Should you limit your available podcast episodes or keep it all in your feed?
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. As you
podcast consistently, you'll build up a back catalog of episodes. But should you keep
all of those episodes online or should you maybe limit how many are available in your
podcast feed and on your website?
This subject was inspired by feedback from my listener Marc Johanssen who said, "I'm
seeking an instructional resource, aka a link, that I can forward to a podcaster in order
to nudge them to take actions needed in order to allow access to all their earlier podcast episodes.
At present, one can only access the latest 50 episodes via an app or via their website."
Thank you for that question Mark.
I hope you'll share this episode with them.
So here are 7 things for you to consider or for you to share with another podcast that
is in this same situation and you want them to have more of their episodes available.
You can follow along in the notes or share this episode with anyone who would need it
by going to theaudacitytopodcast.com/limitornot or tap or swipe inside of your app to get
to the notes and share links there.
First number one, podcast feed vs website archive.
Think about the main two places your episodes live.
First, your podcast feed.
And second, on your website.
And you DO have a website for your podcast that has a separate webpage for each episode, right?
You should.
Many publishing systems will let you limit how many episodes are in your RSS feed.
Most common defaults are 10, 50, and 100, but some of them let you set whatever limit
that you want.
But such limits most likely won't affect your website and where your episodes live
on your website. If an episode is no longer available in your feed but still on your website,
it is technically still online and available, but it's no longer very practical because
it's not available in your audience's podcast apps. Unless they have smart tools for moving
website audio into a podcast app, the only way your audience could hear or watch your
old episodes is through the webpage and their browser. That makes it difficult for your
audience, rather inconvenient and I'd say even inconsiderate if it's something that
they want to consume in the way that they want to consume it. Thus, most of the following
considerations will focus on what is in your podcast RSS feed specifically, but also keep
your website in mind so that people have a place where they can go to hear your episodes
through a browser and all of the other value that has being on your website.
But we're focusing primarily on your podcast feed and thus what shows up in the podcast apps.
Number two, is your content still valuable?
When your podcast episodes from months or even years ago are still valuable and relevant
today, then you've made timeless content.
Timeless content is highly valuable for both you and your audience.
It gives you more content that you can promote, either through marketing or direct recommendations
like saying to people, "Hey, you gotta listen to this episode."
And if you have a timeless episode, then it doesn't really matter when you publish that
episode if your potential audience could still benefit from it.
For example, I still send people to my episode from 2014 about whether episode numbers are
really necessary.
And I have a link to that in the notes if you want to check that out and you're wondering,
Are episode numbers really necessary?
Well go listen to that old episode.
In fact, I even considered re-approaching the content and re-doing that episode recently.
But when I listened to that old episode, I realized that it was still just as relevant
today as back then.
I didn't really need to re-record it.
Instead, I did an episode all about whether episode numbers should be in your titles.
And I referred back to that episode about episode numbers from way back in 2014.
content was timeless. Timeless content also gives your audience more great stuff to enjoy
or learn from. Either for the first time, when they're discovering your podcast and
can listen to all of the great content that you have from years ago, or they've been
listening for a while and they decide to go back and refresh some stuff or re-experience
some old stuff. The other kind of content is time sensitive. It's when your podcast
episodes have a kind of shelf life. Imagine a "best if used by" date on your episodes.
That doesn't mean they're bad after that date, it just means they're best if used
before that date. Just like certain food products aren't bad after the "best if" dates,
but the "used by" dates are more hard. Anyway, that little tangent aside.
This is common, I think, for podcasts about current events. Like a news podcast. Podcasts
about current trends, such as a TV show, are mostly time sensitive because most people
will be interested only when the trend is current. But this can still have some timeless
value. In the case of a simultaneous TV after show podcast, like my old podcast about the
TV show Once Upon a Time was, the value might be more difficult as people can more easily
binge the old show and your episodes will then seem easily outdated because they can
consume the whole TV show much faster maybe than they can consume your podcast or they
might consume them in different orders and so your episodes will sound awkward and outdated.
