It’s incredible how quickly time flies when you’re immersed in the captivating world of podcasting. We’ve covered a range of topics and interviewed some truly inspiring individuals over the past two seasons. 

Today, I want to take a moment to reflect on the valuable lessons and insights I’ve gained along the way.

Lessons in planning ahead and travel

First of all, what I wanted to share is that I actually have not recorded a single episode in the past seven months. So that means these past two seasons, they have all been pre-recorded. And the reason why I haven’t recorded a single episode in the past six months is because I’ve been traveling. I have decided to travel without my expensive and heavy microphone which is a great reason not to record episodes. 

I’m very happy that I worked well ahead. One of the things that I learned in these two seasons, and this is actually also a reason why I didn’t have lessons learned at the end of season seven because I just didn’t have the capacity or the opportunity really to record that.  

I didn’t have to worry at all about these episodes going out. I just knew the content was there. We could work on it while I was traveling. We could just release it regularly so that you have something to listen to and that’s it.  

Flexibility with guests

I asked myself at some point if I was going a little bit too far because at one point I was recording episodes with guests and I had to tell them that the episode would go out in like eight or nine months from now. I thought this is going a little bit too crazy. But to be fair,  guests usually understand this, especially when I said I will be traveling and working ahead. 

I will say that I think it is important, especially when you have quite a new podcast,  to allow enough time and flexibility to also look into what’s working and what’s not working. But since this is a quite established podcast by now, we have a ton of episodes on our belts and I feel like I kind of knew what was working.

Allowing space for creativity

I also noticed that the more content I had planned out and I didn’t, I knew that I did not have to worry about recording new content. I got so creative about the topics I wanted to discuss.

I try to keep kind of like a running list of topics that I wanted to talk about or questions that I’m getting and things like that so that I never really have to scramble for episode ideas. And that list just kept growing. It was nice not to have the pressure of having to record an episode right now.

If you’re not going to travel but maybe you have a busy season and a slow season in your business, in your work, in your life, then I highly recommend using that slow season to just record a ton of content so that you don’t have to worry about it in your busy season or like me when you’re traveling.

Freedom to change things up

I also noticed that giving myself the freedom to change things up if I had to, also was really nice.  Even though everything was planned out, we did decide to push back the release date of this new season twice. And I’m so glad that we did because the timing just was not perfect before and there was honestly no reason to rush.

I’m very happy that we did that to allow ourselves a little bit more flexibility.  

Download numbers

I did see a drop in download numbers after taking a season break. It’s normal and I think a lot of podcasters have no idea about this. My other podcast is weekly and we kept releasing with no season breaks. And that podcast has continuously grown over time. 

Because of that consistency, I have not put a ton of effort into marketing that podcast. It’s a passion project. I enjoy creating content. But just by being consistent and releasing really valuable content, we have gained quite a following there for this podcast.

For The Podcast Babes, that has not been the case and I strongly believe that taking seasonal breaks has a big part in that. 

If you are thinking, should I go seasonal? Should I go weekly? For this podcast, that’s fine. I asked myself a few times, should we go weekly? Should we consistently release episodes? And I think it might make sense for other podcasters to make that decision.

But it heavily depends on the goal that you have with your podcast and the topic that you talk about. I know for this podcast that a lot of people have questions about podcasting. Come here to find out the answer, and then they have what they need and they don’t keep listening. 

Now, is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. I think it’s totally fine if you’re here for a few episodes and you got what you need. In the end, you just want to go off and take action on what you learned.  And then if you have a next question, you just come back, you search for the topics that you need content about and then you implement it again.

I do not need an audience of thousands and thousands of people because if I get thousands and thousands of new clients, we have a problem here at The Podcast Babes. I only need a few engaged people who would like to become a client at some point in the future.