactly how the game ends.
• 5:31
  Nobody feels tricked.
• 5:33
  We understand the deal.
• 5:34
  A good story survives more than one viewing.
• 5:38
  your podcast feed works the same way.
• 5:42
  Whether you brand the repeat like Dr. Sturm's Beauty Unveiled, or you footnote it like the Construction Legal Made Easy podcast, or if you just let it ride, which I've done in the past,
• 5:54
  If you're a busy founder, a C-suite executive, or a person who has a successful show because you're also successful in an actual career, you may not have the bandwidth to build a whole branded segment around your reruns.
• 6:09
  And that's fine.
• 6:11
  That's real.
• 6:12
  You don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time you publish an episode.
• 6:18
  The Chromies model is the easiest version there is.
• 6:21
  One line in the show notes and then the addendum in the episode title.
• 6:27
  This episode originally aired on this date and the addendum in the title from the toolbox.
• 6:34
  And that respects your longtime listeners without demanding a full new piece of content just to explain that you're proud of something you already built.
• 6:48
  And this is why the resurrection metaphor holds up during this Halloween season.
• 6:54
  It's not just a gimmick.
• 6:55
  An episode you buried six months ago, an episode you assumed was dead and gone in the backlog of your feed, is actually not dead.
• 7:05
  It's dormant.
• 7:06
  Give it an aesthetic moment treatment.
• 7:09
  Give it a one-line disclaimer.
• 7:11
  Or give it nothing at all and just let it walk.
• 7:14
  The right rerun at the right hour puts the episode, that episode, in front of an audience that never heard it the first time.
• 7:23
  Do this.
• 7:24
  Go back through your archive.
• 7:26
  Find the episode that performed best, got the most shares, generated the most messages.
• 7:31
  Decide right now which model fits your show.
• 7:35
  A branded repeat treatment like Beauty Unveiled's Aesthetic Moments or a simple show notes disclaimer like the Chromie's Law Firm uses?
• 7:43
  Then republish it without apologizing for it.
• 7:47
  Don't rebuild it from scratch.
• 7:50
  If you want help figuring out which of your old episodes deserve a second life and which rerun model actually fits your show, hit me up, freddy at speakpodcasting.com.
• 8:03
  This is your mic.
• 8:04
  Keep it hot, keep the archive alive, and stop burying episodes that still have work to do.