Podcast Evolution: Exploring New Topics and Keeping It Fresh

Krystal: One of my favorite things to see is whenever I have a new message from this community, whether it's a DM on Instagram, it's a random email throughout the week, or especially whenever we get one of our audio messages on our pod inbox page. So today's episode is going to be centered around a question from the community and today's question is from Cathy, and Cathy's question is all about content in specific episodes. I'm not going to give it away. I'm absolutely going to let her shine and ask her question, but it is a really good one that I haven't thought about in a while, because I think once you get into your content, you get into your groove, or maybe you just get into the way that you experiment often with your content. This isn't something that you think about much after you've made some of these decisions. So I'm really excited to explore the different ways we can go with this. So let's get right to it. 

Welcome to the Proffitt Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, Krystal Proffitt, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we? 

Cathy: Well, hey, Krystal, it's Cathy here. I am so grateful for you and thank you. This is a great place for us to ask questions and I'm definitely going to check into it for my caregiver cup podcast. Hey, my question for you is I am exploring options to go ahead and use the podcast platform for a specific audience. For example, i do caregivers, but I'd love to go ahead and do content for a new caregiver in a specific field, like in cancer, or their loved one has a stem cell transplant. I'm looking for your advice to say what are my options. Should it be a series? Should I do a separate podcast episode? What would you recommend? Thank you again for allowing us to ask questions and put our insights here. Have a good day, thanks everybody. 

Krystal: Okay, so first of all, great question, Cathy. Cathy has been a longtime member of this community and I'm so grateful that she is here, and she has shared bits and pieces of her journey with me, and I think that in her asking this question, it's just the next evolution. And so one of the things I wanna highlight real fast is I know specifically with Cathy, she has a podcast about caregivers, and so it can be a broad topic, similar to marketing, where you can have all of these little pockets right, you have all these little sub segments, sub categories underneath it that you could really have an entire podcast on, like she said, cancer. Like I'm sure that is an entire other podcast if somebody wanted to create, you know, something that is specific around the topic of cancer, and then you can boil that down even more. So it's like you can absolutely niche down and down, and down, and down, and down and down, but at some point you get to the bottom of all the niches and you realize, oh, this is so specific that my audience is very, very narrow. And so the reason why I wanna bring that up is because I've had people come to me and have this realization that they do want to get that specific. 

And then they ask me well, do I need to start a second podcast? And I see the look of sheer terror on their face because they're like, i can barely manage this one Do I need? like they think that that's the immediate solution. They think that that's what I'm going to tell them to do, because I have two podcasts. But let's be real, like, this is the first thing I wanna give you. So, Cathy, I have a podcast episode and anybody that's struggling with this idea and it's called Do I Need Multiple Podcasts? So I'm gonna link to it in the show notes and it's like from way back in the archives. This is an older episode but it's still really relevant because I walked through the process of how I came to the decision of starting a second podcast. And, Cathy, i don't think that you do for your question specifically, but I wanted to bring this up in case you were thinking about this or if other people were. 

 And the main reason why I have two separate podcasts is because they are serving two very different purposes. So I have my show, the Profit Podcast. It comes out once a week, maybe more, depending on if we have bonus stuff or other fun things happening, but it's typically every Tuesday. You're gonna have a new episode for me And then for the potty report. This is a daily show that is solo. It is absolutely solo. So y'all don't pitch me on being on the potty report. I've had it happen too many times. It's not from this audience, it's those people that just send out tons of pitches And no, no, your guest cannot be an interview on this podcast because it is a solo only podcast. It's not gonna work. But it is to go deeper with my audience in shorter spurts throughout the week. So it's five minutes or less Monday through Friday. So two totally different styles of podcasting, but it's talking to essentially the same type of person. It's just getting the information to them in a different way. 

 Now for you specifically, Cathy. I'm thinking about the proposition that you gave. The example of caregiver is your ultimate topic, right? That is who you're talking to. You are talking to the caregivers out there, and that could range from someone that is helping someone that's on hospice, or someone that's helping someone through a really hard time, temporarily, or maybe it's even long-term, and I think that with that, it really just has to do with you zooming out as the host and asking what should I talk about that appeals to a broad enough like members of the audience, like a percentage of your entire audience where, if I talk about this a few times, people won't turn it off. Now let me give you an example for this podcast, just to make it a little bit more contextual. 

