FAQ

Podcasting FAQ

Thinking about a podcast? Get answers about strategy, production, growth, and what to expect.

Is Podcasting Right for Me?

  • Yes. For a founder-led service business, a podcast can help more of the right people get to know you, trust your expertise, and feel confident about working with you.

    You don’t need thousands of listeners to make that worthwhile. The right 50 to 200 people, ideal clients, referral partners, and guests, can be a valuable audience. Every episode gives them a chance to hear how you think, understand how you solve problems, and discover what working with you might feel like. When they’re ready for a conversation, you’ve already given them a foundation of trust.

    The value also extends beyond listening:

    • Inviting a guest creates an opportunity to build a relationship.

    • A useful episode gives a referral partner something to share.

    • One conversation can become video clips, social posts, and email content that keep your expertise working between recordings.

    However, making podcasting worthwhile takes the right audience and consistent publishing. Forge helps you reach the right people with the strategy and production support to keep showing up.

  • Sometimes you shouldn't, and we will tell you so. It takes time, money, and a willingness to keep showing up, and it’s best suited to businesses where your expertise and relationships help clients choose you.

    If you need immediate leads or your customers don’t need to get to know you before buying, another marketing approach may be a better fit.

    Our free Should I Have a Podcast? assessment helps you think through those questions. You can also book a Podcast Clarity Call, where we’ll explore your goals, audience, and ideas together and help you decide whether podcasting makes sense for your business.

  • Founder-led B2B service businesses, where you are the reason clients hire the firm. That includes coaches, consultants, financial and accounting practices, law firms, health and wellness practitioners, and plenty of niches in between. We also work with mission-driven organizations such as nonprofits and associations whose podcast advances the mission.

    Industry matters less than the shape of your business. If you sell a high-trust service, your sales cycle is measured in weeks or months, and clients are really buying you, a podcast can be a great fit.

  • Many of our clients aren’t natural hosts. Some read from a script at first, some are uncomfortable on camera, and most felt like impostors on episode one.

    Here is what changes that: you are not performing; you are explaining things you already know to people who want to hear them.

    Our job is to make that feel safe. You can stop, restart, and take another run at a thought. Nothing goes out until it sounds like you at your best. We coach you between episodes, and hosting gets easier faster than anyone expects.

  • Slower than an ad and longer than any campaign, because a podcast is not a campaign. It is an asset that compounds. Episode three will probably not produce a client. Episode thirty, with two years of your thinking searchable and shareable, changes how every sales conversation starts.

    Most of our clients see the first signals inside the first year:

    • Prospects who mention an episode

    • Guests become clients

    • More referrals come in already warm

    The better question is what your reputation looks like eighteen months from now if you start, and what it looks like if you don't.

Getting Started / General

  • We talk about your business first and podcasting second. Who do you want to reach? What do they need to believe about you before they hire you? What would this show need to do for your business to be worth it?

    Then, we work through your ideas together, helping you refine the concept and give your show a clear direction. You leave with a better understanding of what your podcast could be and whether it’s the right move for your business. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you.

    Book a Podcast Clarity Call →

  • Most podcasts fail before they launch because the founder skipped two things.

    • A marketing strategy for who the show is for and why they would care

    • A production strategy for how it will actually get made every week.

    The Launch Box is how we build both before you record a single episode. Working with our strategy partners at Brand3, we define your ideal listener and study the shows already competing for their attention. Then, we shape your show’s name, messaging, and overall direction, and build a clear plan for producing and promoting it.

    You come out the other side with a show that has a reason to exist and a plan to keep existing.

    Learn More →

  • No. For remote recordings, your Launch Box includes a quality USB microphone and headphones, plus setup instructions. If you already have gear you like, we’ll make sure it works.

    For in-person recordings, we provide and set up the equipment for you.

  • Bryan Steele, our founder, leads strategy and is typically in the room or on the call for your recordings, with members of our team stepping in when needed. Our small remote team also handles editing, show notes, publishing, and support.

  • Plan on a year. Podcasts pay off on consistency, and a year is long enough to build a back catalog and see what it does for your pipeline.
    We recommend a weekly show.

    Shows that publish weekly are about four times as likely to still be publishing two years later as shows on a loose schedule. It’s also the cadence our Top 5% guarantee is built around.

  • Yes, and you’re in good company. Most shows that stop do so within about four months. Our Podcast Rescue Plan audits what you’ve built so far: the concept, the audience, the production, and what got in the way.

    You get a clear read on whether to relaunch, rework, or retire the show, and a plan for whichever it is. If you decide to bring it back, we can take production off your plate from there.

  • Yes. Internal podcasts work the same way as public ones, just pointed inward: a leader's voice reaching a distributed team on their commute instead of in another all-hands. We handle recording, editing, and private distribution so only your people can hear it.

    It is a good fit for companies with remote teams, frequent onboarding, or a founder whose thinking the whole company needs to hear.

Recording & Production

  • Book a guest or jot down what you want to talk about. Show up, talk, and leave. That’s it!
    We handle recording support, editing, show notes, artwork, publishing, distribution, and clips. You never touch an audio file or an RSS feed.
    If a podcast is going to add hours to your week, it won't survive your calendar, so we keep a majority of the work off your plate.

  • For every episode:

    • Recording support, audio and video, in person or online

    • Editing for pace, flow, and clean sound

    • Show notes and a transcript, with links

    • Finished audio and video files

    • Distribution to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and every major platform, plus YouTube for video

    • Social media assets such as a clip, an audiogram, or a graphic

    • Analytics on downloads, listener locations, and platforms

    • A web player to embed on your site

    We also conduct quarterly reviews of the show and have strategy conversations whenever you need one.

  • Both, and no. We are based just outside Wichita and record in person with clients in the area. For everyone else, we record remotely with a setup we walk you through, and the result sounds the same. We work with B2B podcasters across the United States.

  • Both. We record and edit video alongside audio, publish the full episode to YouTube, and cut short clips for social media from every episode. For most of our clients, those clips end up being the most visible part of the show.

  • You will always know where each episode is, from recording to published. We share a simple production schedule for your show, and you get analytics for every episode: downloads, where listeners are, and what platforms they use. Quarterly, we sit down together to look at what the show has done and where it should go next.

Promotion & Growth

  • We give you the tools and the raw material:

    • A launch promotion plan

    • A guest pitch guide to help you get booked on other shows

    • A marketing roadmap, and three ready-to-post social assets from every episode

    We also help you choose guests who are your ideal clients or referral partners, which is where B2B shows do most of their growing. What we do not do is run your social accounts or your ad campaigns. If you want that, we will point you to partners who do it well.

  • If you publish weekly with us, we guarantee your show will rank in the top 5% of podcasts worldwide within one year.

    We measure it with Listen Notes, an independent podcast search engine that ranks about 3.8 million shows by its Listen Score, a popularity estimate updated roughly every month. It is the closest thing podcasting has to a public, third-party scoreboard, and you can look your show up yourself.

  • About six in ten podcasts never publish a tenth episode. One in five stop after a single episode, and it’s almost never because the host ran out of things to say.

    It’s because of five things that have nothing to do with talent:

    • They underestimated the workload. Recording is the easy hour. Editing, notes, artwork, and publishing eat the rest of the week. That’s why at Forge, we do all of it.

    • They ran out of time. Founders already have a full-time job, but your only job here is to show up and talk.

    • They had no strategy for reaching the right audience. The Launch Box defines who the show is for before you record.

    • Nobody held them accountable. Having a recording on the calendar with a team waiting for you is a powerful thing.

    • Nobody was there to coach them. You get actionable feedback and a sounding board after every episode.