393. How to Revive Your Dormant Podcast

Whether by choice or beyond your control, your podcast might have to go on a hiatus—and it could so long that the podcast seems dead! How do you come back from that and get back into your rhythm? It will take some work, but here are my recommendations (and what I'm practicing myself, too!).

1. Review your podcasting goals (your “why”)

Why do you really do your podcast? What P.R.O.F.I.T. (popularity, relationships, opportunities, fun, income, or tangibles) are you after for yourself? What about for your audience?

As you resurrect your podcast, you might need to consider adjusting your purpose and goals for your podcast. It's okay to go from business to fun, or fun to business! But what's most important is that you know why you're podcasting so that you can set appropriate goals, and then take the right steps toward those goals.

2. Treat your podcast return like a launch

Think about everything you had and did when you first started your podcast.

No matter how much you've lost due to your hiatus, you probably still have much more than when you first launched. You have more skills, more knowledge, more relationships, more tools (and probably higher quality, too), more resources, and yes, you even have more audience (you had zero when you first started)! Some people will keep your RSS feed for years, holding onto hope that you'll someday return. That's what I did with the Ask a Ninja video podcast (more about that later)!

Imagine if you had all the resources you have now but years ago! So you can treat your return almost like a launch with the same kind of enthusiasm, “media” blitz, promotion, sharing, asking friends and what audience you have to help, and more. But this time, you have a whole lot more of everything than you had before!

3. Use a podcast trailer to promote the return

If it fits into your timing—and maybe don't delay your return just for this—try to publish a “trailer” to promote the return of your podcast. Make it 1–3 minutes long, like a trailer, and make sure you actually set it as a “trailer” episode type in your podcast publishing tool. As a trailer, either don't use an episode number, or set its episode number to be the same as your next episode will be so that some apps can treat it as a trailer for that upcoming episode. And soon after you get into publishing again, you can remove the trailer from your podcast feed.

Instead of making the trailer about the past by apologizing for being gone or talking about what's happened during that time, focus on the present and—more importantly—the future. Why are you excited to resurrect the podcast? What are you eager to share in upcoming episodes? What might you be doing differently that your audience will appreciate?

You could even take this opportunity to adapt this trailer into your regular whole-show trailer that can be featured in podcast apps!

4. Lower your expectations

This one is a reality check; you'll need to lower your expectations.

Lower your expectations of your podcast's influence.

Lower your expectations of your audience's response.

And even lower your expectations of yourself.

Yes, you have a lot more knowledge and experience than before, but that doesn't mean you can just jump right back in and have all the same popularity, influence, audience, and even strengths and abilities as you did before. But you haven't lost everything!

Although Ask a Ninja did not return as a video podcast (so I can finally delete that RSS feed from my podcast app!), it did return!

Am I angry with Ask a Ninja for being gone for so long? No. Do I need to know what happened