Publish Podcast Episodes More Often With Less Stress

Publishing more often can help your podcast stay top of mind, get more downloads, and keep your audience engaged. But if you increase your cadence the wrong way, it can also make podcasting feel heavier, more rushed, and a lot less fun.

In this episode, we answer a listener question from Rich (Two Guys on a Plane) about moving from biweekly to weekly episodes and break down what has actually worked for us. We talk about the benefits of adding shorter episodes, why quick wins can sometimes perform just as well as longer releases, and how publishing more often has helped us stay in practice without doubling the workload.

We also get into the real risks of pushing your schedule too hard, including burnout, lower-quality episodes, missed deadlines, and losing the energy that makes a podcast worth doing in the first place.

Listen for different ways to make a higher publishing frequency sustainable, including lighter episode formats, Q&A episodes, bonus conversations, two-part episodes, and experimenting without feeling locked into a forever commitment.

Contact Buzzcast

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• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Vietnam Download Spike Mystery

Alban 0:00

Good morning, Vietnam. It's Buzzcast, and we are talking to what now is our number one country who listens to this show. What is going on? For us too.

Jordan 0:13

I don't know. It's it's affecting everybody. That is like the hot topic in all of the online forums and all the communities. Everyone's like, what's going on with Vietnam? Where are all these downloads coming from? I got a thousand downloads this week. What's up with that?

Kevin 0:27

What is up with that? Okay. I mean, this happens once in a blue moon, a couple times a year. Some brand new bots pop up and have figured out a way to get around most bot detection that exists in media hosting until they get discovered, they start generating download traffic. We've never had a good answer of like why. Why in the heck is this uh worth doing?

Jordan 0:49

Yeah.

Kevin 0:49

I mean, there are people who advertise services on Fiverr and stuff like that, or like, we'll grow your podcast, but that stuff doesn't happen on the just across the entire network.

Jordan 0:58

Yeah.

Kevin 0:59

Like once in a while you'll see one show kind of pop off and it starts getting, you know, a bunch of downloads. And then that usually results in us emailing them and saying, hey, are you paying someone to promote your podcast? Oh, yeah, we hired this new service and they're doing great. No, they're not. It's it's bot traffic. We're gonna block it, and we just wanted to give you a heads up. Yeah. But this this is a different thing than that. This is a bot that just starts going across the entire internet, downloading any media files it can find from a bunch of different hosts. And so there's some like inside industry back channels that a bunch of hosts are on, including us. And so we have friends in the industry, like they're competitors, but they're friends. I don't know what you call that. Frenemies, cooperative working group that uh we all work together and share this type of information. And everybody is getting hit from the same stuff.

Jordan 1:44

Yeah.

Kevin 1:45

Um, so as soon as somebody identifies it, we share that with everybody. So we were able to block this stuff pretty quickly, and all the other hosts are doing the same thing. But I saw people chime in from Blueberry, from Transistor, from Captivate, from RSS. Everybody was talking in the back channel. Yes, we're all blocking that. John Spurlock, who's not a hosting service provider, but just does download tracking metrics for people with the OP3, he blocked it. We blocked it, everyone agreed. Um, so yes, there was thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of downloads that did take place within a couple days, and then it all got shut down. So that's why some accounts will see the spike. Going back and removing all those downloads is dangerous.

Jordan 2:23

And kind of a bummer.

Kevin 2:24

Yeah. Once you identify it, then going back into data records and stuff is is pretty dangerous. So as an industry standard across the field, most people don't do that. We do not do that. We don't want to accidentally remove some legitimate downloads. And since the industry like hasn't like they've met all the criteria of a legitimate download, but this is sort of outside of that. It's identifying a bunch of traffic from a few unique sources that have some signals and then confirming that with other podcasting hosting companies. And so we're able to block it going forward, but going back and removing that stuff is not something that really anybody probably should be doing across the board.

Jordan 2:58

That makes sense.

Alban 2:59

You know, over the last few days, I've seen a couple times where I'm on social media and someone's like, oh, I switched from this host to this host and talking about things that they like and things they don't. And I'm always looking at that because I want us to build everything that people like and remove the things they don't. But one thing I've run into twice now is they go, when I moved to this podcast host, it was awesome. We started getting more downloads. Right. That's a red flag.

Jordan 3:24

Nothing changed.

Alban 3:25

Yeah, that's a huge red flag.

Jordan 3:27

Yeah.

Alban 3:27

That's not a good sign. That's a bad sign, even though it feels good. Uh that's just that they're not filtering.

