Seasons vs. Weekly: Determining the Best Podcast Schedule for Your Show

Finally, finally, we are answering one of the most common questions, the perpetual grass is greener on the other side: should your show be weekly or should you run it in seasons? We're going to give you your answer today.

Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey. This is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team, because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it.

Episode 593, answering the most common question that has no right answer, spoiler alert. We're going to talk about running your show seasonally or weekly. I will say there is a right answer for you right now. The goal of this episode is for us to move through that decision-making process together. I'm going to talk about the pros and cons of each from my perspective.

What I want you to recognize is moments where those cons don't seem like so much of a con and/or those moments of pros don't feel quite so pro-ey. Because that's really where your nuance sits. That's really where your own preferences are going to play a big part and it's going to help you identify the right choice for you right now.

We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Before we jump into this, I don't want to get too far before I let you know, I am currently opening up and recording some new spots for free podcast audits. Those air over on The Podcast Newsroom. By the way, if you're not subscribed to The Podcast Newsroom, thepodcastnewsroom.com is the place to be. Get on the list. We've got a couple of those audits already up so you can get a feel for what it actually ends up sounding like, the kinds of things we cover.

If you would like an audit, head over to uncommonlymore.com/audit, submit an application, the team and I will reach out in the next couple of weeks and we will get you booked and we'll get you on the show. I'm excited to be running a few more of those. They were really fun to do in Q1 as it's still Q1 but January was like six years ago, let's be honest.

I want to dig into today's episode because it's such a common question and we're structuring it in a way that's going to allow you to identify the right style for you. Here's why that's important: understanding your brain and your style is going to help you create your version of consistency. There is not a right answer. More importantly, there's not a wrong answer. This is 100% about you identifying what's right for you right now.

I'm bringing this up because we have just opened up spots in April for our Podcast Strategy Intensive and I was reviewing some of the things we talked about Intensives in January and February, and one of the questions that really came up pretty frequently was looking at shifting the structure of a show either to or from, so moving to seasons from weekly or moving from weekly to seasons.

I say it that way because what was interesting to me is in the instances where somebody wanted to switch to something, it was a real chasing of the pros where somebody wanted to move from something, it was a real fleeing from the cons. What I think is important to realize is that there are pros and cons to both. There's not a universal “This is easy in literally anything,” but certainly in podcasting as a way of generating leads and converting them, there's not a magic button, a special lever. It, unfortunately, doesn't exist.

So, understanding that nuance of running to instead of from is important because it'll help you look at the driver and that will help give you some weight to the pros and cons and your response to them. What I want to point out here and the conversations I have most frequently around this are less about which is right and which is wrong but often there's something happening right now that's making this hard right now, whichever format it is. I want to highlight that we all have seasons. We all have seasons in our business and in our life where things are harder.

On the flip side, inevitably there are seasons where things feel easier, and sometimes the decisions we made when things felt hard no longer need to be there. They can change. I think this is one of those instances where that happens a lot. I see this a lot with people who start the show one format because of a whole litany of reasons only to realize that they made those decisions from a perspective they no longer hold or in a position they're no longer situated in. A change can be a real relief.

Again, I've seen it go both ways. I've seen people who were thriving in seasons and be like, “This is hard. I understand my show is doing well in this format, but it's a big lift for me.” On the flip side, I've seen it the other way too where somebody's in a weekly format and they're like, “This is going really well. But it's hard for me. How do I change it?” That's what I want to talk about today is some of these pros and cons so that we can identify if we actually want to change it.

Then we're going to wrap up talking about some other options, because we talk a lot about season versus weekly. In reality, there is another, there is a C option here. We'll wrap up talking about that. Let's start by talking about seasons. I want to start by talking about seasons because there is one time in your podcast where I actually do most frequently recommend one over the other and it happens to be that I most frequently recommend seasons over weekly, and that's when you launch a podcast.

When you're first launching, especially if you launch in the way I most frequently recommend, which is very bare bones, seriously minimum viable product, don't hire a production agency like us to produce your show weekly. Between you and me, side note here, this is one of the reasons Podcast Strategy Intensives exist because we do not take a lot of launch clients. It takes a really good fit for me to be on board with taking a launch client. Even then, we do it in a very well-boundary container. Meaning that I want to test this for x amount of time.

Generally, it's somebody who's saying, “I want to commit to this for a year. I want to produce 52 episodes of the show so that I have on asset,” maybe they ended up running it as a private podcast and it's a year of content that they've done for I don't know, whatever the case may be, but most frequently, what you actually need is someone to map out the launch with you, map out your content plan, and then you can DIY or very inexpensively have somebody clean up your edit and you can DIY the rest.

