One of the stats that I look at fairly often is my feed clicks in the last 7 days. I think it's valuable to keep an eye on what people are listening to each week. It's very common for a discussion or issue to erupt in the blogosphere that creates new interest in a long forgotten episode.
Over the past couple of weeks I've noticed that our show #9 has been the top click in our feed followed very closely by show #13. Taking a closer look, I see that in show #9 we interviewed Hans Lysglimt from Runbox email. Show #13 contains an interview with Michael Robertson, serial entrpreneur and the guy behind Linspire Linux and the Gizmo Project.
What has sparked the new interest in those shows? I haven't the faintest idea, but if I was heavily into monetizing my podcast, I would be taking another look at those shows.
I would likely take the opoportunity to add or swap out any advertising present in those shows. May as well get paid for current advertising rather than continuing to play old ads for free.
I'd also look at my referrer logs and see if I can track down where the interest is coming from. It's possible that my interviewees (or someone else) has recently mentioned the interview and linked to it.
Lastly, I'll learn from those shows. At first glance it seems obvious that interviews are popular, but those two shows may have more in common that I can discover upon closer examination. There might be a lesson in there that I can leverage for future shows,
One of the wonderful things about podcasting is that episodes can stay online forever. Pay attention to the older shows and not just the newer ones. You might be able to learn something from them.