But if someone gets your podcast while watching the show, no matter when they're watching
it or when it is now, as if they were watching the show and listening to your podcast simultaneously
way back when the show was live, then they could experience all the same things, the
same theories, the same questions, the same uncertainty, except without the direct engagement
with your podcast and the community because that engagement and the community has mostly
already passed. Alternatively, a rewatch style podcast such as Office Ladies weighs more
on the timeless side because such a podcast can discuss the show without theorizing or
worrying about spoilers and it's designed generally for people who have already seen
the show and not necessarily watching it for the first time. My Once Upon a Time podcast
almost didn't happen because I wanted to instead do a podcast about re-watching Lost. I'd
never podcasted about Lost, but I did watch Lost and it took me a little while to get
into it. But I thought here would be a really fun idea is do a podcast where my primary
co-host and I were fans of Lost and we knew all the theories and how everything ended.
And then we have a third co-host who was watching it for the first time. So we'd have the first
part of the episodes be where all three of us were together. And then the second part
of the episode would be just the two of us who had already seen the show. So that way
there could still be some of the "Oh wow, I wonder what's happening" part of it. And
there could be some kind of fun with that as most of the audience would probably know
was already happening. And then after that, co-host would leave the episode, then we'd
discuss everything with all spoilers from multiple seasons into the future. But that
didn't happen because the guy who was going to be my co-host said, "Hey, have you heard
about this TV show called Once Upon a Time?" And thus, The Once Podcast was born. And I
still get people listening to it and occasionally still sending emails and someone even just
recently sent a donation, they said, "We know this podcast is no longer active. The
TV show is no longer on the air, but I'm sure there are still some costs to keeping
the podcast online, so I wanted to help you with that." That was awesome generosity.
Really cool of them. So you might fit into one of these situations or something slightly
different but you really need to ask yourself, "Will most of my episodes still be relevant
in a year or maybe a couple of years or a few years. If yes, then you probably have
timeless content and I think you should consider keeping your episodes available if they are
timeless. But if not, like if you have a news podcast that's talking about today's news
or this week's news, people probably won't care about your episodes from a couple of
years ago unless it was a really special episode covering some kind of breaking or amazing information.
So then if you have a time sensitive podcast, it would probably be okay to limit how many
episodes are available in your feed and on your website.
Number three, does your old content have good SEO?
Search engine optimization.
Most podcast apps will search episode titles.
Did you know that?
So your episodes become a portfolio that helps your podcast to be found and helps people
decide on consuming your podcast.
When they view your podcast for the first time in their podcast apps, they will see
the list of episodes.
So that gives them a good idea of what your podcast is about.
Not only from your description, but also they get to see the actual episode topics.
And the SEO value here is that those episode titles can also contain all kinds of great
value and SEO keywords.
So instead of trying to stuff those SEO terms into your podcast title and risk getting kicked
out of podcast apps, which I've done an episode previously about that.
The link for that is in the notes on the website at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit-or-not or
tap or swipe away inside of the app.
So instead of trying to keyword stuff, you could make separate well-titled episodes about
those subjects you want people to search for and find your podcast.
So don't title your podcast "The Business Show" and then dash online marketing, passive
income, affiliate income, cryptocurrency, investment opportunities, selling your business,
dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot.
Don't do that.
Make episodes about those subjects.
Make an episode all about selling your business.
Make an episode all about affiliate income.
Make an episode all about passive income and all of these other things that you want to
be found for.
This helps in podcast apps and websites and social networks when you have episodes about
the specific things you want to be found for.
They're more shareable, they have better search engine value to them, and I think they're
far more accessible and consumable to your audience because they know what they're getting
with that episode.
It's not like they have to skip around to find what they're interested in.
They know, "This is the episode about affiliate income.
That's all this episode covers.
If I want to learn about affiliate income, this episode is the place to get it."
That's why I love single topic focused episodes.
That doesn't work for everybody, but you can try to make it work for you or you could
practice it every now and then. And when you do that kind of thing, that gives
your episodes fantastic SEO value. So if your old episodes do have that good
search engine optimization, then I highly recommend keeping them available both on
your website and in your podcast feed. This will ensure your podcast can then
still be found for all of those things that you talked about in separate
episodes and then found wherever people are looking, not only on the website search engines,
but also inside their podcast apps and that's possible only if you keep your episode available
in all of these places.
