How to take a break from your podcast

The smart way to go on hiatus

It’s good to take a break.

A podcast hiatus is an opportunity to catch your breath, reassess, and tweak. And for shows with defined seasons, a hiatus is a great way to create natural promotion opportunities.

Here’s what you should consider before you take a break:

End strong

During a hiatus, your most recent episode will get a disproportionately large amount of attention, relative to other episodes.

Why? Because it’ll sit at the top of your feed for your entire hiatus.

Look at how the June 8, 2018 episode of Exponent appears in Overcast:

Exponent’s hosts (Ben Thompson and James Allworth) are taking a summer break, which means “Legacy Leverage” will sit in the top spot for the entire summer.

Your last episode before a hiatus needs to be both excellent and representative of your series as a whole. Make sure your season finale is a good indication of what new listeners can expect if they explore the back catalog, and what they can expect when you eventually return from hiatus with new episodes.

Set listener expectations

Podcasts are a medium built on loyalty and habit. When you take a break from publishing new episodes, you risk falling out of a listener’s regular diet of shows. That’s why it’s so important to set clear expections for your hiatus: how long it’ll last, and when you’ll be back.

There are many ways to handle this. I think Ben Thompson and James Allworth do a great job of explaining their summer hiatus in the first 58 seconds of this episode:

You could also handle hiatus-talk at the end of your season finale, but audience retention data from Apple and Spotify suggests many listeners don’t make it all the way to the end of every episode, so it might get lost.

Another approach is to release a separate “hiatus update” mini-episode. Invisibila did this between their first and second seasons:

However you communicate the details of your hiatus, make it clear, and do your best to set realistic listener expectations.

Be careful with “bonus” content

It may be tempting to release special “bonus” episode during your hiatus, in an effort to “keep the feed fresh.”

Be careful with this type of material, especially if it’s not the same quality as your regular season material. Too much bonus content that goes unlistened can trip Apple’s “Not Interested Anymore” switch:

Don’t release a season’s worth of well-produced, high-quality episodes, then clutter your feed with a bunch of mediocre “bonus” content.

Release a trailer for your next season

In 2017, Apple introduced the <itunes:episodeType> , which allows podcast publishers to mark an episode as a trailer . Use this feature.

<itunes:episodeType> and <itunes:season> are a powerful combo, because they let you associate your trailer with a specific season:

Before your hiatus ends, drop a trailer into your feed to build excitement about your new season. Study how shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld build anticipation in the lead-up to a new season, then borrow their tactics.

Don’t forget about your back catalog

As podcasters, we tend to focus on promoting what’s new — our latest and greatest episode. But if your show has a long shelf-life, a hiatus is the perfect time to squeeze more juice out of your back catalog.

How?

Take a page from This American Life’s playbook and build “best of” playlists. Find topical or seasonal news hooks to peg your previous episodes to. Look at your average daily downloads during your hiatus, then use that as a baseline to try and move the needle with a new marketing or promotion tactic.

Use Apple Podcasts Analytics or Spotify’s dashboard to learn which episodes did the best job of holding listeners’ attention. Then re-invest in promoting your best-performing episode.

Treat your hiatus as an opportunity to experiment with new ways to market your show.

Remember

A break can be a good thing for your show, both from a creative and audience development perspective

Podcasts are built on habit and loyalty. Don’t disappear from your listeners’ ears without setting clear expectations about your return

Don’t release “bonus” content just for sake of “bonus” content.

Use trailers to build excitement towards the end of your hiatus

Your back catalog is an asset. Don’t forget about it. Keep promoting it.

Has your show taken a hiatus? What did you do with the time and attention it freed up?