One element of podcasting that you may encounter as hosts is interviewing guests. With that comes an entirely new process that you will have to go over apart from your usual solo episodes. Learn how you can smoothly go through it as we talk about guest scheduling – starting out with guest invitations and organizing your guests, easing both sides towards the actual interview without much work. Be familiar with the kinds of emails you will be sending out – from solicitation and communication emails to information requests and more. Finally, get in touch with the various tools available online that will help you automate your processes, taking you from the hassle of training and coping up with sudden changes.

Welcome to week two of Brandcaster’s client call.

I’ve been on four webinars and I did a social media masterclass.

That was on Facebook. You can go find that on the Feed Your Brand Facebook page if you didn’t see it or you’d like to check it out.

We also are going to put it into the podcast because there was such great response from it.

I was told it’s also in the resources section of our customer dashboard at PodcastStartPoint.com. You all should know your links will always work but on PodcastStartPoint.com, where you log into the dashboard it’s migrating to Pod.ad as our new URL because of the advertising function of being able to put ads. We’ll let you all know more about that. Just in case you see it, don’t panic.

What we’re trying to do with all of these client calls and some of the other things that we did like the social media class, it’s not a class about how to use social media or how to post on Facebook. It’s how I organize us here with our podcasts so that I can proliferate and get out with my team that many messages a week. It’s how I organize those messages and all of those different things that might be on the organizational side or the tactical planning side of things and the strategic planning side of things. Also, how I measure that and because for me, if it’s not converting, it’s work. I don’t want to do more work than I need to. That’s our ultimate goal here with you is to help you get organized in any way, shape or form. We’re going to talk about guest invitations and organizing your guests through the whole process so that it does it for you, so that there’s very little work for you and/or if to use a VA, so it organizes your virtual assistant for you.

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This is intended at least once a month for this call like we did the Facebook class stream which anybody could see. These are just for clients. These webinars on the last Friday of every month is to go over tips, best practices or any things that are changing whether that’s podcasts system like Apple changed with iOS 11. A lot of things that are relevant and important to podcasts or if Google changes something in their algorithms, this is a place where we’re going to talk about anything that we think is important for you to know. It gives you a chance to ask questions about things that may have come up for you that maybe you haven’t had time to email about or you’d rather have a live answer.

I liked this subject now because we have a few clients that are very organized in preparing what they want to record, whether it’s their own shows or the guests that they want to interview. We see a lot of people making their own spreadsheet whether that’s in Google Sheets or their own actual Excel Spreadsheet where they organize lots of information. We understand that but there are also some best practices we want to share about soliciting guests, how to get them to do most of the work in providing you the information that you need on who they are, their bio, their links to their sites, their social media links, and all that stuff. If you communicate with them via email, we have some things to share with you on that as well.

Let’s talk a little bit about how we organize this and how we’re going to go through this. The number one thing that we do is we have an editorial calendar. We plan and we go through and think about this and we like to do it at least a couple of months ahead of time. A minimum of 30 days ahead of time.

You’ve got to plan at least a month out if you’re not going to end up recording haphazardly.

We plan that out also because you need to give your guests notice. You need to invite them so that they can schedule on their best time that works for them and the best time that works for you. That’s one of the things that we do is we plan this editorial calendar. If we’re going to record some guest episodes, we record it in the first week of the month if we can. If we’re traveling, then we shift it a little bit but we plan to always record at least one to two days in the first week of the month. We’ll offer up a third day somewhere else in the middle of the month in case someone wasn’t available or we have someone fell through or something happened. We want to make sure we always have a backup date ready. We plan three total dates across the month that we record. We don’t record on just any date in the month and that’s part of our organizational structure. It’s how we get it, so it doesn’t overwhelm us and it doesn’t take over our calendar and our schedule.

We had it happen where we had a guest who only fifteen or twenty minutes before the scheduled time for the interview had to cancel last minute. Something came up and that happens. We then offer them up rather that additional date as an option. We try not to do it because we don’t want to disrupt the rest of the month workflow, but it depends on how important the guest is. If it’s important to you to accommodate them but in general, we don’t let guests drive our recording schedule.

