We’re following up last episode with a conversation about how to create a great content strategy by playing to your strengths as a host. If you are using a format for your show that makes your core strengths shine, it makes it much easier to reveal your expertise and attract your ideal audience. It also makes a huge difference if you start by speaking to a niche audience. This includes pre-production preparation as well as post-production editing, both on audio and video.
In this episode Tiff and Christine give key tips for making a content strategy that reveals your expertise through every episode.
“YouTube rewards you when you’re finding that niche audience, when you’re bringing people in who know exactly what they’re looking for.”
Tiff Tyler
Topics covered:
- (1:20) Choose content that plays to your strengths
- (4:14) Figure out what you want to be hired to do
- (6:48) How to create videos that make a great YouTube channel
- (9:40) Why focusing on a niche is so helpful when you start a podcast
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Links mentioned:
- Looking for pro support to build your podcast? Find out more ways to work with us!
- Tiff Tyler
- Christine Baird
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Many thanks to our production team
- Worthfull Media for audio editing
- Mosaico Productions for video effects
- Amela Subašić for artwork
Transcription of this episode:
(auto-generated, please forgive typos)
Christine (00:04):
Welcome to Think Like a Producer podcast. I’m your co-host Christine Baird.
Tiff (00:09):
And I’m your co-host Tiff Tyler. Being in the podcast industry, being in the content creation industry. This is what we learned, and this is how you can get out of your own way and get started.
Christine (00:20):
You name it. We’ve probably done it. This podcast is about bringing all the wisdom to you. Tune in weekly, to learn how to think like a producer.
Christine (00:32):
Welcome to this episode of Think Like a Producer, we are covering something we started talking about last episode, but we’re diving deeper. And this is really one of the biggest themes of the whole season. Season two is about using the podcast to attract your dream customers. And so this episode is all about the content strategy that you can implement into your podcasts so that your podcast will naturally reveal your expertise to your audience. And when your expertise is revealed to your audience, guess what people want to hire you? Because they’re like, whoa, this person is so expert on this topic. And that usually leads them to hiring you when they need your expertise and services. So we’re not going to like cover everything about this, but we want to give you a specific episode today where we give you some key basics to focus on when you’re thinking of making a content strategy for your show so that every single episode will reveal more and more of your expertise to your audience, and naturally enroll them into thinking of you as the go-to person when they need to hire someone, uh, in your space.
Christine (01:44):
Does that sound good? Sounds good to me. I know. Uh, okay. So first off, I’m going to share something that I started talking about in last episode, episode 32. So if you miss that one, go listen. Cause we started talking about it there, but we talked about the format of your podcast and how important it is to choose a format that plays to your strengths. And this is key to showing off your expertise because when people choose the wrong format for their podcast, it kind of hamstrings them. Like if you’re not super naturally gifted with holding conversations, especially with people you may not know very well, it probably is not going to play to your strengths to host a conversation interview show, right? Like that’s not going to help you shine. And it might be very distracting because the listener might be like, oh, this is kind of a bland interview.
Christine (02:39):
That’s too bad. Cause I’m really interested in this topic, right? Conversely, if you are a really gifted, natural conversationalist, but you’re hosting a show purely of like solo teaching style episodes. And that really like gives you no energy and brings, you know, joy. You’re not going to sound your, and even if you’re sharing your expertise that way, if you don’t have like your natural joy and passion coming through, it’s like not going to land. So it’s super important. If you want your podcast to reveal your expertise that you play to your strengths, when you choose the format of your show and like we covered in the last episode, you could do an interview based show. You could do a round table style show where maybe you have like three or four co-hosts and you guys all discuss together. Maybe you do solo episodes where you teach and train.
Christine (03:31):
And then you also mix in like coaching episodes where you take live listener call-in questions, and then you could do some live coaching. Maybe you’re an amazing storyteller. And so you just tell stories on the show of like case studies of clients you’ve worked with and like obviously kind of reveal your expertise. Uh, I mean, there’s so many ways you can use a podcast, you could do a mini series, a limited run, short seasons, long seasons, short episodes, long episodes. Like we’ve talked a lot about formatting your podcast on this podcast. So feel free to go through the archives and listen to all the episodes where we talk about all the options and ways to format your podcast. But the thing that I wanted to make a point about today was it’s super important to make sure you choose a format for your show that plays to your strengths so that it will naturally reveal your expertise and not hide it behind a format that makes somebody else look good and not you. Okay. Tiff did that makes sense? I know you’re like get on my soapbox about
Tiff (04:30):
Now. That makes sense to me. I’m with you. I’m with you on following the train here.
