Become a Podmaster Podcast Transcript S3E2

00:00
Gavin Kennedy
Just because there’s a gap in a market doesn’t mean there’s a market in the gap. So you might look at the cake market and say, you know what, there’s a real gap in the market for life size Spider man cakes. And I’m sure every 6 year old would love a life size Spider man cake, but since that’s going to cost you 12,000 rand, there’s not many customers in that space. So yeah, there might be a gap, but doesn’t follow that there’s a market. Doesn’t matter how hard you work in that space, there just might never be a viable market.

00:28
Hendrik Baird
Welcome to season three of Become a Podmaster, where we tackle some of the biggest questions that podcasters have. I’m Hendrik.

00:37
Ethan Baird
And I’m Ethan. Not only did we get the questions from podcasters, but with the help of the South African Podcasters Guild, or SAPG for short, and Solid Gold Podcasts and Audiobooks, we got some answers.

00:49
Hendrik Baird
And today we’re examining the importance of having a niche in podcasting, or as the Americans say, niche, why it matters and how it can help grow an audience and drive deeper engagement.

01:02
Ethan Baird
My wife freaks out when people say niche. She really does. Let’s dive into the strategies that help build listener loyalty and create a strong podcasting community. Our goal with this podcast is to help podcasters old and new navigate the evolving landscape of podcasting with expert insights and practical advice.

01:23
Hendrik Baird
Our question of the day is why should you niche your podcast content? It is said that choosing the right niche is crucial for audience growth and engagement. But what makes a niche effective?

01:38
Ethan Baird
When speaking to podcasters, one of the main questions we’ve had revolves around monetization. There’s no easy answer to that question, as making money off your podcast hinges on a number of factors. For instance, how do you balance passion with profitability?

01:52
Hendrik Baird
Monetization is a complex problem, and today we have to acknowledge that there are common mistakes which podcasters make when defining their niche.

02:01
Ethan Baird
There is power in niching, as it can help a podcaster attract the right listeners.

02:05
Hendrik Baird
But there are many myths around content. For instance, that broad topics lead to bigger audiences.

02:12
Ethan Baird
Every podcaster has to find that sweet spot, taking practical steps to identify and validate a niche.

02:18
Hendrik Baird
And when you look at the most popular and successful podcasts out there, it becomes clear that successful podcasters have carved out unique spaces in the industry.

02:29
Ethan Baird
In this episode, we will examine what a niche is and how to niche as deeply as possible into your niche. And if you’re looking for more podcasting insights, visit Our website, Baird Media. I think the best place to start is by understanding exactly what we mean when we talk about a niche in podCommerce.

02:47
Hendrik Baird
You mean like those tiny little dark corners of the Internet where people obsess over their favourite topics?

02:54
Ethan Baird
Pretty much. A niche is a specific, well defined topic or audience segment that a podcast focuses on. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, niche podcasts target a particular interest, industry or demographic.

03:07
Hendrik Baird
It’s like comparing a general talk show to a show specifically about vintage comic book collecting. The one tries to capture a wide range of listeners while the other builds a passionate, dedicated audience around a very specific topic.

03:23
Ethan Baird
Exactly. And one of the biggest advantages of having a niche is that it helps you attract the right listeners. People who care deeply about a subject are more likely to become loyal followers and even share your podcast with other like minded people.

03:35
Hendrik Baird
But some people worry that being too niche might limit their growth.

03:39
Ethan Baird
And that’s one of the biggest myths about niching. A niche doesn’t mean fewer listeners, it means more engaged listeners. A smaller dedicated audience is often better than a large uninterested one.

03:50
Hendrik Baird
Plus, having a clear niche makes it easier to position yourself as an expert. If your podcast is about, let’s say, personal finance for freelancers, then people looking for exactly that kind of advice will see you as the go to source.

04:07
Ethan Baird
And let’s not forget about monetization. Sponsors love niched audiences because they know exactly who they’re reaching. A podcast about long distance running, for example, would be a perfect fit for brands selling running shoes, nutrition supplements or sports watches.

04:21
Hendrik Baird
So in short, niching is about focusing on the right audience, not the biggest audience. It helps you to stand out, builds a strong community, and even improves your chances of making money with your podcast.