It can be a really simple thing. I like seasons because it gives a container for the experiment, which is what I really recommend most people do when they want to launch a podcast is build an experiment. Like I said, when we take on launch clients, it's because they're a really good fit for us and they're committed to that experiment time “I want to try this for a year.”

I most frequently don't recommend that. In the instances where we've done that and we've said, “Cool, we're going to commit to a year of the show and this is what we're going to build,” there's been a very clear, “I want this 12 months of content to sell this thing. I want to be able to just run this as audio sales assets for launches and whatnot.” It was a very clear purpose to the 52 episodes we produced inside of that experiment, but it was still a contained experiment.

When we reach the end of that year, then there's the conversation around, “Cool. Is this what we want to do? Do you want to keep this going?” then we can keep it going if that's the right fit. We've had instances where it was both where we kept going and where it was like, “No, this was great. I'm full up, this project feels complete.” That's what it's about, is about giving you a time in which you can check in and decide if you are complete, and seasons make that really easy to do. Because you get to have an understanding that you're creating a beginning, middle, and end.

Launches are the time where I most frequently say, “Cool, commit to 12 episodes. Do 12 weeks of the show, do a season, and then decide where you want to go,” because that's three months. That's 90 days. What I'll tell you upfront, and this is where we start looking at some of these cons is that 12 weeks, 3 months is not enough time for a podcast to “work.”

Podcasts are a slow burn. Almost no one launches a show and makes a million dollars. You got to have one heck of an audience ready to buy and then it's almost a matter of it wouldn't have mattered what medium you presented your content in, but you then strategically created content to move them towards an end result. It could have been a podcast, it could have been Instagram. It could have been LinkedIn lives. It could have been blog posts, it could have been videos, which is about creating content that fits right for them.

But it's the real center of the Venn diagram, these things came together, more often than not, you don't get quite here. That can be a hard thing to judge and so you have to be conscientious about how you're judging success and/or failure in 90 days. When I talk about running a 12-episode, 90-day experiment, I'm most frequently just looking to get you past the 10-episode hump, which statistically, less than 20% of shows manage to do. Some of it is getting you past that. That's because this is going to give you enough time mostly to get a feel if this is a fit for you, if this is a fit for how you want to pull together and deliver value and content.

It will also give you an indicator of how sustainable this is for you. Is this something that you can come back to and keep doing? Now with seasons, what's really cool is you have the opportunity to explore an entire idea. I really love seasons for people who love a theme, who want to address something beginning, middle, and end, and really dive a little deeper into a topic because you can wholly explore something in a seasonal format. Seasons can work really well in those cases.

A great example of this is if you're somebody who runs a pretty consistent launch cycle, you can almost use your seasons as your pre-launch and launch content. Then take your pause, go into delivery mode, and then round and round you go again. Let's say you've got two programs, two major programs, one you sell in the spring and one you sell in the fall. In the winter, we launch your season of your show that sells your spring launch, and in the summer we start your show that runs your fall launch and round and round the cycle goes.

But you're able to put your foot on the gas and take your foot off by really presenting again, it's a total idea, a whole topic, but even if you're doing a format more similar to my show, where we're coming in and we're discussing isolated ideas in a general topic, of course, but we're not doing a whole season about why shouldn't you be season versus weekly, this is a whole entity of an episode, you can absolutely do that in seasons as well.

But what's nice is you create seasons for yourself as well. You create that head down in recording mode, then in delivery mode where it's just being released to the world. I will say some recommendations, tips for folks who want to use seasons if that's you, batching is great. I like to make sure I have seasons completely produced before they're ready to release so that we can truly be in production mode and delivery mode separately. It makes delivery mode a little easier.

It also makes being available for the marketing of those episodes a little easier. If you're somebody, and again, this is why I like it as a launch tool, if you're somebody who's DIYing your show right now, upfronting the recording and the production process is going to be the primary way, you're then able to consistently market episodes and see results because again, you're putting a lot of to-dos on your list.

Production is not an easy lift. There's a reason people pay us to do it. It's a lot to hold that: hold the recording, hold the production, hold the strategy, and hold the marketing. This is why only 18% of shows have more than 10 episodes, that's why almost no episodes are releasing weekly episodes still consistently, this is why pod fade exists. If you don't know what pod fade is, we have a whole episode where we talk about it. I enjoyed the breaks, they get built into seasons for somebody who's DIYing a show because again, it becomes imperative that you build in rest.

