Harsha from the Two Cents on Thursday podcast asks, "How do you decide which niche to focus on for your podcast?" TL;DR Recording a podcast with multiple hosts is a lot of fun. You're able to lean on one another to create the content, and the fun banter and chemistry you get with close friends definitely increases the entertainment value.
But there are some technical hurdles you have to deal with in a multi-person podcast recording that you don't if you were doing a solo podcast. So in this episode, we'll explain the best practices for recording multiple people.
What can you talk about?
One of the keys to podcast longevity is choosing a topic you both love to talk about and won't run of ideas for. If you're really into video games and can talk about that non-stop, make that the focus of your podcast.
Once you've identified a topic you want to focus on, try to find an angle or sub-topic that isn't being served in the podcast community. If you're talking about video games, for example, perhaps you focus solely on Nintendo games or first-person shooter games.
Do some research
There are three ways to get ideas about what niche you should focus on. First is simply to look at your own download statistics. If one or two episodes are outperforming the rest, that's your audience's way of saying, "Make more episodes like this!"
The second place to look is with your followers on social media. Ask them what they'd like you to talk about in the future and look for trends in their answers.
Third, you can research your competition. Look at other podcasts similar to yours and see what topics they like to cover. If they're taking their podcast seriously, then you can look for trends in the kinds of things they like to talk about and then make your version of those episodes.
In today's episode, you'll learn how to identify the best niche for your podcast. Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, where you learn the best tips and strategies to launch grow and monetize your show. This week's question comes from Harsha.
Harsha :
Hey, Team Buzzsprout My name is Harsha. And my podcast is called Two Cents on Thursday. It's a podcast that I started with my friend. And it is a way for us to share some of the conversations that we would generally have over a phone call. And we cover mainly topics regarding technology, pop culture, and anything interesting we might have come across during the week. But it has been predominantly technology. Now as it's a very broad topic. What is your advice on finding a niche for our podcast so that we build an audience who has a certain expectation from us? And if you have any tips for us to keep a lookout, as we're recording more episodes, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks, guys.
Gilon :
Thank you so much for your question. Harsha. This is actually a really important piece of podcasting. After launching a podcast and being consistent developing your niche is such an important part of podcast growth. And well niching down can seem like you're automatically excluding people, oh, contraire. niching down actually helps people find exactly what you're offering with your podcast. And if you're podcasting for business, niching down can definitely translate into customers and sales. So in this episode, we're going to discuss how to discover your niche so that you have plenty of things to talk about. And so that your audience knows what to expect when they come to listen to your podcast. So when it comes to discovering your niche, one of the things that you want to think about is what can you talk about endlessly? What are you passionate about, because ultimately, starting with a broad topic here is not the worst thing, and actually allows you to leverage something very broad that you can distill down into a lot of different types of subtopics, which will give you lots of things to talk about. For example, if we're going to talk about technology, we can start with this broad topic of technology, but then break that down into a lot of different subgroups. So there's technology within a certain industry, are we talking electronics? Are we talking games? What kind of technology can we compare technology. So the goal here is to find a niche that you are passionate about, that also fits with maybe a need within the podcasting world. So you don't want to just pick something that nobody's talking about that you're actually not interested in, because that's not going to work. But if you love cat videos, and that is your thing, and you feel like not enough people are podcasting about cat videos, go for it, you're going to be successful there because you're passionate about it, and there's a need for it. The second thing that you want to consider when you're trying to discover your niche is to research. So think about your episodes, if you've already got a podcast, which ones do the best download wise. So if you've got an episode about monetizing that's gotten 117 listens in the past 30 days, and then you've got an episode about content that's gotten 36 plays in the past 30 days, you're probably going to want to look at monetizing a little bit more, because it's indicating that people want to hear more about this from you. The other thing that you can look at is your followers on social media, you can pull them and ask them hey, what do you guys want to hear more of this season? What would you like to see us talk about more. And the idea here is not that you get new ideas necessarily as much as maybe different angles or subgroups on what you're already doing. They're already listening to you. So they like something that you're doing. But hopefully they can provide a fresh lens or a new angle on something that you hadn't thought about before. And then the last place that you can do a little bit of research is with the competition. So if you've got a podcast about lawncare, you can just do a quick search of other podcasts that are talking about lawn care. And if they have really great episodes that are doing well on the latest lawn mower, you can just create your version of that. And that'll also help you know, oh, this does well, I don't have to do a bunch of legwork to discover what does well, I can look at what's already performing really well. And then make my version of that put my spin on that and your audience will love that and eat that up. So the point here is do the research to help you discover your ideal niche. And then from there, you can start generating ideas for potential topics of episodes that fit within that niche. Thank you so much for your question. Harsha. If you have a question that you would like us to answer on a future episode of the podcast, just go to speakpipe.com/Buzzsprout or click the link in the show notes and leave us a brief audio message. Definitely be sure to subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel and subscribe to Podcasting Q&A wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. That's it for today. Thank you for listening and as always keep podcasting