No. 099 3 Powerful Reasons to Produce More Evergreen Episodes
Is it possible to step away from your podcast and have downloads numbers go … up?
That might sound crazy to you. Maybe even impossible. But it’s not. And we have the listener email to provide it. What is this showrunner’s secret? It’s actually not any kind of secret at all.
In this episode, we share the story of Chris Stanley, who hosts the IA Path podcast (IAPath.com). And there is a lot that we can all learn from Chris’ content strategy.
He produces evergreen content, which means that he has:
- The power of leverage
- The power to repurpose
- The power to connect (and the possibility for infatuation)
What do each of these phrases mean in the context of being a showrunner? We explain on this week’s brand new episode.
Listen, learn, enjoy …
The Show Notes
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- Follow Jerod on Twitter: @jerodmorris
- Follow Jonny on Twitter: @jonnastor
- Showrunner FM
3 Powerful Reasons to Produce More Evergreen Episodes
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Welcome to The Showrunner, where we have one goal: teach you how to develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. Ready?
Welcome back to The Showrunner. This is episode number 99. Yes, we are just one episode away from number 100. I am your host, Jerod Morris, VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. I will be joined momentarily, as I usually am here on The Showrunner, by my, “My name is Jon but you can call me Jonny,” co-host, Jonny Nastor, the host of Hack the Entrepreneur. Jonny — I think anybody who’s been with us for 99 going on 100 episodes can call you Jonny, right? Is that cool?
Jon Nastor: Absolutely.
Jerod: Okay, good. Just confirming. The Showrunner, as it always is, is brought to you by the all new StudioPress Sites, a turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those selling physical products, digital downloads, and membership programs — or maybe all of those things, if you’re all of those things. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress right now. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.
Jonny, as I mentioned, episode number 100 is coming up. We have something very special planned, a Q&A. We’ve gotten a bunch of questions. We actually did an episode a couple episodes ago about the power of the Q&A format, so we’re actually going to use that ourselves and do a Q&A for episode number 100. You are not going to want to miss it. Jonny, I don’t know if episode 100 is going to be that special of an occasion for you because you’re way past 100 over there on Hack the Entrepreneur. I don’t even know if you can remember back to your 100th episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Can you remember back that far?
Jon Nastor: Of course I can. Are you suggesting that I’m old, or that I’ve just done a lot of episodes?
Jerod: Just wondering if your episode 100 was special in any way that might have made it memorable.
Jon Nastor: It was very special. It was the first and only time, actually, since 340 something episodes now that I was on the other side of the interview. I was interviewed by Mr. Jerod Morris for my 100th episode. I remember because I was in Vancouver at the time. It was a fun summer. It was a special episode to me. I really liked it. I definitely remember it. But also, this one is significant too.
Jerod: Yes, it is.
Jon Nastor: It’s 99, and I think this is … When I heard this intro from you, it made me think back. I can’t remember which episode, but there was a time on an episode where we were talking about longevity and the idea of continually putting out shows. How sometimes when you put out a show, you start a show, you don’t think of it in terms of, “Will I continue? Will I make it to 10 episodes? Will I make it to 20?” Past that weird number that people usually stop at.
I know I have started shows like that where it’s like, “I just want to get to 15 episodes.” This was a show, like Hack the Entrepreneur, that when I started it, it was obvious that we were going to get here. There was never a time where it’s like, “Oh, should we keep …” It’s like, “No, we just keep doing it.” I really like that. I like that feeling of it. It makes it extra special though. When you get to 100, it’s like, “There it is. Two years later, but here we are.”
Jerod: I agree. Make sure that you join us next week. But this week we have a really interesting topic. We’ve got to give a huge hat tip to our buddy, Chris Stanley from IAPath.com who I had the great pleasure of meeting here in Dallas several months back. He has kept us updated on his podcast project. This is a guy with enthusiasm for days. It comes across when you meet him in person and it comes across in his emails, so it is absolutely no surprise to me that he is being successful.
