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Should you limit your available podcast episodes or keep it all in your feed?

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Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. As you

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podcast consistently, you'll build up a back catalog of episodes. But should you keep

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all of those episodes online or should you maybe limit how many are available in your

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podcast feed and on your website?

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This subject was inspired by feedback from my listener Marc Johanssen who said, "I'm

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seeking an instructional resource, aka a link, that I can forward to a podcaster in order

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to nudge them to take actions needed in order to allow access to all their earlier podcast episodes.

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At present, one can only access the latest 50 episodes via an app or via their website."

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Thank you for that question Mark. I hope you'll share this episode with them.

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So here are 7 things for you to consider or for you to share with another podcast that

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is in this same situation and you want them to have more of their episodes available.

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You can follow along in the notes or share this episode with anyone who would need it

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by going to theaudacitytopodcast.com/limitornot or tap or swipe inside of your app to get

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to the notes and share links there.

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First number one, podcast feed vs website archive.

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Think about the main two places your episodes live.

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First, your podcast feed.

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And second, on your website.

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And you DO have a website for your podcast that has a separate webpage for each episode, right?

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You should. Many publishing systems will let you limit how many episodes are in your RSS feed.

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Most common defaults are 10, 50, and 100, but some of them let you set whatever limit

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that you want. But such limits most likely won't affect your website and where your episodes live

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on your website. If an episode is no longer available in your feed but still on your website,

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it is technically still online and available, but it's no longer very practical because

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it's not available in your audience's podcast apps. Unless they have smart tools for moving

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website audio into a podcast app, the only way your audience could hear or watch your

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old episodes is through the webpage and their browser. That makes it difficult for your

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audience, rather inconvenient and I'd say even inconsiderate if it's something that

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they want to consume in the way that they want to consume it. Thus, most of the following

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considerations will focus on what is in your podcast RSS feed specifically, but also keep

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your website in mind so that people have a place where they can go to hear your episodes

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through a browser and all of the other value that has being on your website.

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But we're focusing primarily on your podcast feed and thus what shows up in the podcast apps.

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Number two, is your content still valuable?

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When your podcast episodes from months or even years ago are still valuable and relevant

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today, then you've made timeless content.

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Timeless content is highly valuable for both you and your audience.

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It gives you more content that you can promote, either through marketing or direct recommendations

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like saying to people, "Hey, you gotta listen to this episode."

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And if you have a timeless episode, then it doesn't really matter when you publish that

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episode if your potential audience could still benefit from it.

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For example, I still send people to my episode from 2014 about whether episode numbers are

3:40

really necessary. And I have a link to that in the notes if you want to check that out and you're wondering,

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Are episode numbers really necessary? Well go listen to that old episode.

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In fact, I even considered re-approaching the content and re-doing that episode recently.

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But when I listened to that old episode, I realized that it was still just as relevant

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today as back then. I didn't really need to re-record it.

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Instead, I did an episode all about whether episode numbers should be in your titles.

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And I referred back to that episode about episode numbers from way back in 2014.

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content was timeless. Timeless content also gives your audience more great stuff to enjoy

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or learn from. Either for the first time, when they're discovering your podcast and

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can listen to all of the great content that you have from years ago, or they've been

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listening for a while and they decide to go back and refresh some stuff or re-experience

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some old stuff. The other kind of content is time sensitive. It's when your podcast

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episodes have a kind of shelf life. Imagine a "best if used by" date on your episodes.

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That doesn't mean they're bad after that date, it just means they're best if used

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before that date. Just like certain food products aren't bad after the "best if" dates,

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but the "used by" dates are more hard. Anyway, that little tangent aside.

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This is common, I think, for podcasts about current events. Like a news podcast. Podcasts

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about current trends, such as a TV show, are mostly time sensitive because most people

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will be interested only when the trend is current. But this can still have some timeless

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value. In the case of a simultaneous TV after show podcast, like my old podcast about the

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TV show Once Upon a Time was, the value might be more difficult as people can more easily

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binge the old show and your episodes will then seem easily outdated because they can

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consume the whole TV show much faster maybe than they can consume your podcast or they

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might consume them in different orders and so your episodes will sound awkward and outdated.

