How To Brainstorm Awesome Podcast Topics {SPEP12}

Listen to “12. How To Brainstorm Awesome Podcast Topics” on Spreaker.

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In this week’s episode, I hope to help you with brainstorming ideas for your podcast. Here are a few tips you’ll find on the show:

• Remember your mission
• Create pillar content topics for the year that solves problems
• Map it out in your tool of choice then your calendar
• Plan your first recording session
• Keep brainstorming!

What happens when you know that there will be many weeks and months ahead to fill up your podcast with helpful content for your listeners, but where you will need to make sure to fill up your podcast with incredible content, but the idea of planning is stressing you out a little?

I’m going to give you four very basic tips to help you move forward in that direction toward making sure that you feel more confident.

In my very last episode, I talked about how to launch your podcast without perfection. I also aim to help you feel more confident in your podcasting endeavors.

Remember your mission

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is it that you actually want to be doing?
• How do you want your audience to feel?
• What do you wanna be talking about so that your audience feels a certain way?
• What are you trying to accomplish on your podcast?

Every single episode should be supporting that overall goal. So if you want your audience to feel encouraged, then every episode should be encouraging them.

If you want your audience to feel entertained, then by the end of every episode, your audience should feel really entertained, whether they’re laughing, whether they’re amused.

What is your goal?

Do you want them to feel spiritually fulfilled?

Or do you want them to feel enlightened?

Figure out what that is, because in every single show that you do, the topics will lend themselves into your final goal. Your topics should always be supporting your mission.

Create pillar content topics for the year that solves problems

Here’s what I mean: if you are in the health industry and you are going to be talking about your physical health (such as fitness), mental health, and emotional health, there will be different aspects of health that you will cover on your podcast this year and you’ll want to take those pillar content topics and break them down into subtopics.

Those are the subtopics that are going to solve specific problems for your audience. You’ll want to talk about these topics on your podcast, interview guests if that’s the format you’re using, or just share your own experiences, or find statistics and information online that can help your audience. You may also like to share excerpts from a book that you’ve written and talk about things that are going to help support your listener in solving the problems that they’re having.

Just be sure that the topics that you’re talking about throughout the year are going to help your listener in a very specific and concrete way.

Map out your podcast topics

The next thing is just to make sure that you have enough content. And I am almost 100% positive that you won’t run out of ideas, and there are specific strategies that I use to curate ideas for my podcast from year to year.

I always encourage my clients to have a strong podcast start. So if there are 12 months in a year, how often do you want to release a podcast episode? Figure out the number of episodes you want to publish each month and multiply that times 12 so that you know how many you want to publish in a year.

Whether that number is 48, 24, or something else entirely is completely up to you and your comfort level for your production schedule.

Go ahead and write those down, and type it up into your idea bank, so that when it’s time to actually start finding who’s going to be on that episode to interview about that content piece, or where you’re going to find information for that content piece, you’ll already have the topic provided. Then all you have to do is fill in the missing pieces to create the episode itself.

The idea of topic curation is one of the most basic foundational parts of podcasting but it is what’s going to help you to get a head start and to have a foundation for the year.

You’ll want to make sure that you feel confident in what you’re going to be talking about before you go and fill in the content. (Filling in the content is simply just gathering your interviewees or finding the information that you want to present on your episode.) If you have the topic ideas, then you can create your outlines for each show. Each of these is a very separate step, but in this episode, we’re only talking about brainstorming your topics.

When I first started this podcast about podcasting, I knew that I wanted to initially start with a once-per-week publication schedule. At some point, I kind of tapped back to about twice a month or every other week and we’ll see if I want to revamp that to weekly again. I made sure that I already had 48 episode ideas ready to go. In fact, I’m looking right now at 51 ideas that I have ready to go to talk to you guys about this year. (No excuses for me!)

I can always open this Google Doc that lists all of my episodes. And at any point when I’m ready to start creating outlines for one of those episodes, I already have my topic, I just need to do the research for it and create the outline. And then it’s time for me to record, produce and edit. All I have to do is sit down at my microphone and record this information.

Next, after you’ve created those podcast topics for the year, you kind of have an idea of how many episodes you want. You’ll just want to map it out. Use your tool of choice. That could be your Google Calendar, it could be Trello, Asana, ClickUp, or any project management tool that works for you.

And so I always like to recommend starting with just Google Calendar to begin with and plugging in those days of the week that you plan to, first of all, record based on the topics that you’ve selected for the year and the outlines you’ve created for those topics.

Plan your first recording session

Now it’s time to pick a day that you’re going to edit that episode for the week or whether you’re going to have someone else do that for you. Then, you’ll have a day of the week that your episode is going to be scheduled to be published. Every day that you want your podcast to be published needs to show up on your calendar so that you’re aware that it’s a publication date.

That means your show needs to already have been edited, and ready to release. This could mean that your episode has already been uploaded and scheduled to release that day. This is going to help you stay consistent.

After you brainstorm those podcast topic ideas, make sure you’re consistent with publishing.

Keep brainstorming your podcast topics!

And lastly, just keep on brainstorming.

Just keep right on curating ideas. This is going to look very different for everybody, but it could be that you take one day out of the month to sit down and look in KeySearch to see what people are looking for, or do a Google Keyword Tools, or use some type of search engine optimization tool to help you figure out what people are looking for and what your ideal audience would be searching for so that you have even more ideas that you could add to your content idea bank.

Stay motivated and keep content curation a part of your routine for the days and weeks to come.

Resources mentioned on the show

Join the Christian Women Podcasters Network here. Just fill out the application to apply.

Learn more about my podcasting beginnings and how I got started in podcasting.

🌟GET YOUR 1:1 podcast coaching -> http://www.impactpodcastcoach.com/podcast-coach

🌟Pick up your FREE copy of your Business Clarity Guide before you start your podcast, plus download your Launch Confidently Podcasting Checklist:
https://impactpodcastcoach.com/

🌟Join my 7-Day Podcast Launch Challenge: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/6412487a6ed2f85879bdb90d

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Did you enjoy this week’s show? I sure hope so. I’d love for you to leave a five-star review in Apple Podcasts if this show has been helping you with your podcasting.

Thanks for listening, friends, and I’ll be back next week with more tips for you on my podcast about podcasting!