He sent us an email with an update on his show, and that email serves as the inspiration for this episode. I want to read the email, because I think it provides a few interesting observations for us to make as a jumping off point to this episode about the power of evergreen content. Here’s the first part of this email from Chris.
“Jon and Jerod, I wanted to show you the stats from the podcast and point out two things I find interesting. First, I fell off the podcasting wagon and didn’t publish an episode in April until the 20th. A month between episodes, bad me, but look at the stats. Without publishing an episode for a month, my show has nearly doubled each month. So although growth is small, it is growing. That month I didn’t podcast, I grew my email list to over 300, wrote a book on the topic, sold courses, etc. Everything else is fueling the podcast versus the podcast fueling everything else.”
We’re going to talk here in just a minute about why this is happening. But, Jonny, there’s actually another observation or a more general comment about Chris’ show that you want to make, and I think it’s an important one. Let’s talk about that real quick before we jump into talking about evergreen content.
Why Jonny Finds Chris’ Podcast Fascinating
Jon Nastor: Yeah. I think it’s beneficial to really kick in. I’m slipping on the title of it right now, IA …
Jerod: IAPath.com.
Jon Nastor: IAPath.com. IA stands for insurance adjusters.
Jerod: Insurance adjusters.
Jon Nastor: Insurance adjusters. Those are people who come to your house and figure out how much damage was done and how much it’s going to cost the insurance company, or how much you’re going to receive. More specifically, for catastrophic residential, I believe, insurance. Meaning when you —
Jerod: Like hail damage on your car, roof damage, that kind of thing. At least for us here in Texas.
Jon Nastor: Exactly. I love this because, first of all, I never would have thought at all of a podcast for insurance adjusters. When Chris reached out to us — this was a year or two ago. Maybe about a year ago we started this, right?
Jerod: It’s been a while.
Jon Nastor: He joined the showrunner podcasting course, and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the most specific niche I could imagine, but it’s fascinating.” It’s fascinating because it’s not an interview show. It’s not a show where it’s based on the marketing niche or the business or something really popular. It’s not doing comedy. It’s not doing the things that we think of as “big podcast.”
Chris is very much proving that your show doesn’t have to be “big” or successful in that way to be super successful in what the show was meant to do and what it was. Like what the cause or the purpose of his show was for his business, which was to build an audience. But not just that, it was also to build authority.
Us, as showrunners, when we get so far into showrunning, we think of somebody else starting a podcast and we’re not wowed by it. But it’s a fascinating thing that most of the world has no concept of ever how to start a podcast. It immediately puts you up on this pedestal of being an expert or authority in that marketplace for having a show. It’s obviously less so if you get into the marketing space or the business space like I am in — lots of people do it. As marketers, lots of people start shows. But when you’re in something like this … It’s fascinating to me, because he actually went on to say in his email that he actually had more participants, more people who bought his course now than he has listeners of his show, which is really fascinating to me.
Jerod: That’s amazing.
Jon Nastor: Yeah, exactly. Just think of that when we’re going through this. This is for insurance adjusters for catastrophic insurance. I love it, Chris. I love it.
Jerod: I do too. Okay. What’s happening here? He had a certain number of listeners in February. It grew in March. It grew in April, despite him not even putting out any episodes, as he said, until the 20th. How can a podcast continue to attract listeners, continue to grow in an audience when there’s no new content being put out there? Quite simply, this can happen when podcast topics are evergreen.
What do we mean when we say that a topic is evergreen? That means that that content is useful the day that it is broadcast, six months later, a year later, two years later, and perhaps even longer than that, because it’s about a topic that maintains relevancy. For example, the vast majority of the episodes of The Showrunner and the content that we have discussed is evergreen.
Perhaps back in our first few episodes we talked about something with iTunes … For example, iTunes now has Podcast Connect, which has changed things a little bit. Maybe an individual discussion that we had about iTunes isn’t still relevant today. But what would you say, 98.9 percent of what we’ve talked about on The Showrunner is basically evergreen and still relevant today?
Jon Nastor: Absolutely.
