Now, when it comes to making a podcast, the most important thing is the topic/idea/theme/whatever you want to call it. It has to be wide enough that you can make indefinite episodes about it, but not too broad as to where you don’t focus on anything in specific and lose some listeners. For example, say your main genre is media. That, as a topic, is too broad. Nobody will go there thinking “Yes! Finally, a podcast about __________!”, because media is just too broad. They might get one, two, maybe three episodes about their favourite topic, but they just won’t care as much about the other episodes and, chances are, they’ll stop listening. As podcasting professionals say, that’s not good.
However, there is another end to the spectrum, as if your topic is too narrow, say, oh, I don’t know… Misophonia. Let’s just use that as an example. First of all, you can’t really make all that many episodes on misophonia as it’s a pretty narrow subject with not that much to say about it, but also, who’s going to tune in every week or two weeks or however often your episodes come out to listen to information about misophonia? You probably haven’t even heard the word “misophonia” before this paragraph where I’ve used it four times and counting. If you’re wondering, misophonia (five) is when a person hates certain sounds, and they don’t know why. Misophonia (six) is surprisingly common, but that’s not the focus of this article. The point is, don’t make your topic too broad, but also not too narrow.
Still on the topic of, well, topics; It’s important to pick a topic that you care about, so you feel motivation to keep making episodes. If your topic is misophonia and you really care about it and want to put information about it out into the world, go for it! Just don’t expect many listeners. However, if you don’t really care about cars but make a podcast about all things with wheels, chances are you won’t stick to making that podcast because you simply don’t care about the topic. The simplified version of all of this is this: Pick a topic that you care enough about to talk about for at least 10 hours, and make sure that your topic isn’t too narrow or too broad. Now that you have a topic picked, let’s move on to the next steps, like picking a name.