Kevin 3:34

So, or they're not filtering as well. Yeah. Moving from one host to another host should be completely transparent to anybody in your audience. No one should ever know. Yeah, that does nothing to help promote or grow your show. You shouldn't be getting any more exposure, unless, you know, your previous host, you weren't listed in all the directories, then you move to a new host and then you list in a few more places or something like that. But outside of any changes like that, your numbers should stay pretty close. Like the the IAB V2 certification gets us all, you know, kind of plus or minus 10% or so. If you see anything outside of that, you're getting, you know, numbers that are 20% higher, 30% higher, your sharings, then that's a red flag that whoever you just moved to is probably not filtering as well as your previous host. And what feels like your show is growing is actually probably not real.

Alban 4:17

You know, one way you can verify this is setting up something like OP3. And so if you turned on OP3, now you're getting a measurement on top of whatever BuzzProwl offers or on top of whatever RSS offers or whoever you're with. And then if you switched, you'd see your OP3 stats are probably not changing at all. Maybe and the underlying hosts are showing you something different. That's a good sign. It's just filtering. Somebody else sees all these Vietnam downloads and goes, hey, it technically it's legit. So let's keep, you know, really let it keep flying and let everyone think 40% of the podcast listening audience in the world is based in Vietnam.

Kevin 4:58

Yeah, I I think that's a good recommendation, especially if for whatever reason you're using a hosting company that's either new on the scene or is like a free podcast host or something like that. There's a couple of those out there. But if you're using a paid podcasting hosting service, a company that's been around for a while that has a good reputation in the industry, that's probably not necessary as like a check for the stats. If they're IBv2 certified, you you don't need to do that. That check's already in place. There's other benefits of listening like with OP3, just like if you want to have your stats be open and available to the public, that's great too. But they should be pretty similar.

unknown 5:33

Here we go.

Jordan 5:39

Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzz Sprout. So this quick cast, we're dedicating to a family message from Rich from two guys on a plane. And he said, Are you guys enjoying the long and short episode format that you're alternating between? We're thinking about moving to weekly episodes rather than bi-weekly. And this seems like a great way to avoid burnout and save us studio time. As far as feedback from an audience member goes, I think it's great. All right. So are you guys enjoying the long and short episode format? That's the first question here.

Kevin 6:12

I am ish.

Jordan 6:14

Yeah. Same. Why why is your ish? Because I think we enjoy it because it's nice to have like the weekly cadence and it's nice to be in the feed a lot. So what's the ish part of this?

Kevin 6:27

The ish part is that when we launched the podcast and we started our every other week cadence, we did that because this is just part of much larger jobs that we all have at the company. And it it takes a lot of time. So we said, hey, like every other week feels about right. And then we realized that we we wanted to do more. We weren't showing up in people's feeds very often. I would launch my podcast listening app every day or every other day. And it was like, golly, our show doesn't just show up here very often. I want to figure out a way to solve that. And then we came up with this idea of doing the every other week. So it's just more, more load. Every time that we do it, I enjoy it. I enjoy the fact that these shorter episodes, they're quicker to record. I assume Jordan, they're quicker to edit, and that they don't require nearly as much prep. So it's not like we didn't double our workload. And it is accomplishing most of the reasons that we decided to do it in the first place. What's really interesting is remember when I was doing all the uh stats analysis for episode a couple episodes ago, I was using AI to help me analyze all the stats and everything. The the shorter episodes perform like just as well as the longer ones.

Jordan 7:30

They do.

Kevin 7:31

And so I thought that was really encouraging is that you can get a lot more, I don't know what we call it, traction, engagement, whatever, like performance without necessarily doubling your work. And so I think it's a great topic. And I'm really excited that Rich, this episode is based on a comment that he sent us because Rich just launched video podcasting this week. Yeah. I've been working with Rich. Uh, he's in our video beta program and he launched, I think he's got three or four episodes in an Apple Podcast video now. So nice. Go look up his podcast and check out the video.

Jordan 7:59

Yeah, I'll link to that. Alban, how are you feeling about the weekly hate ends with the smaller episodes?

Alban 8:04

I like things being a bit more of a like we do the same thing every week. And so if I had my perfect world, it would be like we did a 30-minute episode every week and we did the same one. And you guys feel the pain of that because I show up 10 minutes late today with a recording on a new day and a new time. And as soon as that happens, my brain just turns off any outside influence until Kevin's texting me, going to show up to his postcast recording.