Jerod: That’s a powerful thing. If you are talking about underlying principles and those kinds of things, you can create evergreen content. What that means is that time that you invest in the content, it’s not just going to pay dividends and attract an audience for a week or for a few days, but well into the future. That’s a powerful thing. When you look at the titles of Chris’ topic: How to Get More Deployments as a Hail Adjuster Without Breaking the Bank on Licenses. Obviously it depends on how he’s covering the topic, but that is going to be relevant today and probably two years from now and probably four years from now. How the “Us Vs Them” Mentality is an Adjuster Career Killer.
We’re talking about basic, underlying principles here that are going to be worthwhile for someone who is looking to get into insurance adjusting — in particular, the kind of insurance adjusting that Chris is doing — for well into the future. It’s such a powerful concept, Jonny, and that’s why we want to cover it in this episode and give you some compelling reasons to produce more evergreen content. Which, if you have a current show and you’re not doing evergreen content, then hopefully it’s something that inspires you to try and find ways to do that.
If you’re still at the stage where you’re trying to figure out what kind of show you want to do, allow this episode to present some evidence for why you want to consider a topic where you can produce evergreen content. I’m really excited about it, because I think this is something that could really help out anyone listening for the long term as you start thinking about your content strategy.
Jon Nastor: Absolutely. Can I also bring my daughter into this conversation?
Jerod: Yeah, for sure.
The Slow Build of Evergreen Content
Jon Nastor: My daughter started a podcast years ago. She actually put out her last episode — I looked it up this morning — she put out her last episode in January of 2015, so over two years ago now. She started a podcast called Between Two Worlds. She was fascinated with reading. She would read a kid’s novel and then she would do a little book report thing on it, do different voices, do jokes, and all kinds — she just had fun with it and playing with GarageBand and stuff.
She stopped that show over two years ago. Because her Libsyn account is attached to my account, I can switch between shows. I do that randomly, and I’m always fascinated by her downloads. Again, it wasn’t something that got pushed. It didn’t get marketed. She just started a show. Put up a website. She had some listeners. She got feedback from other kids that were listening to it and such. But over two years ago for her show — again, evergreen content, because it’s books that kids are still reading as they’re growing up through that age now. Her All-Time Downloads now are just over 21,000 downloads, which is over double what it was at the time she quit.
Jerod: That’s awesome.
Jon Nastor: Yeah, I know. In April of this year, last month, she had 478 downloads. In March, the month before, she had 572 downloads. Also, randomly you’ll go through and there’ll be a spike of 250 downloads in a day. I’ve tried so hard. “Where is this coming from?” It’s iTunes, but I can’t find it on iTunes except for searching it by name.
It’s fascinating to me. This is the reason, when you’re stuck thinking about, “Should I start the show on this topic and will it immediately bring me benefits?” I don’t know if it will immediately bring you benefits, but two years later there’s still a potential — and three years later — of these things. This work you’re putting in now, it’ll leverage and scale out and continue working for you well into the future, until you decide to actually take it down because you don’t want it up there in public anymore.
Jerod: We need to have her on the show.
Jon Nastor: She’d love it.
Jerod: She could teach us a few things, I think. All right. Let’s jump in and let’s talk about this, because we’ve got three really powerful reasons why you should produce more evergreen content. Let me start this by saying, why would anyone ever not do evergreen content? Are we saying with this episode that you should only do evergreen content? Absolutely not. There is certainly a place for non-evergreen content. For timely content.
One thing that I will say about evergreen content that you really want to make sure that you’re careful with, is you have to have the right mindset for evergreen content. A lot of times evergreen content isn’t necessarily going to be the kind of content that’s going to get you a huge spike that first day. It’s going to be a slow burn for a long time and continue bringing people in, especially if your content is about something searchable.
Now, I have learned this firsthand with The Assembly Call, because The Assembly Call, my IU basketball post-game show, is the complete opposite of evergreen content. That is content that is literally relevant for 24 to 48 hours. As soon as the next game is played, it’s basically irrelevant. There’s been some hugely impactful, memorable games where people still go back and listen to the old post-game shows or we’ll repost them, but those are very few and far between. For the most part, we’ve got to get our downloads in the first 24 to 48 hours after a game or we’re not getting them.
