Choosing a topic for the right reasons will ensure you stay in the game long enough to see the results you’re looking for.
TL;DR:
- When deciding on a topic, think about what you can talk about all day without getting bored
- To decide the format of the podcast, get clear on what your goals are
- To come up with episode ideas, think through the problems your target audience is going through and how your content can help them through those problems
So you’ve got your fancy mic, your camera that gets your good side, and lighting that makes you stand out, but you realize you’ve got a problem: you have no idea what to talk about.
At this point, most people invite a friend on and just have a normal conversation. They’re just hanging out - except its being recorded. This may even end up being quite fun to record - after all you’re hanging out with your friends.
You think, what could be better than this? I get to have fun with my friends and get a ton of downloads for it?
You upload it and start dreaming up what you’ll do with all the ad revenue. A day goes by and you have 0 downloads. You share with your social media and after a week you have a whopping 3 downloads.
But the episode was great, right? You had a blast recording it. It was hilarious and covered so many topics!
There’s two problems with not having a clearly defined topic and format for your podcast:
- Podcasts discoverability is hard enough as is, if you can’t clearly communicate how someone will benefit from listening to the podcast, good luck getting strangers to listen
- You’re not Joe Rogan… At least not yet. Joe Rogan has spent years perfecting his craft as a host, not only on his podcast but in various media roles. It may seem effortless for him, but there’s years of work and his own personal brand that elevates his podcast above the competition.
If you want a podcast that is able to reach new audiences and really builds a following of its own, you have to be intentional with the niche you pick for your podcast and the topics you choose to discuss on the podcast.
What Can You Talk About All Day and Not Get Tired?
Before we even get into goals, it’s important to ask yourself: what you can talk about all day and not get tired?
Podcasting is a long, slow, lonely journey. If you don’t actually like the topic you’re talking about, you’ll get bored before you see any meaningful progress.
For the Branding Deep Dive podcast, branding was a topic that I could learn about and talk about all day with friends. It was a topic that I would talk so much about that my friends would get bored and try to change the subject.
Get Clear With Your Goals
The niche and topics you pick will vary based on what the actual end goal is for your podcast. Here are some common goals and formats that could work with those goals:
- Establish yourself as an authority in a niche: solo podcast sharing best practices and industry trends
- Build a following: Cover trending topics and do interviews of other creators that have a bigger following
- Network with industry leaders - interview based show where you do research on the person/company and make them look good on your podcast
- Generate/nurture leads for your business - interview your dream clients (people you want to work with) and use the podcast as a way to connect and develop relationships
With Branding Deep Dive, the goal was to learn from people actually building brands so that I could take those lessons into my own projects. So the topics were more focused around the stories and lessons of founders, marketers, and brand strategists.
If the goal had been to generate or nurture leads, I may have been better off not doing interviews and instead sharing best practices and case studies of branding so that my potential clients could develop trust with me. Alternatively I could interview potential clients and use that as a way to network and land clients. It all just depends on what you’re trying to do.
Coming Up with Episode Ideas
Now that you have a topic and a format, the last step is to come up with episode ideas and shoot them. Of course, this will vary based on the goals you have, but the principle is to think about how you can serve your target audience with the content. How can you make their lives, their business, their relationships better in some way? Understand the problems that your target audience is going through in their lives and create content that helps them get through those problems.
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