There’s a mistake you can make that guarantees your podcast will fail.

That mistake is choosing the wrong niche, or even worse – not choosing a niche at all.

A podcast niche is much more than just the genre of the podcast. 

The genre is whether the podcast is based on comedy, real estate, music production, etc. 

The niche is what specific topics, angles or population segments you cover in the larger genre.

Your niche is the #1 factor for whether your podcast can grow, and how much money you could make. 

And the biggest podcasts in the world actually all started and grew using niches.

The Biggest Podcast in the World Started Niche

When you look at very large podcasters, you’ll see that they cover many topics in their episodes. And you might want to model that in your own podcast.

• The Joe Rogan Experience
  • 16.4M Subscribers
• Lex Fridman
  • 3.81M subscribers
• Flagrant by Andrew Schulz
  • 1.57M Subscribers
• Or whoever is the big player in your genre. 

But if you look at where these podcasts started, you’ll realize that they first grew by covering niche topics in niche communities. 

Joe Rogan started his podcast in Dec 2009, when Podcasting itself was a niche. 

But that didn’t stop him from niching down further and doing ‘The Joe Rogan Experience: MMA Show’. 

His MMA podcast was among the first to cover the small but growing Mixed Martial Arts/UFC scene. 

As the UFC grew, it’s helped Joe Rogan’s audience grow, and he still does dedicated ‘MMA’ episodes today. 

Andrew Schulz, another comedian podcaster, used a strategy of growing in ethnic communities. 

Schulz has an interest in the cultures of groups like Indian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Chinese-Americans, etc. 

So he would tell jokes with surprising insight into the lives of these groups. 

These communities were delighted that he knew so much about them. And that made them share his clips with their friends, helping Schulz grow his audience.

Here is Schulz himself talking about this approach of ‘niche-hopping’ between different ethnic communities. 

Lex Fridman is a popular podcaster who covers tech, science, and politics. But he actually started his podcast as ‘The Artificial Intelligence Podcast.’ 

He covered AI exclusively until he started gaining significant traction. Then he expanded the scope of his podcast, and renamed it to ‘the Lex Fridman Podcast’.

The common pattern here is that the biggest podcasts were once small. And the way they grew was by tapping into small and growing niche communities. 

Doesn’t Niching Down Reduce my Potential Audience Size?

Yes, narrowing your podcast’s focus will reduce your potential audience size.

But counter-intuitively it’ll speed up your podcast’s growth. All the big podcasts today leveraged niches to grow.

And to grow your podcast you’ve got to

1. Reach new potential viewers and
2. Keep them coming back week after week.

Both of these are helped tremendously by narrowing and focusing your energy down into a niche. 

Reaching New Viewers

When you’ve narrowed down to a defined audience or 500-10,000 people, you can reach them a lot more easily. And they’ll be much more likely to pay attention to your content as well.

Your niche will have communities based around it on Reddit, Facebook or WhatsApp. 

The narrower the audience, the more starved they’ll be for content that targets them well.

Your large competitors will be too big to serve this niche well. So you can quickly become the big fish in this small pond. 

Keep them coming back week after week

When you’re craving Chinese food, you go to a Chinese restaurant. You go to a sushi restaurant when you’re craving sushi. 

You likely won’t go to a general restaurant that has all kinds of food. That’s because you instinctively know that restaurants with a narrow focus have better quality food.

The value of niching down is that you become the go-to podcast for someone with that interest. 

Even if someone checks out your podcast, and realizes it’s not ‘for’ them. They’ll be more likely to recommend you later to someone who does fit the target audience.

If your podcast is too broad, and no one knows who you’re really ‘for’. Then they can’t recommend your podcast easily.

How to Identify Your Niche

A good niche is a small but growing group that’s underserved by existing podcasts. 

Some questions to help you brainstorm possible niches are:

Two things can combine to form something entirely different and desirable

Can you combine 2 or more of your interests?

As human beings we all have multiple interests.

2 of your interests might combine to form a unique niche that other people in the world can relate to.

There are 8 billion human beings. So there could be many thousands that share the same crossover of interests.

And in that case, you’re actually the best person in the world at serving this group.

An important question though is how easily can you reach these people? The next two questions can help you find that out.

What are People Asking About?

Your podcast genre likely has communities on Reddit, Facebook and Whatsapp. Many people will be posting questions on these forums.

Can you segment the questioners down into different groups with unique needs/priorities?

For example in a coding forum, everyone may be trying to learn how to code.

• But some people are hobbyists who want to learn a new skills,
• Others are students looking to break into the industry. 

You could break students down even further into

• Young students pursuing their first career and
• Adult students looking to break into a new career.

So in this example case, a niche podcast could be for ‘adult students learning to code so they can break into a new career’. 

This would be much more attractive for them than a general purpose coding podcast.

By finding groups with unique needs and priorities, you can position your podcast for them. Then deliver a significantly better experience than a more general podcast could.

What Are People Searching For?

How Large is the Niche?

One of the best ways to gauge how large a niche is, and how well it’s growing is to look at its search traffic.

Identify some keywords that people in your target niche might be searching for. Then plug them into Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

Google’s Keyword Planner will tell you how many people every month are searching for this topic.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can attract these searchers to your website or podcast.

More importantly, you can gauge whether this audience is sizable enough for you to want to target.

If you could get 30% of the search traffic to your podcast, would it make a sizable difference to your Podcast growth? 

Is the Niche Growing?

You can also plug these keywords into Google Trends. Which will let you see whether this audience might be growing or shrinking.

If the audience is small to medium, and also shrinking gradually it may not be worth targeting. 

But a small and fast growing audience/topic may be a big opportunity for growth.  

—–

Choosing the right podcast niche is one of the most important decisions you can make.

It has a huge sway over whether your podcast will grow, and how much money it can make. 

Growing your podcast is an enormous effort. And a much bigger challenge than producing your Podcast. 

That’s why at Podmate, we’re creating tools to help you save time on editing. So you can use that time to grow your audience!

You can learn more about Podmate here, if that sounds intriguing.

Make sure to subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss the next issue on growing your Podcast!

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