The downside to that is we’re putting this time into producing the content and it’s not really paying a long-term dividend. That content isn’t out there still churning downloads. The upside is that we get between 4,500 to 6,000 downloads in the first 24 to 48 hours when everyone is rushing for content about that topic. There is definitely a place for timely, newsworthy content, there’s no question about it. It goes back to, “What is your goal?” For us, with that show, with that content, that context, and that audience, we’re building an audience around capitalizing on those 24 to 48 hours of interest. We’ve got sponsors. People donate to our show. And it works.
If, as most people listening to The Showrunner, if you are using a podcast as a form of content marketing, building an audience to attract people to your services or to a course or to something like that, then there may be a place — and there probably should be a place — for evergreen content in your podcast mix. I wanted to make that distinction. We’re not saying that non-evergreen content isn’t good. It can be fantastic. But I think a lot of times we get really intrigued by the non-evergreen content because it’s like, “Oh my God, I got 3,000 downloads in 24 hours.” That can be awesome, but don’t let it, in your own mind, discount the power of evergreen just because it takes a little bit more patience to see it pay off.
Jon Nastor: A few episodes ago, you told us that you are doing audio versions of blog posts.
Jerod: Yes.
Jon Nastor: Are those meant to be more evergreen?
Jerod: Even that content, at least so far, has not been evergreen, because it’s still about news events that happen. Now, eventually I might. We have a whole series on IU artifacts where an IU historian basically comes and tells the stories of these artifacts. So I could eventually turn that into a podcast series and that would be more evergreen. But I haven’t gotten there yet, so everything is still very much timely.
Let’s get to these three powerful reasons why you should produce more evergreen content. I’ll tell you right up front what all three are, and then we’re going to break them down. We got the power of leverage, the power of repurposing, and the power of connection and the possibility for infatuation. Those are the three.
The Power of Leverage
Jerod: Let’s start with the power of leverage. Chris explained the power of leverage wonderfully. Number one, you can step away and your show will keep attracting new audience members when your content is evergreen. What’s very important to remember here is that you want to have an evergreen call to action. If someone listens to an episode a year from now, that’s great, but only so much as they’re taking some action on it. If you’re sending them to a landing page that is no longer relevant, then that’s not … Obviously, you’ll get the listen, and maybe you get the attention and people subscribe, but you’re not maximizing it if you don’t have an evergreen call to action on there. That’s extremely important.
Also, while you’re away, the second point here is that you can work on other big picture items like Chris did. The power of leverage allows you to step away. Your show continues to attract new audience members and you can go work on other big picture projects. Chris wrote a book and he’s selling courses. You have the ability to step away and your podcast will keep going. For The Assembly Call, during the season if I want to take two weeks off, no new content comes up and we’re not getting many downloads, because it’s all very timely content. With evergreen content, you really do have that ability to step away.
This power of leverage also is going to give you some added value with sponsors who are going to get residual attention from your episodes for a long time. The caveat here is that most podcast sponsors, they’re really looking at the first week and the first month of downloads. That’s what speaks the most to them. But you are able to say, “Hey, look, our archive is generating X amount of downloads. We have an episode from two years ago on X topic that just got 200 downloads last week.” This episode, this sponsorship — if what you’re selling is going to stay on there in perpetuity, that’s going to give that sponsor additional value.
There are other elements here, but the power of leverage is, to me, the single most compelling reason that you would want to go with evergreen content. Because of what it allows you to do in stepping away. Your podcast continues to grow while you’re able to work on other things.
Jon Nastor: Exactly. That’s one thing I’ve gotten wrong on my way to trying to create 300 episodes of evergreen content, I’ve messed up my call to action. No, maybe I shouldn’t say I’ve messed it up. But I have had very timely calls to action, and I leave them in because I think it’s too much work to go back. I think that people understand that if the date on the episode says January of 2016 and the call to action was for a specific amount of time, it says, “For the next three weeks” …
I think people understand that if that landing page — I do redirect it so it ends up on a main landing page — but that call to action is now done. There’s a real power in having something very time-specific. For scarcity and for … That really does help at times. You can go back and change those calls to action if you want as well, but it’s leveraging both ways of it. The content itself is very much evergreen and people can listen to it years into the future, but the calls to action aren’t necessarily always.
