There is an item of perpetual business advice that certainly applies to anyone starting up a podcast – this is that you need to find a gap in the market. Where podcasts are concerned, this means finding a niche listener base, or a hypothetical audience of listeners who would be specifically interestedin your podcast and what it has to offer.

This point about a “hypothetical” listener base is particularly important. When you start your podcast, you do not have any listeners. When you decide upon your niche, you still don’t have any listeners, but you do have an imagined listenership. Success, therefore, is moving from the hypothetic to the real, and turning your imagined listener niche into a body of listeners who are indeed interested in the things your podcast offers.

You niche will determine all sorts of things about your podcast, from how it is marketed to what topics you cover and from where you spread it around online to what guests you invite on. That means it needs to be the first thing you consider. So much is obvious,but it all begins with the question, “Who would want to listen to this”?

Sometimes, you can imagine a listener base only to find that it doesn’t materialize. This could be because you haven’t marketed the podcast properly or because you haven’t made a very good podcast!  There could therefore be a degree of trial and error in this process.

A Word About Ecommerce Podcasts

Sometimes, a podcast doesn’t start from scratch. This is usually the case when a company that already has a customer base decides to diversify and start a podcast. In such a case, you could well have an audience of listeners straight from the off – and your niche could already be decided by the type of people who visit your website.

This is usually the case with ecommerce sites. Plurawl, a company out of New York specializing in t-shirts and prints for the Hispanic community note that their Hispanic podcast already had its listener base before it was even launched – the very people who already visited their site.

However, you need to consider how to integrate your products into the podcast. Do so too much and it can come off as nothing but shameless marketing. Do so too little and the traffic to your site might be totally uninterest in the content of your podcast. It is a balancing act.

Brief Tips for Finding Your Niche

With all of that said then, here follows some brief tips for settling on your podcast niche:

Consider What You Are Interested In

Yes, you. Think about it, you are not going to produce a very good podcast about something you don’t care about. Furthermore, your niche is likely not made up of people with similar interests to you.

Don’t Make it Too Broad or Too Narrow

If the niche is too broad, then it isn’t a niche at all. However, if your topic is too arcane, you are going find it difficult to make many episodes about it, find guests or, indeed, find many listeners.

Market Well

There will be places on the internet where your intended niche virtually “hang out”. These are the places to market most heavily on. The podcast marketing should also show clearly what the podcast is about. You will not reach your niche if the podcast isn’t obviously concerned with those topics.

A niche might suggest a small and limited listenership, but the internet is a hard place to stand out so cornering a small group of people at first gives you something solid to build on.