Christine (04:36):
Okay. Well, I’m going to toss it over to you because what else do people need to think about when they’re trying to choose a content strategy that reveals their expertise?
Tiff (04:46):
Sure. What do you want to be hired to do? Um, I think this is something that when Christine brought this up and we were really narrowing down what we were going to do for season two, we had to think about ourselves individually. What do we love to do? What do we hope people will hire us for? And that really helped us break down season two and what we were going to do for some people, I know you are like me, you are multi-passionate you like a lot of different things. And it might be kind of hard to come up with. This is what the show is going to be about. Again, we’ve mentioned this before. You can have theme seasons, maybe this season, you just talk about one hobby and expertise that you like. And in season two, you can focus on something else. You can have fun with this.
Tiff (05:27):
You can play with this a little bit, but really keeping to a theme so that as you’re talking and as you’re building an audience, they not only understand you clearly with these two to three concepts that you talk about, but they also know when they recommend you to someone else. They know exactly how to talk about your show, how to market your show for you because you kept it so simple. So you’re not this kind of this out of the box, do whatever you want. But I will say there are some shows that seem like they’re out of the box. They just kind of two hosts talk about whatever they want, but there is still a theme you can talk about your life. If this is going to be a show that you’re going to talk about a couple of different things. But if you are someone who’s into video production, you are someone who loves circus life.
Tiff (06:07):
And you’re like, I love circus performing. And what people do, you can still keep it very central. So people know in one to two words, this is the show that I’m going to be listening to. Um, and the reason why we’re bringing this up is that we want to keep you clear and concise as you continue to, to kind of think about your show before you even start your show. Um, if you have a show already, like we said, you might have, have season one and season two down, or you’re thinking about what am I going to do for season three? That’s okay, too. This really is called the pre-production process. I’ve mentioned this term before we’ve talked about it before, but for anyone, this might be your first episode. Listening to us, pre-production is everything you do before you start recording. And we highly recommend that you do as much as you can before you start recording, not to overthink it, not to stop yourself, stop yourself from creating, but you make the creation process and the editing process, which typically, I mean, I’m sure you agree, Christine, most of our clients, that’s the big issue.
Tiff (07:02):
Once they’ve got the concept and they’re like, I got all the equipment I’m ready to record editing and breaking things down. If they weren’t really clear in the strategy and the pre-production process becomes a longer and not as fun process, uh, to get the show out and launched. So we’re talking about mainly audio podcasting, but of course I love video production. I love YouTube. Um, and the more that I’ve talked to YouTube strategist, and I’ve worked with teams that have YouTube strategist come in, it’s been great to, to continue to narrow down. Like sometimes even to the time limit of the video, what this particular channel is going to do. So for example, if you have a motivational channel that can fall into a lot of different buckets, you can have, you know, relationships, you can have a business strategy, it can kind of cover a lot of different things, but for people who are just the relationship expert, all I’m going to talk about is relationships only interview people and talk about relationships and romance and how you grow, how you love yourself, how you love others.
Tiff (08:04):
Those channels typically grow a little bit faster than the ones that have so much of a wide range, because you’re trying to bring in everybody as opposed to this one person who might be looking for this, who’s going to recommend this channel because they finally had a great first date. And now they’re going to recommend this, uh, romance channel to their friends that they can have a great first day too. So really on YouTube, it helps like if you’re going to have a relationship channel, like I said, for example, being able to put the hashtag relationships, hashtag love, hashtag self care, three continuous hashtags, that when people are searching, they can find you as opposed to a lot of different ones on each video that can just hit a range of people. So YouTube rewards you when you’re finding that niche audience, when you’re bringing people in who know exactly what they’re looking for.