Jerod: I agree with you. I think there are times when you’re doing a promotion and you have something very timely, that you want to do that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every episode has to have an evergreen call to action. But when you’re just starting out, if you’re producing evergreen content you really want to think about that. Put a URL out there that you’re going to keep somewhat general and that is going to be an evergreen call to action that you can send people to. Certainly, redirecting people — if it’s one of those time-specific URLs and people happen to go — that’s a really smart strategy. You just want to think through that ahead of time. Again, when you’re going to have a big promotion, certainly do that and don’t worry that maybe this won’t be evergreen, because you’ve got to capitalize on the here and now. But what about all the other episodes?
Jon Nastor: Exactly.
The Power to Repurpose
Jerod: Maybe don’t wait till episode 50 to start thinking about it if you know your content’s going to be evergreen. We’ve got the power of leverage. The second powerful reason to produce more evergreen content is the power of repurposing. Jonny, I find that as we get more into our shows and our shows become more mature, we’re naturally finding, learning more about the power of repurposing. We talk about it a lot now, and I think there’s a reason, because it’s such a smart thing to do. It allows you to work smarter, not harder. It allows you to work more efficiently and capitalize on your best ideas.
The first point here that’s important to know is that you can turn your best episodes into blog posts if you’re creating evergreen content. Now, there would be absolutely no reason for me to create a transcript and turn a post-game show into a blog post because, again, the work required to do that is not going to pay off when it’s only relevant for 24 to 48 hours. For us, for example … The power of evergreen content. It was powerful 10 years ago. It’s powerful today. It’s going to be powerful five, 10 years from now, Jonny. So we could repurpose this, turn it into a blog post, and now that’s going to be able to attract non-audio people to this very same content. It would be worth the time investment potentially because it is an evergreen topic.
The question is, of course, if you’re going to turn an episode into a blog post, where are you going to post that blog? I would suggest that you do it on a site hosted at StudioPress, with StudioPress Sites. As I mentioned to you at the beginning of the show, StudioPress Sites is a turnkey solution that combines the ease that you’re looking for from an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. Those are not two elements that are easy to balance. They can be difficult to balance, but StudioPress Sites does it. That’s why it’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as I mentioned. You can have a great podcast episode and then turn it into a blog post all there in one content management system on one site, which is really nice.
You can also go to the next step. If you’re creating podcast episodes and you’re creating blog posts, why are you doing that? Hopefully so that, eventually, you can sell physical products, digital downloads, membership programs, and on and on. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, if you’re ready to host a podcast and to turn your evergreen podcast episodes into blog posts and then continue to go to the next level after that, then you want to see for yourself why over 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress right now. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress and check it out.
Jon Nastor: I want to see this for myself. I’ve been hearing these ads, and I have to say, I’m intrigued, Jerod.
Jerod: Are you?
Jon Nastor: I’m very much intrigued by this.
Jerod: You should not go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress right now, because we have a recording to do.
Jon Nastor: Right. Okay.
Jerod: After we’re done, then you should go. Okay. I talked about the first point from the power of repurposing. Let me quickly talk about the next two points and then, Jonny, let’s discuss this. The second point is — and this is something that you’ve done — you can combine podcast episodes that you’ve already produced into a new podcast feed on a sub-niche to then attract more attention, or maybe even a little bit of a different audience, but really hone in on one element.
For instance, Jonny, you’ve done 300 and some episodes of Hack the Entrepreneur. Maybe there have been 10 about people who created a lifestyle business around a SaaS product, or 10 episodes where people provided their best tips on how to manage their email in the morning or whatever. Literally any sub-niche that you could think about. You could combine entire episodes or take pieces of episodes and basically put them into a new podcast feed. It would be a new feed out there optimized around different search terms, ready to go in New and Noteworthy. That’s another area where you could repurpose.
