Stop Guessing: Podcast Niche Specialization Attracts Action-Taker Listeners

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard.

Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. And today we're going to talk about niching down your podcast to up your engagement. And that may sound a little counterintuitive, but there's a lot of wisdom in it and a lot of experience. So let's take it away. Tracy.

Yeah, as our good friends and podcaster Scott Carson says, riches are in the niches. And it is so true. And this is what we tripped on, Tom, right when we started. We really don't think realize that we were so deep in a really valuable niche that that was why our podcast took off. And I don't think we realized it when we were setting it up and starting it. We knew we had a great topic and a great area that we were excited about in this particular, our very first show, 3D printing, for those of you who haven't heard us say that a million times, WTFF, which is fused filament fabrication 3D printing. And it was just this new topic area, and we were really deep diving into all aspects of it. So there was a broad amount of information, but it was deeply into the topic area. And that's what I wanted to really highlight first, Tom. And is this idea that people think a niche is a niche audience, but it's not really the audience that matters as much as the topic area. And if we focus on that topic area, that area of interest, then we have actually a better chance at getting a focused audience.

I agree with that. And really what's on my mind right now, Tracy, is that we have a couple upcoming episodes involving YouTube and YouTube compared to podcasting. And there's really a big difference between YouTube video consumption and podcast consumption in our experience anyway. And people want to take deeper dives into niche topics in podcasting, I believe more than in YouTube, at least the most popular YouTube channels anyway. And it's really what makes podcasts successful is people subscribe because they want to keep coming back for more. They want to take deep dives into those narrow, narrow topics. Right?

Well, it's a numbers game only in podcasting. It's how many views, how many listens can I get, right? How many plays can I get? If you go in the generalist model, so the only choice you have is to up your place. That's the only way you're going to make more money. But if you dive deep into the niche, you not only have a chance to Raise the dollar value of any sponsors and advertisers that you might get in that space. But you'll sell your own stuff. You'll sell courses and programs and books at a much faster and higher conversion rate because you are a deep expert in this particular niche and you're not a generalist. So when we are out there on YouTube and we're just trying to get everything anywhere, or we're out on social, it's the generalist model is what you have to do because you're focused on your demographic. So you have to do anything that that demographic cares about. But in podcasting, the demographic doesn't matter as much as the topic area niche. It's similar in blogging too, when you think about it, that those two things are a lot more similar. And we've said this so many times before, that bloggers do better in podcasting than influencers do. They have an easier time of making a go of it. And that's because they understand this niche down model.

I really feel like what we're saying here and what I'm seeing happen with the YouTube channels that are very popular is they're very good at grabbing attention in the moment with what's current, what's trending right now. It's kind of like the shock factor or they've got to grab you within those first few seconds or no one's going to be watching the whole video. The tactics for getting you to watch a video long enough for very different than in podcasting. And it's for a lot of these same reasons.

Yeah. We find that the niche model is a better starting point and that's what I want to say. It doesn't mean that you're not going to broaden as your audience grows or do any of those things, but when we started our 3D print podcast, we thought our audience was going to be 14 year old boys in the garage. Like that's what we said it was just going to be, you know, and they don't have any money. So like, you know, why are we doing this? Well, because we thought maybe there was some other people out there who could use the information. And so we were out there exploring it. What we found is that there were very few 14 year old boys in their garage listening to our podcast. But there were lots of retired engineers and educators in the Midwest and women in stem. It was like broad. It was so broad in terms of the demographic model that I think the age range and just the parts of the country we touched on shocked me when we Looked at the numbers later and we got more and more information, but it didn't change what we were talking about. None of that changed because the topic and what we needed to cover was what everybody needed because they were all interested in 3D printing.

And I think that's true regardless of your niche, your topic area, your general topic area. But when you take deep dives into niche subtopics, then you end up with this wealth of content in your audio. And if you do it right in the companion blogs on your website, you become a really deep, authoritative resource for people. You get found in more Google searches, you get found in more podcast searches, but people find you and they become loyal raving fans that keep coming back for more and more and more because you're always expanding what you're talking about in all these little niches around the same topic. And we've done it now in podcasting for a long time and in this podcast. And a lot of the people we support in podcasting, they have different topics, whether it's real estate or medical or, gosh, so many different things. Publishing, you know, it's really endless. But there's a lot more long term value, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. There's a lot more equity you build, if you want to think about it and put it in real estate terms, equity in your podcast, equity in your website, equity in your brand, in your authority, your authority that is out there. When you put it out in all the ways that you should and don't just leave it as audio in the listening apps, you know your website and on social and other things, you end up building this really deep catalog of data that continues to serve you for, you know, years and years and years. And it still happens. I mean, I personally experience it every week I get people coming to our website from a Google search that was a very niche topic about podcast websites, that it still comes up on the first page of Google search, first organic thing, they click, boom. They're on our website, they fund our show. And I hear this from customers all the time. And we have a customer. I was just reviewing one of their websites. Each episode blog ranks on about.

