I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about the past. This, this is probably gonna sound a little strange, but just bear with me for a second. Because I just want to tell you like, I'm just not the type of person that likes to dig around in things that I created a few years ago unless there's like a really specific reason, right? Like, I'm not going back and listening to every single podcast episode I've ever created, or watching every YouTube video or reading my old
emails. And I think that this surprises a lot of people. They're like, wait, you don't reuse like your old content? Like you don't go back and use it in different ways? I mean, yeah, you can. There's some really cool things. You know, we've talked about repurposing many times here on the podcast, but I want to specifically talk about using your podcast backlog strategically, today. Yes, all that hard work that you've put in the
episodes that you've already created. Or if you're just getting started, I want you to be thinking about these things now, because this will actually make your life a lot easier. And the months and the years to come. So let's get right to it. Welcome to the profit podcast where we teach entrepreneurs how to start launch and market their podcast. I'm your host, Krystal, Proffitt, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging
out with me today. Because if you've been trying to figure out the world of podcasting, think of this show as the time saving shortcut you've been looking for. So let's get right to it, shall we?
Okay, I'm getting all I'm getting all fired up today. I'm like getting extra comfortable. In my chair, I got my iced coffee, because I'm recording in the afternoon today. And I'm just really excited because I want you to think about your content in a way of not only producing something one time, and you hit publish, and then that's it. Right? Like, if you've been around here for a while, you know, we try to get as much like leg work, like what's the saying, uh, see, again, again, with
Krystal and her terrible metaphors. If you're just if you're brand new around here, welcome. Get used to them. I say analogies wrong all the time. But I'm sitting here thinking like, you want to get the most mileage as you can out of one piece of content, specifically one podcast episode, because it is a long form piece of content. Typically, the episodes that I record on this show are anywhere from like 15 to 25 minutes up to an hour and a
half long. So I want to make sure that what I produce is something that I can refer back like people back to over and over again in the future. But also, I'm already thinking about how can I formulate this into something that we're going to talk about here in a little bit? Oh, I'm about to give it away. I'd love to give it away. We're not we're not quite there yet. Because I just want to get into ways that you can use your podcast content that's already published in a brand new
way. So honestly, this doesn't even matter. Because I know that there's a lot of brand new podcasters in this community. Hi, shout out, I know that you're there. And you haven't even launched your podcast yet. You're like Krystal, how does this relate to me? I just want you sitting back and listening to the strategy. So when it's been six months, and you've been at your podcast, you're gonna come back to this episode, listen to it again and say, Oh, I see. I see now,
okay, yes, this is smart. This is how I want to rework my episodes and use them in this strategic way. But even if you've only been podcasting for two months, you can use the strategies that we're talking about today. If you've been podcasting for six months or two years, even better, you're actually going to have a lot of great content
already in your back pocket that you can use. So I already know that there's gonna be a few options that you can use on how you can start with all pieces of content that you believed performed really well. And you can kind of choose like, what performs like I'm saying that air quotes like performed really well. What does that necessarily
mean? Does that mean that it got the most downloads, does that mean, people were screenshotting it and talking about it on Instagram, or people were, you know, putting a whole bunch of comments whenever you put up an audiogram on Facebook, like, I'm gonna leave that up to you to judge how well an episode performed because it's gonna be different for everybody, because maybe you're like, well, I'm only on Twitter. And that's the only place where I
interact with my people. Well, then maybe reach out on Twitter and ask them like, Hey, I saw that. This was the most downloaded episode, what did you love about it? There's all kinds of different ways that you can engage with your audience. But I really want to talk about how I've been able to do this with pieces of content. And then I'm going to give you some options for how you can use the episode you already have very strategically,
right? This is your podcast backlog, that's what we're going to call it.
So if you're like, what is a backlog, that means anything that you've published today. So like I said, brand new podcasters, this won't apply to you. But if you've been doing this for at least two months, there's a good chance that you can use some of the strategies that we're going to talk about today. Even if you can't use them immediately, you'll be able to use them very soon.
