The days of making a success of an I’ll-just-chat-about-anything-and-my-show-will-be-for-everyone kind of podcast are gone, unless you’re already famous or have a huge advertising budget behind you.
There are over a million “active” podcasts out there today. Whilst that number is minuscule compared to the number of blogs or websites out there, it’s still a busy space to go and create content in.
Which means that if you want a successful podcast, you're going to have do something to make your podcast stand out from all those other podcasts out there.
Here's what you can do to help your podcast stand out from the crowd.
1. Choose the right topic for you
By the time you've got to this stage in the Academy, you should have worked out why you're setting up a podcast and what your goals are for it.
The bottom line is that the podcast topic needs to be interesting and engaging, so that people will actually listen. It also needs to be something you are passionate about because if you don’t enjoy making it, I can guarantee that nobody is going to enjoy listening to it.
But remember: you don’t need to get this right first time!
There are so many people who have launched a show with what they think is their ideal topic, they put a lot of time, effort and energy into, learn the ropes, get all excited and then they realise that really, what they actually want to be talking about is something else.
All of our business grow and develop and sometimes completely change direction over time, which means that any work we put out, including podcasts, will change, too.
Don't delay starting your podcast because you're not sure what you should be talking about, just start right now. You have nothing to lose and everything you do now will be experience that holds you in good stead in the future.
2. Find your niche
So, how do you stand out in a market of millions? You get really specific.
To help make your podcast stand out from the crowd, your overall podcast topic needs to be less general and much more targeted towards a very specific audience or “niche”.
Say you have a podcast on relationships. Instead of it being just another relationship podcast, it could be “the relationship podcast for single parents” or “empty nesters” or “FIFO workers”.
This cuts down the number of potential listeners, but it also drastically increases the value for those who are the show’s target listeners. Those people see your podcast and think “this is perfect, exactly what I was looking for. It feels like they’ve created this just for me!”
Other examples of this might be:
- The travel podcast – for LOTR fans
- The marketing podcast – for beauty salons
- The menopause podcast – for men
When you do this, you can create a show that’s unique, original, and has the potential to grow a hardcore fanbase around it.
3. Break Things Down
When we talk about podcast topics, it can mean one of two things:
- The overall topic of the podcast channel, or
- The topic of an individual episode.
First of all, you'll choose the overall topic or theme of the channel, such as online marketing, relationships, playing the guitar or menopause.
Then you’ll break that down into individual podcast episode topics.
So, your podcast about menopause might focus on a different aspect of navigating through this time of life in each episode.
Or your online marketing show might look at everything from graphics to text to social media and google ads.
When you’ve worked out your overall podcast topic, then you can start working on interesting episode ideas.
4. Podcast In Seasons
Once you've got your channel topic sorted and you've come up with some great episode ideas, you can add a third level to the mix by categorising your podcast topics into seasons.
This means that you can organise your whole podcast like this:
- The overall topic of your podcast channel
- The topics in each season
- The topics of the individual podcast episodes that make up those seasons
Say you have a podcast about relationships, your three levels might look like this:
- Channel topic: Relationships
- Season 1: Communication
- Episodes: the different styles of communication, how to communicate with each different style, an in-depth look at each style, etc.
This approach makes your show very listener-friendly, and easy to navigate. It has a lot more focus and flow than if one week you were talking about how to deal with an untalkative partner, then the next week you were talking about infidelity.
Creating content in this way makes it easy to repurpose, too. Your podcast seasons can become chapters of a book, for example.
For a deeper dive on this, check out the lessons on podcasting in seasons in the Speak Up Podcasting Academy. Join today!