80 keyword phrases each blog. I mean, these websites can become powerful, but it's not just about the website. It's about your content, your podcast.

Absolutely. And we mentioned at the beginning of this riches in the niches from our podcast friend, Scott Carson. No closer show, no closing. It's a really deep dive niche within the real estate market. How valuable is that? And it's cyclical. So it comes back as to being. There's a lot more distressed notes at this time or about or coming up. I'm sure you're coming up. Yeah. And so it's gonna happen again. And all that catalog and resource of information. He's the choice. Like, how could you not? I think he has over.

He's the authority.

Is it over a thousand episodes yet? I don't know. It's pretty darn close, I would think. Anyway, so it's really large. So why wouldn't you go to someone who's got that bank of knowledge from year over year over year to help you tackle what's coming for you next or what, where you could be making money and in that section of the real estate market. So this is really why it becomes valuable. And I, we, you know, we were talking about our WTFF show. The reason we have this business that we have pontitized is because we took that show. And in five months, by the time we reached a hundred episodes in five months. Cause we did one, we did five a week. So we did a lot of episodes, but we reached a hundred episodes. And when we reached a hundred episodes, we also reached the milestone of 100,000 listeners. That is amazing. Short period of time. And everyone was looking at us like, and this is a decade ago, everyone was looking at us like, wow, how'd you do that? A lot of the heavy lifting was done by the niche itself. And then our heavy lift was the number of episodes we put into it, the amount of content we put into it, because we covered so many important topics within that niche in a short period of time. So that's really where we want you to start. We want you to really think about this. Anyone who's out there just telling you to start an entrepreneur on fire is giving you bad advice. As a startup podcast, if you have a celebrity, you can start whatever kind of show you want. But we do not want a show that is so generalized in this day and age. You will have such a difficult time of drawing an audience. And if you want to, we're going to talk about this next week with Fran, or I'm going to talk about this next week with Fran. But this deep dive into this idea that you want monetization on YouTube, that you want to hit the metric of watch time hours, which is what we're going to talk about next week. In order to hit that metric, you need people to consume your entire catalog. You need them to consume every episode. So when you add up those numbers Tom and I had a hundred episodes and we had a hundred thousand listens. It spread amongst all of those. That means we actually didn't have a hundred thousand listeners. We had a hundred thousand listens. Right? That's what we were getting on a monthly basis because they had a hundred episodes to consume. So every single listener could consume a hundred episodes of our show. And they did. That's what always shocked me at that time. We used to get reached out and someone would say, I just been on your first 50 episodes, and I'm wondering if before I get to the next 50, if you've covered this topic, if you haven't, please record it. So it's there for me when I get there. I can't tell you how many times somebody said that to us.

It was a shock to us that, wait, people are binging through all our content? You know, this was a decade ago, so it was new to us then. But that's exactly what happens as long as your content is still relevant. And for most people that are podcasting for topics that are related to what they do for a living, they're usually a lot of evergreen topics there. And they will continue to serve people year after year, as we've found. Now, obviously, things change, but that's where you can do an update niche topic episode and update something and link it back to the previous episode so that you continue to serve people and expand your knowledge base and expand your content that you're serving people with people often. Tracy. I'm always surprised, and I don't know why I am, because we've been doing this a long time now. But I was surprised when a new podcaster comes to us or an aspiring one, and they're questioning getting started because they're like, I don't know that I can come up with something to talk about every week for a year. I was like, really? You know, in my experience, I think it's really easy now. Cause we've been doing it for a long time. But when we sit down to brainstorm topics, they're worried about having coming up with 25 for the first six months, and we end up coming up with 150 in an hour. I mean, it's really. When you think about, you know, again, like you said, you don't want to cover too much. You don't want to go too broad and try to do everything in one episode. No, you're doing very, very small, I would call them micro chapters, really, of content for each episode that will give you something to talk about and true value to provide your audience for the foreseeable future. You should be able to come up with more niche topics, micro topics, subtopics about your area of expertise, your topic, your genre. Then you will have time to record.

