How you treat your brand is how your clients treat you. If you level up your podcast game and improve your show every year, so will your clients’ treatment of you! Today, Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard spill much-needed tips on how you can do just that. From making sure you present yourself the way you intended, to letting people find you in a sea of podcast shows, you’ll find essential strategies in this episode. And oh, you’ll also discover great ways on how to feel good about your recent uploads. So tune in and level up your podcast!

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Leveling Up The Podcast Game: Tips On How To Evaluate And Improve Your Show Every Year

We are here to talk with you all about a subject that unless you’re a brand-new podcaster is going to be of interest to you. If you’re a brand-new podcaster, you’re doing all these things or we’re doing all these things for you. We’re going to talk about it to set yourself up for your show.

If you’re a new podcaster, these are the same things that you may want to check. You may want to audit for yourself and make sure that you’re presenting yourself out there in the way that you intend. Sometimes the technical execution of things doesn’t always look as to how we execute it on our end as content creators.

Making sure that that’s working for you could be important at the start as well or at the time of launch. This is a time to make adjustments. What we’re going to talk about is what I call my yearly maintenance list. It’s my yearly maintenance in my audit list. It’s the thing that I check across my podcast specifically.

A few things are on the website but it’s this checklist of things that I have that we’ll go through it. It will check the way we’re presenting ourselves out to the world. How does our brand look? Is the message coming across? Is everything as I intended it? Are things missing? Do things need to be changed? We’re looking at it for many things as we go forward as to what our new strategic plan might be. Remember, since you started your podcast, a lot may have changed.

Tracy, what is your first suggestion for something to take stock of and review here about your podcast?

The first thing I want to do is I want to look at my brand and all assets, all the things that I created, whether it’s my social profiles, website and podcast. When I look at them, I want to look at them as someone who doesn’t know me yet. In the case of a podcast, I want to search like a listener. Specifically, I’m only searching like a binge listener like how one would go out there and search because I know that those are my most valuable listeners at the end of the day.

I want to search for things the way that they would find me if they didn’t already know me, they didn’t know the name of my show, my name or how to spell it properly. This is where I go. I’m going to go and search in my favorite podcast player. I’ll do them all eventually but I’ll start in the one that’s my favorite because it’s my comfort zone and most podcast listeners will start in their comfort zone.

Go to my favorite podcast player. In my case, that’s Google Podcasts. That’s the one I like. I will go from there to be able to look at and search for the topic of my show. In my case, it says podcasting help, education and tips. Whatever those terms are that might be useful like podcasting success stories. Whatever the terms that you think, make sure you’re using terms that aren’t your internal languaging. We got to get out of our own heads and industry terms. If we don’t know what they are, go ask a listener or someone who isn’t familiar with your industry, what they would type in if they were looking for a show on your subject. That’s what we’re going to type in first.

One of the things that are occurring to me that you should do because I have done this with my own is when you search on a term, if your own show doesn’t come up, look at whose shows do come up. You can learn a bit about how others are doing it and also read their descriptions in their shows as you see what shows are coming up while why it’s probably in their title, description of their show or an episode.

Make sure you're presenting yourself in the way you intended. Click To Tweet

I did a podcast episode on giving and a philanthropy podcast for giving Tuesdays. That’s what I did. When I did that, I searched in that global search engine of Google Podcasts, Stitcher and Apple. I searched for giving social good and philanthropy. I searched for those terms to see what came up. When I saw a repeat across three players, that’s when I chose them. That’s my methodology for doing it because it shows consistency in search credibility.

That’s the one thing that you’re going to check each time. You want to maybe take a screenshot or jot a list down of the top five podcasts that show up and see if they’re showing up consistently because if they’re only showing up in one player but not in the others, there’s something that happens to work in that player. It’s not something consistently that you may want to emulate, so we like to look at it from that perspective.

When I’m looking for once, I get that dialed in, and I see my show in the mix, I want to see how my cover art looks against the others. I screenshot and take a look at it. I think about, “Should I change the color of my cover?” This happened to us. When we first started the show, the cover was black and green. It was black and it had green words because it was feed. It was growth. That was the plan for it. It had looked like a flower field and had social media icons on the top of it. That’s what the cover looked like.

I almost forgot about that cover. It was so long ago and we’ve pivoted a few times on that.

