The truth about binge-dropping your podcast (and why weekly releases win if you want real growth)

Voice Over: 00:00:00

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the PodSchool Podcast.

Rachel Corbett: 00:00:10

Hello. Welcome to the show. Today's question is from Elijah. Elijah says, should you release all your podcast episodes in one go?

The answer to this question is almost always no.

I have trialed this and experimented with it over the course of my career and it's never yielded as good audience results as when you release your show consistently over time. I understand where this comes from and that is the Netflix model.

You know, there was a time in all of our lives where we had to wait a week for new content when we liked a show.

But then Netflix decided we're going to drop everything at once and all of a sudden we're like, I'm sorry, unless I have everything right now, I'm not a happy camper. But that is not really how podcasting works. Works.

Podcasting is really more about long term relationship building than it is about short term binge listening. And releasing everything at once basically kills your biggest growth engine in podcasting, which is consistency.

The benefit of releasing consistently over time every single week is that it gives you multiple weeks for your show to be discovered. The more you are uploading your show, the more you can promote it.

You can promote it consistently, point people to new episodes that come out, you've got more opportunities for word of mouth. You know, you've got a real signal to the apps that your show is active.

You build a stronger relationship with your audience over time because you're not just in their sort of ears or in their face once. And then by enjoy that, you are meeting them there every single week, coming back, building that relationship.

So if you just do that all at one time, you get one moment and then it's kind of silent.

I've even tried in the shows that we've experimented with this, we have done promotion ongoing, obviously, because you're not just going to promote it that one week, but there is something about the actual dropping of an episode. And to be honest, some of it might be that apps auto download things, right?

So if you are dropping things once, you're only going to get an auto download once of those episodes.

Whereas if you are dropping everything week to week, there is going to be a download level that you're going to get to that is going to slowly grow incrementally.

So promotion alone to a cold feed that's not releasing new episodes has never, in my experience brought people or downloads to a feed like dropping a new episode has. So I now will always drop episodes weekly. Even if it's a short run series, even if it's just a story that exists for six episodes.

I would rather eat those six episodes out over six weeks and have six weeks of promotion. Six weeks of relationship building. That's still not a huge amount of time to build audience, but it is much better than one week.

So I would definitely recommend releasing your show weekly rather than all at once.

The interesting thing about promotion, even though the show exists and this happens everywhere, when it comes to like PR promotion, there's this necessity for why now?

And if your episodes dropped a month ago, there is a bit of a lack of urgency or, or a lack of relevancy for people in the why am I going to listen to it right now? Why are you telling me this about this?

That released four months ago, Whereas if you are releasing today and say this is the episode that's out this week, there is much more of a sense of oh, I need to keep up with this show and check in with the show. So it's a bit of a mental thing I think. But it is just really hard to build audience around a binge drop, basically.

I guess the main question to ask yourself when you're doing this is what is your goal?

If your goal is building a loyal audience, building trust in your show, increasing your discoverability for your podcast, improving your rankings, growing your show over time, then releasing weekly will always win out. That is always the best strategy. If your goal is just to make people spend a weekend with your show, then a binge drop can make sense.

If you just want to release something all at once because it's a resource for your website and it makes sense for all of that content to be there in one place and it needs to drop at once.

So it's less about building audience and it's more about a content strategy so that all of that content is available in one go in audio form, then a binge drop makes absolute sense. But most of the people that I work with are looking to grow an audience and so I would always say to them, drop your episodes weekly.

Slow and steady ain't so sexy, but it always wins the race, I'm afraid. So if you've got a question that you would like answered, you know where to find me.

You just head to the description of the episode and you click on the link there and I think I've got another couple of episodes before I will be wrapping up this show for the year. Having a little bit of a break, probably collapsing in a heap trying to rejuvenate myself for the New year.

I've taken quite a bit on my plate this year and so I am trying to get ahead of myself, get on top of things, because there are things that I want to keep going, like this show, like my show, me and my tiny human, like my business on top of having a job and a child. So I am looking forward to a bit of time off to actually have a bit of a break, but also to just start planning ahead for the New year.

So if you've actually got any thoughts, feelings, suggestions about this show, in particular, if there are things that you would like it to evolve into next year, if there's stuff you would like me to touch on, then please get in touch with me. I would love to hear it. I'm going to be definitely sitting down and doing a lot of thinking and strategizing and planning about the New Year.

So I would love your input. You've got any thoughts on that?

And if you are looking for help with your podcast, you'll find all the ways that you can work with me in the description of this episode. Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next week.

Voice Over: 00:06:07

That's all for today.