071: The Best Strategies for Taking a Break From Podcasting
Ready for a summer break from podcasting? While you’ll hear me say how consistency is key, you should also know that I am a big believer in taking breaks when needed.
In this episode, I break down how to strategically take breaks from your podcast. You’ll hear strategies that myself and our clients at Wild Home Podcasting have used to take a break from recording (while keeping an engaged audience). If you’ve been thinking about taking some time off from recording new episodes of your podcast, you’ll want to tune in to hear this.
What’s in this episode:
Why you should build breaks into your podcast schedule
My favorite strategy for taking a break
Examples of how people reshare past episodes
Links:
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The Transcript:
071: The Best Strategies for Taking a Break From Podcasting
One of my favorite things to do is to re-air old episodes that were either really popular or you think are maybe super timely again. So well, how I like to do this is to go back through, look at my episodes, see what makes sense and then do almost a little series of re-aired episodes. You can call it a "best of" series or "from the archives" is a really good example.
Welcome to the Wild Home Podcast, where we talk about podcasting, life and all the wild in between. Joining me, Caroline, every week as I share a peek into the world of podcasting and my wild life as well. Ready. Let's get into it.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Wild Home Podcast. I'm just going to preface this episode by saying that there are so many noises going on in my house at this moment. I don't know if they are going to be able to be heard on this episode, but most likely. And this is pretty typical for me in the afternoon. It's really hard to find a quiet moment. I'm sure many of you who buy gas from home can understand I've got a robot vacuum running, a dog who thinks that he needs to be in here with me all the time. And then my kids are upstairs doing some work at the kitchen table, but they're stomping their feet, which is right above me. So that's super helpful. So here we go.
And today's episode, I wanted to talk about getting your podcasts ready for summer. I can't believe we're even talking about summer. My kids keep asking me when summer break is, and then I have to break it to them that we may not have a summer break because they're behind on their schoolwork. Homeschooling is super fun sometimes. We've just been taking off weird times this year, and so usually we start in July. But this year, because we moved, we didn't start until late August and then we took off on a whole month of December, which we normally do. So we're just like a little bit behind. I told them that we may have to go into June and we're also going to be taking off sometime in May because my brother in law is getting married. And so anyways, they keep getting disappointed.
But what we did do, which I'm very excited about this year, is actually get a membership for a pool. So we live in Colorado and our swimming season is so short and you have to find a heated outdoor pool if you want to swim because it's cold here. Even though it gets hot and the sun is warm, the ground never really warms up. And so anyways, we're very excited to have access to a pool this summer. So I have all kinds of summer plans, and so I've been thinking about, OK, what am I going to do with my podcast this summer? Do I want to record every week? I'm not sure I haven't decided, and so I thought we could talk through some options to help you get your podcasts ready for the summer. So let's dive in.
The first thing I want to say is it's important to build in breaks into your schedule. So go ahead and take a look at your calendar for this summer. We know what your kids have going on. Maybe they're doing a summer camp and it's going to require you to drive there and back. My kid is going to summer camp quite far away this summer, so we're trying to figure out how we're going to do that. Maybe you want to take a vacation, right? We all want to take a vacation. And so when are you going to do that? When is it going to happen? How are you going to build that in thinking about when you need breaks, when you're going to take breaks and then thinking about your sales and marketing schedule? How do these breaks coincide with that? Do you need to keep producing content while you're on that break? Can you take a full break or do you need to schedule something because you're running a promo or you have a program launching, et cetera? So you kind of need to do an overview of your calendar before you even start thinking about what is my podcast schedule going to look like, right?
So the next thing I want you to do is think about what you want to do during those breaks. And there are some things we can do to either keep our podcasts going if we need to, or there's ways that we can handle breaks, et cetera. So let's just talk about those for a minute. One of my favorite things to do is to re-air old episodes that were either really popular or you think are maybe super timely again. So well, how I like to do this is to go back through, look at my episodes, see what makes sense and then do almost a little series of re-aired episodes. I mean, you can call it a best of series or from the archives is a really good example. And you can either just realities as is or sometimes what we like to do is have our clients record a special intro that goes to the front of them. And in that intro, I will say this is a re-air. We're re sharing this episode because of these reasons. And then if there's a promo that they want to promote, mention that right there.
And so that's one of my favorite things to do. The other thing you can do if you don't necessarily want to re-air old episodes, but you need a break and you want to keep people engaged with your content is to take a break. Just take a break and then in your marketing, actually share older episodes and talk about episodes that maybe people missed. And you can either come up with graphics that you shared before or come up with a new strategy for sharing these old episodes. I love doing this because a lot of times when people catch you and they find your podcast, they may not necessarily go back and listen to every episode. They might just scroll through and find episodes that resonate with them by the title. But maybe they missed a few. And so I love doing this because I feel like it pulls people in and reminds them that there's like a wealth of knowledge that maybe they haven't found yet.
And so you can do this, I've seen this in many ways. I've seen people reshare, like I said on social media, older graphics or reshare graphics from before pick out new quotes to share. Maybe make a couple of reels that point people back to those. And then I have also seen which I think is really neat, is people do emails where they do a list like each week that they're on breaks. Let's say you take a month off and each week you send out an email with like four episodes that you recommend them listening to and what they're about and why you recommend them. And I love these kind of options. I think there's a lot of things you can do here and play with, and so definitely think about what would work best for you. So let's talk about some other things that you may want to do if you either want to keep your podcasts going, right? So one of the things that I'm going to say and you're all going to be like, Yes, we know Caroline is to batch record, but I actually mean at this time. OK, so what I've done, for example, so I have a very busy day coming up and going into June. And so I've actually already scheduled out and thought about my episodes through the end of May. I haven't done June yet. That's on my calendar for this next couple of weeks is to schedule out June. And then I'm going to set aside a couple of days at the beginning of May and just batch record All of these episodes. Get them done, get them recorded, get them ready to go. And then the great thing about it is I don't have to think about it in May or June. My team can take care of it for me. They can get it ready to go. I just have to promote it on Instagram and such when they come out.