PDZ 4 | Guest Scheduling

Guest Scheduling: Do not let guests drive your recording schedule. You’re doing them a favor. This is good publicity for them and that it should be them who goes around you.

 

You’re doing them a favor. This is publicity. They should be glad to be on your show. They’re not doing you a favor. We got to keep that in mind. This is good publicity for them and that they should go around your schedule. I’m an Inc. columnist and I demand that they schedule on my available time. If you approach it that way, it’ll make it a lot easier to handle. It will seem less overwhelming to you. We plan this editorial calendar. We think about who we want to invite as guests. We do have a virtual assistant who will research some things for us and go out there and say, “There’s someone new doing this.” Because the 3D printing portion of our business is not the primary job that we have. We needed somebody else to help us research it. For Feed Your Brand, we know exactly who we want or product launching. We know exactly who we want to invite because these are the people we’re interacting with and networking with every day. They’re the high-value people in our industry so we know what we’re doing there.

There’ll be an episode with Jennifer Spencer and talking about guest influencers. She’s talking about it from the perspective of finding a good guest. There’s an episode on that and we did one on how to get guests. There’s a couple of episodes out there if you want some more information on that then we solicit those guests. We’ve got them planned, we have our list and here’s the thing. A lot of people leave this to their assistant and I found it to be, over time, a failure. It takes longer. It’s a waste of time. The guests that you want to invite gets insulted that you didn’t personally invite them especially if you happen to know them or they’re in your network. I find that the easiest way is to reach out and send in a standard email. Have a draft of it and have it ready to go. I substitute a couple of things and it’s fairly simple. We will get a copy to you.

Most clients should have received a copy of this at some point in their setup but it’s also going to be available in the resource section of our site. A guest solicitation email example. We have some standard copy. It’s like, “Greetings. My name is Jane Smith and I’m the assistant for Tom Hazzard of the Feed Your Brand podcast.” We do put in a specific sentence about the proposed subject or topic that we intend to record with them.

Which is why it goes back to that editorial calendar. When we think I’ve met the guest that we’re going to invite, we also think about the topic we want to cover with them. While we know that they may have general experience and they may be great to chit-chat with, and that’s going to be wonderful, we still want to focus it so that we’re getting across one major topic and message or one major set of questions. Sometimes in the conversation, they’re doing something so new that we never heard of before and it goes awry. That’s okay. We’re flexible because we haven’t set this in stone. It’s just a plan. It’s flexible. What I also do with the solicitation of the guests is I find LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the best ways. If you don’t know someone, rather than having your assistant do it which is a way to say, “Would you be interested?” especially when you’re going into a corporation trying to find the right person within a company, the assistant is the way to go. If you’re trying to go direct, I message them on LinkedIn and I connect with them. If they’re somebody high profile, I get them to notice me ahead of time. I start commenting on their posts even though they’re not connected to me. I might do that before I ask for the connection and then message them. Now I don’t seem like someone they don’t know. They think they know me. That’s how that works for me. I’ve never had a failure and scheduling is another thing. Sometimes they’re not always available on the schedule you want but I’ve never had them say no. That’s one of the ways that I find the best way to get through it. You could try it on Facebook, but I don’t find it as successful there.

I want to finish up on this solicitation email. It’s like, “We’d like to know if you’d be willing to be interviewed on our podcast. Once you confirm that you’re willing to be a guest, we’ll send you another email with a link to schedule your interview on our online booking calendar.” This is a very important tool. We’re going to highly recommend all of you to use it if you’re not already. “Please let me know if you have any questions in the meantime and I look forward to hearing back from you.” That’s one example of that first guest solicitation email.

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There’s a reason why that link isn’t in that because sometimes we don’t know if they’re going to be a right fit, so we want to get a little background. We might want to get a little more information so we’re connecting back and forth with them to make sure that they are going to take the initiative. If they don’t take the initiative and we have to keep pushing them, we don’t want them to also sub it out to some junior assistant to be on the podcast if we invited them. We always want to build this dialogue and relationship going back and forth so we send them the link after they’ve responded.