The first year that I went to review it, Libsyn came out with their podcast and copied our name so close that it was like on top of us and the cover art was green and black. I said, “That’s it.” We switched ours to blue and we had this blue color styling going on. Then we’re switching it to a white background, which we don’t normally recommend for people but we’re doing it for a particular purpose but it has a strike around it. That’s part of what we’re doing because otherwise, white blends completely into the background of everything else that you do. It can make your cover art looks smaller than everybody else’s, so we put a strike around it to make it look larger.

We’re changing that up because things change over time. New shows show up. When you thought you had this high contrast, stand-out cover art that you were proud of, all of a sudden, you find out it doesn’t work anymore. This also happened with our 3D Print one and over time, we shifted the colors too. We didn’t change a lot about the cover art. We just changed the contrast to the color.

Brighten it up, refresh it and make it look more current because maybe the color got a little outdated. These are the things that we’re looking for. The other thing we’re looking forward to see is the name of our show still working. If I were looking at all of those shows out there, does this name still work for me? By comparison, am I compelled to choose my own show? This is the stuff we have to think about.

I think very often for podcasters, the idea of changing the name of your show is a daunting one and people tend to avoid it. It’s like, “I started here. I need to keep my show named the same.” I want to make sure everybody reads this and understands. That’s not necessarily true. Just because you changed the name of your show, is not going to change everybody who’s been listening. It’s not going to prevent them from getting your next episode. They’re subscribed to your show listing, which you can change the name, cover art and description. Everything about your show listing, after it’s already been syndicated and published, you can change that stuff at any time.

Don’t think you have to go back and fix everything. Your subscribers are there. It’s for the people going forward who are finding you knew that you may want to make these changes for. There’s another thing that then I want to search for, the next thing. I searched like a listener. I was looking for it. I might check the categories. I might go within a category and search within a category.

 

Those are other ways you can dial in a little deeper if you’re getting too broad results and your show’s not coming up. That may be likely because you’re in the general search area and you’re not in the business search area or the finance podcast search area. You may want to dial a little deeper to get more realistic results. Podcast listeners are smart enough to know how to get the best results for what they’re looking for because they’re listeners. They understand how the engine works.

The next thing you want to do is type in your show name. I had one happened where the show was called Give – A Philanthropy Podcast. That’s the title of it. If I type the word Give, which was the way the cover art looked, that was what you saw. You assumed that Give was the title and the other part was the subtitle. If I type Give, they shouldn’t show up at all, partially because it was too new, too generic and too general.

Give was on the cover. It was the first word but that wasn’t a part of the podcast title?

It was a part but if you didn’t put Give and the word Philanthropy, you couldn’t get their show to show up. Thinking about that, sometimes your show doesn’t show up. Sometimes there’s an older show that has more hierarchy, that’s a little closer to your name that shows up before you and so you don’t get served up as well.

Check your show name and see how it’s showing up. It may be a strategy where you need to add a subtitle. You may need to add a qualifier to your title. You may need to promote it differently than calling your show Give in this particular case out there. You may need to give them the words so that they can find your show when they’re looking for it by name. The other part is that I then always look for my name as the host. Am I showing up? I try to misspell my name. In my case, I’ll put one Z instead of two Zs to see if I show up.

You do that additionally. It’s not an either-or. You put your name additionally in the description somewhere misspelled.

You would do that. It’s very common for people to misspell your name. In my particular case, when we type it in, there aren’t a lot of Tracy Hazzards out there. It serves me up either way just because there isn’t another one with the misspelling. If your name or the slight misspelling is a common use of your name, somebody else might be appearing in that. You may want to have both. You can add that into your description and pretend it’s a typo. Try to ignore it for those perfectionists out there but it’s there to help you show up in search engines when people don’t understand how to spell your last name.

That’s a pretty common thing. People having a website URL might be hard to spell. They also get the misspelled URL and then forward that into the real one so that they try to catch everybody.

I butchered someone’s name because she didn’t say her name on her show. The introduction didn’t have her name on there. She didn’t say it. She went by her first name. When I went to say the host of the show is so-and-so, I had no place where I could find anyone who pronounced it. If that’s the case, then go by your first name and your last initial. Just go, “I’m Tom H.” Whatever that is, go for it and leave that on your cover art everywhere else. If that’s where you are in the world, then go for that. See what happens and try that out instead. That’s another thing that we want to do. We want to make sure we’re found when people are looking for us. That’s our purpose for doing it that way.