And so that's one of the best ways, I think, to get through a break, especially when you want to keep content going, is to plan ahead with plan really far ahead and don't just plan ahead like the weeks that you're gone. Plan the week before when you're busy getting ready to go and the week after when you get back and maybe even the week after that and try and batch record, if you can. Now this brings me to another really great idea. See, the thing is, is sometimes batch record a bunch of solo episodes is not the most fun thing in the world. I don't mind it because that's what I do, but I know that doesn't work for everybody. So another idea that they have that I love and I'm actually going to be doing this personally, is to run a special series. So while I'm on my break for me, my summer break is mostly going to be May. I'm actually going to be running a special series. I'm really excited about it and putting together short episodes that are going to run each week. And these are going to be short, actionable episodes. It's going to be a special series, so it's not going to be it's going to be kind of packaged differently. I'm really excited about this and even thinking about doing different graphics just for this series to kind of get people excited. And then I'm being very, very specific with my call to action with the series and what I want people to do. And the purpose of this series is how it serves me, and my business is super important.
And so this is another really great way to kind of shake things up while you're on break or even just for the summer when people tend to get busy right because they're outside at the pool, that's going to be me. I'm so excited. So that's another really good example of kind of a creative way to keep people engaged. And again, I'm not recording hour two hour long episodes. These are going to be a short five to 10 minute episodes that are going to be very specific, very succinct, serve a purpose and move on. And I'm going to be able to batch record those easily because they're not going to be so long, right?
The other thing that you can think of, and if you haven't done this yet, you can still do this. So I know that a lot of us, we have seasons in our lives, right, not just in the year, but in our lives. Usually back to school is a super busy time because I have kids. The holidays are super busy time. And so when we think about these times during the year or when we're really busy and how to build in breaks and things like that, one of the things you can do is to format your podcasts in two seasons and actually build breaks into your normal podcast schedule. And if you communicate this to your audience, it's no big deal, right? We're done with season two. We're going to be back in a couple of months for season three, totally fine. And just making sure that you're engaging your audience during those breaks in different ways, in different places and letting them know how they can connect with you, right while you're on your your season break. And so I think that's a really great idea, too, and I think it works really well for the summer. If you need to just say you're taking a season break and take a season break again. It's important, though, if you're going to be gone for a long break that you have a plan for making sure that you're still engaging with your audience. And it's it's totally OK to take a break like I don't want to be A. Break here. I think it's important we all need breaks and I think just figuring out the way that it works best for you.
And so those are my ideas on how to prep your podcasts for the summer. Now, I thought I would share a little bit about my. I've kind of mentioned it in the episode, but I'm just going to go over it again just to give you an idea of what I'm doing. So again, for me, the month of May is going to be super busy and that's kind of when my summer break is. So I am running regular episodes through the first week of May, and then I'm going to be running a special series. I may bump this out a little further, just as I'm looking at my calendar right now and realizing that it's already the end of April, we may need to pump it out just a little bit. But my plan is to have all of this recorded before I need to be gone on my break. That way, my team can just roll with it.
And this is a great thing about outsourcing as well, is knowing that I can just record and they can take care of all of the pieces. The only things I still do in my podcast, so somebody edits somebody writes shownotes, and somebody makes the graphics, which is amazing. The only thing that I still do is schedule the Instagram post and schedule the emails, but I'm actually going to be outsourcing that pretty soon as well.
And so it's it's really nice because the way that my life is set up, I'm a very busy person. I homeschool my kids. I have a toddler running around. Taking a break is is really important and and I need a break very badly. Everybody needs a break. And being able to actually step away is super, super key. And the podcast is really important to what I do, and I don't want to just drop it off the face of the Earth, especially because it's been picking up momentum lately. And so I knew that taking like actual time off was not going to be the right thing for me this summer. So my plan is after the special series runs to air some episodes I may do later in the summer, just a quick, little brief best of series. Right now, I do actually have my podcast in seasons, which I did when I had my baby, who is now about to be two, which is crazy pants. And so I may do a little pause in August and do a best of series and then start a new season of the podcast. And so that's kind of where my head's at and what I'm thinking.
So I hope this helped you and gave you some ideas on how to prep your podcast for summer. Remember that podcasting, the world of podcasting is still really new? We like to say it's still the Wild West a little bit, and what I mean by that is there's so much room for creativity here. You don't need to do what everybody is doing. You need to do what works best for you, your podcasts and your business. And so if you can think of an option that's super creative and maybe something that you haven't seen but excites you, I say, go for it.
And if you are thinking about taking a break during the summer and keeping your podcast going and you would like a team to support you while you do that, we do have openings. Head to WildHomePodcasting.com/services and you will see the different services we have if you just click on Learn more. You will see the different monthly packages we have and you can sign up right there. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will be back next week after a little mini break, venting just a really tiny mini break. OK, bye.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. To stay in the know, head to WildHomePodcasting.com and be sure to connect with me on Instagram @WildHomePodcasting. See you next week!