Number four, do you sell your back catalog?
A good way to monetize a popular and deeply engaging podcast, those two things are very
important there, popular and deeply engaging, can be to limit the number of publicly available
episodes, both in the feed and on the website, not having them there. And then sell the access
to the rest of those old episodes. There are several ways that you can sell access to your
old episodes and I have links to each of these in the notes for this episode. You could sell
access through a creator support platform like Patreon, Glow, or Supercast. You could build
your own membership system like with WordPress and MemberPress. I've done that before. Or you
You could sell your old episodes by bundling those old episodes together and selling them
as a single downloadable package or multiple downloadable packages like you can do easily
with WordPress and the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.
Another thing that I've done before too.
Or you could use podcast subscription platforms and I'm using the word subscription in the
more modern way where you're paying to subscribe to something in a podcast app.
That's like what you can get with the Apple Podcasters program and more.
And some of these even integrate with these other tools like Patreon, Glow.fm, Supercast,
Member Press, maybe other things that we might develop inside of Podcasting 2.0 and more.
This approach works great for podcasts that aren't designed to sell something else, like
your own products and services, except for selling their own inherent value within each episode.
This only works when the audience will actually want those old episodes.
If you have a daily news podcast, how likely is it that people really care about what you
had to say about the day's news from five years ago if nothing really special happened
on that date?
I see this used most often for the entertaining podcasts.
Remember, I consider that all content on the internet is either helpful or entertaining,
or it could be both really.
So for those entertaining podcasts, like a comedy show where you sell your old episodes
because they're just as funny as the new episodes.
It didn't matter what was happening in the world at that time or it didn't matter all
that much.
People know that that joke is still funny no matter when you tell it.
So maybe you sell access to those old episodes or those old stories.
Or maybe you're doing a drama and the older episodes are bunched together in older seasons
and maybe you make those older seasons available only for sale while you keep your current
season online in the podcast apps, on your website, and available for free.
If you sell your old episodes, please remember to remove, I suggest really, any advertising
from them because you're no longer trying to use the episode to sell something else.
Instead, you're selling the episode itself because of its own inherent value.
And this would be, then, the ideal situation to limit your feed and your website to only
your latest episodes, however you want to break that off.
Whether it's always only the latest 10 are available for free, or maybe it's only the
current season, the current year, or however you want to define that.
That's up to you.
Number five, what profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, are you seeking with your podcast?
I make profit stand for something.
It's what both you and your audience can gain from your podcast.
P-R-O-F-I-T.
Popularity, relationships, opportunities, fun, income, or tangibles.
If your episodes regularly help build your profit, then it would probably be most profitable
for you to keep them online as long as possible.
And if they have good SEO value, they'll continue attracting people.
And if they have good calls to action or other profit-building value, then they'll probably
continue returning that value for as long as they stay online.
For example, I still get a request every now and then for me to design a website or podcast
cover art for someone because I promoted those personalized services back when I offered
them myself years ago.
I don't do that work anymore, by the way.
Now I refer that out.
So you're still welcome to ask for my recommended referrals.
understand I'm going to refer you to someone I trust because I just don't do that work anymore.
And I continue to receive new subscribers to my email newsletter through past episodes that
promoted exclusive resources. I also continue to receive new members to my podcast reviews
and customers to my other products and services because of how they were relevantly promoted in
timeless content even from years ago. If I took those old episodes offline, I would be losing all
those opportunities to build my brand, my authority, and my influence. So if your podcast itself is a
form of marketing for something else you offer, a product, a service, or anything like that,
even affiliates that are timeless affiliates, then you would probably want to keep the older
episodes online for as long as possible, both in your feed and on your website.
Number six, is your feed getting too big? A complication arises when you have so many
episodes and such large notes for each episode that your podcast RSS feed grows to multiple
megabytes. With my own article-style notes for each episode, multiplied by the hundreds of
episodes I've published, I only recently realized my own RSS feed was over five megabytes. For an
For an RSS feed, that's big.
And I never really noticed because I use Blueberry's Podcast Mirror service as a proxy for my RSS
feed to keep it fast and stable.