That’s our guests scheduling. We have an email example for that, “We’re excited to have you. Come on to the Feed Your Brand podcast. Go to this booking link, select a day that’s available.” On our calendar, there are only two days available per month on the calendar. They can only book on the days that we’re willing to record. We restrict that.

This is our Basecamp. We use it with our product clients. We built a whole Basecamp and it’s our way of using projects. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a project management software. What we like it for is otherwise you’ll end up with tons of emails that you don’t know who and when they sent them. We forced it all into the base camp so it’s an email tray. We do use this with the episodes as well. You can see we’ve planned out. This is WTFFF?! for March 2019. We planned out some blogs we were going to do that on separate. Sometimes we do that. We used to do an occasional replay. It didn’t go over so well so we stopped doing that. What we do here is we plan out an episode, we title it, we’ve given it the number, and we’ve given it the date that it’s going to air. It’s getting emailed to some of the people in the team. We also have some comments here, which is where it sends you over to that. This is where we put the bio information and any photos they send us. Anything that they’ve sent us via email gets dumped here so that our team can use it. You’ll see this is where those wonderful headers that you get created. They were here because this was created for us and we used to drop this in before the team did this portion for us. That’s where that went.

There are the guests’ information that we added to remind ourselves so that we have a place where we’ve recorded this ahead of time or either before the interview or during the interview. When we go to submit this episode for production, everything’s in one place. When you go to the customer dashboard, you know you have to enter all those web links, bio information and stuff like that. You can go and copy here from Basecamp or your calendar. It could be Google Calendar, it could be a number of different tools and then paste it into your episode requests. That’s all right there.

For us here, this is where we specify the title. We’ll change them on a recording in case the messaging changed. In case, as we were recording and we go, “That doesn’t fit anymore. Let’s change the title.” It isn’t until we’ve recorded this that it goes final. For you, you would go from here to the dashboard and enter it from there. From there, we invite the guest as the email per Tom told you and we send them here. Now, we have one for all three of them, but we also have individual links that will take you to one of the podcasts. If you were to schedule on Feed Your Brand podcast interview, you would go here and it shows you all the available time slots. They will pick a time and it tells you it’s in their time zone. For us, we also have this form and this is what I encourage you to do. This is where you don’t have to scramble and make sure you have the bio, make sure you go back and forth.

We require a lot of this information. There are stars by the things that are required their name, their email, their company, and their Skype contact name. The website, their bio, their headshot, their Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest link, YouTube link and anything that we might need. They don’t have to fill out all of those but if they have them, they do. The topics which we ask you about and anything else we should know that we didn’t already know. When they click that and are done, it sends that to our team and our team will load that into the base camp for us and/or load it straight into the episode when it’s ready. They have that on hand ready to go.

PDZ 4 | Guest Scheduling

Guest Scheduling: When submitting an episode for production, make sure that everything’s in one place.

 

You should know in terms of how ScheduleOnce works, this makes a calendar appointment not just on our Basecamp calendar. It makes it in your Google calendar or your iCal or your Outlook calendar. You can have it fill and populate that information there and all of this information that they’ve entered is in that calendar record.

If I popped up my calendar, you would be able to see all of that in that description there including the link, including the Skype names and including the information we send back to them. Here are some of the things. They get notifications from here. This allows us to give them prep tips and other things. After the booking is made, there’s all these follow-up messages, the customer notification. The prep tips are here, Feed Your Brand prep tips. You should have the copy of this email already that you have done. This is where we have prep tips and this is important because we want to make sure they’re prepared so that the recording sounds good. We remind them again that if they didn’t provide the bio and all that stuff because those weren’t required fields. I don’t require them because sometimes they get lazy and won’t book because they don’t have that in front of them and they’re looking on their phone. I don’t want them to not have their headshot is the reason they didn’t book the appointment with us.