So I wanted to give you an example from my own content journey. And that is how I use spin off pieces of content for my YouTube channel. Like I take pieces of this podcast, and I use it for my YouTube channel. So I I'm trying to think of let's let's go back, let's go back to the beginning. I should like insert, like birds chirping or something. I don't, y'all No, no, no, we're not fancy on the production side around here. Just imagine that there's birds
chirping, singing, it's a glorious day. It's the Genesis moment of this beautiful podcast. And I was just creating content. That was a lot of interviews. And then I thought maybe I should put these on YouTube. So I did. I don't recommend it. It's not something that my YouTube audience really cared about. Because it's not like today's video podcast where it's like, oh, you can see me another person. Like it was literally just my podcast artwork for the rookie life, the original
name of this podcast. And it was just the artwork. And it was me talking. I don't even think I had a waveform like there was no audiiogram, like a wave bouncing across the screen to let you know that there was even talking it was just the artwork and audio in the background. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. But you know what, you make mistakes and you learn. That's the only way that we get better, right? Keep it up. We all got to start somewhere. So this was my somewhere that I
started. terrible mistake. But whenever I was ready to get more serious about YouTube, so I did the rookie Live podcast for about 10 months. And then I rebranded to the Proffitt Podcast. And that's when I went all in like it was for the last two years, we have been talking about nothing but podcasting. And that's crazy. We're actually coming up on the two year anniversary. So I guess it's just shy of two years because it was May 7,
may 5, may 7, somewhere around there. That's when we launched the official trailer of the Proffitt Podcast or made a big announcement that we were switching. And so whenever I did that, I also thought, Okay, I'm going to go all in on podcasting. But podcasting, like there's just some pieces of it that need to be visual, right like it needs you need to see a tutorial of how to edit your podcast or how buzzsprout works. Like there's a lot of nuances that go into explaining
something. Just in a podcast episode, I felt like things needed to be visual. So whenever I decided to get serious about my YouTube channel, which was last year, last January was when I went all in and said, I'm gonna publish two videos a week. For the end of time, basically, that was my commitment. I'm like, I'm gonna publish to YouTube episodes, or videos every single week, no matter what, right come hell or high water. I'm putting out two episodes a week. But I it kind of made me nervous.
It like scared me a little bit because I'm like, wait, what am I What am I supposed to talk about? What What am I was talking about on these YouTube videos, because I was new to YouTube. I mean, I had done it unsuccessfully for a while I had tried some things I tried to be, you know, do some quirky videos, and just things that did not work out well. So whenever I was looking at creating like a content calendar for YouTube, I thought, well, I've already published a lot of episodes,
right? Because we had switched to the Proffitt Podcast in May. And now mind you, this was May 2019. And then in January 2020, is when I made that commitment to go all in so from May to January, there was a lot of content that was a lot of time to pass of me producing regular consistent content. So whenever I went to go all in on YouTube, I went back to my podcast backlog basically this is really long story. I'm just now realizing like you could have wrapped this up in a
month. two sentences. But here we are. Here we are about two minutes into the story.
But I went back to my podcast backlog and I said, What are my most popular episodes, that's where I need to start. I need to start with the ones that I already know are successful. The ones that had the most downloads, the ones that I had the most visits to my website. And the ones that were fun for me to make like that's another factor, right? It's not just about popularity and the most downloads, it's also well, is that something that
you want to continue to talk about, right? Because you'll notice on my YouTube channel, I don't particularly talk a lot about editing. And that is simply because I don't do a lot of editing. And I don't really care to be the go to podcast, editing expert, no, thank you, I don't want that title. Like, please, and thank you go away, I'm good. But I did go back into my podcast backlog whenever I started YouTube. And then I just started creating
spin off pieces of content. And you may even notice, if you follow this podcast, and my YouTube channel, most of the content really coincides with one another, I will line up my podcast calendar with my YouTube calendar and say, Okay, if I'm talking about this on the podcast this week, then I should probably talk about that on the YouTube channel or a form of that, or just one piece of
that. So this is already a few ways that you can think about your content and how you can use what you've already published, and use it in a new way. Right? This is repurposing on the most basic level.