Jordan 8:32

I was really apprehensive about this, like moving into a weekly cadence, even with a quick cast episode. But what I found is we're able to cover these topics that wouldn't quite fill like a full hour episode, such as like just something simple like ways to increase your publishing frequency and just answering like a single fan mail and dedicating, you know, like 10 minutes to it. I also enjoy that on the weeks where I'm just not feeling as energetic, I can tell myself, okay, you can talk about this topic for 10 minutes. You got this, you can do this. All you have to do is get on the microphone for 10 minutes and talk about this one thing. And then I'm like, all right, let's go and we can do it. And I also have enjoyed the fact that I feel like I'm more in practice. If I skip an episode of recording with Buzzcast, so I was sick last time, you guys covered for me. And then when I came back, I felt out of practice. And I was just like, how do I go about this? And I was just like cognitively malfunctioning a little bit because it just interrupted my routine. And so I love that when we're just doing these quick episodes, it's kind of like a quick refresher or quick like practice. And I've gotten better at editing. I've gotten better at coming up with like outlines very quickly. It just feels really good for that reason. And so that's on top of, you know, basically doubling our podcast downloads. That's on top of like making sure that we're staying up at the top of the feed for podcast apps. There's so many benefits to increasing your publishing frequency. But at the same time, I think that there's a lot of things that you have to look out for. Burnout can really lead to not as good a quality. Like if you're doing a quantity over quality sort of thing, I think that it can hurt your podcast in the long run. You might not feel as like impassioned about it. You can also miss deadlines and you know, rush through things and like it, it makes it harder to take breaks from your podcast too, if you're increasing your publishing frequency. So there's some different ways that you can go about it so you don't run into those issues. Like you can do what we do and just have like long and short episodes. Or if you record uh one episode, you can like chop it in half and maybe record like two parters.

Kevin 10:43

Yeah. When we when we first experimented with this idea of quick casts, we we tried a lot of different things. One of the things, or I don't know, did we actually do this? Did we actually ever record a full episode and then right after we finished that one, like stopped recording and started a new recording and then recorded a quick cast right after? I think we did once.

Jordan 11:02

Yeah, we did once.

Kevin 11:03

And so, like if you're a batching mindset type of person, it doesn't mean that if you want to release every week that you have to record every week. You could still record every other week, but your recording sessions just are whatever, 10 or 15 minutes longer because you finish your full episode and then you might do a shorter episode, but you record them all at the same time.

Alban 11:20

All right. My take on batching episodes is this advice you get all the time. Like you should batch. It's so nice. You bat you record five, and then you edit five, then you publish five. It feels like you're all the way into like automation mode when you haven't even figured out what you're doing. And so it's really, I think it's bad advice for anyone who's new, but almost anybody who's kind of treating their work as a craft. You're turning your podcast into like an assembly line. And what I really love is we do a podcast, we notice a couple things we like, we notice the things we'd like to do better, and we try to do it in the next one. And the next one we notice something new, we change it. And each time we iterate, I think we're getting a little bit better. And not that every episode is better than the last, but overall the trend is up and to the right. And so I'm not a big fan of batching. It also just for me, the energy goes downhill the longer I sit here and stare at, you know, a Google Meet session and record on my microphone.

Jordan 12:18

Yeah.

Alban 12:19

Um, so I prefer what we're doing. We do a big episode once every two weeks, and then we have one where we pretty much show for 30 minutes total. We chat for a little bit at the beginning, we kind of check in on what everyone's working on, what's happening at the company, and then we record. It feels a lot better to me than if we were, I don't know, recording back-to-back episodes.

Kevin 12:40

Right. Yeah. But I think you would say, Alban, like that you're just expressing what works well for us and for you and what you prefer.

Alban 12:46

Yeah. I'm still in the what works for me mode, not the you need to do what we like mode. Right.

Kevin 12:52

And so I think that like our advice is not batching is a bad thing. Our advice is batching doesn't work for us. You need to figure out what works for you.

Jordan 13:00

Yeah.

Kevin 13:00

If batching works well for you and like you have one day a week or one day a month, but you want to publish weekly, and you want to record whatever, four episodes on a Saturday, and that's fun for you and that's fulfilling, and it's easy for you to schedule a guest all on that same day or whatever you're doing, then that's totally fine.

Alban 13:15

Yeah. If that's what you enjoy and you're having fun doing that, then go for it. I do think there's some value, especially early on, in going through an entire process, you know, beginning to end, multiple times, and iterating rather than jumping to the final stage and building the entire assembly line all at once. We used to see this all the time. Daily podcasts were like the rage, yeah, you know, 10 years ago. And everybody was starting daily podcasts because John Lee Doumas had a daily podcast and it was really successful. Yeah. But then they burned out instantly and they're like, oh, but are you batching? And I was like, but it's like, yeah, but if you're telling people to start day one with a new podcast where they batch seven episodes, it's a little bit much.

Kevin 14:00

Yeah. I I put batching in a like in the optimization category. Yes. And you should not optimize until you know what works for you yet, or you've kind of perfected your craft or you know what you're creating and you know what you're building. Once you get through that stage, then you can go back and you can start optimizing stuff. But if you if you optimize too early, you you might be optimizing the wrong things, right?