Absolutely. And they'll recycle. Trust me, you're. I mean, I don't know how many times we. In 3D printing, we covered filament again. There was always something new we could cover on the side of filament, you know, so it will come up that you'll be able to talk about these things again and again, because new things will change. Things will change in your marketplace, change in your industry. There's always an opportunity to do that. The other part, though, that I want to say is somebody sitting here thinking, but I have a really general entrepreneur show. What do I do? So let's give them some advice time. I think that this is my favorite part about podcasting is how flexible everything is. So if you've already started your show and you say, you know, maybe this is why it's not working. It's too generalized. There's a hint somewhere in your show, somewhere in your catalog already for where your niche in your marketplace lies. It's probably in one of three things. One, the topic you've come back to again and again and again, or if you've done interviews, where those conversations go again and again and again. And it's because it's an essential piece of whatever's going on in your particular business, your particular perspective, your particular market area. It's coming up again and again. So that's hint number one. Now, if it's popular and needed enough interest, it got talked about on social media. It probably got the highest plays in your analytics. It's the one that you got the most feedback on. So it's one of those where you would think about it, the engagement is high. And the third thing that really is important to look at, and if you don't have your blogs already happening, then Go use Google AdWords or keyword searches or any of those kinds of things. But if you're seeing a lot of keywords being associated with that particular blog, or you're seeing keyword growth there, go check the value of those keywords. And if they're high. So, like, when we would look at our 3D print and we would cover stuff like cat, sometimes those words, those keyword phrases where we're $70 a CPM, which is.

No, that's per click. You mean? Not CPM.

Per click.

Per click in Google AdWords which is just insane to think about, right? That somebody's willing to pay that much for a click from a website of something relevant on that topic. But it happens. I mean, we even seeing things that were, you know, $25 a click was like, whoa, let's go make a power web page. All built around that topic. Because, you know, if you're on a passive strategy, you make a lot more money that way, right?

When you start to see the alignment of those three things, that's where the growth really will take. That's where that is going to up that engagement. And then you have to check it against your audience. So this is where we ask the wrong people. Like, yeah, I always go, you know, I always say, you ask your yes men and your no women. That was what I always used to say in our podcast when I would give a speech in a presentation, is that you have the people out there who are your big supporters and no matter what you say, they're going to say yes to it. And there's the others that are out there who will be the detractors and be like, don't change anything. Right? You don't want to ask those people. What you want to ask is the people who, this is key, focused on where you're the big resource for the ones who reached out to you, asked you for something else, who said, oh my gosh, you're right on. This is what I needed. This is what I was looking for. Those are the people you want to ask and say, if I deep dive my podcast into this niche, will you listen to all my episodes? Will you listen to more of my episodes? Like, that's the question you want to ask and you cannot worry about the people that you leave behind. It's just going to happen.

I think that's true. You can't really get too self conscious about, well, I'm not covering this, I'm not covering that. If it's working and your listenership is growing, then don't worry about it. You want to fish where the fish are. You don't want to be creating content for something that maybe you as the expert, think they're going to be interested in. I mean, don't get me wrong, you want to share your wisdom with people and those important, valuable nuggets of information that are going to help them, that things that they don't know. I'm not saying they should already know what you know, but you really do need to keep an eye on the pulse of the audience and what's resonating and I remember some topics I was very surprised that people would reach out about. I mean, we used to niche down and it was easier when you were doing. Well, easier and more difficult at the same time when you were doing five days a week. But what we would do is, for a while there, each different day of the week was a different sort of a theme. Like we were doing 3D printing. Well, on Tuesday was like Tech Tuesday, which was a particular techie topic. Some people were really into it and other people were not into it, who were not super techie people, but still doing 3D printing. But we would get feedback from some of the regular listeners. Comments. He said, oh, I really love tech Tuesdays. And that would give us some feedback. All right, hey, let's pour some more fuel on that.