Here is the reminder that they need to email it and here’s the email address. Hello@podetize.com is where they need to send it to and we add it to the overall organization of the program. We remind them that if they haven’t done it. We also remind them to connect to us. You can remind them to review the podcast which is a great idea if that’s what you would like them to go do. Make sure they’ve listened to it. Here’s the stuff we want them to be prepared for and also, it cuts off a lot of the phone calls from the nervous Nellies. It happens all the time if there’s someone who’s totally never done a podcast interview before. They’re so nervous about it and/or their corporate organization wants to know exactly how everything proceeds because they’re controlling all the press and everything. This is our process and we make sure your customer’s Skype, make sure you are using a computer instead of a phone. Find earbuds or headset without a microphone.

That’s ideal but with the mic, it’ll still work.

This way if they have a problem, they will resolve it. They’ll go find one because they have this ahead of time. If you have a good USB microphone, please use it. Just some tips for turning up the notifications. It makes it easier when we sit down to go record that they’ve read through this and they’re like, “I’m ready. I’ve done all that. I’m ready to go.” That’s how we do it and then there will also be a reminder of the dates and times. A reminder that they can add it to their calendar if they haven’t already and there’s more of the information that they’ve entered.

This is all set up through ScheduleOnce. ScheduleOnce sends these out and you create these templates.

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You decide when it’s going to go out. This goes out 48 hours before the scheduled time that they’ll be there. It doesn’t go out ahead of time. It goes out 48 hours. This is a follow-up message that will go after we’ve recorded which we also do. We follow-up with them and we thank them and we remind them to follow the links on the iTunes and Stitcher and leave us a review. We also recommend them to go to FeedYourBrand.co to look at the podcast blog posts. That’s where there’ll be able to link through to see it. We give them a lot of this information and what I find happens which is funny is that people don’t realize all the time that it’s an auto message. It says this and it gives them all this and they’ll send me back and they’ll go, “Here’s my Facebook page and my Twitter profile. I had so much fun. Thank you.” You get a personal message back. Even though it is a generic message, I find that it’s relationship-building. It works for us.

Anything you can automate in the process of guest solicitation, guest communication, and collecting the information is going to make your life easier. It makes conducting all these interviews for our various podcasts now manageable in reality. Some of our clients might be thinking, “I already have a calendar program I use on my computer. Why wouldn’t I use that for organizing all my editorial calendar like Basecamp?”

You can. It’s just that I found that it was busy. It overwhelmed my Google Calendar and you constantly had to shut it down. I like the separation of it and I like to be able to keep my podcast from overwhelming my core business and have me go into it when I’m ready to, but that’s me. If you want everything visually and all in one place and already for you then do that. I want to say we use ScheduleOnce for a specific reason. We use it because there’s two of us and it needs to check the free time between the two of us. Because my calendar is busy and I have my own appointments that I’m booking and Tom has his own that he’s booking, we have a lot more complex calendar. If you have a co-host situation or you have a VA you want to include or assistant or production manager, you may want to have a market sophisticated calendar like this setup for you. You can use Calendly which is free and there’s a whole bunch of them that you can put these questionnaires against. It’s super easy to manage that portion of it. They all have notification messages. Some of them aren’t as sophisticated that auto does it 24 hours and you don’t have choices when they send them out. For the most part, they all have them.

For a lot of podcasts hosts out there and it’s just you as the only host, you may be able to use a free one like Calendly with no problem. As Tracy said, there are some inherent complexities not only in having both of our schedules. Although, we do have some new customers or co-host situation or if you’re organizing three of you, that would even be more important. Also, the fact that we’re recording three different podcasts, that had something to do with it. Because we need a different pick and page for each podcast with its own identity and logos. We don’t necessarily tell everybody we have three podcasts. They think we have one.

We don’t always send them to the multiple link page because it’s not sophisticated. You can do that. I might do this, I might send somebody to a single page for me. I also might send them to the page at which they could book an Inc. interview, they could book a straight call with me. They could book a product interview. There’s a bunch of different things that I do and it’s easier for me to remember the one URL and send it all to everyone. I do have some that I keep separated because I don’t want them to be able to book in any of my calendars. I only want them to book in a restricted calendar. Separating them gives me the ability to restrict those calendar dates availability, otherwise you have to block your calendar out on your Google end. I don’t like to do that. In Calendly, you can schedule only specific days. I’ve done that before but it’s a little more complex. You have to go into it and you can only do it once. It has to work for the particular event.

