So You Want to Start a Podcast? Part 2

A four-part series to guide you through the basics of podcasting in 2021, with some tips you may not have read elsewhere.

TRADE SECRET — People don’t listen to podcasts because of the amazing audio quality. Might not be a trade secret necessarily, but no one is raving about the sound quality of a show to others.

Part 2 — Content:

Welcome to the second part of this series about starting your podcast! In the first part I covered the equipment you’re likely to need when podcasting. So taking a step back from the mic, we’re going to zoom out to look at the Content you produce.

To reiterate a point made in the first part of this series: People don’t listen to podcasts for the amazing audio quality. They listen to podcasts because of the content and the personalities. They want to listen to interesting stories, especially longer-form stories. They want to learn, be entertained, enlightened, inspired, and connected.

Great audio might get someone to try your podcast out. But when you have great content your audience will continue to listen.

There are four pieces to this:

1. Figuring out your purpose + ideal audience
2. Nailing down your core content
3. Bringing your personality to the mic as the star of the show
4. Working out a consistent structure (but we’ll get to that in Part 3)

Purpose + Ideal Audience

Before doing anything else you’ve got to figure out your theme and your ideal audience.

Your purpose is going to be a combination of the topical focus (eg: product, field of business, state of being, type of art, etc) and your primary job as host (eg: to educate, entertain, enlighten, inspire, create connections, etc.).

For example:

1. My Branding Banter podcast focuses on the impact of branding.

2. The primary job (for me and my co-host Delphie) is to educate and inspire.

3. From here, it’s relatively easy to figure out our ideal audience, because we just need to ask ourselves “who are we educating and inspiring about the impact of branding?”

4. The answer is the group we know the most about and want as clients: small businesses in Australia.

So, your ideal audience — the one you’re doing all this for and (hopefully) the ones who keep coming back — should be a specific set of people. If people outside that specific set happen upon your podcast and love it, that’s excellent! But you should be directing your efforts toward delivering value to your ideal audience.

Now there is a quick caveat to this. If you realise your actual audience develops into a clear niche that differs from your ideal audience, it would be wise to confirm that shift by asking your audience a bit about who they are and why they keep coming back. With that information, you can then decide which audience to focus on. You might shift your content to better match your “ideal” audience, or you could potentially pivot your focus to your “actual” audience (which becomes your new, or revised, ideal audience).

QUICK TIP — To find out more about your audience, point them to a quick survey link left in your show notes. You can even incentivise that action to gain the most amount of clarity.

If you are creating a business-oriented podcast, your ideal audience could be the people you’d like to engage with as potential clients. If you are creating an investigative type of podcast, your audience might be people with an affinity for true crime. If your podcast is focused on entertainment, your audience might be those who love a specific type of comedy.

It’s enough to have a broadly defined ideal audience, but it can be super helpful to narrow down your audience as much as possible. Try to figure out what kinds of things they like and dislike, where they spend their free time, how they spend their money, etc… In client-based businesses, we call this the “ideal customer” and many businesses use the idea to create a persona they can then target their business’s decisions toward.

Having that level of specificity about your ideal audience is really helpful when you’re planning the details of content, structure, and distribution because it means you can make a lot of decisions quickly and easily.

Should I use this music clip for my opening?

• Nope, my ideal audience isn’t into this.

Would a funny snack break be appropriate?

• Yeah, my ideal audience loves snacks.

Is it okay to talk about my love for geckos?

• Not really, my ideal audience doesn’t care about geckos.
• But they do care about environmental issues so maybe I could talk about the rare psychedelic rock gecko and its threatened habitat…that’s hyper-specific but you get what I mean.

Once you’ve got a solid idea of your podcast theme and ideal audience you can focus on your bread and butter: core content.

Core Content

First and foremost, always approach your content with the question: how is this making life better for my audience?

The answer can go a lot of different ways — entertaining, educating, inspiring, connecting, etc… The important thing to remember is that, as fun and personally rewarding as a podcast can be to produce, it’s ultimately not solely about what you (the host) get out of doing it. The equal point of a podcast is to bring value to your audience.

A great way to offer value with your content is to be strategic and consistent in every episode. I’ve found that when I first start a new podcast I have lots of great ideas and then, as the weeks progress, I either get in my own head about what to produce OR I start to lose steam. It’s a common pain point for many (the majority, actually) podcasters who start out, get to episode 10 and then burn out.

So instead of floundering around, trying to figure out what to talk about every week, I’ve been using a tried and true content-creation method that works quite well for me. It has been adopted from other forms of content-based media, most notably in social media.

You may have heard of “pillar content” and that’s what I’ve adapted for podcasting content.

The idea is to think of podcasting content as narrowing down through three (related and overlapping) layers:

1. Main theme — this is the overarching theme (or topic) of the podcast (which you’ve already come up with based on your purpose!)
2. Pillar content — these are 2–5 approaches, topics, or pillars around and which you base all your podcast content; they’re all under the umbrella of the main theme
3. Individual topics — one singular message or takeaway (generally coincides with a single podcast episode) that fall under one (or more) content pillar

This breakdown of core content will look different for different kinds of podcasts (or hosts) but no matter who you are or how you’re thinking of your podcast, this structure is a great place to start.

Take the following examples to get an understanding of what I mean when I talk about these three layers.