Let's talk about another con though with seasons. I have to start back up again. With rest comes restarting and if you're somebody who has a hard time stopping and then starting again, I’m totally raising my hand on this one, it can be really hard to do that. It can be really hard to get yourself back up for another round of it. That's why what I again most frequently recommend is if you do a season or maybe two and you're like, “Yes, this is for me,” that's when it's time to hire production help.

That's when it's time to reach out to us and let's talk about what it looks like to support you and your show on an ongoing basis because it's a lot to hold for a long time. I say this as somebody who did this for seven years before they handed off any of it. I do this professionally and it was still a lot to hold on my own. I didn't even realize how much it was to hold on my own until I put it down, until my incredible team stepped in piece by piece and started helping me with this show.

I had no idea of what a lift it was for me. Of course, I can do it. I do this all the time. It's heavier when it's your show. It's heavier when you're doing it alone. It can get harder to pick up. It can become less and less enticing to pick up. This is, again, why we see shows one and done. This is why we see shows do a couple of episodes and then fade away into the abyss because they didn't prepare for the lift. They didn't prepare for the marathon because it just keeps happening, and they didn't build in ways to rest.

When you're DIYing seasons, it's a really good way to do that as long as you can pick it back up, as long as you can rest, and then start again. The other thing you have to consider with seasons is for every pause you take where you rest, so is your regular listenership. It gets really easy to get out of the habit of listening to your show because it's no longer popping up in my feed every Wednesday morning. When it doesn't pop up in my feed, I probably don't initially notice but after a couple of weeks I go, “I haven't listened to it,” and I go look and the show’s not been there for such and such.

It's going to be imperative that you prepare your listeners for the format style. Letting them know we're going to run 12 episodes, 20 episodes, whatever the case may be for the season, letting them know, “Hey, this is the last episode of the season. Our next episode will be coming out in,” and it doesn't have to be January but it does need to be the winter, the fall, the new year. That gives them some time in the future.

If you know that you want to run a 10-week season and a 4-week rest, that's your cycle, a 10-week season and a 2-week rest, or whatever it may be, honestly, two weeks is not a season but you know what I'm saying, not a rest, then let them know, “Hey, we run this show 12 episodes and then we take 4 weeks off and we'll have new episodes for you.” I want you to make sure that you are preparing them for your return so that when you return, they return because again, it can be a bigger lift.

On the flip side, there's content for people to discover your show every day. You may be ready to start a new season next week and somebody else has just found your show and been binging the last season. It's not like your content goes away when you're not in production. This is where it needs to become really, really consistently part of your plan, how you market when you're not releasing.

When you're not currently releasing a season, you need to still be talking about the past season. What's cool is you can talk about it in totality. If you're somebody who's running themed seasons, you can say, “Hey, we're jumping in and doing this educational series.” A great example of this is if you're running an education-based business where you're going to be teaching people things and you know you're going to be looking at beginners, you know your clientele is new to the space but there's a lot in the space they need to understand.

There are a lot of great examples of this in the cannabis space when we're talking about learning about the cannabis industry and what's required. There's a lot of information you need to have to enter that space. I see this also a lot with realtors, people teaching realtor content where there's a lot of jargon. There are a lot of laws, there are a lot of legalities. There are things you can and can't do in some spaces, less so in cannabis and/or realtors, but you might have ethics considerations, I mean, even in the cannabis space when we start talking about medical stuff, there are ethical considerations that you need to consider in starting that business.

You can absolutely be building seasons where you go in-depth into some of that. We could do a 10-episode season on the laws new dispensary owners need to know and that's built to sell a dispensary owner one on one course on the back end, but it's going to be a whole lot easier to get them doing stuff and get them moving in the course if they understand the baseline legal side of it.

Between seasons, I've got a whole course essentially, that I get to keep promoting and saying, “Hey, the whole series is up now. Find out in X amount of hours how to set up your dispensary business, the laws to set up your dispensary business in California or whatever it is.”

I want you to really be looking at, if you're looking at seasons, and if you're looking at addressing this from a beginning, middle, and end, you want to cover a theme in your seasons, great, how do I market that between seasons? How do I leverage the fact that there are seasons and there is a beginning, middle, and end when I'm between the end, the last end, and the next beginning? That's got to be part of your overall podcast strategy and marketing strategy in a way that you don't have to factor in for weekly because with weekly, there's always something new.