Check your show name and see how it's showing up. You may need to add a subtitle. Click To Tweet

Once we find our show, we checked out our show, we’re going to check out the feed view. That’s the view of our icon for the cover art. With the little short description, sometimes you have to hit the arrow down button to read it or even take a look at it. We want to look at the formatting of it and the way it’s phrased. Sometimes it looks right when you put it into your podcast host feed.

When you put it in on our end in Podetize, it looks correct there but spaces or hard returns aren’t being read properly on the feed side. These are some things to take a look at. You can get some help from our team. In our particular case, you can send a help ticket in or send a request and say, “This isn’t looking right.” Send a screenshot of what it looks like on Apple. “Here’s what it looks like in my portal. How can you help me make this look right again?” Our team would go in and fix it for you.

For others, you may have to experiment and try it. Play with it on the feed side and then look at what it looks like on the director side. Remember that there’s a delay in it showing up. It may take an hour or so to display on the podcast player that you’re looking for. It’s not an immediate thing. You may want to make a change and then later in the day, check it out and see if it works.

Doing this thing may take you several days to achieve what you want to but you can get there.

You’re checking the view, seeing how everything looks. Is it cutting off my cover art? Is my cover art grainy because I didn’t put a good resolution size in, to begin with? These are things you want to check out. How well presented are you? Is this coming across the way that you intend it? Scroll through your feed and check your episodes. A lot of times, we find that other podcast hosts end up putting the episodes out of order. Even though you aired them in a specific order, they’re not showing in that order and it may not be what you want.

One of the most common mistakes is because Apple changed and made some new features about how episodes are displayed. You can display them in seasons. The biggest mistake I see people making is they have their episodes or some of them classified in season one and others in season two but then some episodes got published and they didn’t choose a season. They didn’t put anything in the season designation. It shows up in the Apple app as an unknown season and it can be out of order. You might think, “Where’s my latest episode? It hasn’t shown up.” In fact, it has shown up. It’s just that how Apple is displaying it is showing things in a certain order that maybe you didn’t intend.

Which is why we want to know, once we’ve checked it in our favorite player, we know what to look for, we’ve made some adjustments to our favorite player because it’s more likely to cascade and work in others as well. Correcting that the first time, getting it right once is the best way to go about it. Once you have it right and it’s appearing right in the way that you want it in that favorite player, we’re going to go check all the other players because sometimes there can be nuances and differences. If we got it looking right in Apple and it doesn’t look right in Google, we may need to make an adjustment. Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart, TuneIn and then check your website because there’s also a player for most of you. We use a Fusebox player. The Fusebox player has a way that it displays and it may not look right there either.

The other thing I want you to do is to check the links that are showing up in your episode descriptions. Sometimes we call them calls to action. Sometimes they’re links about how to find me, where my website is and things like that. You’re going to check all of that text and data but you’re also going to check your main links. It usually says the word website. When you click it, does it go to your website or does it go to your podcast host? Check that. Make sure that that’s not wrong. That’s a common problem.

Not only the links within your description. We have that a little later down the list but the description itself is important. As long as we’re there, let’s talk about that. I had this happened. A client has been with us for years. When he started with us, he was already a podcaster. He had this description. We were a relatively young company at the time. He had his show. It was established. He probably wasn’t going to ask us what we thought of his description or even thought it was a big issue.

 

All these years later, he’s reached out to me and saying, “I’m noticing that a lot of your other shows have a much longer description than I have. Is that hurting me for SEO?” I’m like, “Yes, it is as I took a look at it.” He has done this type of audit on his show already. We’ve rewritten his entire description and that was making a big difference for the show coming up in search results within the podcast apps. It’s a good time to do that.

I want to remind you to get picky with the first three sentences because that’s what shows to people. That’s what matters and what a listener is probably looking for. The remainder of the 4,000 characters that you have allotted to you is for the search engine. This is where you’re going to bury in and drop in the wrong spelling of your name or your show.

Whatever that might be are going to be in those other places but that’s where the other search terms. The ones that we were talking about at the beginning that we were using like a listener, this is the place to put those in. We don’t want to cram them in. We want it to be like pros. We’re trying to make a well-written thing. On occasion, our phrasing is a little unusual. We don’t want to get too editorial, nitpicky and too perfectionist about the writing here because it’s written for a bot and not for a human but the first three sentences are humans.

We’re trying to make sure you get found by the people you want to find you. Then updating in general. Things may have changed in the intent of your show. You’ve pivoted a little bit. You used to be more of an interview show and then not so much or you’re providing different kinds of value. Keeping that description up to date and as you’re evaluating your entire show, looking at it on a yearly basis is a very good thing to do.