Yes, every now and then when I try and view the source I had to wait for a few seconds
for everything to load but I never really took note of how big in megabytes the feed
actually was.
But it was still so big.
Even with the proxy service that Blueberry provides through Podcast Mirror, the feed,
feed was so big that some podcast apps and services were starting to choke on it, even
causing some old episodes to not display anymore. I could have reduced the number of episodes
in my feed, but then that would have cost me the SEO as I talked about in point number
three and the profit as I talked about in the previous point number five. And until
my proposal to support notes inside chapters is adopted with podcasting 2.0, I have a link
to that in the notes, or until PowerPress changes how it generates podcast feeds from
WordPress, I didn't want to remove my full articles from my RSS feed.
Like there's a simple option inside of the WordPress reading settings to say that you
want the full content or just the excerpts, the summaries.
I did not want to switch everything over to summaries because there are cases where I
want the full content to show.
So instead, in my case, since I use PowerPress to generate my RSS feed, I enabled PowerPress's
Feed Episode Maximizer feature which allows full content on only my latest 10 episodes
and then minimal content, especially omitting my lengthy articles, on all older episodes that are
beyond those latest 10. This reduced my feed with nearly 400 episodes from over 5 megabytes to that
sweet spot of under 1 megabyte. I highly recommend you listen to or read some of my past episodes and
articles to learn more about feed limits and considerations that come along with each of these.
There are three that I link to in the notes at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit or not.
Those three are A) what you need to know about episode limits and your podcast RSS feed,
B) how to shrink your podcast RSS feed and why it matters, and C) what to do when you
have too many podcast episodes in your RSS feed.
Check those out in the notes at tap or swipe away in your app or at theaudacitytopodcast.com/limit-or-not.
So you really need to consider the complexity you might be introducing by allowing all your
episodes to remain in your feed and then look for optimization options if you can.
And number seven, think carefully before expanding your RSS feed.
If you've decided you want more of your old episodes in your feed, you need to know what
could happen if you expand the limit on your RSS feed. First, there's the size to consider,
as I addressed in point number six. You don't want your feed to get too big. I recommend
under 1MB. Plenty of apps out there can handle larger feeds, but I think under 1MB is mostly
reasonable. There are also potential consequences for automations and the audience experience.
Let's focus first on the audience experience. Most podcast apps track each podcast episode
by the episode's globally unique identifier or GUID. Some people pronounce it GUID, some
people say GUID. This is an RSS tag that you don't have to worry about unless you're
migrating hosting providers or publishing tools, in which case worry a lot because the
GUIDs should never change. Some apps will remember only the GUIDs that still exist in
the feed, and that's how they know what episodes were played and what episodes weren't,
And they'll forget anything that's no longer in the feed.
So when you expand the feed to include more episodes, those old episodes might look completely
new to podcast apps because the apps have forgotten the GUIDs or they've never even
seen those GUIDs in the first place.
Then the app will probably download or re-download those old episodes, even if they were already played.
to the app. It's thinking, "Oh, I haven't seen this G.U.I.D. anymore. This looks like
a new episode. I better download it." It might have forgotten that you actually played
that episode already. At the least, they might be displayed in the podcast apps as new and
unplayed and thus confuse or worse, frustrate your audience. Unfortunately, how these apps
handle your reappearing old episodes is outside your control. So you have to consider whether
the cost is worth it to you and your audience to expand how many episodes are in your RSS feed.
Alternatively, you could create a separate RSS feed to hold your older episodes,
like 100 episodes at a time, each with its full text content then, because you know it's only
ever going to have 100 episodes and therefore it's fine with the number of episodes it has
and you don't have to worry about updating it with new episodes. It will always be only those
certain 100 episodes like episodes 1 to 100 and then each can have its full content with it.
This would keep those old episodes available, especially if you submit those archive feeds
to podcast apps and directories, which I do recommend you do if you make archive feeds,
but their own SEO would build the archive feeds ranking, not that of your active podcast feed.
Now that's in the podcast apps. On your website it would probably still be all the same because
on your website there's no division of it. In the podcast apps though you would have your active feed
with your latest however many episodes and then your archive feeds with say 100 episodes at a time.