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But if someone gets your podcast while watching the show, no matter when they're watching

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it or when it is now, as if they were watching the show and listening to your podcast simultaneously

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way back when the show was live, then they could experience all the same things, the

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same theories, the same questions, the same uncertainty, except without the direct engagement

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with your podcast and the community because that engagement and the community has mostly

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already passed. Alternatively, a rewatch style podcast such as Office Ladies weighs more

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on the timeless side because such a podcast can discuss the show without theorizing or

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worrying about spoilers and it's designed generally for people who have already seen

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the show and not necessarily watching it for the first time. My Once Upon a Time podcast

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almost didn't happen because I wanted to instead do a podcast about re-watching Lost. I'd

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never podcasted about Lost, but I did watch Lost and it took me a little while to get

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into it. But I thought here would be a really fun idea is do a podcast where my primary

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co-host and I were fans of Lost and we knew all the theories and how everything ended.

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And then we have a third co-host who was watching it for the first time. So we'd have the first

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part of the episodes be where all three of us were together. And then the second part

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of the episode would be just the two of us who had already seen the show. So that way

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there could still be some of the "Oh wow, I wonder what's happening" part of it. And

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there could be some kind of fun with that as most of the audience would probably know

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was already happening. And then after that, co-host would leave the episode, then we'd

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discuss everything with all spoilers from multiple seasons into the future. But that

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didn't happen because the guy who was going to be my co-host said, "Hey, have you heard

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about this TV show called Once Upon a Time?" And thus, The Once Podcast was born. And I

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still get people listening to it and occasionally still sending emails and someone even just

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recently sent a donation, they said, "We know this podcast is no longer active. The

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TV show is no longer on the air, but I'm sure there are still some costs to keeping

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the podcast online, so I wanted to help you with that." That was awesome generosity.

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Really cool of them. So you might fit into one of these situations or something slightly

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different but you really need to ask yourself, "Will most of my episodes still be relevant

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in a year or maybe a couple of years or a few years. If yes, then you probably have

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timeless content and I think you should consider keeping your episodes available if they are

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timeless. But if not, like if you have a news podcast that's talking about today's news

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or this week's news, people probably won't care about your episodes from a couple of

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years ago unless it was a really special episode covering some kind of breaking or amazing information.

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So then if you have a time sensitive podcast, it would probably be okay to limit how many

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episodes are available in your feed and on your website.

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Number three, does your old content have good SEO?

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Search engine optimization. Most podcast apps will search episode titles.

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Did you know that? So your episodes become a portfolio that helps your podcast to be found and helps people

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decide on consuming your podcast.

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When they view your podcast for the first time in their podcast apps, they will see

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the list of episodes. So that gives them a good idea of what your podcast is about.

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Not only from your description, but also they get to see the actual episode topics.

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And the SEO value here is that those episode titles can also contain all kinds of great

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value and SEO keywords.

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So instead of trying to stuff those SEO terms into your podcast title and risk getting kicked

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out of podcast apps, which I've done an episode previously about that.

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The link for that is in the notes on the website at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit-or-not or

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tap or swipe away inside of the app. So instead of trying to keyword stuff, you could make separate well-titled episodes about

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those subjects you want people to search for and find your podcast.

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So don't title your podcast "The Business Show" and then dash online marketing, passive

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income, affiliate income, cryptocurrency, investment opportunities, selling your business,

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dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot.

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Don't do that. Make episodes about those subjects.

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Make an episode all about selling your business.

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Make an episode all about affiliate income.

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Make an episode all about passive income and all of these other things that you want to

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be found for. This helps in podcast apps and websites and social networks when you have episodes about

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the specific things you want to be found for.

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They're more shareable, they have better search engine value to them, and I think they're

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far more accessible and consumable to your audience because they know what they're getting

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with that episode. It's not like they have to skip around to find what they're interested in.

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They know, "This is the episode about affiliate income.

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That's all this episode covers. If I want to learn about affiliate income, this episode is the place to get it."

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That's why I love single topic focused episodes.

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That doesn't work for everybody, but you can try to make it work for you or you could

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practice it every now and then. And when you do that kind of thing, that gives

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your episodes fantastic SEO value. So if your old episodes do have that good

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search engine optimization, then I highly recommend keeping them available both on

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your website and in your podcast feed. This will ensure your podcast can then

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still be found for all of those things that you talked about in separate

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episodes and then found wherever people are looking, not only on the website search engines,

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but also inside their podcast apps and that's possible only if you keep your episode available

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in all of these places. Number four, do you sell your back catalog?

