Ideas for your 100th podcast episode (or any other milestone episodes)

I'm super excited to share ideas for your 100th podcast episode (or any other milestone episodes) because you should celebrate it!

You’ve made it to 100 episodes - let that sink in!

It’s no small feat to create this much content and it zooms around faster than you think, especially if you’re releasing more than one episode a week.

So how can you make it special?

In this episode, I’m going to share some fantastic ideas for your century achievement. It’s a great chance to reflect back on your time recording and any lessons you’ve learned. Through experience, I’ve seen how reflection episodes resonate with listeners and are amongst the most popular downloaded.

You can even organise a giveaway or discount for your listeners or cut together snippets from your favourite episodes to show all the fun you’ve had and the content you’ve shared.

If you’re feeling brave, there’s even the possibility of running a LIVE episode with your audience. Everyone loves chiming in and it’s a great opportunity to further connect with your amazing listeners.

There are so many options to make the episode stand out and mark the occasion - I’ll let you know my absolute favourite choice after listening to thousands of episodes.

Of course, you don’t have to do anything special but… why not? Make it fun!

Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod what should you do for your 100th? Episode? This is a question. It definitely comes up from a clients of ours, they will contact me and say, oh my gosh, I've been going for a while. I don't want my 100th episode to be just another episode, I want it to be kind of special. Do you have any ideas? Do you have any things that you would recommend that you know play well, so you can treat your 100th episode like any other podcast episode, you don't have to be super fancy with it. 100 episodes does come up pretty quickly. It's not even a year's worth of content if you know if you're releasing once a week. So you don't have to feel pressured to do something. But there is something about the number 100 that people really enjoy. So why not make it something a little bit special?

Here are a few ideas that I like to tell our clients. And let's just rattle them off. So the first one reflections on what you've learned since starting your podcast, any episode where you're reflecting on something that you've learned, is going to play well to your audience, because it does give them a little bit of a behind the scenes I guess as to who you are and what you've been doing. So that one is definitely one that I've seen play well, and if you title it properly, you will get a lot of clicks on that type of episode.

You could also share your favourite reviews. This is great because it also reminds people to write a review. And you can only currently write a review on Apple podcasts. So it has to be for those listeners that are listening on Apple podcast to go and review. But it's a great way to kind of big note yourself without feeling like a, like a douche, I guess to share your views is something that's quite nice. And you don't get a lot of opportunities to do that, without you feeling perhaps a little bit weird about it. So it's a good idea to do for that 100th episode, because it's kind of like proof that people are listening and that they're enjoying your content. So don't be afraid to do that.

Another thing that I see play really well is actually running a giveaway. So this is something that you would announce a few weeks before your 100th episode to announce the winner within the 100th episode. Maybe that's a hamper, maybe that's a one on one session with you. Maybe that's a call, maybe that's a discount to some programme that you've got anything that you have that makes sense for your business to run a giveaway for do that, as part of your 100th episode special thing, you could also use the opportunity if you were running a giveaway to collaborate with a brand or with someone that you love, and they have a product or something that you feel would align well. That gives you the possibility of increasing your audience size to because you're collaborating with someone else. And that is never a bad idea if the collaboration makes sense, and it aligns with your values.

Next one that we've certainly done before this one takes a bit of effort. So I would advise to have your podcast production team do this for you because it's a lot of work to do by yourself is to put together a snippet episode. So this could be your favourite episodes from the last 100. And they could be like just little grabs, you know, so a couple of minutes, have a particularly great bit of an episode. And it's good to have obviously an intro to that episode where you say, you know, this is what this episode is going to be about. And then a little bit of an intro to each of the snippets that you're going to share so that it's not just one after the other with no real connection between the two or, or any kind of reference point as to why you're sharing. That definitely takes some time. I would say that probably takes a good four weeks of planning and back and forth and editing. So give that some room if you want to do an episode like that. There are a lot of fun. They play really well. Yeah, a great idea. The other way you could play a snippet episode is actually get feedback from your audience as to their favourite episodes, and then share portions of that episode. feedback from your audience could be that you ask for that info via DMS on Instagram. Or you could also actually just look through your podcast statistics and look at what the most popular episodes are. And run snippets from those episodes depends on how much audience engagement you want to have.

Now while I'm talking about audience engagement, you can also use an app like SpeakPipe, which we've done this for one of our clients before, actually a few of them were They asked their audience to leave an audio message for them. And this can be something like what have you learned about x topic from my podcast. And then they put in the little audio message, you know, hi, I really loved it. This is what I learned, I love you, blah, blah, blah. And it's really cool to get other voices. And it also gives, again, that social proof. So you could include, you know, five, or 10, probably not 1010s a bit much, you could include a few snippets of your audience and now get a kick out of it too, because they'll hear themselves on the podcasts that they listened to all the time. It's really cute, and fun, and a great thing to do. But again, it takes timing, it takes planning, it takes a decent amount of editing. So unless you are a proficient editor, I would not do that. Get your production team to do that.

Another thing you can do is run a live podcast episode, if you're brave enough to do so. So you could you know, be live on Instagram, you could be live on Facebook, whatever. And then you're also recording the episode live. And it's kind of like a celebration and a party. And you're getting feedback from people in there and it feels more like something a bit special. So you could do that kind of thing. Or depending on your audience size, depending on your listenership how big you are as a podcast, you can also run a actual live event, which is really cool. And that has been happening a lot, especially in the US, it's starting to happen bit more in Australia. But you can do a live recording of your podcast with a live audience. And that's really cool, you have some special guests, all that sort of thing. So that would be something else I could recommend to you.

The last one I'll mention is if you have a fellow podcaster friend, that would be great if they interviewed you for your podcast, that could be getting to know you more, it could be your lessons learned. It could be a general chat, it could be about a particular topic, anything at all, but it's really cool to be interviewed yourself on your own podcast, and have someone else that is good at interviewing, actually do that.

Okay, that's my round up. So it's quite a few ideas. As far as what my personal favourite is, I really think it's a toss up between just the actual reflections of what you've learned since starting, and a snippet type episode where the audience has some sort of participation in it. That's probably my two favourites. I think anything you do is going to be fun, as long as you commit to whatever that thing is. And if you really don't feel like making any big deal out of it again, you don't have to but if you're listening to this episode, you're probably looking for tips to make it that bit fancy.

But the thing is, doesn't have to apply to 100th episode could be your 360/5 episode. You know, one year of podcasting could be a special holiday episode, something like that, you know, anytime there is a special event is a good time to do something a little bit fancy and a little bit different. That's it for me today. If you have heard kids in the background, Crow's anything that you would not normally hear it is because we have had to have the children at home today due to all the flooding that has been happening in Brisbane where we live. So I'm just doing my best here to still keep to the schedules that I want to keep to and you will just have to put up with that. So I hope you've got a great week planned and thanks for checking in with me.