Finding evergreen ideas for your episodes might be a challenge. How to be always relevant to your audience and, at the same time, in line with your DNA, missions and visions in order not to dilute too much your messages and, consequently, your impact?
This is the type of questions you might have asked yourself while preparing your episodes.
In this new article of My Blog Box, I will share with you 5 tips in order to know how and where to find ideas and inspirations for your podcast episodes. That way, you will always know what to talk about, when and how.
Tip #1: Monitor what is happening in your industry
Generally speaking, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on what is happening in your industry. It will help you to anticipate some changes, the apparition of new topics which you can share with your community through dedicated episodes.
It will show your audience that you keep yourself informed and can convince them about your relevancy.
For that, you can create a basic Google Alerts on keywords linked with your industry, follow authority accounts on social media, subscribe to newsletters from companies and/or publications in your fields.
What they will talk about can become topics for future episodes. You might even discover profiles to interview in your podcast, which might help you to increase your reach too.
Tip #2: Monitor your target audience
The next action I highly recommend you is to survey your target audience. You can start with your existing clients, if you already have some, and/or with your buyer persona, the profile of your ideal client.
That way, you will know about their issues, their challenges, their interests. And, all of these can become topics for your episodes. Talking about subjects your target audience faces, and offering solutions or advice, will also be proof of your relevancy. Soon, you will become an authority on your own.
And, why not offer a past or current client to be interviewed in your podcast? Again, this way will help to demonstrate your expertise and convince other people to follow your podcast, your business, and to become clients too.
Tip #3: Ask your community
Another great way to find topics for your episodes is to directly ask your community.
For that, you can organise pools on your social media profiles, should it be Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
My advice here is to ask your community to choose between different subjects. If you leave this part blank, you might not receive suggestions. At least, this is what happened to me the first time I decided to ask my followers if they had a topic linked with fashion history they wanted me to talk about. So my lesson from that experience is to always offer suggestions.
You can also share this pool, or create a survey on Google Docs for example, through your newsletter.
That way, you will be able to prepare episodes tailor-made for your community with topics they are interested in.
You can use this tip when you are looking for guests to interview. I’m sure your community might have names to suggest to you.
Tip #4: Benchmark similar podcasters
Similar to the first tip I gave you about monitoring your industry, benchmarking other podcasters can also give you some content ideas for your episodes.
Be careful, though, about not copying them. Here, it is really about knowing what kind of subjects they talk about and how you can take inspiration from them.
Look for podcasters evolving in the same industry as you and with a similar target audience. Follow them, listen to their episodes, take note on what kind of subjects they talk about, what kind of people they interview, as well as the subjects they don’t mention or the people they don’t interview.
This task is a lot like competitors' benchmarks and the information you will learn will be very useful for not only your podcast, but also your business, if you use your podcast to promote your offers.
Tip #5: Organise your editorial planning
And, a last tip I can give you to make sure your topics will be relevant not only to your community but also to your business, is to organise them as part of your editorial planning.
You want to make sure the subjects you will mention in your episodes are going to reinforce your main messages.
What I can advise you is, for each month, to give a general topic for your communication actions (blog, social media, newsletter, podcast). Then, decline this general topic in blog posts and podcast episodes.
It will give consistency to your message and reinforce your impact.
Moreover, what you can do is to have a dedicated document in which you write down all your ideas for your podcast episodes. It will act as a stock of topics you can go back to when you don’t have the inspiration and you can choose from them according to your editorial calendar, the news from your industry and your community’s challenges and/or interests.
I hope these tips will help you fight against your fear of the blank page and lack of inspiration for your next episodes.
And I am always here to advise you on your podcasting journey. Check out my offers and pick the one fitting the best to your current needs and challenges. Apply to work with me now.
Happy podcasting!
Cath @MyMarketingToolbox