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A good way to monetize a popular and deeply engaging podcast, those two things are very

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important there, popular and deeply engaging, can be to limit the number of publicly available

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episodes, both in the feed and on the website, not having them there. And then sell the access

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to the rest of those old episodes. There are several ways that you can sell access to your

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old episodes and I have links to each of these in the notes for this episode. You could sell

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access through a creator support platform like Patreon, Glow, or Supercast. You could build

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your own membership system like with WordPress and MemberPress. I've done that before. Or you

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You could sell your old episodes by bundling those old episodes together and selling them

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as a single downloadable package or multiple downloadable packages like you can do easily

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with WordPress and the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.

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Another thing that I've done before too. Or you could use podcast subscription platforms and I'm using the word subscription in the

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more modern way where you're paying to subscribe to something in a podcast app.

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That's like what you can get with the Apple Podcasters program and more.

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And some of these even integrate with these other tools like Patreon, Glow.fm, Supercast,

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Member Press, maybe other things that we might develop inside of Podcasting 2.0 and more.

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This approach works great for podcasts that aren't designed to sell something else, like

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your own products and services, except for selling their own inherent value within each episode.

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This only works when the audience will actually want those old episodes.

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If you have a daily news podcast, how likely is it that people really care about what you

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had to say about the day's news from five years ago if nothing really special happened

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on that date? I see this used most often for the entertaining podcasts.

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Remember, I consider that all content on the internet is either helpful or entertaining,

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or it could be both really. So for those entertaining podcasts, like a comedy show where you sell your old episodes

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because they're just as funny as the new episodes.

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It didn't matter what was happening in the world at that time or it didn't matter all

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that much. People know that that joke is still funny no matter when you tell it.

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So maybe you sell access to those old episodes or those old stories.

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Or maybe you're doing a drama and the older episodes are bunched together in older seasons

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and maybe you make those older seasons available only for sale while you keep your current

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season online in the podcast apps, on your website, and available for free.

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If you sell your old episodes, please remember to remove, I suggest really, any advertising

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from them because you're no longer trying to use the episode to sell something else.

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Instead, you're selling the episode itself because of its own inherent value.

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And this would be, then, the ideal situation to limit your feed and your website to only

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your latest episodes, however you want to break that off.

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Whether it's always only the latest 10 are available for free, or maybe it's only the

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current season, the current year, or however you want to define that.

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That's up to you. Number five, what profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, are you seeking with your podcast?

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I make profit stand for something.

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It's what both you and your audience can gain from your podcast.

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P-R-O-F-I-T. Popularity, relationships, opportunities, fun, income, or tangibles.

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If your episodes regularly help build your profit, then it would probably be most profitable

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for you to keep them online as long as possible.

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And if they have good SEO value, they'll continue attracting people.

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And if they have good calls to action or other profit-building value, then they'll probably

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continue returning that value for as long as they stay online.

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For example, I still get a request every now and then for me to design a website or podcast

15:47

cover art for someone because I promoted those personalized services back when I offered

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them myself years ago.

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I don't do that work anymore, by the way. Now I refer that out.

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So you're still welcome to ask for my recommended referrals.

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understand I'm going to refer you to someone I trust because I just don't do that work anymore.

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And I continue to receive new subscribers to my email newsletter through past episodes that

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promoted exclusive resources. I also continue to receive new members to my podcast reviews

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and customers to my other products and services because of how they were relevantly promoted in

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timeless content even from years ago. If I took those old episodes offline, I would be losing all

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those opportunities to build my brand, my authority, and my influence. So if your podcast itself is a

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form of marketing for something else you offer, a product, a service, or anything like that,

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even affiliates that are timeless affiliates, then you would probably want to keep the older

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episodes online for as long as possible, both in your feed and on your website.

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Number six, is your feed getting too big? A complication arises when you have so many

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episodes and such large notes for each episode that your podcast RSS feed grows to multiple

17:05

megabytes. With my own article-style notes for each episode, multiplied by the hundreds of

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episodes I've published, I only recently realized my own RSS feed was over five megabytes. For an

17:19

For an RSS feed, that's big.

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And I never really noticed because I use Blueberry's Podcast Mirror service as a proxy for my RSS

17:28

feed to keep it fast and stable.

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Yes, every now and then when I try and view the source I had to wait for a few seconds

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for everything to load but I never really took note of how big in megabytes the feed

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actually was. But it was still so big.