1 to 100, 101 to 200, 201 to 300, something like that would be your archive feeds. So if you have
a really great episode in your first 100 episodes and it ranks well in search in apps and on the
website, well it won't really matter what happens on the website in this case, but in the apps it
It would then be promoting your archive feed instead of your main active podcast.
If you do that kind of thing, then you should definitely do two things here.
Number one is consider making all of those old episodes promote your active feed.
You could put in a little ad at the beginning of your episodes either dynamically or you
go back and edit all those episodes.
Maybe something quick that says something like "This is an episode from the archive
feed, please make sure you're following the main active podcast feed and give
them your website or your follow the podcast link or anything like that so
that they can then follow your active feed and get every new episode. So that's
one thing you should do with your archive feeds. The other thing to
consider doing would be this would be a great opportunity to create a channel in
Apple Podcasts. This is a new feature in Apple Podcasts and some other podcast
apps are adopting this too where you can have a channel or a collection to say
these are other podcasts by me. Not other podcasts that are related to mine. Like I
wouldn't put Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting in my channel, but instead it would be like
including The Audacity to Podcast episodes 1 to 100 would be in the same channel as the
Audacity to Podcast active main podcast feed. That's inside of Apple Podcasts. It's called
the channel feature and you can only set that up currently through the Podcast Connect website
that Apple provides. But there's also an upcoming alternative inside Podcasting 2.0 that would
allow you to put this in your RSS feed to indicate which of your feeds are members of
a channel. So that Podcasting 2.0 apps could then group your shows together, maybe in multiple
channels or you have just one channel. It's still yet to be completely defined. But I
think there's a lot of potential there. So if you are creating archive feeds, make sure
you do those two things. Number one is A) put in some kind of pre-roll or post-roll or
something where people know prominently that they're listening to an archive feed and
should make sure they're following the main feed. I might suggest actually not a pre-roll
because if people are listening to all your old episodes, you don't want to annoy them
with hearing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again with each
episode that they listen to at the beginning of the episode. So maybe you do a pre-roll
every 10 episodes or so and then do a post roll in all of the other episodes besides
that. And the other thing to do is b) make a channel with all of your feeds inside Apple
Podcasts, other podcast apps, and the upcoming Podcasting 2.0 alternative.
When old episodes reappear in your RSS feed, you might also have similar troubles with
some automation tools as some of your audience might have with their podcast apps. For example,
something that automatically tweets whenever you publish a new episode, might also then
tweet when all of your old episodes show up in your RSS feed. But from my observations,
and I haven't tested and observed every kind of automation tool out there, but from my
observations, most of these tools look for only what's new at the top of an RSS feed,
where new items are, older items are at the bottom, new items are at the top, or only
episodes that have a date more recent than the last time the automation ran.
Thus, reappearing old episodes probably won't trigger any automations, but it is still possible
and unfortunately you might not even know until it happens.
So these are 7 things for you to consider whether you should limit your RSS feed to
a certain number of available episodes.
Number one, podcast feed vs website archive.
Number two, is your content still valuable?
Number three, does your old content have good SEO?
Number four, do you sell your back catalog?
Number five, what profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, are you seeking with your podcast?
Number six, is your feed getting too big?
And number seven, think carefully before expanding your RSS feed.
And yes, I know this outline wasn't completely parallel. Shhhhhhhh.
Let's not talk about that.
If you need help with some of this stuff, either figuring out how to implement this
for your own podcast, or you want to try and figure out the strategy that you can do to
leverage this to the best effects for your podcast, whatever your goals are for your
podcast, I'm available for custom personalized coaching and consulting to help you with podcasting.
Please contact me through the website at theaudacitytopodcast.com or you can email feedback@theaudacitytopodcast.com.
If this episode has been helpful to you or there are some podcasters you think need to
hear this episode because maybe you want them to expand their limits so that you can get
their older episodes, then please share this episode out.
Go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/limitornot to review the notes, share this episode, get
the links I mentioned, or access the same through a tap or swipe away inside of your app.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for
you to go start and grow your own podcast, with lots and lots of episodes, for passion
and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from TheAudacityToPodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.
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