5 Tips For Selecting a Podcast TopicPosted by Kennedy Brandt on March 24th, 2021 The first order of business for anyone starting a podcast would be to select a podcast topic. While this might seem like a straightforward answer, if chosen poorly it could result in a number of problems from a fledgling audience to podfading. So here are 5 tips for choosing a podcast topic which will ensure success and longevity. What are your interests? Podcasting about something you have an interest in will help you in several ways. � Your enthusiasm about the subject material will reach your audience. � You will be motivated to produce content. � In the early stages of your podcast when your audience is growing slowly, podcasting about a topic that enjoy will get you through those weeks once you don't always feel like investing in the time and effort. � If you are not thinking about the topic you are podcasting about, why do you consider others would be interested in listening to it? Choose a topic with depth One pitfall that many first-time podcasters fall into is selecting a topic that does offer any true depth of topics. You have to be able to quickly think about at least 10 show topics for your podcast in roughly five minutes. If you can't, then you have probably chosen a subject for your podcast that either doesn't have enough material to help you to produce quality content for an extended period of time. You may well be in a position to remedy this by broadening your topic a little bit. Example: A podcast topic of reviewing coffee shops in your neighborhood will limit one to the 7 or 8 shops inside a 5-mile radius. What if you decided to review each of the coffee shops in your complete city? By widening your category you may find much more to draw on when creating content for your podcast. What is your anticipated release schedule? If you plan on releasing a fresh podcast each week then you need to make sure that you have enough material inside your topic to create new, quality, content weekly; and yes it must be quality content every week. Assuming you have work hard to generate new content for your podcast episodes, you will discover that enough time between podcast episodes grows from weekly to monthly or monthly to every 2-3 months and eventually the podcast will drop off altogether. Does this issue have an audience? Keep in mind that the goal of any podcaster is to have an audience listening to your podcast. This will definitely be taken into consideration when choosing a topic. There may not be a big audience for a podcast on insect species in South America, when there is an audience for that sort of podcast; how will you reach them? Reaching your market is something that I discuss in several posts under podcast promotion but you should become aware of it even as of this early stage in the life span of your podcast. Does your podcast fill a need? One of the best methods to ensure that you can attract listeners to your podcast is to look for a topic or niche that's not already saturated with 10 other podcasts on a single topic. The less competition from established podcasts in exactly the same topic the easier time you should have in growing your audience quicker. Do a little research, if you feel that you have found an excellent topic then visit the iTunes podcast directory and execute a search on your topic. See how many other podcasts are on the market using the same keywords. If you discover that there are 5-9 other podcasts then click on each of them and appearance at a few things. � Just how many episodes have they released? Is it a new podcast? � How often do they to push out a new episode? � When was the final time that they released a fresh episode? You may find that there are 5 other podcasts with exactly the same topic but they have not released a new episode in per year or two. This could still be a good possibility to fill a need in market that has been a little stagnant. Making Money For anyone who is starting a podcast with the intent of generating some type of income linked to the podcast then this adds a fresh level of research to choosing your podcast topic. Obviously some forms of podcasts are simpler to monetize than others. Music interviews reviewing the most recent gadgets and gizmos may be better to monetize through sponsorships and affiliate programs when compared to a podcast in which you interview someone different in your senior high school class each episode. If making money is your goal with your podcast then ensure that you have a very clear plan of how you are going to monetize your podcast using the topic you haLike it? Share it! |