EXAMPLE 1: Branding podcast

Main theme: A branding podcast for small businesses based in Australia

Pillar content:

• Running small to medium businesses to better connect with customers,
• Australian companies and clients who have recently rebranded,
• Branding education (visual, messaging, strategic, etc…),
• Industry guests specific to the topic of branding (eg. copywriters, photographers, web designers, logo designers)

Individual topics:

• Married entrepreneurs talking about branding their fireman-themed male entertainment company (guests, small businesses) — yes, this was the first and second episode of my Branding Banter show.
• What makes a great logo? (education)
• Branding a regional college (medium business, Aus-specific)
• Copywriter talking about the customer influence good copy can have when a brand can communicate better with a customer (industry expertise outside our own knowledge)

EXAMPLE 2: Whiskey podcast

Main theme: A podcast for whiskey enthusiasts

Pillar content (whiskey types):

• Irish
• Bourbon
• Japanese
• Scotch

Individual topics:

• What’s unique about bourbon?
• Interview with an owner of a scotch distillery
• The history of Irish whiskey
• Tasting Japanese whiskies

Tasting Japanese whiskies

Example 3: family podcast

Main theme: a podcast about family and friends-as-family

Pillar content:

• Family relationships
• Conflict in familial groups
• Communication styles and techniques
• Self-care and support

Individual topics:

• Growing up in a big family
• Growing up as an only child
• How to fight fair
• Hard conversations with people you love
• Setting boundaries at holidays

Hopefully these examples give you an idea of how pillar content can work for your podcast. I like to think of it as a triangle (or pyramid, if you’re into 3D) where your main theme is the bedrock of the whole deal, the pillar content makes up the bulk of the body, and individual topics are informed by a refinement of the other two chunks.

I suppose that’s an inverted triangle. You get my point, though.

Bringing your personality to the mic

Story and content are at the forefront of entertainment for the audience. Having worked in television for 9 years prior to starting my own branding consultancy business, I would see the daily ratings of each and every network show to realise what was resonating with audiences and which shows confirmed my own bias of being total shit.

However, it wasn’t always the content that made it good or bad. It also relied upon the on-screen talent that made the show. In other words, the stars of the show made or broke the viewer's attention. QUICK CAVEAT: Not all podcasts require a host’s personality to drive the interest in the show, especially if it’s not appropriate for the genre of show you produce — just something to keep in mind.

Now shows like Masterchef Australia for a decade had the same 3 hosts that made the Masterchef experience what it was and people tuned in for season after season to have that memorable feeling again and again. The Voice was always less about the singers vying for a recording contract and more focused on the celebrity judges that made you come back for more because you’d wonder who was going to turn their chair around first. Or on Seinfeld, Friends or The Big Bang Theory, audiences tuned in for the lead characters episode after episode rather than celebrity guest cameos.

Your guests are not the star of the show

My point here is that a podcast is no different. The star of the show is the person who is there week after week, episode after episode and season after season. YOU!

Your guests, no matter how amazing or great they are, are the guest — not the star. They may bring the content, but you are the star lead of this operation so you’ve gotta act like it.

An opening skit

Have you ever watched a late-night talk show like they do in America? Be it one of the Jimmy’s or even Graham Norton in the UK, they are the star of the show — especially as their name is on the show’s title. So to add to that experience they give their audience, they open each show with a skit or monologue. This not only warms up the audience but also draws the focus solely in on them.

In your podcast, make that time at the start, middle and end of your show a time for you to shine. Throughout an episode, add your two cents to the conversation. While remembering that you have the power to dictate the direction of the conversation and can control what the show becomes.

Because here’s the thing, you know your audience. You know what they like, respond to and want to hear. Your guest doesn’t and they need to be guided to make the content fit with the show you produce.

Character Development Arc

The other part to this is that if your listeners stay with you a loyal listener, or at least stick it out over a full season, they have the opportunity to witness the personality you bring to your show over each episode.

Like any new podcaster, you’re probably a tad nervous (good or bad nervous). But as you record more episodes, your ‘character development’ will show an increase in confidence your listeners will pick up on. I’ve seen so many people, myself included, progress as they work out and fill their shoes in the places they engage with their audience.

However, the only way this can happen is if you are willing to bring that personality of yours to the table and maybe even find your voice in the process. Now I can’t begin to tell you what this does for you in other areas of your life outside of podcasting as a result, as your ability to communicate with others increases dramatically. Just the same as it would if you made YouTube, TikTok or Instagram content.

This also means you have the ability to tell your story over a number of episodes to connect with your ideal audience and consistent listeners. But I’ll leave that for when we talk about your Episode Structure in Part 3 of this series.

Speaking of Part 3, there’s another approach to content that many successful podcasts have in common: consistent episode structure. However, I’m going to stop here and leave you on a cliffhanger, eagerly awaiting the third part of this series. So stay tuned for Part 3 — Episode Structure!

-Frank

PS: I wrote this series with a wonderful content writer named Rachel H. If you’re in the market for long-form writing (like articles or newsletters or whatnot), she’s the gal to talk to and you can find Rachel here.

PPS: This article is Part 2 in the series. You can find >>Part 1 here<<

Frank is a brand identity designer, podcaster and host of Brand My Podcast. A podcast show AND service to help podcasters start their podcast and build their podcast brand.

For info about how to start and brand your podcast with confidence, to make podcasting as easy as pressing record, visit: brandmypodcast.com

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