Lightweight Formats For More Releases

Jordan 14:20

I was thinking about another way that you can increase your publishing schedule without it being like too heavy of a load. You can do more lightweight formats with your podcast. So something that came to my mind was we have a post show at the end of every big episode. What you could do if you have that time where you guys are chatting and you're on the mic, it's being recorded. And every time you're going, oh, this is really funny. Like I kind of wish we could keep this in the podcast, but you know, it doesn't really fit with this episode. What if you were to once a week drop um like a green room sessions or like a studio talk or, you know, like a backstage sort of thing where your listeners can get an insight into just you talking about life or talking about current events or movies that you've watched, you could totally do that. And that is really lightweight because you're just chatting, you're just talking, you're not doing prep. This is off the cuff kind of stuff. And I feel like that would be a really cool thing for listeners to get like once a week if they're interested in that kind of stuff.

Kevin 15:22

Yeah, that's a great idea. And and some of the when we get criticism, very rarely, but when we get it, some of the, some of the uh like the common thread between the criticism is uh you guys get off topic too much, there's too much banter, there's whatever. And so yes, we do.

Alban 15:37

Which is also one of the top compliments we get. We other people will write it and be like, I love like the friendship, I like you guys laugh, and I like your talk about these other things. Yeah. It's the positive and it's the negative.

Kevin 15:48

Yeah. But for some of those reasons, we do our best to keep most of that chitter chatter either at the beginning of the episode or the end in the post show. But yeah, I think that's a really cool idea is that you could also release them as completely separate episodes. So for people who enjoy it, those episodes get dropped. For the people who don't, they could just skip over those episodes.

Jordan 16:04

Yeah.

Alban 16:04

All right. So something I've seen in podcasts I listen to are the QA episodes. And we've done some version of this, but where pretty much the idea of a QA episode is you're using the audience, help fill the calendar. Yeah. You don't have to come up with every topic, let your audience recommend hey, here's something that's happening in the world related to this podcast. I want you to talk about it. And you don't have to do as much prep because you just pick the questions that are kind of interesting, like we did for this episode. And then we hop on a mic, we record, we edit, and our total investment is really diminished.

Jordan 16:37

Yeah. And I think that if you're trying to increase your publishing schedule, these are really great places to start. And ultimately, you don't have to stick to it. Like you don't have to completely commit to this idea of I'm going to increase my publishing schedule. Maybe it's not for you. Maybe it won't work out. Maybe your audience isn't interested in this additional like content. And you can just temporarily do this. It is okay to experiment with your podcast. We talk about this all the time. You should have fun with your podcast. You should experiment with it. You should constantly be improving it. And part of that is being willing to try something out and just let it go if it doesn't work. And if it does work, then you can keep at it. So just make it temporary. You can make it a seasonal thing. You can introduce it as a bonus thing that you're just doing for a couple months. You can tell your listeners about it. And if they like it and ask for more, stick to it.

Kevin 17:28

I love the idea of reminding yourself that you have permission to experiment. This is your show. You can try things and you can have fun with it. We did tons of different experiments and variations of what a quick cast or a short podcast episode was going to look like in the beginning. And ultimately, we've kind of figured it out. And this is where we've been for the last year or so. But in the beginning, it was very different. We'd pull topics from longer episodes and we try those. Again, we tried batching for a little while, or at least one episode. Um, we used to always have like a quick cast in the feed, and then when a new one came out, we'd replace the old one and delete the previous one. We tried that for a little while. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Just a bunch of random ideas. None of them ended up ultimately kind of being what this was, but we got to hear by trying all of that stuff.

Jordan 18:10

Yeah.

Kevin 18:10

And then and listening to the feedback from our audience. Like I know one of the reasons that we stopped removing episodes from the feed was that people were referencing episodes that were no longer in our feed. Somebody actually wrote in and said, I think you talked about this at some point, but I can't find it anymore. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that was a quick cast and we deleted it. We should probably stop doing that.

Jordan 18:26

Yes.

Kevin 18:26

Oh, yeah.

Alban 18:27

We used to call them Snapcasts because it was like a Snapchat podcast. Yeah. Forget about that.

Jordan 18:32

That did not work at all.

Alban 18:34

Yeah. I think that it's got to go back to you're having fun and you're enjoying it. You don't have to promise, like, we're going to do this forever, and then immediately figure out, oh, I don't like it. You don't have to keep doing it. It's your podcast. You could quit doing it. You could try a new experiment until you land on something like we have, which is we like it more than we don't like it. And we're going to continue trying to make it into something we really, really enjoy. And when it's, you know, Friday and we hop on for an hour and we record, not a big deal. And so it works out pretty well.

Jordan 19:02

All right. So if you have a topic that you'd like us to cover, go ahead and tap the send us a fan mail button in the show notes, and maybe we'll cover it on a future quick cast. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.