Tiff (08:48):
And the last thing I say before I kick it back to you, Christine, is that I know a lot of people get nervous on video. Trust me, I understand season one, I show so many bloopers of me being nervous on camera. So I understand I’m always the one kind of behind in coaching and supporting the talent or the people who are going to show up, but it’s a lot to kind of get here and try to get a single concept down for people to understand and not feel nervous about it and let people know your expertise. What I would say is that the clearer you are in pre-production the better you are at understanding, okay, for this season, for these 15 episodes, for these 20 episodes, these are the main things that I want people to learn and understand the better you’re going to get.
Tiff (09:27):
The more that you record, because you know that if you start to go off on a tangent, like I typically do, when you start, you can bring yourself back to those two to three concepts and make sure that you can wrap it up in a very, very nice, pretty bow. So yes, that’s just another thing we’re saying. If you really figure out what your expertise is, what you’re trying to move towards, it can really help you in the production and the post-production, which is the editing process for your show overall. But Christine, what else would you want to tell the people before we wrap episode 33,
Christine (09:58):
If that was such a great focus for YouTubers, I just almost I’m like, man, everyone should just let that sink in. Uh, so great, great point, but we can apply some of the same wisdom on an audio or a video show. And what really I heard you talking about was the importance of focusing when you start out on a niche and Tiff just made great points about why that’s helpful, but I want you to kind of think even deeper about why it’s helpful to focus on a niche. When you begin to show specifically in the words you use and the terms you use, um, it’s easy if you’re an expert in something to just want to speak your own jargon and your own language and just be like, people are gonna love it. And I’m going to sound so smart. What’s probably going to happen is you’re going to leave people in the dust and they’re going to get like glazed over because they don’t know half the terms you’re using.
Christine (10:53):
So just like in many different forms of media, the old wisdom to use simple terms that people understand applies in podcasting, whether you’re audio only, or also doing video. Um, think about the core terms that you use over and over and over again, when you’re explaining your key concepts really make those kind of like the focal points of your content strategy. Repetition is super effective in podcasting because one, a lot of people will only have ever heard you in that random episode. So don’t assume anyone knows anything. And then two, the more someone hears you use the same terms in the same niche, the more that the concepts actually start to sink in, right? Like there’s research that shows, this is how we learn. Like we have to have a certain amount of exposure to ideas and words and concepts before it really like sticks in our brains.
Christine (11:50):
And so the point is simple. Actually give your content the ability to reach a wide audience niche concepts, actually give your content the ability to reach a wide audience, all the points Tiff made, as well as the point I made earlier in the episode about playing to your strengths and making sure your format supports that this is all coaching to help you make sure that your expertise and your content actually helps people understand what you’re good at. If you get too far out and too general and too like, you know, esoteric or jargony, like you’re gonna lose people. And so trust the process. And when you’re beginning, I would say the first season of your show, keep things really simple in the words you use and the concepts you share and let people really let it sink in. And then you can start to layer in more over time.
Christine (12:44):
Once people are on board, they get you, they’re used to you, you’ve given them kind of that basic education about your niche. And then you can really start to get creative as time goes by. So I think we’re going to wrap it there. This was a focused episode building on last week’s episode, to help you understand content strategy that will actually reveal your expertise. I want you to really take this to heart. Even if your show concept is like anecdotal or just for fun, this applies no matter what. And so I hope that you have some ideas cooking already, if you do, and you want to share them with us, we always love chatting with you over on Instagram. I think like a producer, you can DM us or just comment and let us know the ideas you have. And absolutely like we said, be sure to check out the past episodes that we’ve released in season one.
Christine (13:40):
And just last episode, episode 32 about formatting, your show. Thinking bigger about that as always, we are so delighted when you share the show with people, you know, it appreciate it. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite audio podcast platform. And if you really are hearing this and want to hire us to actually go through a process with you and take your show, or your soon to be show through this, we’re always here for you and you can always hire us. Uh, you can check out our services at worthfullmedia.com and we have links to everything that Tiff does as well. So we’re always here for you and we can’t wait to see you on the next episode.
Christine (14:25):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Think Like a Producer. This has been a Worthfull Media production. Massive thanks to our team who makes the show possible. Worthfull Media for audio editing, Jorge and Veronica from Mosaico Productions for video effects and Amela Subasic for our amazing artwork and graphics.
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