Then, of course, the third element here is you can use episodes as the basis for a book or course. But again, you can only do this if the content is evergreen. If it was timely, if it was just newsworthy for a couple of days, then doing any repurposing is not going to make a difference. But if it’s evergreen, turn it into a blog posts. Create new feeds. Use it as the basis for a book or course. We could go on and on. Evergreen content allows you to leverage the power of repurposing, which is another reason to do it.
Jon Nastor: Yeah, I like this. This, to me, is not the initial way to repurpose stuff, but this is a fascinating way. I did the Top 10 for Hack the Entrepreneur. I pulled the top 10 episodes from my feed that was about 250 at the time, I believe. I pulled the top 10 due to popularity. I pulled out the ads from them, I sold a new ad package to FreshBooks, I gave it new artwork, and I re-launched it and gave it a separate page on my site where I direct people to. It gives them a good overall feel when they find my show of what to expect from the show.
Now I’ve got them over 300 on iTunes — or Podcast Connect, I guess you would call it now. It only goes up to 300. Your archive only shows, or your feed will only show 300. I’ve actually just started — I’m going to take my first 100 episodes and do a Hack the Entrepreneur First 100 as an archive, because you can’t find them on iTunes anymore. It’s a perfect reason to launch a new show and get it into the iTunes, get it into the search engines and repurpose that.
I don’t think I’ll pull those ads and redo it like that, but that’s absolutely something that needs to be done. Since I’m doing that — I don’t need to do the second 100 yet, but I probably will do them both in conjunction and get them both out there one after each other. Use that to call to action everybody back to the site and build on the main feed.
Jerod: Someone may ask, “Okay, why would you go back? You’ve done 300 episodes, why would go back and do those first few episodes? How is that stuff still relevant?” If the content’s evergreen, it’s still relevant. I will tell you, there have been so many times when I have been looking for a podcast episode about a specific topic … This has happened for me a lot since my daughter was born, because I’ve found myself searching for a lot more specific topics as she goes through different stages and my wife and I are interested in researching different elements of parenting.
I search on topics and I find episodes from three, four, five years ago. Sometimes the show is no longer there, and sometimes the show is still going on and that was my entry point to the show. Now, I would never subscribe to the show and actually go back 300 episodes or binge listen to all of them. But what it does — and this is why having descriptive titles around searchable keywords is important — is it puts the individual episodes out there for discovery.
You never know who that next person is that’s going to discover an episode from four years ago that answers a question that is relevant to the person today — and the answer is still relevant. Now they subscribe, find out what you’re doing, and they become a member of your audience for current shows. Don’t discount the power of that, which is why, Jonny, I think that’s a really smart idea that you have to keep those episodes in there even though they fall out of your main feed archive.
Jon Nastor: Exactly. That’s the reason. It’s not so that somebody can find episode 73 and then go back 72 episodes and forward to 100. That’s the entry point. The more content we can get into these search engines properly key-worded … People can have the ability to find that one episode. That one episode — if they’re into it — should send them to your main feed for the new stuff.
Jerod: That’s awesome.
Jon Nastor: They can look through and see if there’s anything else of interest. It’s just an entry point, that’s it. You’re not trying to kid yourself that people are going to download all hundred of those episodes, or whatever that archive is. It’s just another entry point for people.
The Power of Connection and the Possibility for Infatuation
Jerod: Yep. All right. We have talked about the power of leverage. We’ve talked about the power of repurposing here as we explore the power of creating more evergreen content. Jonny, as I sat down to put this outline together, those were the two that came to me the quickest. Those were the clearest, the most obvious reasons to produce evergreen content. But in some ways, I feel like this third reason might even be the most powerful, even though it took me a little longer to think about it. It makes so much sense when you do. It’s the power of connection and the possibility for infatuation. Let me explain what I mean by that.
When you have evergreen content, it encourages sharing and linking and saving and re-listening to shows. If your content is only relevant for a day or two, what you’re asking of your audience members is … You have such a small window for people to find the show, to listen to the show, and to still have time to share it and link to it where it will still be relevant. No one’s going to want to share a show that isn’t relevant, or it’s on its legs of relevancy. We see that with The Assembly Call. Shares — right when we put it out — they’re much higher. “Hey, this content is still relevant. The game just ended. This is awesome.” A day later, two days later, people are already looking ahead to the next game.