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Even with the proxy service that Blueberry provides through Podcast Mirror, the feed,

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feed was so big that some podcast apps and services were starting to choke on it, even

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causing some old episodes to not display anymore. I could have reduced the number of episodes

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in my feed, but then that would have cost me the SEO as I talked about in point number

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three and the profit as I talked about in the previous point number five. And until

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my proposal to support notes inside chapters is adopted with podcasting 2.0, I have a link

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to that in the notes, or until PowerPress changes how it generates podcast feeds from

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WordPress, I didn't want to remove my full articles from my RSS feed.

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Like there's a simple option inside of the WordPress reading settings to say that you

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want the full content or just the excerpts, the summaries.

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I did not want to switch everything over to summaries because there are cases where I

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want the full content to show.

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So instead, in my case, since I use PowerPress to generate my RSS feed, I enabled PowerPress's

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Feed Episode Maximizer feature which allows full content on only my latest 10 episodes

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and then minimal content, especially omitting my lengthy articles, on all older episodes that are

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beyond those latest 10. This reduced my feed with nearly 400 episodes from over 5 megabytes to that

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sweet spot of under 1 megabyte. I highly recommend you listen to or read some of my past episodes and

19:16

articles to learn more about feed limits and considerations that come along with each of these.

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There are three that I link to in the notes at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit or not.

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Those three are A) what you need to know about episode limits and your podcast RSS feed,

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B) how to shrink your podcast RSS feed and why it matters, and C) what to do when you

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have too many podcast episodes in your RSS feed.

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Check those out in the notes at tap or swipe away in your app or at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit-or-not.

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So you really need to consider the complexity you might be introducing by allowing all your

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episodes to remain in your feed and then look for optimization options if you can.

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And number seven, think carefully before expanding your RSS feed.

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If you've decided you want more of your old episodes in your feed, you need to know what

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could happen if you expand the limit on your RSS feed. First, there's the size to consider,

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as I addressed in point number six. You don't want your feed to get too big. I recommend

20:24

under 1MB. Plenty of apps out there can handle larger feeds, but I think under 1MB is mostly

20:31

reasonable. There are also potential consequences for automations and the audience experience.

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Let's focus first on the audience experience. Most podcast apps track each podcast episode

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by the episode's globally unique identifier or GUID. Some people pronounce it GUID, some

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people say GUID. This is an RSS tag that you don't have to worry about unless you're

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migrating hosting providers or publishing tools, in which case worry a lot because the

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GUIDs should never change. Some apps will remember only the GUIDs that still exist in

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the feed, and that's how they know what episodes were played and what episodes weren't,

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And they'll forget anything that's no longer in the feed.

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So when you expand the feed to include more episodes, those old episodes might look completely

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new to podcast apps because the apps have forgotten the GUIDs or they've never even

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seen those GUIDs in the first place.

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Then the app will probably download or re-download those old episodes, even if they were already played.

21:37

to the app. It's thinking, "Oh, I haven't seen this G.U.I.D. anymore. This looks like

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a new episode. I better download it." It might have forgotten that you actually played

21:46

that episode already. At the least, they might be displayed in the podcast apps as new and

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unplayed and thus confuse or worse, frustrate your audience. Unfortunately, how these apps

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handle your reappearing old episodes is outside your control. So you have to consider whether

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the cost is worth it to you and your audience to expand how many episodes are in your RSS feed.

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Alternatively, you could create a separate RSS feed to hold your older episodes,

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like 100 episodes at a time, each with its full text content then, because you know it's only

22:25

ever going to have 100 episodes and therefore it's fine with the number of episodes it has

22:30

and you don't have to worry about updating it with new episodes. It will always be only those

22:34

certain 100 episodes like episodes 1 to 100 and then each can have its full content with it.

22:40

This would keep those old episodes available, especially if you submit those archive feeds

22:45

to podcast apps and directories, which I do recommend you do if you make archive feeds,

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but their own SEO would build the archive feeds ranking, not that of your active podcast feed.

22:57

Now that's in the podcast apps. On your website it would probably still be all the same because

23:03

on your website there's no division of it. In the podcast apps though you would have your active feed

23:07

with your latest however many episodes and then your archive feeds with say 100 episodes at a time.

23:13

1 to 100, 101 to 200, 201 to 300, something like that would be your archive feeds. So if you have

23:20

a really great episode in your first 100 episodes and it ranks well in search in apps and on the

23:27

website, well it won't really matter what happens on the website in this case, but in the apps it

23:31

It would then be promoting your archive feed instead of your main active podcast.

23:37

If you do that kind of thing, then you should definitely do two things here.