So I am not an email marketing expert, but I have written emails to my audience since 2018, 2019. Like, I have been writing emails for a really long time, on a weekly basis, sometimes more. I do them for my launches, i do them for my promotions, i know how tagging works, I know how automations work. I know how to settle the things up. So to the average person, you could say oh, crystal really knows email marketing, so I could set it up, because that technically falls under the umbrella of my larger topic, content creation, and I could talk about email marketing easily. 

Now my question and how I would put myself in your same situation is do I create a series about email marketing Maybe it's three episodes long or do I just create one episode, see how it goes, see how the responses from my audience, and then go from there? So this is actually like there's two options on the table that I would take if I were in your shoes contemplating do I talk about a specific topic that seems like it's not as relevant, like high level relevant, to all the other content that I've created, but if it's something you really wanna talk about, this is the key. I don't want you just talking about something, to talk about something like everybody right now is talking about AI and chat to PT and how you can use it in your content, how you can do all these things. If you really wanna talk about that, please do, please do. We had an episode on this podcast about it, but it's not the thing that I really wanna talk about all the time and then all of a sudden just completely pivot and that's all I wanna talk about. 

I wanna talk about podcasting, i wanna talk about content creation and when I think about email marketing, it's one of those topics that really lights me up, like I could easily come up with a three or even a six part series on email marketing. But then when I step back and I ask myself, i'm truly honest with myself and I know my audience, which, Cathy, I'm sure that you know, your audience. I know that you know what they're going through, what they're looking for, what kind of advice, what kind of lessons that you've learned through your own caregiving experience? So if you zoom out and you say, okay, if I do this, does it appeal to the majority of my audience or to the minority, and it's gonna be something that may be a little risky, and if it is on the riskier side not meaning that people are gonna turn you off forever but if you talk about it too much, are people gonna say that's not really why I'm here. Because I know that that's what would happen for this podcast. If I started saying, okay, I'm doing this six part series on email marketing, some people would be like, okay, but that's not really why I'm here, like that's great, but I'll come back whenever your six part series is over. And guess what, not everybody's gonna come back. So that's why I'm saying like that is a little bit riskier And I mean I've said this so many times, i'm more risk averse in so many things that I do, and so I would start with a single episode and see what happens. 

And maybe it's a more generic cancer topic, if that's what you wanna do or like, where it has more broad appeal to a larger portion of your audience, or it could be very specific to the types of cancer or the types of treatment or the types of whatever, whatever the core message that you're gonna have for that episode. You can really focus in on stories that you've heard from members in your audience where you can say you know, i talked to Jane and she was going through this time as a caregiver And this is part of her story. Obviously, you know, do it with her permission, but you wanna say this is what she was going through And I wanted to share about it because I have X, y and Z experience and I think that you would find it helpful. So you have a few different ways to look at it. So lots of options. Right, you could just go all in and say I'm going to do a series on this and then we'll reevaluate what the audience thinks, but I think at the end of the day, you have to go. What you feel like is the right amount of risk for you. I know this is so silly to talk about it being risk versus non-risk, but that's how I think about it. 

I'm so invested in what you my listener think about this podcast that these are the thought processes that I go through when I'm making content decisions. Which is why I know I'm sure Cathy asks this question is because she knows I'm very methodical. I ask a lot of questions to myself and other people whenever I'm thinking about content, but at the end of the day it comes down to a gut feeling. It really does. So much of what I do comes down to a gut feeling and making that decision of is this how I want to proceed with this? And if the answer is yes, then I do it, and then I don't look back. And if it doesn't work this is so key, so listen to me here. Hear this part of the message If it doesn't work, that is okay. 

Meaning if you see your numbers drop, it is okay. If you have people write in and tell you this isn't really like this, this wasn't a great episode, or I didn't really connect with this, then it's okay. It's not the end of the world, then you know, okay, well, at least I learned something. And now I know that maybe that is something I'll just mention within other episodes and I won't dedicate entire episodes to that one topic. But it's super, super important that you experiment and you figure it out. But to Cathy and anybody else that's thinking about trying a new topic in their content and they're just not sure if it's going to work. I'm going to encourage you to do it. Just do it for one. Do it for one episode, like as someone who's created I've created over 1200 episodes, 1200 episodes between the profit podcast and the potty report. I can tell you I have done some crazy experimenting with so many things with my shows and I've never once regretted it. I've learned something every single time. 