Your bio is one of the other things that we like to check at this time. Usually, there’s a section of your bio in there. I update our bios sometimes twice a year but every single year for sure that are on our website and other places. Anywhere that it is, I need to update it. If it’s in our social profiles, I have to update it there. If it’s here in our show description, I need to update it here as well. If there’s anything that’s about the host, this is a time and a place to go and update that as well.

It’s more important to read this at this time for yourself also to look at how it looks visually because sometimes it’s too many words and they’re not broken up with a little bit of space. You don’t want to take up and waste space but you also don’t want it unreadable at the end of the day. If someone does read it, you want to make sure they can read it. The other thing I want to do is check my episode list. Do they appear in the right order we talked about? Is it time to get rid of some episodes? Are there people that we no longer want to be officially associated with anymore?

We have that happened.

People are going out of business. They’re shifting and pivoting their business. The episodes are not as relevant as they used to be for some shows. Going through and taking an opportunity at the end of a year to cull through those episodes and taking the time to do it at once, rather than any time you randomly think about that is better. Doing that at this moment in time is a great time.

What we like to do is take out the episode from being live in our feed. We remove it and unpublish it from the feed. We leave the blog unnavigatable. We remove it from categories. We do everything. We take it out of the list of blogs that show but if someone had a link to the actual blog episode, it won’t break but once they find it, they’ll head back into the normal blog and the website.

We want to make sure we're found when people look for us. Click To Tweet

We still want to break that because if someone’s coming randomly from somebody else’s social post that happens to have your blog episode, even if you didn’t like the episode, you still want to capture that reader, listener and viewer. Let’s let that happen. We do it that way but we do take it out of our audio feed. That’s one of the most important things that we do.

You should have copyrights. There’s a spot for it. There’s a copyright line that’s a part of the feed setup when you do it for Apple or for Ever. You do want to take that out and make sure that you’ve updated it for the current year if you haven’t updated it. Here’s the thing that most people don’t do and it’s highly recommended to do it. You should leave the range if available.

In other words, if you’ve had your podcast since 2015 and it’s going into 2021, you would say 2015 to 2021, even though you’ve made changes to it, you’ve updated or whatever you want to leave that range in there. A lot of the podcast players don’t let you do that. It’s just a one-year date. You want to put it on the most current date because your new content is coming out through that and all of the rest is still covered anyway.

From a legal standpoint, if you have a range, go ahead and put it in there from the start date to the current date. On our websites, we always do that. We do it from the start of the current version of the day we bought the URL and the website went live. We start it from that year and we continue it through and going forward, even though the style might have changed and the content changed. We protect it from a copyright standpoint.

One thing that’s important to understand here about the copyright line is that I don’t believe that if you don’t update the date to be 2021 on January 1st that somehow, you’re giving up some copyright. I don’t think that is. I’m not a lawyer. However, I do think it makes an impression about your show if you haven’t updated that and it says cover at 2017 and here we are in 2020. It says something about you’re not paying attention to detail. Are you serious about your show? It makes an impression that is not helpful.

You’re not up-to-date and tech-savvy. You don’t care. If your business depends on that, then this is a place for you to show. How you treat your brand is going to be how I treat you as a client. That’s going to be an extension of that. That’s where we build a higher trust factor by making sure that these things are fixed.

The last thing you might want to do is check your categories. Our clients have all known that there were lots more categories added. They were able to update them and we allowed them opportunities to do that. Anyone who’s new coming in has the longer list of categories. If you set up your show a long time ago by yourself and you are not maintaining the categories or haven’t looked at that, you need to double-check because some new categories have come out that might be better for your show. Now is a good time to reselect those and change them out in the feed.

Some people have shows that are not very clear what category is the best for you. There’s not a very clear line that says, “My show should be in that category.” You can be listed in several categories. There’s nothing wrong at times if you feel over time, “I don’t think I’m getting a lot of traction in that category.” You can change a category. You can try another one.

Try a new one. See if it’s a better fit for you, especially, when you do that audit and check of the competitors. When you see a competitor that you think, “I want to be where they are,” go check, take a look at their category and emulate that. That’s a great way for you to reposition yourself right next to them.

 

Calls to action. This is a good time to update calls to action. We usually have a call-to-action at the end of every podcast episode on how to find us on social or where to go. We like to keep it simple and generic. We don’t put in specific calls to action that aren’t like Podetize.com/masterclasses or Podetize.com/resources. It’s always something where we can forward it to our latest classes, courses and things.

