Let me tell you a little story about podcasting, if I may.I've been a big follower of podcasts for a couple of years now. I've got my favorites, which span a number of genres, but I've been consistently impressed with the quality of the productions (for the most part) and the great content. When my daily commute was an hour each way, I consumed podcasts regularly and they ruined me for traditional radio.
As I recounted in one of my all-time favorite posts, There Are Riches in Niches, I was mulling over two podcasting ideas with Bryan Person, host of New Comm Road. He gave me some valuable advice, which was to be unique, serve a small audience, and do it well.
So, with that in mind, I took the plunge and started producing a podcast last month.
To be frank, I had very low expectations for it. It is a podcast strictly focused on a sub-segment of the literary world - specifically, of Sherlock Holmes devotees. It's definitely an educated group, but not technologically advanced, so I figured that if I got 35 listeners, I'd be lucky. After all, this is uber-niche.
Imagine my surprise when I checked my stats and saw that my audience is nearly 5 times what I expected!
So What's the Secret?
There are a number of factors that went into getting such a large audience, and as I'm only on my third show, I'm sure I'll be learning a great deal more as the show continues to grow. In a post tomorrow, I'll share with you some of the specific actions and steps that I took to achieve what I have.
In the meantime, I was pleased to find a nice blurb on the SplashCast blog today, courtesy of Marshall Kirkpatrick:
I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere is a really neat example of niche audio content with supporting blog posts. Scott Monty and Burt Wolder have also done a great job of leveraging a whole bunch of different services to create the beginnings of their online community. You can even get the show’s intro audio as a ringtone! I am impressed.Thank, you Marshall. We're pretty impressed ourselves.
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