And, Cathy, I think of specifically to you when I think about someone that's a caregiver and you being able to talk to their specific experience as a caregiver to someone with cancer. I believe that that is going to really resonate with your audience And I don't know what that looks like Like I'm making a prediction. I'm making a projection here that when you get really specific and talk about caregiving from the lens of helping someone through cancer, things change, like the emotional piece of the human connection changes, because I know what that's like, like I know people in my family that have gone through cancer. I can viscerally, through my body, remember what those experiences were like. You know, when they rang the cancer bell. You know that they were cancer free and just witnessing the entirety of their journey and the ups and the downs and the twists and the turns and the unknowns in that journey. It's such a deep connection And so I said go for it. 

I want you, at the very least, to create at least one podcast episode about this topic. Now you know we can structure it any kind of way that you want to, but I just think that introducing it, as you know, i really wanted to talk about this topic and give the reason, like, truly like. Give. The reason behind it is has someone been asking you about this topic to share, about your specific experience? or have you heard kind of rumblings in your community that people are saying, man, i really wish that she would cover this one topic. Or maybe you get questions in your personal life that you're like gosh, i should really talk about this on the podcast. There's so many reasons why you really want to explore this topic. Share it If you feel comfortable. Share that story. I've been talking about this a lot Like. 

This is the theme of 2023 is share more stories in your content that make it relevant to your listener, because that is what they connect with. They connect with the realness of who you are as a podcast host, not just the expert, not just the person that is seen as the leader in your industry, but as a human. We've relate to human stories, and so I really want to experiment with this and just tell that story of why this topic is important to you and why you wanted to bring it to your audience. Okay, so that is resource number one. I want you to go check it out. Like I said already that it's called, do I need multiple podcasts? And since we're on this topic, so that is a podcast episode. I actually found two YouTube videos that aren't super long I dug these up from the archives too, but they are still relevant for Cathy or anybody else that's in this kind of same predicament And one of them is called solo podcast ideas more than one topic per episode, like question mark on the end, and this is a great one to really hone in on having that one umbrella topic for a specific episode. 

Now, what I mean by this is not shoving a ton of ideas into a single episode where people are like, okay, what did I just get out of that? Or if they can't tell you what the number one takeaway was for them, that's a problem. You need to have at least one very specific topic and don't shove too many ideas in there. This is like a quick reminder, but if anybody is struggling with you know, maybe you listen to Cathy and you're thinking, oh you know, i want to. I want to get on doing more solo content, more solo content. 

I've had several podcasters tell me that recently that they feel like they've mastered the interviews. They really enjoy them, but they want to branch out and do more solo content. Well, i want you to go watch this video, because it's kind of a cautionary tale of shoving way too many ideas into a single episode. So go check that out. And then the third resource that I have to share with you is the second YouTube video, and it's podcast topic ideas how to get specific. So this is the idea of taking something that is broad and niching it down to where it's the right amount for your audience, your listener, and so I want you to go explore this too, because maybe it could spark some ideas on what you could do within your caregiver umbrella to have some of these more specific topics and what that looks like. But at the end of the day, i just keep going back to in my mind. I really want you to experiment with your content. This isn't just for Cathy, this is for everybody, and there's a lot of different ways that you can do that, and one of the ones is your format, the format of your podcast. 

Don't think that once you say I'm just going to do interviews only, or I'm only going to do solo content, or I'm always going to do a podcast that's 23 and a half minutes long, or I'm always going to do one that's 44 and a half minutes long, like I have heard all of the you know absurdities that are out there, because I've said them too. I have said them so many times And if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know things don't say the same around here And that's kind of on purpose. I don't want you to predict what's coming down the road. I really don't. I don't want you to settle into okay, crystal's going to talk for exactly 23 and a half minutes, and then next week she's going to do an interview and it's going to be 44 and a half minutes long. Like I don't. I don't want that. 

I don't want my content to get predictable, and it's not just for you, that's really for me, because to me I'm not going to say that I'm going to get predictable turns into boring in my creative space Right. Like I know that there's some people that they need that predictability in order to get their content like going and making it very simple for them to create content. I get that. Oh my gosh, i have a hundred percent been there. I've been there several times in my journey, like all of 2021, the only way that I created so much content two podcast episodes a week, three YouTube videos, five episodes for the potty report, the weekly email newsletter, posting on social media Like it was so much content and a lot of it was predictable, a lot of it was. 