Right? And for us, we also, because we did it so often, we would work on theming the week. So we might have color as the theme of the week, and we would talk about the text side of the color. We'd have a project on Fridays that would be fun, that would be using a multicolor printer. So, like, we would kind of give that focus for ourselves, but it would give the audience a way to navigate through it and also invite them to come to the next day, the next day and the next day, whether they realized it or not, because it was a continuation of that topic and that theme for them. And so it invited this kind of diving into the content and continued stickiness and ability for them to actually binge on everything we said. I can't tell you that how many people I came across over the years when I would give a speech somewhere and would come up to me and say, I have never missed an episode. I was like, we have 655 episodes. You never missed an episode. Oh my gosh. You know, but that's what it was like. This is what it can be like for you as well. When someone listens to you for 100 episodes or more, there is no way they don't believe that you're an expert, which means that they're out there referring you to other people. And that's why your listenership goes up. That's why your engagement goes up. That's why your power, your ability to go give speeches goes up. It is so easy to select a speaker who you know is a real authority in this area and of interest to your audience that you're bringing into your event. I mean, I. I had to turn down speaking engagements when we were back then. They weren't always of interest to us. That was the easiest way from us to grow as well, because then you get in front of that audience and you show your podcast and the next thing you know, you got even more listeners, a little boost. So all of those things do drive this growth in listenership and engagement that I think is really one of the critical factors that we're leaving on the table. Now, I want to be really careful here because I was saying before, Tom, avoid demographics. But that doesn't mean you should avoid niches and demographics of your guests. That's different, right? So I have a podcast that I'm doing right now with Scott Kelly called Emerging Managers Podcast. Emerging managers is a segment of the venture capital group who are on their first fund. Half of our focus is to establish a relationship with those managers that we're interviewing so that we have a network. So because we're interview and guest focused, not just audience focused, that is a niche in and of itself. So it's not just we said anyone in venture capital, that's the way it would have been, a generalist podcast, but it's focused on the managers managing their first fund. That's niche, right? So you can do it even if you've got that model going on. Think about if you've got. You want to go for authors. The last thing you want is to have any author, if you specialize in health care, authors in authors who are covering politics, whatever it is, keep that focused. Or create like Tom and I did, spin off shows, right? And different days of the week, you could spin them off into their own entities, an envelope level network that is your author network and have the health care, the finance, the, you know, tech, the fiction, whatever you want for all the authors underneath and have them each be their own separate show. You're not only creating a niche within it, but you're also creating the broad brush value to an overall website, right? You could be running a network website.

So interesting in this case, you're talking sort of about an umbrella of categories within a niche within a subject area. And then the niches are the different ones within it. And you can do that even if you're not doing it every day of the week show like we did. If you're doing like over the course of a month, you could have that theme going on in different aspects of it each different week of the month. Or maybe do increase to two episodes a week and you'd have a little more to work with.

There used to be a podcast network that was on the veterans. I'm not sure if they're still there, they're still doing it. It was a long time ago, but they used to have the veterans. And because it was like the umbrella network was focused and their website was focused on focused on all kinds of veteran services and all kinds of introduction to veteran organizations. But by having individual podcast shows underneath it that we're each diving into different areas like wounded warriors or families loss, whatever it might be, you've got those focused underneath it makes it easier for listeners to consume in the area they need the help the most, but still keep it under the generalized umbrella of where the services were provided. I mean, that was both the example I was giving about authors. You provide publishing services and other things for authors. But more importantly, if you provide marketing services for authors and then you divvy this up into smaller pieces below it, where you're focusing on the different genres of it, what you're doing is creating a more valuable publicity model for the authors that you interview. Your own authors. Right. If you them on healthcare, and that's the kind of author they are, then anyone who wants to pick up healthcare news, new books publicists that are out there, or someone who's looking to book for radio and tv, they could go to your podcast as a resource because it's isolated. When you have any author under the sun, it's too much work for those publicists to go through, for those guest placement agencies to go through. Like it's too hard when you keep it in that general. But when you keep it siloed, it's so much easier for that to provide more value. And you're still getting the generalized value of the focus of making sure that you're helping your clients market.

So most people are not going to be part of sort of a collective of shows like that, but you got to think of your own show as a collective of niche topics. Right. And that's, I think, what's going to apply to most of you.