I do like ScheduleOnce and there’s a cost to it.

PDZ 4 | Guest Scheduling

Guest Scheduling: Separating things will give you the ability to restrict the availability of calendar dates, otherwise you have to block your calendar out on your end.

 

It way exceeded. Originally, we were paying $49 a month for it and now we pay almost $150 because we have so many complexes. Three businesses and so much complexity and multiple calendars going through it. It ends up costing you but they have app integrations like Infusionsoft, Zapier and that’s where the cost starts to go up. I saw an email about it. Calendly is allowing you to take payments as well. I don’t know if their payment integration is through PayPal but the payment integration through your ScheduleOnce you can do a connect. When I book a strategy appointment for product design, I charged them $1,500. They pay through the calendar links. They can’t even book with me unless they paid. We do that. It does cost because ScheduleOnce takes a cut and then PayPal takes a cut, but I find the convenience of it and in that way, we don’t have this email back and forth. It’s a lot more immediate. I get paid immediately and I get scheduled immediately. I find that to be efficient.

The Zapier integration is important because anybody who books one of those types of appointments, it’s not a podcast guest I’d have to say. If you are also booking other appointments in your consulting business or your real estate investment business or whatever your business, it can zap and integrate all that information they enter that you ask them to fill out on your form into your sales database.

That’s a combination of Zapier and Infusionsoft integration. You can also do it where it’s just sending you the email response that they booked and here’s all the information they entered. You can even go and have that zapped into a file folder that is being kept for you on a Google Drive. That way it’s there for your virtual assistant or it’s there when you’re ready to go, grab it down and then add it to your dashboard entry when you record the episode.

If you’re reading this and you may be thinking, “This sounds complicated. I’m going to need an employee or an assistant to figure all this out.” It sounds complicated and there are lots of layers to it and lots of things you could take advantage of but it’s a one-time setup situation. Once you get this set up, it does it for you. That is the whole point. That’s what we’re trying to share with you.

In ScheduleOnce and Calendly they both have video tutorials about how to set up so it’s easy. It used to be a lot harder. When I first started ScheduleOnce for us and the dashboard doesn’t look half as nice as it does now and there are all these things. I don’t understand what this was for and we were ending up going all over the place trying to set something up properly. Now, it’s a lot clearer as to how to do it and there’s this video tutorial. All of them have gotten a lot better at it and it should be easy for you to have someone set it up for you or set it up for yourself.

The one last thing that we do is the Ego Bait™ email. That’s coming out of our system that doesn’t come out of this as a response from our ScheduleOnce. That’s coming out of the dashboard system because it needs to have the episode link completed. The episode has to be uploaded in the blog post it has to be live and all of that has to happen. All of you should have gotten an email from Alexandra. You should have gotten an email from her with your copy of the proposed template. Please feel free to mess with this. Make it yours. This is your email that you’re going to send out. If you want it to sound exactly like you, rewrite the whole thing. It does not matter to us but this is the standard email. It will get sent out and we’re suggesting some copy here that would be appropriate for you. “Thank you again for taking the time to do an interview with us. The blog post for your episode can be found here. You can download the new unique graphic image here.” It’s giving them everything that they need in one place.

Remember, this is your show. If an episode is with terrible guests, you don't have to air it. It's your choice. It's your prerogative. Click To Tweet

It’s giving them in it so that there isn’t a mistake in the code, the links, the graphics, all of that is all done properly because it’s automatically done out of our system for them. There’s none of this, “You typed it wrong and autocorrect.” That happens too. I see that all the time. We had that problem when I was doing the code the old-fashioned way until we build our code generator. We were doing it the old-fashioned way and all of a sudden it was autocorrecting from double quotes to single quote. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working because the quotes are still there or so I thought but your eye doesn’t always see that. This is like an easy way to do it but make it yours. If you don’t love the graphic, if you don’t love the color, our team will redo you those for you till you get it right, but you need to authorize that before you do your next episode. You want this stuff to go out. You want to start using it because otherwise, you have to remember to email and thank your guest.