But I want you to start thinking about your episode you've already published and say, How can I get more mileage out of this? Another cool thing that's really awesome for SEO purposes is whenever I publish an episode, and I'm thinking of an episode that's in my backlog, I will mention it on the podcast. And then I will link to it in the podcast show notes. Now I don't want to go down an SEO rabbit hole. This this is search engine
optimization for anybody that's not familiar. So SEO is how your podcast or your website pages rank on Google? Well, the more links that you have to your own stuff, it's going to help your website rank higher when people search for whatever it is your topic is about. So I love to mention old episodes of the podcast in current episodes, because it reminds you that Oh yeah, we had this. This is a great conversation that we had like with this one guest or we had a returning guest and
their message really coincided with this one. So you should probably like it's kind of like a spiderweb of content and you want everything to go back to each other. And one episode I'm thinking of in particular, and we'll use this as an example. I'll link to it in the show notes is Tashe, so, shout out Tashe, she's in our Facebook group. She was asking, how do you celebrate your podcast milestones? And I was like, Oh, I we have a podcast episode about that. It's here and I just
linked to the podcast episode. So I want you to get the most mileage out of your episodes like when people ask you questions like isn't that the reason why you created a podcast, you don't have to repeat yourself over and over and over again. So if you already taught a lesson, or you know, you went through a step by step process, and then another podcast episode, don't go through the
entire process. Again, in your current episode, just mention it and say where people can go listen to it, you can link to it in your show notes for your current episode. Or you could have you know, some other way, whenever you publish it, hey, make sure you go listen to this episode two, these kind of go hand in hand. So I hope that that makes sense. But I definitely want you linking back to old episodes in your show notes, because that really, really helps your SEO for your website.
Now, I wanted to tell you a few other fun ways that you can use your backlog of episodes. Some of these I've tried some of these I've seen other people try. But I just wanted to give you some examples of like I said, some fun ways that you can do it.
So number one is you can make a database for your audience with clickable links for your episodes. Now, I actually have this for my party people. So shout out members of the party people you know who you are. But I have a database of all the podcasts we've ever published, and it's in a Google Sheet. And what we'll do my project manager or she'll go and update it from time to time once a quarter, once a month. And what it is is basically someone could go in Type the ctrl f
like the you know, find key. And they could type in whatever subject that they're searching about, you know, I'm searching about podcast titles on what to look up show notes, and they could type in those words, and they would find every episode of the Proffitt Podcast, and clickable links for it So I think that this is something that could be really cool freebie, right? Everyone's alway asking me about lead magnets and growing thei
email list. This is one thing that I think woul be really cool is to have a database for you audience with clickable links to your episode
Now, the second thing, like a fun way to use your backlog is you can also create PDFs with curated playlist that you can use as a lead magnet. Now, what would this look like? Right? So you could go into a Word document, a Google document or into a publishing tool like Canva in create like a fun graphic or, like a fun
document. And it's saying, Hey, if you're brand new to podcasting, here is a playlist of the most important episodes you need to listen to all about interviewing are all about equipment are all about setting up your website, you know, whatever, I could do this in like 50 different ways. But I
think it would be really cool. For those of you that have been podcasting for a while to set up a playlist, because this will actually help you get more downloads, believe it or not, like it's not always about cranking out the content and creating more content, you can get more downloads for your podcast, just by linking to the backlog of episodes that you already have. So you could
create this as a lead magnet. Or you could just create the file and put it on your website, you could share it on social media, like there's so many different things that you could do. But I really like this idea of creating these curated playlist that you could use to give to your audience.