It started to get to a point where I was hitting that like burnout, like I was bumping up against burnout, and so much of it was because I was becoming predictable. And that's when I had to shake things up a little bit and change things because it was too much. It was too much for one. It was way too much content that I was producing and I was starting to get bored with the process of creating it. And so, Cathy, this is like another. Like I feel like we're in like an underlying therapy session. 

I've been calling myself like a podcast therapist for a while and I feel like once I start digging a little bit deeper too, that could be what it is and that's okay. This is okay, and what I mean by that is the topic of caregiving could be something that is a little broad and you want to get more specific, you want to get more niche in some of these areas that you haven't explored yet. But maybe it makes you a little nervous. This is exactly what happened to me Whenever I wanted to start talking about podcasting. It made me nervous. I was like, oh, my entire audience is going to leave, which was a good thing, it was fine, because I didn't have a huge audience anyway. When I decided to change to the profit podcast that's neither here nor there, right, but it did happen. Like I had a lot of people leave because they were like, oh, she's talking about podcasting now, that's not really what I signed up for. But if that's the root of the issue, if you're nervous, if you're scared remember we talked about the riskiness. That's why you go with something small and you just commit to saying I'm going to dedicate a podcast episode to experimenting. So not just for Cathy, but for anybody. 

Going from a solo to an interview episode, or from interviews to solo episodes, or going from a typical 45 minute episode down to 15 minutes, this is okay. Do you know this? Do I need to say this? I feel like all the time, what I'm doing behind the scenes to so many of you in this community is giving you permission. I know this sounds super simple and it sounds a little silly, but I do So. Much of my job is giving you permission to do what you want with your podcast, like this me saying, yeah, you can absolutely do a solo podcast. Or yeah, you can absolutely do a topic about something you've never talked about before. It's okay, you can do it, but at the end of the and I don't mind doing that I'll give you permission. All day long. 

Everybody come to me with your questions. I love answering them because they're so fun to explore the different challenges and see the situations that you're facing. I love putting myself in your shoes because it reminds me of where we all are on. Our journeys is so different, but there's so many pieces of it that we can interconnect and learn from, and this is what I love so much about this community. So, oh, Cathy, I'm so excited for you. I love the idea of your show helping caregivers and for anybody else that's out there that is in the same realm, like you are helping people I want you to think about. Actually, I have another podcast episode. If you have not listened to it yet, please go listen to the ripple effect of podcasting, because those of you that are helping people, that are helping others that ripple effect is incredible and it will blow your mind when you start to think about it. 

Because when I think about Cathy's podcast, I don't just think about the person that's listening to it that is possibly in need of a lot of help or wants to know that they're not the only one going through maybe this really hard time by themselves. Maybe nobody else around them gets it. I think about that person finding Cathy's podcast and starting to feel this relief of okay, it's not just me. This other person who's created this entire podcast knows exactly what I'm going through or can at least relate to it. It's those little moments of hopefully relief that they're feeling and maybe even a sense of belonging to a larger community, or maybe even having this idea of I can take a deep breath. Now I think about whether those are parents, they're grandparents, their brothers, their sisters, whoever they are, where they are in their journey in this world, that it would make them a better person or that it would make them have a different experience in life just because they listen to Cathy's podcast. I just love thinking about this so much. 

Go check out the Ripple Effect of Podcasting. I'm going to link to that in the show notes, as well as all the other resources that we talked about here today. Again, Cathy, thank you so much for this question and for being a member of this community. That's all I have for y'all today. Make sure you take a screenshot wherever you're listening to this and tag me If you have a question. Let me know what it is. 

Tag me on Instagram and say, Krystal, I want to be the next listener segment. I want to be the next listener submitted question. You can go to our pod inbox page. I'm going to link to it in the show notes, but it's Krystalproffit.com or, sorry, hang on, nope, podinbox.com/theproffittpodcast is where you're going to find it. Again, you don't have to remember that URL. I'll have it linked in the show notes, but go check it out. If you want to be featured on the show, just like Cathy, then submit your question there and you have a very good chance of being on the podcast. Make sure you're subscribed or following the show wherever you are listening. As always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.