That can happen with news shows. People are already looking ahead to the next story or the next episode of a TV show, whatever it is. You may not encourage the same kind of sharing. The other thing is saving. I’ve saved tons of podcast episodes in Evernote or on Google Keep, then I’ll go back and listen to them later. But with a timely show like a news show I’m not going to do that, because I know that I’m never going to listen to it again. That helps you connect with current listeners and also helps you, obviously, share and spread the word. Evergreen content can do it. Maybe not necessarily the avalanche of shares right at the moment, but that slow burn over time, which is what we’re talking about building here.
The other thing to remember is that evergreen content provides the opportunity for binge listening. As we just said, Jonny’s not putting his archive episodes out there because he think people are going to go back and listen to every single one. But guess what? No one’s going to binge listen into your show if only your most recent episode is relevant.
This has happened to me a lot of times. Where I search for an episode of a show, I find it, I like it, it’s about an evergreen topic, and I’ll just start downloading every episode. I found — what’s the name of the show? Your Parenting Mojo. If you’re into parenting podcasts, it’s a great parenting podcast. I didn’t find that show until maybe five, six months ago. It had already been going on. I found the show and I went back — all the episodes were evergreen, so I downloaded them all and have binge listened to every single one of them. Because it’s evergreen, it provided the opportunity for me to do that.
Having evergreen episodes — the other thing that I think it does, and I found this myself as a listener, is it gives people a reason to listen deep into your archives. That allows people to see how far you’ve come. That happened with this Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. You can see when she started and doesn’t quite sound as confident and the audio quality is not quite as … All the stuff that we all face when we first put a podcast out there into the world. But now you see how much the quality has grown, and, especially if you binge listen, you can hear it incrementally get better.
I really think there’s something subtle and even subconscious about that, that as an audience member it’s like you’ve now gone on the journey with that person. You’ve seen where they were. You’ve seen where they’ve gone. You’ve seen that they clearly have invested in learning and getting better. Maybe invested money in a better microphone for better sound quality.
When you see where something has been and where it’s gone, it feels like you’re part of something that’s growing. I really think that is a powerful way to lock in an audience member and to get people excited about your show and to get people leaning forward when that next episode comes out. Because if you’ve come so far, where are you going to go next? I want to find that out. I want to be part of it as an audience member.
When you provide people that ability to connect with you and that possibility for the kind of podcast infatuation that makes a listener download your entire archive and listen to it over the course of a week or go back every couple of weeks and get four or five more episodes — all the different ways that we can binge listen to a podcast. When you provide that possibility for infatuation, you really give your show a chance to connect in a different way with an audience member than you can ever really connect with a show that isn’t evergreen like that and that can’t ever really encourage that burst of listens that you get when someone binges.
That’s why I think the power of connection and the possibility for infatuation is a next-level potential that doing evergreen content, producing more evergreen content will give you. And, when combined with the power of leverage and the power of repurposing, makes evergreen content something really powerful that you should consider for your shows. Jonny, what are your thoughts on the power of connection and the possibility for infatuation, because I have to think that you’ve gotten a lot of listeners and locked in a lot of audience members through that with your show?
Jon Nastor: Yeah, I guess I did this inadvertently without really being aware of it. As you said, the first two came really quickly and this one took some time. But you’re right, the power of connection and having people go back through those, it’s a fascinating thing. I was actually taking some notes. I was like, “There’s a couple things I should actually do to go back.” I was actually thinking, “I should go back to my Start Here page and I should put in my very first episode right there.”
Put the player right there and be like, “You’re starting here, but we’re at episode 340. Things have changed a lot. Here is when it started.” It’s with Chris Brogan and I was super nervous. I had never interviewed anybody. So it’s come a long ways. But that would be something — they’re not probably going to listen to the whole thing even right there, but it shows the other side of you and it allows people … I think that would draw them in. “Wow, that’s cool.” You know what I mean? That would definitely … And then if you especially had, “Make sure to subscribe to the show now” right below it, that would push people right there.