04:34
Ethan Baird
And once you’ve chosen a niche, the next step is making sure you stand out within it.

04:38
Hendrik Baird
So I spoke to Yaz the student and he had this question about niching.

04:44
Yaz the Student
So I think for me, more of the questions would be around from a South African perspective, specifically for audio only podcasts. Because I think trying to build in brands from a visual perspective, the through line becomes a lot easier to be able to sell to brands. The necessity of it. But when you’re doing a niche podcast, for example, I do two very specifically focused podcasts, one on African cinema and one on the South African entertainment industry. Navigating that space, even from a one to one where you’re the person who’s doing the actual direct sales becomes a bit harder to navigate.

05:27
Ethan Baird
You also spoke to Bob Rock. I found his podcast A good example of how to niche into a very specific topic.

05:33
Bob Rock
The premise behind the show is to expose the RC drifting hobby to not only the community, but to a wider audience as much as possible, bringing them the latest news in the drifting world, what people are doing in different countries in terms of drifting, latest products, and any other issues that are affecting the RC drifting community. Be positive or negative, we talk about it and see how we can put a positive spin on everything. And yeah, it’s been five seasons so far.

06:12
Bob Rock
And because it’s such a niche hobby and also a niche sort of podcast, focusing only on that, I think I’m in a really good position to make something really good out of it because one of the things I found is that even though this hobby has been around for many years, a lot of people still don’t know something like this exists. So I think it’s also an opportunity to climb on there and really do something good. So that’s why I’m trying to get as much help and advice as possible. Yeah. In between some self learning I’ve been doing is starting looking at trends and started looking at the analytics of each episode or try and figure out what made one episode better than the other. Was it the time that it was posted? Was it the subject matter?

07:10
Hendrik Baird
Gino Arlecchino’s question is around developing a niche audience.

07:15
Gino Arlechino
The first one is developing a niche audience, which sounds ironic because it’s kind of like smaller the better. But you do need numbers ultimately at the end of the day for you to be of some worth. So that would be the first ones, like, how do I develop enough of an audience base within this market? Right. And by market, yes, it’s largely for film practitioners and media practitioners, but there’s also people who don’t know what to do with their lives, people who might be interested in, say, for example, photography or special effects makeup, and they don’t know how to get into making Blood for Glory seen on television. So a lot of it is like haphazardous listeners who. Or just information seeking. And it’s being able to grow with that and if possible, if it cannot be used as a tool.

08:02
Gino Arlechino
So looking at maybe like a university base where in the same way you’d have a film lecturer, you now have an online tool where you can go and pick an episode to say, this is how we score music and make money from it. This is how you produce a promo, this is how you clip and edit. So I think maybe that’s largely the market I want to go for the More educational, entertainment type. And then the second question, if I were to ask around monetization. I had Nicole Engelbrecht on my previous podcast and she mentioned that she was lucky enough to get a surveillance company, which makes sense because she’s dealing with true crime. So you can sell CCTV cameras. In my instance, you’re selling an opinion. It’s very subjective. It’s not something that’s easily linked to something else.

08:55
Ethan Baird
Before we dive deeper, a quick shout out to our Podmaster startup programme helping new podcasters launch with confidence. Check out our website, Baird Media for more info.

09:06
Hendrik Baird
And while we’re still on the topic of niching your podcast content, many podcasters start with a broad idea thinking they’ll reach more people. But the truth is they the more specific you are, the easier it is to attract and retain a loyal audience.

09:22
Ethan Baird
That’s because people want content that speaks directly to them. A highly focused podcast feels more personal and valuable.

09:29
Hendrik Baird
And niching isn’t just about picking a topic. It’s about positioning yourself as the go to person in that space.

09:37
Ethan Baird
Right. And it also makes content creation easier because you know exactly who you’re speaking to.

09:42
Hendrik Baird
Ethan, I think it’s time we turn to the experts to help us find answers to some of these questions.

