Welcome to Day 3, and this is where we tie down the details of our Podcast. It's time to… and I'm sorry for this… Strategize!

Today we're looking to plan our strategy for the first (or next, if you're already rolling) few months of Podcasting. Passion about your subject is great, but we really need to direct it into a set of focused and measureable aims to make sure that we make our Podcating efforts worth it. Let's get started!

What's so Important about a Strategy?

So, why do we need a strategy? That's just a corporate buzzword, surely! Well, not in this case.

It's a really common situation – a Podcaster dives into producing their first few episodes with the vague idea that:

• I'm going to talk all about How to Run a Triathlon, and we'll see how it goes.
• I think I'll teach a bit of web design, a little marketing, maybe even some productivity for small business.

Your audience has no clear message to latch on to, so you grow slowly. And you have such a wide range of topics that it's actually harder to choose and make something compelling.

A podcast is the same as any other piece of content really, and the phrase ‘Content Strategy’ has been around for years. Firstly, Podcasting is not a quick thing to do. Much like writing blog posts, it takes time and effort to create an episode – more time and effort than a single blog post I’d argue.

Defining your strategy starts with aims, and these aims allow evaluation. Evaluation is really the only thing that lets you check whether your Podcasting efforts are worth the time you invest in it. Only by having clear aims can you evaluate whether you’ve been successful in your efforts.

Translated: always set yourself up so that you can check you’re not wasting your time!

Another advantage of a strategy is that it makes your podcast much more focussed, keeping it on target. This helps with a couple of things: interest and quality. First of all, a podcast that is always on-point, talking about the things that really inspire its fans, will always be much more popular than one that is general, rambling and often off-topic. Second, rambling and un-focussed aren’t exactly by-words for quality, are they? And what’s the point of doing something if it isn’t good quality?

Lastly, having a good, sharp strategy at the start will keep you going when times are tough. It’s much more easy to create new episodes when you have clear aims, clear topics and some personas that you can speak to. You’ll create all of those within your strategy and they’ll help you along the way when podcasting topics seem hard to come by.