Jerod: There’s a vulnerability to it, and people connect with vulnerability. When they hear your early episodes — that they weren’t as great and that you’ve grown — there’s a vulnerability there that people connect to. I think it’s great. I think that’s a really smart thing to do, to be that explicit about it. Literally, “Start here. Listen to where we began,” but even without being that explicit about it. Just having an archive out there with evergreen content so people can go and discover that on their own, there’s a powerful level of connection.
Will the majority of your audience members do that? No. Will a lot of them do that? No, probably not. But you’ll get a handful, a select few. Man, you can really lock those people in. Those are going to be the people who are going to share it with other people. They’re going to buy courses that you put out. That are going to be with you over the long haul.
We all need a core group of audience members like that. I think when you give people that possibility for infatuation and allow them to connect in that way, boy, it can really give you some powerful audience members that become almost an unfair advantage for you as a podcaster as you move forward. Those are the people that keep you going and that support your show through thick and thin, and that’s a huge thing to have.
All right. Let’s go over these again. The three powerful reasons to produce more evergreen content: the power of leverage, the power of repurposing, and the power of connection and the possibility for infatuation. Those three powerful elements are all at your fingertips when you produce more evergreen content. If you aren’t producing evergreen content right now, think about it. Consider it.
Try to challenge yourself to think about ways that you can fit evergreen content into what you’re doing even if you’re doing a timely show, a news-related show, a current events-type show like I’m doing on The Assembly Call. I’m now trying to think of ways that I can get more evergreen content in there. Think about it. Challenge yourself to do that. Again, if you’re thinking about a new content strategy for a show or any show that you have, consider ways that you can get more evergreen content in there so that you can add all of these powerful elements to your show and to your audience growth.
If you are looking to start a new podcast, we have something for you that we want you to take advantage of, that is The Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Remarkable Podcast, which is a simple no-frills, nine-step plan to get your podcast off the ground. You’re going to learn a lot in this guide. You’re going to learn how to define your audience of one and pick your format. You will learn six paths to podcast monetization. You’ll learn about equipment that we used when we first started our podcast. To get this free, nine-step Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Podcast, you want to go to Showrunner.FM/Report. That’s Showrunner.FM/Report.
All you have to do is enter an email address. When you do that, you will immediately get The Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Remarkable Podcast. You will also get a very insightful email sequence that gives you some interesting things to think about with your show and asks you some deep questions that really get you thinking. We’ve gotten some amazing responses to the questions that we’ve posed in this email sequence. So that’s another bonus that you get when you go to Showrunner.FM/Report and enter your email address. Do that today if you haven’t done it already.
Jon Nastor: Very cool. That was fun.
Jerod: That was fun.
Jon Nastor: Let’s take one more moment to thank Chris for sending that email, for sharing his stats with us and allowing us to share it with the audience. There’s something special and helpful to both Jerod and I — and also you as the listener — when we get to answer real questions from the audience and things you’re either learning, realizing, or need to learn about your show as you start it, launch it, and scale it, and grow it.
Once again, episode 100 is coming up. If you have any questions and would like to be on the show or have your question on the show — we will, I guess, mention your website as well, if you wish — then email us. That would be, I guess … How do you email us? You email us at …
Jerod: Just email me at Jerod@Copyblogger.com.
Jon Nastor: There we go. Yeah. You’re doling out your email. I guess mine’s Jon@HackTheEntrepreneur.com.
Jerod: I’m fine with that.
Jon Nastor: You can Tweet us or you can track either of us down on Facebook. There’s a ton of places to reach out to us either through our sites or through Showrunner. You can even hit reply to The Showrunner email if you’re on that newsletter. We’d love to answer your questions. Have we mentioned Chris’s website?
Jerod: IAPath.com.
Jon Nastor: IAPath.com. Check it out. You can see the whole show that we talked about on this episode. See what you can use from what he’s doing and implement it on your own show.
Jerod: Absolutely. All right, we will talk to you next week for episode 100.
Jon Nastor: Take care.