It's impressive to see the branded company podcasts that have the longevity to reach 50, 100, multiple hundreds of episodes. When you have a content property that has that volume of recurring material, you're constantly searching for the next episode topic.

That's somewhat more straightforward for interview (keep finding and booking relevant guests) or host perspective shows (just keep opining on current events). One of Motley Fool’s shows in their network is a great example of how to use structured themes to keep the content machine humming.

Rule Breaker Investing

The show is nearing their 500th weekly episode, with host and Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and producer Rick Engdahl doing a mix of some solo and some with guests. What they do very effectively is release episodes that are the newest edition of repeated formats they have establish. It's relatively common and compelling to do a “Mailbag” episode answering listener questions. They also have a “Market Cap Game Show", “Blast From The Past", “Essays From Yesterday", and " Games, Games, Games”.

The essays format is particularly relevant to other brands. David takes the company's most popular blog posts of investing advice from across many years, randomly picks a few, and recaps the key themes and how they are still relevant today. It works really well to get fresh life out of existing material plus as a bonus drives some cross channel impressions.

And “games" is just a fun touch that the show has earned. There is a bit of thematic overlap between board games and investing. But mostly it's a repeated episode format because David is passionate about games and it ended up being a part of his personality that came through in the episodes over time.