23:43

Number one is consider making all of those old episodes promote your active feed.

23:49

You could put in a little ad at the beginning of your episodes either dynamically or you

23:54

go back and edit all those episodes.

23:56

Maybe something quick that says something like "This is an episode from the archive

24:00

feed, please make sure you're following the main active podcast feed and give

24:04

them your website or your follow the podcast link or anything like that so

24:08

that they can then follow your active feed and get every new episode. So that's

24:13

one thing you should do with your archive feeds. The other thing to

24:16

consider doing would be this would be a great opportunity to create a channel in

24:21

Apple Podcasts. This is a new feature in Apple Podcasts and some other podcast

24:24

apps are adopting this too where you can have a channel or a collection to say

24:29

these are other podcasts by me. Not other podcasts that are related to mine. Like I

24:36

wouldn't put Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting in my channel, but instead it would be like

24:42

including The Audacity to Podcast episodes 1 to 100 would be in the same channel as the

24:47

Audacity to Podcast active main podcast feed. That's inside of Apple Podcasts. It's called

24:53

the channel feature and you can only set that up currently through the Podcast Connect website

24:58

that Apple provides. But there's also an upcoming alternative inside Podcasting 2.0 that would

25:03

allow you to put this in your RSS feed to indicate which of your feeds are members of

25:09

a channel. So that Podcasting 2.0 apps could then group your shows together, maybe in multiple

25:15

channels or you have just one channel. It's still yet to be completely defined. But I

25:21

think there's a lot of potential there. So if you are creating archive feeds, make sure

25:26

you do those two things. Number one is A) put in some kind of pre-roll or post-roll or

25:32

something where people know prominently that they're listening to an archive feed and

25:37

should make sure they're following the main feed. I might suggest actually not a pre-roll

25:42

because if people are listening to all your old episodes, you don't want to annoy them

25:46

with hearing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again with each

25:50

episode that they listen to at the beginning of the episode. So maybe you do a pre-roll

25:55

every 10 episodes or so and then do a post roll in all of the other episodes besides

26:00

that. And the other thing to do is b) make a channel with all of your feeds inside Apple

26:06

Podcasts, other podcast apps, and the upcoming Podcasting 2.0 alternative.

26:10

When old episodes reappear in your RSS feed, you might also have similar troubles with

26:16

some automation tools as some of your audience might have with their podcast apps. For example,

26:22

something that automatically tweets whenever you publish a new episode, might also then

26:27

tweet when all of your old episodes show up in your RSS feed. But from my observations,

26:34

and I haven't tested and observed every kind of automation tool out there, but from my

26:37

observations, most of these tools look for only what's new at the top of an RSS feed,

26:45

where new items are, older items are at the bottom, new items are at the top, or only

26:49

episodes that have a date more recent than the last time the automation ran.

26:55

Thus, reappearing old episodes probably won't trigger any automations, but it is still possible

27:03

and unfortunately you might not even know until it happens.

27:08

So these are 7 things for you to consider whether you should limit your RSS feed to

27:14

a certain number of available episodes.

27:16

Number one, podcast feed vs website archive.

27:19

Number two, is your content still valuable?

27:22

Number three, does your old content have good SEO?

27:26

Number four, do you sell your back catalog?

27:28

Number five, what profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, are you seeking with your podcast?

27:34

Number six, is your feed getting too big?

27:36

And number seven, think carefully before expanding your RSS feed.

27:40

And yes, I know this outline wasn't completely parallel. Shhhhhhhh.

27:44

Let's not talk about that.

27:46

If you need help with some of this stuff, either figuring out how to implement this

27:50

for your own podcast, or you want to try and figure out the strategy that you can do to

27:55

leverage this to the best effects for your podcast, whatever your goals are for your

27:59

podcast, I'm available for custom personalized coaching and consulting to help you with podcasting.

28:05

Please contact me through the website at theaudacitytopodcast.com or you can email [email protected].

28:13

If this episode has been helpful to you or there are some podcasters you think need to

28:18

hear this episode because maybe you want them to expand their limits so that you can get

28:23

their older episodes, then please share this episode out.

28:26

Go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/limitornot to review the notes, share this episode, get

28:33

the links I mentioned, or access the same through a tap or swipe away inside of your app.

28:38

Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for

28:42

you to go start and grow your own podcast, with lots and lots of episodes, for passion

28:48

and profit. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from TheAudacityToPodcast.com.

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Thanks for listening.