Well, you can, especially if you have a really big show catalog. I mean, Tom and I have done this multiple times where we start spinning off our catalog. 3D Printing has four volumes, actually. Four volumes, yeah. And so, you know, we split them into volumes of 200, but they're by date. What if you split them out by volumes by topic? What if you split them off into volumes so that your current show is the current 100 and then you break them off and move them into the others? Tom and I actually built potties to be able to spin them off and you can move them into any one of the show Volumes you want. So we made it really simple and easy to move episodes without breaking all your links and messing everything up. Right. They still exist and they're still there. And that is really useful for you to be able to keep the navigation and deep dive going for somebody interested, but keep your existing recording model and the way that you work. So there are ways for you, if you already have an existing show, for you to start to niche it down and figure out models for reorganization. What else you got? Tom, Any other ideas about niches niching down?

I mean, I just think that I want podcasters and aspiring ones to really understand and believe.

That the niches are there in your topic area and not to be concerned about struggling to come up with it. They're there. You just need to think about it a little differently and come up with what those niche topics are. Something you can speak on for at least 20 minutes if you're solo or if you're having a discussion with somebody, you know, half hour to 40, 45 minutes, whatever it is, the niches are there. If you don't think they're there, you're just not approaching it the right way. And I would always say approach these things for. From a perspective of what kind of questions is your ideal listener going to ask if they're trying to learn something and think about answering those questions and not answering too many in a single episode?

Right. And you're looking for that overarching theme for the show itself that covers that niche area where you provide something unique and special, but where you're bringing something special to the world. When we were doing wtff, it's what the fused filament fabrication, it was like the definition of everything was so undefined. There were like, no user manuals to have the printers out there. Right. Everyone was on their own figuring it out. So we were like, what the. You know, and that's what we were helping them navigate. It was the perfect solution for us. But what we didn't deviate from, we covered fused filament. There are other types of 3D printers. We occasionally touched on them to highlight that they were out there and that you might want to use them and upgrade. But they were not the focus of the show. We were focused on that person, 3D printing in their home, in their school, in their business, with a fuse filament fabrication machine. Like, that's it. That's how we decided to define it. Because all those other areas were like, okay, totally different focus. It was like, we got to talk to business executives and VPs who are thinking about buying metal machines. It was just too complicated for us to go down that road at the same time and keep it that general. So you can always do a special and cover something cool and unique that people want to know about, but you don't have to make it the focus of the show. So I just want you to think you can deviate from your theme, but deviate with a special purpose.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Don't try to be all things to all people. Figure out not only what you're an expert at and what you're interested in. Right. But you need to be that expert or be a conduit to other experts to help if you need to, to provide more value to your listeners. But, yeah, I mean, there's so much wisdom to share, and reality is you have a lot to offer, and you just need to start thinking about what those topics are and put them out there.

As you said before, Tom, this is where the equity is. Right? This is where the value is. And I always think about it as I want to show that I'm going to. I could sell someday. Right. I want to show that doesn't matter about me, that I could sell someday because it's so valuable to somebody else doing this next. And if that means how you name it, how it's focused, the website that you build around it, like, all of those things need to be in a situation where I'm building this authority and equity, because I cannot tell you how many of you. I hear this again and again. You want to leave a legacy. You want to be an authority. You want to be no longer a hidden expert.

You want to be a resource.

You want to be the resource. Right? You want to be that person that's out there that people come to to get their questions answered. That means that you cannot be a jack of all trades or you will be a master of none. And that is really what we're saying here today, is if you really want your podcast to take off, think about niching it down instead of generalizing it up.

All right, that sounds like a good place to drop the mic on this one, Tracy. You can go to the blog post@podcastersunited.org, we have links to anything we talked about today. And see, we don't have a guest. So, you know, it's only just us, but also all of our other topics. If you want to search on any niche topics related to podcasting, you can do that right there. There is a search that goes through all of our episodes and it will give you any relevant episode on that niche topic. So that's always there for you as a resource. And while you're there, don't forget you can sign up for our Podcasters United Weekly newsletter that provides a lot of this information to you and other relevant topics. More niches there and it actually will serve you more of what you're interested in. That's the way this one works. It's AI driven, so check it out.

Yeah, it comes out on Tuesdays. Make sure you check it out because it'll tell you what our live topic is Wednesday. So if you have a lot of questions in that topic, join us live. If you get the newsletter, you can click through the link and you can join us live. And we'd love to see you there. So thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracie Hazard along with my co host and partner Tom Hazard. We'll be back next week with another.

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