229 | How to Find Winning Podcast Episode Topics

Have you ever poured your heart into creating a podcast episode only to have it vanish into the void with barely a whisper of engagement? Okay, that's a little dramatic, but this is a painful reality for you and for so many podcasters. Now, imagine if instead before you ever hit record, you knew that your next episode was exactly what your audience was hungry for and you knew that your show was going to grow. My name is Kev Michael. This is chief audience officer and my job is to help you grow your audience online so you can grow your business. And today, we're going to talk about how you can create podcast episodes that actually get noticed and grow your audience. We're tackling a question that could completely change the way you approach your podcast, which is, what if your next episode could be almost guaranteed to resonate because you picked the topic the smart way? In this episode, you're going to learn three things. Number one, why topic selection is the most important thing if you want your podcast to grow. Number two, the five sources of episodes ideas and exactly when to use each and then number three, a simple 10 minute exercise that is going to generate your next winning topic right now. Oh, and by the way, there is an eye opening takeaway about copying people, done ethically, that might just become your new favorite growth strategy. So if you're ready to stop creating podcast episodes that disappear into the digital abyss and start making content your audience actually wants so that it grows, then let's get started here on chief audience officer. So I have been helping to grow podcasts for the last seven years. I've generated more than 54 million downloads for my clients combined. And as you can imagine, after like five years of helping shows grow, I started to get pretty comfortable with my methods. And that was especially true for deciding what to make podcast episodes about. But there was a moment last year where everything that I thought I knew about how to grow a show was turned on its head. And that was when I was meeting with a one-on-one client who had hired me to grow his podcast. Now, this is somebody that a lot of people have heard of. He's spoken on a lot of stages. He is a well-known figure in the online business space. And we were in the middle of working together one-on-one when I noticed that his YouTube was absolutely exploding. He was getting tens of thousands of new subscribers every single week. And here's the thing. He was just taking his podcast episodes and putting them on YouTube. And I was stunned. I was like, what are you doing? Like, this is crazy. And so I said, hey, what are you doing over on YouTube? And he said, oh, it's actually really easy. I just hired this guy who goes around on YouTube, sees what videos are getting tons of attention, and then tells me what to make videos about. And then I make the video and I give it to him and then it gets tons of reach. And I was like, okay, that's crazy. That was even crazier is that those episodes that he was making for his podcast were performing really well on the audio side as well. And that approach, starting with what already has proven demand, was pretty new to me and was completely different from how most podcasters pick episodes. Since I've been diving deeper into how to grow a show on YouTube, what I've learned is that episode topic selection isn't a nice to have. It is the entire game. You see, what I used to do and what most podcasters do is come up with an episode topic or maybe come up with a guess that they want to talk to record and then try to figure out what the episode was about retroactively. And what I've learned is that that's kind of a death sentence on YouTube or maybe not death, but stagnation. And what I've learned is that with YouTube in particular, you have to start with the topic and the packaging of your episode first before you hit record, regardless of whether you're doing solo episodes or guest episodes. Now this was a huge realization for me and it completely changed the way that I think about picking podcast episodes. And as I dove deeper into studying what's working now to grow podcasts, what I've learned is that there's actually five different ways in addition to the one that I mentioned to pick your episode topics so that your show grows. And so what I'm going to do now is walk you through what those five sources are for episode topics. And my hope is that you can use them so that you can pick better topics and your show can grow faster. So here are the five sources of episode ideas for your podcast. And I'm going to give you them in the order that I recommend you start using them because you don't have to use all five of them all at once. And so I'm going to go in order. The first one is your curriculum. So this is particularly for those coaches, consultants, business owners who are there to help take their audience somewhere, right? You are there to help take your audience to an outcome or a destination of some sort. And you have your own method for how to do that. You have a curriculum. So there's a good chance that if you've ever consumed any of my stuff, you've heard me kind of talk about my strategy. I talk about the podcast ladder, the four steps to growing a monetizing a podcast, those types of things. That's my curriculum. And so if you're starting from scratch or if you've ever made a course or you've written a book, I would go there first for your episode topics. And that's because you have so much experience talking about your curriculum and you have already generated your unique ideas about whatever it is that you're talking about. So number one is curriculum. Number two is your calendar. This is something that I borrowed from a huge creator that you've probably heard of. And what that creator does is once a week, he looks at his calendar to understand what he did in the past week. And then he just makes content related to the life that he's living. But what's cool about this is when you make content about just what you experienced in life, your content is not only more authentic and unique because it's your lived experience, but it's also really timely and usually