Welcome to help me podcast. A show designed to help
you launch and grow your podcast. I am your host Gino. And
twice a week, I will release a new episode with different tips and
tricks for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering
to planning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a
bite sized tip to help you podcast.
Welcome back to help me podcast I'm glad that you're here. I'm your
host, Gino. And today, we are talking about taking
a break from your podcast. And if you've been following along
with this podcast, you know that recently I took a little bit of a
break from it. And, you know, I kinda stepped away from it
for a bit because I felt like I was kinda getting to the point
where I was getting really behind on myself, and I wasn't
taking my own advice of banking some episodes and having
some ready to go in case life happened. And I just felt like
they were becoming rushed. And, you know, I didn't want my
quality to decline. So I took a little bit of time off,
and I really just wanna talk about my experience in it, and maybe it's the
right thing for you in your podcast. So, yeah, I took a
break from this podcast. I didn't really know how long it was gonna
be. I initially thought it might be a week or 2 weeks just so that
I can fill up my Bank of episodes and have some
episodes that are ready to go, so it doesn't force me to,
you know, make an episode if I'm not feeling good or if I'm sick or,
you know, something came up with a client, and I just don't have the time
for it. I now have a bank of 8 episodes that I
can use if something like that happens. So a,
that's taken a lot of the pressure off of me. As far as being able
to release 2 episodes a week, and it's also really helped rejuvenate
me and get me back to being creative with this show. I
went into it with not knowing how long it was gonna take, and I ended
up taking almost about a month off. And in that
time, like I said, I was able to make that Bank of episodes I
was also able to do some other things that were very beneficial for my
podcast that I wanna talk about and share with you. So
Definitely number one was recharging my creative mind and the way
that I think about this podcast. I think, you know, before the break, I
was kind of getting stuck into a routine, and I have
sort of this master content list that I've kinda gone
through, and I basically picked all the good ideas already. And
I kinda felt like I only had, like, the the half thought out ideas
and ones that I didn't really wanna use. So during this break, I
was able to go ahead and look at that content list again.
And kinda just replan myself and and redirect my
content strategy and take the bad ideas and get rid of them, and
and I came up with new ideas because Again, I was recharging my
creative mind. I also had the opportunity to learn more and to research
stuff and to read articles and come up with a better content
strategy. So between having the extra episode
bank and feeling better about my content strategy
list, Those two things took a huge amount of pressure off of me when I
decided to come back and start releasing episodes again. Because now I'm
confident in in that list, and I'm not, like, going to it every week and
thinking, like, these ideas are kinda half thought out, and I don't really like them.
Now I have a list of stuff that, like, I'm excited to talk about, and
I took, you know, bullet points on, and it'll be easier for me to
then create 2 episodes every week. So the break has been very
beneficial as far as, like, rejuvenating my podcast
and and having it be less of a chore and more of a thing that,
like, I'm excited about doing again, which, you know, I think is a very
important thing because when you're excited about doing something, You
just do it that much better because you're into it. So
that was kinda what this break did. That was the main thing that this break
did for me was it. It made me want to be doing it again and
not be annoyed or resentful at it because I'm releasing 2 episodes
a week. Some other secondary benefits that this break also allowed
me to do was it allowed me to look at my podcast
thus far. I had recorded 50 episodes you know, I was also able
to take a look at the analytics and to see what was working. And
and I was also thinking about taking the structure of this podcast and
changing it. I thought maybe maybe 2 episodes a week is too
much, and maybe I should make longer episodes, and maybe it should only be once
a week, and I really kinda played around with that and
kinda decided not to do that. And I think, again, after
being, like, rejuvenated from this break, I felt confident that I would be
able to continue to make 2 episodes a week and have it be
beneficial to you all And, you know, that was one of the
conclusions that I came up with. Another realization that I had was
that I need to do a better job of creating my show notes and my
show titles and my transcriptions and making sure that I'm
putting all of the back end data into the episode and
not just having, like, the m p 3 file in loading it and then, you
know, having a sentence for the show notes. I really wanted to make sure
that I'm creating good show notes. I mean, I I did a whole episode about
what good show notes are. I know what they are. And because I was a
little bit burnt out, I wasn't really putting effort into creating good show
notes. And I also didn't have a system put in place to be
able to repeatedly do good show notes and good show
titles and transcriptions. So What I've done in this
time off is I've created a system for me to help me transcribe my
episodes to come up with a great episode title. to come up
with show notes that really work. And now I feel like I
got a system down to be able to create those with the use of the
AI tool that I talked about in the last episode. So if you haven't listened
to that episode, go back to episode 55 where I talk about creating
transcripts and using cast magic, which is an
AI tool for podcasters. But the moral of the story is I I
found a process and a workflow that works for me to be able
to do good show notes, good show titles, and transcriptions
for every episode that I release. Lastly, another big thing that I was
able to do during my break was I was able to create my lead magnet,
my podcast launch road map, which is to help any other
podcasters out there and you all who haven't started your podcast
yet. I'm really happy with the way that came out, and I think the final
product is something I'm confident in. And if you'd like to download that,
you can go to the show notes, the link for that's in the show notes.
But it really gave me the time to finish that up. It was something I
was kinda working on for a while. and kinda felt like I was just
stalling with the the editing of it and and putting it together and making
it look aesthetically pleasing. So I'm really happy with the way that came
out. And then the last thing that I want to talk about was
the actual analytics of everything. Right? I guess I guess
everybody's fear for maybe stopping a podcast or
taking a break from a podcast is that you're going to lose
downloads. Right? And you're gonna people are gonna go away. They're not gonna listen anymore.
And I think it was actually really surprising that
during the break, it didn't really seem like I lost any
listeners. And You know, maybe that's because I had a episode bank
of 50. Maybe that's because I told people I was going on a break.
Maybe that's because you know, the break was not even a
month long, and it was only a couple weeks. I don't really know. But I
I am very happy with the fact that, like, I didn't lose a lot of
listeners And my data seems to be
continuing to slowly grow ever since I started. I I
guess I took the break from, like, the last week of June to
1st couple weeks of July. And June was actually,
like, doubled May's performance as far as down lows and listeners.
So, you know and it's been trending upward, so it's not too surprising. But I
think it's funny that, you know, it was almost double the month before when I
took a whole week off in June. And July's, you know, the
month where I took the most time off, because in July, I'll really only be
releasing 4 episodes in doing 2 weeks. And, you know, right
now, the month isn't over yet at the time of this recording. but
it looks like July is gonna surpass June. So, really, you know, I
it seems like I didn't lose listeners. So that's always really encouraging, and
I think that's an important point to bring up. Sure. You can't,
you know, guess what it would have looked like if I did put episodes out.
But I think the important thing is all those benefits that I just
listed and not losing listeners or not having
listenership decline, I think that's kind of you know, a win
win, and and I couldn't really ask for for more than that. So I just
wanted to talk to you about my experience about taking a break. why there was
a lot of benefits from that for me, and really wasn't a whole lot of
downsides from it or really wasn't any downsides from it at
all. And I think It's been really helpful for me, so
maybe it could be helpful for you. And that's all I got for you
today. You know, as always, you could shoot me an email. You can download my
podcast launch roadmap in the show notes, and I will see you all
on the next episode Happy podcasting. We've reached the end of
the episode. And if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something
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link. Thanks for listening and happy podcasting.