(That Most People Skip)
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If you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast, there’s a good chance the first question you’ve asked yourself is something like: what should my first episode be about? What should I name the show? It feels like the logical place to start. You’re launching a show, you need content, so you figure out what to talk about first. But that question, as natural as it feels, is the wrong place to begin. And starting there, without answering what comes before it, is one of the biggest reasons podcasts end up feeling disconnected from the business behind them and stop within six months.
The questions to answer before starting a podcast aren’t about titles or topics or episode formats. They go deeper than that. They’re the foundation everything else gets built on, and when you skip them, you feel it later. Your episodes start to wander. The show starts to feel like content for the sake of content. It’s not leading to clients. Your email list isn’t growing. And you can’t quite figure out why, because the episodes are good, the topics are interesting, but something is just off.
Nine times out of ten, that feeling traces back to the foundation not being laid before the first episode was ever recorded.
These are the four questions worth sitting with before you hit record on anything.
Question One: Who Is Your Show For, Specifically?
Not a broad category. Not “women in business” or “online coaches” or “moms.” A real, specific person. Think about a current client, a past client, someone you’d love to work with. What is going on in her life right now? What is she trying to figure out? What does she want that she hasn’t been able to sort out on her own yet? What’s making her feel stuck?
The more specific you get, the better your podcast will be. And here’s what happens when you get it right… the person who finds your show knows immediately that it was made for her. She’s thinking, she’s speaking directly to me. That’s when she starts bingeing your back catalog. That’s when trust builds fast. That’s when she reaches out already halfway convinced you’re the person she wants to work with.
The other people, the ones who don’t fit that exact description, they’ll still listen. They’ll self-select what’s useful to them and some of them will still want to work with you. But you can’t get there by trying to speak to everyone at once. If your answer to this question is something like “anyone who wants to grow their business,” keep going. That’s a category, not a person. Get more specific.
Question Two: What Do You Want Them to Do After Each Episode?
Every episode needs a job, and that job should connect to something real in your business. Do you want them to join your email list? Book a discovery call? Download your freebie? Visit a sales page? Keep listening to the next episode? There’s no wrong answer, but there has to be an answer.
A podcast without a clear next step is a great conversation that ends with no direction. You’ve spent time building something with that listener over twenty or thirty minutes, and then it just stops. They might come back next week, but you’ve left them without a path into your world. You’re not leading them anywhere, which means the trust you just built doesn’t have anywhere to go.
Before you record each episode, know what you want your listener to do next. Make sure the episode is leading them there. It doesn’t always have to point to an offer. Sometimes it leads to another episode that will do more of the nurturing work. But the direction needs to be intentional, not an afterthought.
Question Three: What Does Your Podcast Do That Social Media Can’t?
This one is worth sitting with because the answer shapes everything about how you show up when you record.
Social media creates awareness. Someone is scrolling, they find you, they see your name. That’s the job it does well. But if that same person goes looking for your podcast and presses play, something different starts happening. They’re hearing your voice. They’re hearing how you think, what you believe, how you explain things. Words land differently when they’re spoken than when they’re read. The warmth, the tone, the personality that gets lost in a caption, none of that gets lost in audio.
A podcast builds the kind of trust that turns a stranger into someone who already feels like they know you before they ever reach out. That takes time, and it takes you showing up consistently and saying the real things about what you know and believe. That’s a different job than social media is doing, and when you know that going in, you record differently. You stop chasing downloads and start making episodes that feel like they were made specifically for that one person you identified in question one.
Those are not competing goals. They’re actually the same goal, approached the right way.
Question Four: What’s the One Thing You Want to Be Known For?
Not five things. Not your whole offer suite. One thing. The clearest, most specific version of what you do, who you help, and why it matters.
This is the hard one for a lot of people, and it’s worth being honest about that. When your podcast doesn’t have a clear answer to this question, your episodes start to wander. One week it’s one topic, the next week it’s something completely different, the week after that it’s whatever feels relevant in the moment. For a longtime listener, that might be fine. But a new listener who finds your show and can’t quickly figure out what it stands for and whether it’s for her, she’s going to leave.
When every episode points back to the same core idea in a different way, your podcast starts to feel like a body of work. It stands for something. It has a point of view. And that is what makes people tell other people about your show.
Getting specific doesn’t mean you can’t have other offers or serve other people. It means the show has a clear center of gravity that everything orbits around, and that clarity is what draws more people in.
Why These Four Questions Come Before Everything Else
Topics, titles, episode formats, cover art, all of it gets built from these four things. When you can answer them clearly, everything that comes after them gets easier. Episode ideas flow more naturally because you know who you’re talking to and what you want them to do. Your content stops wandering because you know what you’re building toward. The show starts to feel less like a content obligation and more like a real business tool.
If you already have a podcast, these questions are just as worth revisiting. If something has felt off, if the episodes aren’t leading anywhere or the show doesn’t feel quite aligned with where your business is right now, coming back to these four questions is usually where the answer lives.
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