I'm going to take that sloppy segue and move right into the format we have here, weekly. This is probably the more common format. I have no data for that. I have no numbers for that. But I'd argue that this is the most common format when we're looking at weekly. I say weekly, because that's the cadence that we see most frequently, but this could be daily, this could be monthly, this could be I'm not going to say bimonthly because if you release an episode every other month, you're basically in single episode seasons.

What I mean more when I say weekly here is evergreen. We're running the show 52 weeks a year. It's always there. It's ready to go. You'll notice in my language, you're probably starting to figure out what our other option is going to be. We're running weekly. Again, we're going to use weekly as our cadence here, the benefits of that are right in direct contradiction to what happens in seasons. It’s always going.

I'm going to use me as an example in why this works because this is one of the reasons that works for me well. Momentum is big for me, body in motion, Stacey in motion kind of thing. A testament is right now I am recording this episode about three weeks ahead of its release. That's because my return to podcasting in Q1 is the hardest bit of podcasting I do all frickin year.

Another word wanted to come out. But I don't want to mark this episode as explicit so it's the hardest, Q1 is my hardest podcasting season because I have set the show down for four to eight, honest to goodness, I think I set the show down for about 10 weeks this year. A little more than two months, I didn't record anything. That's a fib. Flag on the play. I recorded The Podcast Newsroom. But recording that is different than recording the show.

I don't batch that, it's one and done. I record it, it gets cleaned up, and it gets released to you. There's a lot less production in that show than this show from a front-end recording standpoint. I don't batch because literally the news you need now, I pull it together and that show, I record to release within a couple of days. I run that show on my own. The team doesn't edit that one for me. That's different.

But I had not sat down to batch since October because late October, early November, I batched everything because we go into getting everything prepped for our clients. In November, I go into our Q1 production meetings, then we've got Thanksgiving holiday here in the States, then we've got like two weeks till our two-week break at the end of December.

I know I'm not going to have time to record so I try to get it done through the end of January. I think I'm going to start trying for the end of February. I had till about mid-February done by the beginning of November last year. I hadn't touched this show, except to market it from November-ish till mid-January-ish. That meant recording one episode at a time. It meant running into all the things that I don't run into when I do this consistently.

For me, that momentum of weekly is really, really important. Because it's hard for me to get out and get back in. It's hard for me to rebuild the batching muscle that I build so well between February and October where I'm recording three, four episodes at a time, I batch a whole month. This year, I'm going to be experimenting a little bit with increasing that and trying to move to more recording in one month everything I need for a quarter.

But I'm not even sure about that. Because I'm not sure I can put it down and pick it up that infrequently. It's tough for me. So as long as I stay ahead, I'm good because I can keep batching and we've still got plenty of room on the front end.

The downside of weekly is it's always there. It's never not on my to-do list as hard as it is for me to pick the show back up and start recording again late January, early February. This is one of the reasons I like to get into February because if I record through the end of January, I've got to start recording February at the beginning of January.

That can be hard as we enter the New Year to also sit down and buckle in for batch recording. They end up individual and I'm recording them one at a time. It's literally never not on my to-do list. As hard as it is when I put the show down in October, November, it's really nice not having to show my to-do list for a little while. It's really nice having that space from it because again, we don't realize how heavy it is until we put it down.

You have to look at how are you going to care for yourself, how are you going to strategically set supports in place to support you because it will always be on your to-do list if you do a show weekly. It will always be something you need to do for your show.

Oh, by the way, let's talk about how we have to market our episodes too. I'm recording this in February. You're hearing it in March—that's if you listen to it when it came out—you're hearing this March, which means right now as you're hearing this, I had to reconnect with the show to start sharing it with you, to tell you I was out and that is hard for some people and so you have to find the ways that work for you in getting that done.

One of the ways I do that is, spoiler alert, I write the email that goes out with the show right as soon as we wrapped production on it. My email is scheduled usually two, three, or four weeks before this episode actually gets into your earbuds. Look at where you can be building in your marketing piece with your production process so that you're still in line with the show.

Maybe that means reporting your stories and saving them. Maybe that means making sure that your production team is building marketing assets. We do audiograms and graphics for all the shows we produce. There are some marketing materials ready to go without any real additional lift from you. You just got to add some captions and get them posted, which most frequently gets pulled from the show notes which is great. I love it.

You gotta be considering that when you look at weekly is how can I build in that rest that I'm not getting when I'm working in seasons? Where am I building in that space to do the marketing because I'm not creating that space by being in and out of production like I would with the seasons?

I want to shift to some of the other pros and that's around your listenership. You know the show is going to be here every Wednesday and so every Wednesday, it pops up and it's there. I don't have to worry about you forgetting the show is here in the same way as I would if the show wasn't here every Wednesday. I don't have to worry about re-engaging you in the same way because we've built a real habit of consistency in this time together. That's really nice.