We don’t give complex URLs or very specific things that are set in time for promotion in that episode or blog post descriptions. We don’t do it there. We try to keep it generic. The reason is because we don’t want to update it. If you did do that, maybe you want to start making a more generic option that allows you to do URL forwarding, move things around and be able to keep it so that you don’t have to update this year over year.

At least use some flexibility to change it elsewhere.

Don’t forget if you don’t have a call-to-action, add one. People need to know how to find you. They need to be invited into your community. Don’t assume that they will figure it out for themselves. Make it easy for them to find you. If you don’t ask and invite, they won’t come. Trailers.

Something that people often talk about is their first episode. What should their first episode be? Should it be a different format than the others? There’s not an absolute right or wrong answer to that question. It is a preference and a choice. However, there have been some changes again over the years.

Apple, who does still leads the podcast industry because they invented it after all, has made it so that you can classify an episode as a trailer episode, which to them means your preview or introductory episode of your show. They also allow you to have a trailer episode for a season so you can have a different trailer for each season if you want to.

You can also select one of your episodes to be that trailer, pinning it to the top or something. You don’t have to have one that’s only a trailer. Keep in mind, people want something shorter and sweeter for a trailer. There are a lot of them that are 30 seconds, a minute and a half. They have this power, movie-style trailer. That’s great but if you don’t do that, at minimum do an intro episode. Less than ten minutes about what my show is about, who I am, why I’m here and why I care about you. We’re setting ourselves up. We use that to write the description so why not record it and make it a great episode? That’s a great way to do it.

I like to update it. Sometimes I’ll do it every hundred episodes. It’s not a set and time of the year that I update it. Things change on my show. I add new features. I’ve gotten some great guests. I might want to refer them to some of the best episodes to go back through and check out if you’re new to the show. You want to do this for people who are new to the show, not for your existing subscribers. Think about that when you’re in the mode of recording. That’s why it might be a little bit different than you normally would do it.

This next one is one of my pet peeves. If your show has been around for a year or more, listen to your own intro and outro. Think about what it’s like for a listener to listen to it over and over when they’re on a long drive and listening to a number of your episodes back-to-back.

How you treat your brand is going to be how your client treats you. Click To Tweet

I did this from when we’re recording. We have a relatively new client who is doing a refresh, a time for a new intro and outro, new theme music and the whole thing. We’ve been working on that. He performed. This person is recording his intro and outro, which is fine. That’s a choice. He’s got a great voice. I listened to the recording of it. It was about 35 seconds long.

There was a portion of what he said that was not repeating himself but a little bit redundant. I said to him, “I want you to think about this. Think about somebody listening to this multiple times within a couple of hours because they’re listening to a few episodes. Would you feel that intro like, ‘That’s the show. It gets me in the mood. Get on with the show,’ or would you be sitting there thinking, ‘Come on. Get on with the show already?'” That’s all too often how a lot of listeners feel about it. We tend to subscribe to less as more. In 15, 20 seconds, say what you got to say, announce the show, get people upbeat in the right mood and move on.

It’s okay to have a longer one on that trailer we were talking about. That might be ideal because that’s that first episode and place for the first people to find you. You may want a longer one there. That’s okay there. The other thing that I want you to do is listen to your outro going into your intro. You want to have it auto-play from one episode to the next so that you can hear that length. That’s where it can be repetitive and way too long. It gets people to not then listen to the next episode. They think, “I don’t have time for this.” They crash out before they get into the next episode.

I often find it, Tracy. I want to see if you agree with this because you’re a binge listener. If you’re listening to a number of episodes in a row and you’ve heard the outro. Once you get to the outro, can’t you skip to the next episode?

That assumes that you have your hands available to do that. Many people don’t also because I listen on double speed and faster, which many people do. You may want to check out your show at that speed to see what it’s like. I don’t always have the ability to do that. Keep that in mind that that can be a frustration point for binge listeners. We want to be binge listener-friendly. That’s one of our goals here.

The other thing is that go and spot listen to at least three of your episodes. Go listen to an early one. You’re going to cringe because you know your sound maybe wasn’t as good. You were a little stiffer and rougher but I want you to listen to it because it’s a frame of reference for improvement. If we don’t hear how we improve, we don’t feel good about our recent episodes either.

We need to put it in context for ourselves and also because that’s the way new listeners do. They come to an early episode and check it out. They’ll go to someone in the middle that they find an interesting topic or an interesting guest and then they will listen to the most recent. They will do a three-show check. They may not listen all the way through to all of them until they get to the most recent one because they want to be on that and then they’ll work their way backward later. That’s a model for it.

