Editorial Territory for Podcasts: Why Your Show Needs One

Quick take:

If you run a business podcast and every few weeks you find yourself opening a blank document wondering what to talk about next, I don't think that's really an ideas problem. Most experts I talk to could come up with 50 topics if I forced them to. An architect can talk about planning permission, budgets, floor plans, materials, contractors, extensions, sustainability. A wealth advisor can talk about retirement, investments, tax, estate planning, exits. A wedding photographer can talk about timelines, lighting, venues, posing, first looks.

Plenty of topics exist. A list of topics doesn't add up to a point of view, and it definitely doesn't guarantee that after someone listens to ten episodes, they understand what you're good at.

This grew out of an episode where I was playing publishing partner for a wealth advisor. Instead of organizing the show by service category, January is retirement, February is tax, March is investments, I started organizing it around moments in the client's life, the three years before a founder sells their company, the first year after liquidity, living with concentrated wealth. Halfway through, it was clear this deserved its own episode, because we weren't really talking about a wealth management idea anymore. It's a bigger editorial strategy idea.

Say you hire me tomorrow and send over a spreadsheet with 80 episode ideas. That sounds great, I'd rather have too many than none. But I'm probably not going to ask which one to record first. I'm going to start grouping them:

Underneath all of that, I want to find the bigger territory you're qualified to own.

A topic is something you can talk about.

An editorial territory is an area where I want the market to associate the thinking with you. That's a much higher bar.

Take retirement planning. It's a topic, and a huge one. There are thousands of pieces of content already exist about it.

Example: The three years before a founder sells the business is a territory.

Inside it there's room for: retirement, tax, liquidity, concentrated wealth, estate planning, lifestyle, identity after an exit, what happens to income, what should get decided before a transaction instead of after.

Now the expertise has context, and more importantly, the right listener has a reason to think this is for someone like me.

Let’s take a completely different industry, wedding photography.

Wedding photography tips is broad.

How to create a wedding day photography timeline is slightly more specific.

But if the photographer's real philosophy is that couples shouldn't disappear from their own wedding for two hours just to get beautiful photographs, now there's a territory:

How to get extraordinary wedding photographs without turning your wedding into a photo shoot.

Suddenly there's room for:

Different episodes, but all reinforcing the same idea. After hearing four of them, someone has more than "this person photographs weddings." They understand how this photographer thinks about weddings, and that's far more valuable.

I don't want every recording cycle starting from zero, sitting down with a founder twice a month asking whether anything interesting happened at work that week. That's not a publishing system. With four or five strong territories, planning gets easier, because now the question becomes what haven't we explained yet inside this territory, rather than what should we talk about this time.

Constraints make editorial decisions easier. If your own catalog already feels like a collection of individually reasonable episodes that don't quite add up to anything, that's exactly what the Founder Podcast Authority Audit's positioning and editorial strategy sections are built to surface.

You can build an architecture podcast around planning, budgets, materials, design, contractors, renovations, all relevant topics. But imagine one of your ideal clients is planning a high-end custom home and has never done anything like it before. One territory could be the decisions homeowners don't know they'll need to make before construction begins:

Still not running out of ideas, because the search stopped being scattered.

Editorial territory is one reason to be cautious about interview shows built entirely around who's available this month, a branding expert, then an investor, then someone who wrote a book about leadership, then an AI founder, then someone who climbed Everest. All interesting people. What is the show becoming known for?

Guests absolutely can work in founder podcasts. But I'd want the territory first, then ask who could help explore it. A wealth advisor whose territory is three years before an exit might bring in an M&A attorney, a tax advisor, a founder who's sold a company, an estate planning attorney. Now the guests deepen the territory instead of pulling the show in five unrelated directions.

If you've worked with a social media manager or content coach, you've probably heard the term content pillars. It's related, but I'd draw a distinction. Content pillars often become categories, marketing, leadership, culture, growth, filing cabinets that tell me where to put content without telling me what you believe or why the audience should associate that area with you.

A useful editorial territory has a person, a situation, a problem, often a point of view. Instead of leadership, the first leadership hires a founder makes before the company is ready for management layers. Instead of client experience, the decisions a luxury service client needs to make before they can evaluate providers properly. Instead of podcast strategy, how a founder's podcast becomes useful to the business instead of becoming another content obligation, which is basically one of the territories running through this show.

Territories should overlap a little, expertise overlaps, clients' problems overlap, some episodes will sit between two. That's fine, nobody's checking whether episode 23 technically belongs in two categories. I wouldn't aim for 12 of these, that probably defeats the point. Three to five strong, slightly overlapping territories is enough to give a catalog real structure.

If you already have 20 or 30 episodes, start there. Put every episode title into one document, ignore dates and episode numbers, just look at the ideas and start grouping.

That last one matters. Interesting doesn't equal strategic. I don't want to discover that your strongest editorial territory happens to be something you have no commercial interest in being known for, we're still building a business podcast.

This connects back to why old episodes should still be working for you well after publish day. Once a territory exists, the archive stops being episode four, episode eight, episode nine, episode 17, episode 28, and starts looking like start here if you're preparing to sell your company, here are six episodes. Start here if you're planning your custom home, here are eight. Start here if you're trying to turn your founder podcast into a client acquisition asset, here are five.

That's the difference between a feed and a library.

Forget individual episode titles for a minute. Imagine someone listening to ten episodes.

Could they finish this sentence: This is the podcast I listen to when I want to understand ___.

If the answer is: business, marketing, or leadership, there's real work to do, because those categories are enormous.

But if it's this is the show I listen to when I want to understand what I should do with my wealth before and after selling my company, or this is the architect I listen to because they explain the expensive decisions before I start building, or this is the photographer I listen to because she cares about getting incredible photographs without making the wedding revolve around them, now you know what you own.

An editorial territory is a specific problem or area of expertise the market comes to associate with a particular person, built from a recurring point of view rather than a loose collection of related topics.

Content pillars often function as categories like leadership or growth, useful for organizing content but not for showing what someone specifically believes. An editorial territory includes a person, a situation, a problem, and usually a point of view.

Around three to five tends to work well. Enough to give the show real structure without spreading it so thin that no single territory gets explored deeply.

List every episode title in one place, ignore publish dates and episode numbers, and group them by pattern. Look for recurring opinions, topics that attract the right conversations afterward, and groups that correspond to problems people pay for.

When guest selection becomes the editorial strategy, the show can end up covering many interesting but unrelated topics, making it hard for listeners to describe what the show is about. Choosing a territory first, then finding guests who deepen it, tends to solve this.

I take one idea from the wealth advisor episode and give it a full episode of its own: why a business podcast doesn't need more topics, it needs a specific territory the market comes to associate with your thinking.

The Founder Podcast Authority Audit looks at your positioning, editorial strategy, packaging, discoverability, publishing system, and commercial path.

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