It's also here whenever I needed to sell, when I decide to test something, if I want to start playing with language, introducing a new framework, or talking through something I want to beta test, to stress test. I come here, I talk to you because we've been in this for a while. We do this every week. When we come together for our weekly meeting, as it were, I'm able to really quickly be like, “Hey, this is what I'm thinking, are you in?” and you're really quickly able to go like, “Yeah, let's do that.”

I don't have to go, “Oh, I don't have a new season coming out for six more weeks. That's our window to talk about this,” or “I have to adjust that,” or whatever. It's nice. It's really nice. I will say for me, the components around consistency are the most attractive part of weekly episodes. The cadence that is built not just on your side, but on the listener's side is really valuable. Not priceless, not without its own costs. But it's nice. It's nice to have and it's why I have a weekly show. It's why I have an evergreen show, that’s why we move around with this cadence.

I want to bring us to our third option, the hybrid option, we're going to call it, because you may have already called me out in your head. But I'm going to call me out now. This show doesn't actually come out every week. Even when a new episode is released into the feed, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a new episode.

For example, in February about a month ago, from the time you're listening to this, we released a quick two-minute episode because there was something I wanted to point you to on The Podcast Newsroom that was a podcast audit we did have a sales asset episode built to promote discovery calls.

It was a really good audit. Shout out to Diann for doing that with me. It was a great audit. I wanted to point you there. I didn't release the episode that was planned to be released that day. I pushed it a week. I said, “Hey, here's a quick little message. Come see us over there because that was something that made more sense.” I, in the past, have taken the last two weeks of the year off. When we're off, the show is off.

That's not the case necessarily every year, it wasn't the case last year, we released a couple of episodes. I not infrequently take time off in July or August. I'll either re-release an old episode, so something new does hit the feed on Wednesday or I will just promote to the email list because I have been doing this long enough, I've got data that I can see what happens. We're all distracted in late summer, all of us and so the juice isn't really worth the squeeze.

I've got a ton of great content. I build sales assets, I can repurpose. I do it. That’s, for my money, the best option is you building a version of this that works for you. That may mean I do eight episodes and then I take four weeks off and then I do eight episodes that I take four weeks off. That's what it looks like quarterly. It might look more like what I'm talking about where you run an evergreen weekly show and as needed, you get take time off or you repurpose.

Repurposing gets easier as you have more episodes. You need to get 50, maybe 100, 100 really have a lot of options, 50 to have one or two good options in the bank for sure because you've got a year of content. I want you to be looking at, more than anything else, what resonated today in the pros or the cons where you were like, “Ooh, that feels good,” “Ooh, that would be nice,” “That's possible?” What tickled those kinds of things because that is your indicator for what's going to be right for you.

If you want me to give you a “here's the right answer,” for my money, in most cases, you do seasons to launch and then shift into a weekly show with support. That's the format I recommend the most. It's the format every single one of our production clients uses. Now, it's the format I would use if I were to launch a new show. If I were to launch a new show right now, it’s just not out of the question. I'd launched the first bit as a season. I’d run a 12-episode first season. Then I would decide is there enough juice here. Is this sustainable? Do I like this?

I'd assess and then I'd shift into weekly, if in that assessment I decided it was, obviously. Not like, “It's terrible. Okay, let's do it.” No. I want you to look at, and I'll wrap up this really long episode, what's right for you right now? Does the idea from your project-based season feel like an easier lift? Do you need that momentum of weekly, that commitment, that cadence that comes with regular production and regular releases?

More importantly, where's your hybrid? Where's your in-between? Where's your “This is what works for me”? Weekly with an asterisk maybe we’ll call it, what works for you. Next steps. We have a couple of production spots available as we look towards Q2, we have Podcast Strategy Intensives opening back up in April, head over to uncommonlymore.com, whichever is right for you right now, let's get you booked.

Let's have a conversation and discuss which might be best for you right now. I’m happy to help you verbally process that and get to what's right for you. All of the information though is at uncommonlymore.com. All right. I'll see you right back here next week.

Thanks so much for listening to this show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes, so commit to doing something from today's episode. Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about Podcast Strategy Intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team. All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com.

If you haven't yet signed up for The Podcast Newsroom, I want to remind you that is a great next step. If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there. Get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. The last favor I will ask, because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating and review for the show. If you go to ratethispodcast.com/more, that's the easiest way to do it. But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you. This is just the start of the conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.