Okay, number three, you can use the content you've already created, and repurpose it for another platform. Now we were talking about earlier, my really bad attempt to doing this on YouTube. Like, I still think that there's very cool ways that you can repurpose stuff. But what I like to do is I will you know from time to time Look at my podcast downloads so if you're a buzzsprout user shout out is Nimbus brought amazing if you have no idea what I'm talking about. This is my podcast hosting
provider. It's where I upload my audio files to go out to Apple podcast all the all the players all the places, and you can learn more by going to KrystalProffitt.com/buzzsprout. I'm an affiliate with them. I've been with them since day one, they are incredible. They're amazing. But if you were in your buzzsprout account, you could go to the stats section, and then go to episode downloads,
and then an episode downloads. It gives you the option like you'll kind of there's like a chart and it'll tell you, you know, over the last seven days, how many downloads of which episodes have gotten. ignore that for now, I want you to go down below there. And you can sort all of your episodes by date published or by popularity. And you'll be able to tell what are your top 10 episodes or your top 20 episodes, right? And this is how you could create your playlist or this is how you can say
man, this one episode performed. So well. Maybe I should create a spin off piece of content. Maybe it was a four step process. And I could grab one step out of that episode and just go really, really deep with it. I do this all the time. We all do this all the time. This was the early days of right after I i rebranded to the profit podcast. And I was talking about launching I
wanted to break down. Okay, well, here's everything you need to know about launching a podcast and I kind of shoved it all into one episode. And then I was like, ah, I really just need to talk about the launch plan. Okay, so let me let me go back and I because how to launch a
podcast was one of my most downloaded episodes. So what I did is over the course of the next few months, I took pieces of that episode and created other spin off pieces of content that were their own episodes, I did one all about how to create a launch plan. I did one all about picking your podcast launch date, like there was some really like broken down like let's get in the nitty gritty of each one of these topics. And I think that those performed really well like it was great
too. Have one place to send someone that's brand new to thinking about launching, and then I could send them they're like, Oh, you need to listen to how to launch a podcast. But then they also had options of like, Oh, I just need to zero in on my launch strategy, or oh my gosh, I can't believe she has an episode just about my launch date and how to pick it. By the way, I'm gonna have all of these all the episodes I'm talking about. If you're listening, you're like, Oh, I need to
listen to that. I need that. I want that right now. I'm gonna link to all of them in the show notes. So the Show Notes for this episode are KrystalProffitt.com/episode247. That's where you're gonna see everything that we've talked about here today about using your podcast backlog.
But I really just want to wrap up with, like I said, I want you to use the incredible content that you've already created and get the most mileage out of it. You don't just have to have a one hit wonder amazing podcast that just really took off, like just one episode that you're so proud of, but it'll never happen again. Now, I create spin off pieces of content all the time, all the time. I actually thought about this particular podcast episode today talking about my
backlog. When I was looking at oh my gosh, like y'all, I have 247 episodes of this podcast. That's not including bonuses, because the bonuses don't even get a number. So I have like more than 250 episodes of this podcast. And I asked myself, am I using them all strategically? Am I going back and taking ideas and like reiterating or like, you know, things have changed, like so much has changed in the short two years since this podcast,
like first came in into existence. And I like to go back and see like, Oh, I was wrong about this one concept, or Oh, I can make that episode better. I know I can. So I want you to constantly be looking at your content, how can you make it better? How can you reuse something that you've already created? And at the end of the day, the smartest way to keep really creating that great content and sending it to your audience is to figure out what's working for them already. And
capitalize on that. constantly be looking at your numbers, know what's working and ask your audience Why is this working? Why do you want to hear this? Like, It surprises me all the time, that the office lady's case study is still one of our most downloaded episodes. And I'm, it's kind of a mystery to me as Why? I don't know if it's because it's got really great SEO, I don't know if it's because you all just love a good case study or I
have a bunch of fans of the office here. But the other episodes that are there always make a lot of sense. For me, that's just the one that always kind of throws me off and maybe are telling me you'll want to see more case study episodes. And if that's the case, reach out to me, send me a DM and say, Krystal, I want to know how this podcast does it like do some research go all geeky and nerd out on all the things that they do behind the scenes because we want to know if that's you don't
hesitate to reach out, okay? Like because we can absolutely have this conversation. But I want you delivering value. Every time you show up behind the microphone, I want you to make your content better and better every single time and gain the momentum to really keep delivering that value to your audience every single week.
But that's all I have for you today. So make sure you go check out the show notes. Go see all the episodes we talked about here today. KrystalProffitt.com/episode247. And if this is your first time tuning in, I'm so happy that you're here and you're part of this community. Make sure you hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening to this episode. And don't forget that we have our review contest coming up. It is
so close I can taste it. If you want to learn more about the review contest that we're doing it is only for April 2021. So if you're listening to this in the future, I am so sorry, but you've missed the train. It has left the station. But at the end of April 2021. We're having a huge review contest. You can learn more about it by going to KrystalProffitt.com/review, Krystalproffitt.com/review. There's also going to be a link in the show notes but that's all I have
for you. So as always remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.