If I am a new listener to your show and I listened to the early one and the audio was a little rough, echoey and other things, I’m going to go, “They’re new to this.” I will give you the benefit of the doubt if I think your show still sounds interesting. I’ve listened enough to know the topic is interesting to me and so I’ll go on to the next one. I’ll pick one that interests me and go to the most recent one.

When I hear an audio improvement, that says a lot about the care you’ve put into your show, when it goes to 100 episodes and you haven’t improved at all in that, it shows that you didn’t listen to your own show. You didn’t care and you didn’t put an improvement in the process. I’m not so sure I’m going to stick around.

 

We want to demonstrate that improvement over time. You want to check it out and listen. I have had a few people who ended up going from their office to their home office because of the pandemic. They didn’t realize that their audio had problems and shifted. This is a good time for you to audit that and check on that.

Those are different environments. We have some people that have more than one residence and they’ll record. Half the year, they’ll be in one residence and half the year at another. They don’t realize that there’s quite a big difference in the environment that they are recording it.

I had that and that’s the benefit of the doubt. I was doing a coaching call and that happened. Her audio is good for a while and then all of a sudden, it wasn’t in more recent episodes. I realized she was in a different country, so she was in a different location. I thought maybe it’s the environment they’re in. When we got on the call, the first thing I did was, “Let’s fix your sound right now.” It turns out she wasn’t even using her microphone properly.

It was a whole tech fail. It wasn’t the environment. We got it quickly fixed and her sound is now great. It’s an easy fix if you need help with that. There are lots of people out there who are willing to go down the other end of Zoom and check it out for you. We’re here for you too. We’ll always be a team here for you. This listening experience is important to keep those listeners coming back for more. We need to do a benefit.

The other thing is if you want to make some great improvements in your show, listen to how you are in the show. Do you talk too fast? Do you talk too slow? Do you say so all the time? Do you say um all the time? There are ways to improve that in some coaching and help that you can get if you’re interested in making an improvement to how you perform and present as a podcast host.

Having said that, if you’re a new podcaster, I don’t want you to obsess over this. I would much rather you get going and record than try to be perfect and waiting until you’re perfect to do it. Don’t get stuck in this area of permanent potential and not put your content out there. People are going to value the content more than your perfection as a speaker.

This is the thing. Sometimes we’ll get a new client and we’ll listen to their first few episodes. I’ll want to say something but we don’t because we know that 10 episodes, 15 episodes in, they’re going to naturally improve. It happens. You get more comfortable in the space. If you were relying on notes, you realize it’s too much work and you’ll stop doing it. There’s a whole process by which we see a shift happen naturally. You will hear that if you check out your show. That’s why I want you to hear the contrast between all the pieces.

The last thing I want you to do is a plan. Start a list. As you’re checking out those competitor shows and found some of them, go back to them and make a list of their guests that you think, “They should be on my show. If they were on that show, they should totally be on my show. I’m going to make that happen. I’m going to reach out to them.”

There are a lot of opportunities for topics as well. Remember, you don’t have to listen to their show. You see how they title it and the topic that they took. Do your take on it. Make it original and make it you. You don’t need to do it because they did it. Do it because they did it and you believe you have something more important to say about it. That’s a great way for you to plan your topics for the next year. Get a jumpstart on who to invite for your next guest.

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That’s a good list of things that people can do to take stock of their show.

One more thing I thought of that you should do is as you’re checking out those competitive shows and all those other shows that are in the topic area and maybe there are a lot of them that aren’t competitive but they’re in the genre of what you want to be, these are guests you want to invite to your show, do a podcast host swap and get some publicity. They have a similar audience and interests that you do. This is a great way for you to have a publicity swap going on for you to get introduced to their listeners and them to get introduced to yours.

I hope you find these tips helpful as we’re coming into the end of 2021 or your 50th episode, 100th episode. It’s good at least once a year to review your show. Do some maintenance and make sure you don’t have any cobwebs in there that needed to be cleaned out. Stay current and fresh and maybe pivot a little bit.

Make sure your brand is being presented how you intend it to. Thanks for reading the show. We’ll be back with more topics, interesting subjects, tips, tools and success stories from other podcasters and other shows.

Important links

• Google Podcasts
• Fusebox
• Podetize.com/masterclasses
• Podetize.com/resources