it's stuff that's on the top of mind of your audience as well because they're living and working in the same spaces that you are. But I know that sometimes if you just look at your calendar and look at all the meetings that you've had and the dinners that you went to and the stuff that you did, it might be hard to look at that and say, oh, that should be a podcast episode. So here's a little cheat cheat for how to look at your calendar and convert that to podcast episode topics. Just remember PQRS. What problems did you solve throughout the week? What questions did you answer for other people? What realizations did you have? And what stories could you tell? And your stories could be a story that you lived through a story that you heard, a story that you saw, anything like that. When you do that, when you do a weekly calendar review and ask PQRS, you have endless episode topics and it keeps your content fresh and uniquely you. The third strategy is copying. This is the one that I discovered last year that crushes when it comes to growth. This is where you intentionally copy the packaging of other successful videos on YouTube. It doesn't have to be podcast, but what you want to do is look at the titles and the thumbnails and at the very beginning, almost directly copy the title and thumbnail that you see on a successful video that has gotten tons of reach. Now, I know, I know you want to be ethical about this. You don't want to copy someone's video completely, but it's really not that bad to model someone else's packaging as long as the episode that you make is your unique take and is about what you have to say about the topic. But anytime you see packaging that's already working on YouTube, a title and a thumbnail combo that's crushing it either in your niche or in another niche, use it and watch how much quicker your show grows. Source number four of episode topics is your closers. Now, that's if you're a business owner who has a sales team. If you are your sales team, you are the closer. And what I mean by using your closers as your source is I assume that your show is there to support some sort of business, right? We are all here because we want to grow an audience of buyers. One of the strongest ways to make podcast episodes that convert listeners to buyers is by handling common objections. This is when you make episodes that explain away objections that you commonly get on sales calls. I'll give you an example. I am currently not seeing a new cohort of the Grow the Show Accelerator, which is my flagship program on how to grow a podcast. This version of the accelerator is going to focus on growing on YouTube and a common objection that I have gotten in conversations about this cohort is I'm not sure if YouTube needs to be my priority right now. And so since I've heard that objection many times, I may make an episode that says I totally hear you. There's many different investments you can make to improve your sales and marketing positioning online. You can invest in newsletters or social media ads or social media marketing or you can try to go on short form. There's so many things that you can do. However, YouTube is the only one that has it all. It's the only one that has long form that has short form that has SEO that has an algorithm and has paid ads. Oh, and by the way, that pays you to do it. So the way that I handled this objection is all the other things that you're considering doing you will do if you grow on YouTube. So that's why I think it should be the priority, but I digress. The fifth source of episode topics that you can use to grow your podcast on YouTube is keywords. People are not opening up Apple podcasts or Spotify and searching for solutions, but they are absolutely opening up YouTube and searching for solutions. And honestly, with the advent of chat GPT YouTube may surpass Google because I don't know about you, but I don't really search anything on Google anymore. I just ask chat GPT questions and it gives me the answers, but I absolutely do search stuff on YouTube when I know that I want a video showing me how to do something who knows maybe chat GPT in the future will just make a video right then and they're explaining something. But for now, people search for stuff on YouTube. And so if you have a podcast that provides solutions and especially if your audience is very interest based like a real estate agent or maybe you do something having to do with weddings or something like that where people are searching for solutions, then finding the right keywords can be a great way to grow your podcast. One of my best performing podcast episode that was made into a video, I specifically titled the video after a keyword. And to this day, it still gets thousands of views every single year. Okay, so those are the five sources of episode topics. Your curriculum, your calendar, copying your closers and keywords. And if you're not sure where to start, I recommend you go in that order for the most part. Ideally, you want to add all five of these episode topic generators into your toolbox so that you never run out of the right topics. But again, the key behind this and the reason why this is going to help you grow your podcast is because you will start making podcast episode topics not based off of what you feel like talking about and not just based off of, hey, I landed this guest. Let me talk to them and hope that people listen to my conversation with them, but you're actually proactively deciding in advance. What is it that my audience wants to listen to? What would they like? What can I give to them? And then you make a podcast episode around that. So if you try one of them this week, try doing a calendar review and spend just 10 minutes looking back at your week and ask PQRS or if you don't do that, go on YouTube and just search for videos that are similar to your niche and your topic and find one video and literally copy the title and the thumbnail for yourself or model it. I use the word copy, but you know, don't copy content completely. You get it. But just try it and watch how many more views you get. All right, that's going to do it for this episode of Chief Audience Officer. I'm Kev Michael. I'll see you in the next one.