09:47
Jonathan Warncke
I’ve got two bugbears to talk about here, first of all. Okay, well, you’re talking about niche. Let’s start with niche. Yes, I think niching is very powerful and very important in our, let’s say economy, demography in our country as well. We just don’t have the kind of population numbers to support a national show. If you go international, if you can crack the international market, great. But if you want to do a national show about kite flying, you’re going to have 10 people on that show. You’re going to have 10 listeners. Right. If you’re making a show about a major sport like rugby or soccer, cool, you can access a much larger market. But you’re going to be competing with Supersport with some very excellent content creators. As I would say.

10:32
Jonathan Warncke
I think there’s less competition and there’s more passion and there’s more engagement down the way of niche. And I’ll point out a show like a table in the corner from Russell Wasserful, which is all about the food industry in South Africa and predominantly kind of Cape Town, and trail chases from Dean Horowitz, which is about trail running. And those are niches that are people are passionate about. And the corollary to that as well is that those are valuable Audiences because people, if you want to sell your show, people with money are interested in trail running and cuisine. So it’s. You can do anything you want. But if you’re intent on monetizing, then you need a little strategic thought behind it.

11:10
Paulo Dias
It’s probably the only way to go. Which kind of like doesn’t make you. It’s always a difficult conversation I have with big brands especially who just want scale. And then you kind of like got to ask. The question of a podcast is because you talk about like I talk from my experience. I produce two shows that are very niche, my own shows, two are very niche and one’s broad. So one is a nostalgia 1980s based show which is very niche. But my audience, I’ve actually, that show’s gone international because it’s a niche that a lot of people care about. And again, you talk about the. The profile of the people is that they’re, you know, upper income, moneyed people. So it’s not a massive audience, but it’s an audience that can matter.

11:53
Paulo Dias
I produce another radio industry podcast for radio creatives, people working in promotions departments and radio stations. Again, that we’ve also gone worldwide because it’s such a specific job title and job role, there aren’t that many people doing it. And again, it’s reached very important people and I have one one contact with the listeners of it and they’re all like pretty serious people within radio businesses. So it goes like that’s quite valuable. Then on the other hand, I produce a sports podcast which is just impossible because once you do something, no matter how good we are, I cannot compete with the podcast that has Premier League footballers on it. I can’t compete with that. And then now you’re competing with the whole world and now you’re competing visually. So it’s like the first two really drill down into a niche thing go.

12:39
Paulo Dias
These are things there’s an expertise in or a passion about and they break through so nicely and they attract the right sort of audience. Where our sports audience is so much more varied and so much more volatile and it’s difficult to manage and it’s difficult to predict where the other two you can watch the patterns in. So I’d say, look, find your niche. And we’re not even saying niche like you said cart flying. I mean, it doesn’t have to be kite flying, it just goes. It still blows my mind how few local language football podcasts there are. I don’t think there’s more than two or three Isis Zulu podcasts about Soccer, which is crazy. So it’s not even saying niche. I’m just saying like this. Every topic that you can think of that are the mainstream topics, do it in your mother tongue.

13:22
Paulo Dias
That’s niche and that’s how you’re going to break through.

13:24
Jonathan Warncke
And the advantage that we all have as South Africans, you don’t have to take the advantage. You can go international, but an American podcast is never going to be able to cover finance in South Africa as well as you can. So you can look around the world and go, what’s an incredibly successful show template or story type or whatever it is, and then cool. Do the South African version and you’ve got a chance.

13:45
Hendrik Baird
Sam W. on one of the groups of the guild said today that she had a YouTube channel forever. She was doing tech reviews behind the scenes vlogs, gaming and esports and then she decided to just focus on competitive counter strike and took a while.

14:02
Jonathan Warncke
Many years of my life.

14:03
Hendrik Baird
Yeah. So I mean hyper focusing on something like that one game, one like Magic the Gathering or you know, one of those things certainly has a much broader appeal to a very specific group of people than just generally. Let’s talk about tech and all sorts of, you know, I, I might be interested in one or two of the episodes, but the rest don’t really speak to me. So do you think that might be an example of specific tailored content and how to do it?

14:30
Jonathan Warncke
Well, that’s an empirical evidence piece you’ve got there. I think it’s a perfect example. I mean it might not be statistically representative, but my intuition is yes, going from tech reviews, literally the most competitive type of content you can make in the world, to simply speaking about a single game. And that’s what Twitch streamers do. Well, some Twitch streamers play lots and lots of games, but some of them are also just I do Starcraft and they get audiences, I believe.

14:57
Paulo Dias
And I think there’s also a degree of attracting hate bait because everyone’s going to have a better opinion than you or know more than you and just be attracted to you for that reason initially and then you can convert them. So yeah, it’s a great example of it.

15:09
Ethan Baird
Gavin from Solid Gold Podcast and Audiobooks has a warning about niching.

15:13
Gavin Kennedy
Just because there’s a gap in the market doesn’t mean there’s a market in the gap. So you might look at the cake market and say, you know what, there’s a real gap in the market for life size Spider man cakes and I’m sure every 6 year old would love a life size Spider man cake. But since that’s going to cost you 12,000 rand, there’s not many customers in that space. So yeah, there might be a gap, but doesn’t follow that there’s a market. Doesn’t matter how hard you work in that space, there just might never be a viable market. So understanding why you choosing a topic or a niche for a podcast? Am I doing it because man, I love koi fish and I just want people to know more about koi breeding?

15:51
Gavin Kennedy
Or do I want to talk about koi so that I can get people to hire me to build ponds? Or because I want EPOL to sponsor my podcast? Understanding the realities of the niche you’re choosing and why you’re choosing the niche are really important.

16:07
Ethan Baird
If you have a story to tell, a message to share, or a brand to build, Solid Gold podcasts and audiobooks can help you bring it to life.

16:14
Hendrik Baird
With state of the art studios, expert production, and a team that makes podcasting effortless, Solid Gold is the go to partner for individuals, businesses and brands looking to create high quality audio content.

16:26
Ethan Baird
Whether you need a full service podcast production, an audiobook recording, or just a professional space to record, Solid Gold has you covered.

16:34
Hendrik Baird
You can take your podcast or audiobook to the next level by visiting solidgold Co za today and start sounding like a pro. So what did we learn today?

16:44
Ethan Baird
Ethan well, we’ve established that choosing a niche is one of the most powerful decisions a podcaster can make. It helps you build a loyal audience, position yourself as an authority, and even attract the right sponsors.

16:56
Hendrik Baird
Right, but that doesn’t mean just picking a random niche and hoping for the best. There has to be a strategy to it.

17:05
Ethan Baird
Exactly. First, you need to pick a niche you’re passionate about. If you love your topic, creating content won’t feel like work. This passion will also come through in your episodes, making them a lot more engaging for your listeners.

17:17
Hendrik Baird
But passion alone isn’t enough. You also have to research the demand. Make sure there’s an actual audience for your niche. Otherwise you could be talking about something you love but with nobody listening.

17:30
Ethan Baird
And that’s where finding a unique angle comes in. You need to differentiate yourself from other podcasters in the same space. What makes your podcast stand out? Is it your format? Your expertise? Your guests?

17:41
Hendrik Baird
And then once you’ve identified your niche, the key is consistency. It takes time to build an audience, and constantly changing your focus makes it harder for listeners to know what the hell to expect from you.

17:54
Ethan Baird
And finally, test and adapt. Listen to your audience, track which episodes get the most engagement and refine your approach based on what’s working.

18:03
Hendrik Baird
So, in short, successful podcasting isn’t about appealing to everyone. It’s about appealing deeply to the right people.

18:11
Ethan Baird
And those right people will become your biggest advocates, helping your podcast grow naturally.

18:16
Hendrik Baird
And that’s it for this episode. I hope you found it valuable, and if you did, don’t forget to share and Tag us on LinkedIn. Let’s continue the conversation there.

18:27
Ethan Baird
Want to take your podcast to the next level? Join our upcoming masterclass. The details are on our website, Baird Media. In our next episode, there’s two ways.

18:36
Gavin Kennedy
To monetize your audience. One is an ad played before the podcast by the platform you’re on. So you put your podcast up on Iono, you enable monetization, and before anybody can listen to the podcast, they’re listening to an advert that’s inserted by the platform. That’s kind of an aggregated sales strategy, Iono. Injecting ads into lots of podcasts based on the data they have on the listener might not be your own. You might not be able to monetize that audience yourself.