For a while, that was my responsibility with our podcast. I would get emails two weeks later from a guest that said, “I saw my episode was up.” I was like, “I forgot to email them.” I get so busy as I’m sure a lot of you do.

Your assistant goes on vacation and you don’t realize that they do this and you haven’t done it and that’s where this stuff goes wrong and you’re not getting the most share power, the most influence. You’re not getting that if you don’t do this great follow-up. We spend so much money and so much time and energy on doing new programs and getting them set up but our follow through sucks. We get busy. That’s that marketing rollercoaster. We get so busy. We forget how important these things are and they have an ongoing residual benefit that we don’t want to lose. I’m busy like you. If I can do it in an automated way, I’m going to do that. That’s what we wanted to talk with you about because I feel that some of you are still doing it very manually and it feels labor intensive. This whole thing should feel easy. It should feel like you’ve recorded, you’re done. It should be that easy.

The other reason we suggest automating a lot of this and why we built in this automatic guest communication right into our dashboard system is to help do it for you. You don’t have to take advantage of it. You don’t have to use it, but it’s there for you to use. Here’s a good reason. We used to have an assistant named Grace who was with us for two years. Not only did we train her but then she turned herself in what to do. S lot of the email templates that we have to provide to you that are in the resource section came originally from what she had set up. We sanitized it so it wasn’t in our brand and you enter your brand here type thing. Grace’s husband is in the military and he got deployed to some other part of the world.

She worked remotely for a while but eventually it wasn’t what she wanted to do and she decided to move on and leave. Now, we have to go through the headache of training a whole another assistant to do all this stuff. That’s the reason why. I know some of you do have assistants and they communicate with you and that’s great. I’m glad you have an assistant, somebody that’s a wonderful thing but everything is temporary. At some point, that person may not be with you. The more you can automate or using something like ScheduleOnce for soliciting and collecting information from your guests and the more you can use automated communication back to them from ScheduleOnce or from our guest communication system when you’re absorbed publishes. The more you can automate, the better off you’re going to be and the fewer headaches or problems you’re going to have as things change in the future.

A lot of people are spending a whole lot more time managing their virtual assistants coming up with whatever it is. I see it all the time. It happens all the time. Someone will pick up their phone and send a voice message straight to their virtual assistant. They send such and such an email or, “I forgot. Did you send out this response?” If that’s you, that’s too much work. Simplify that. That’s all we have. Preparing for that guest management and making it smooth. You’re doing the guest a favor by being organized about it. It makes you look professional, it makes them be excited about the show, it makes them happy to share, and it makes them excited to suggest another guest which is something that I highly recommend you do. Go and ask them for who else would make a good guest on the show. If that’s what you’re struggling with, ask.

PDZ 4 | Guest Scheduling

Guest Scheduling: The more you can automate, the better off you’re going to be and the fewer headaches you’re going to have.

 

Put your best effort. Some guests still will not have read every detail of the email. The number one thing I still want to stress that every one of you needs to ask when you’re guest comes on, when you connected with them over Skype or Zencastr is, “Are you using a headset?” That is the number one cardinal rule. Even if they don’t have a good microphone, they can use the mic that’s on the computer. It will be fine. If they’re not separating what they’re hearing from what their microphone is hearing, that’s where you have technical problems. I know this is not the technical day for going over recording training but it’s an important part of guest preparation.

It’s the reason why you sound that you’re in an actual box. It’s the reason why you have bad audio. The last thing you want is you don’t want that audio caused by your guests. This is where we see it like with BlogTalkRadio because a lot of those guests are dialing in that it sounds so bad. There’ll be over their phone. There are all these background noises, there’s all this stuff and they’re not separating that out because they’re not doing it that way. That doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t make you sound good and it doesn’t make them feel that they’re on a professional show. We want to be able to do the best we can with your audio. Do that one question and get that going at the start of it is the most important thing you can do when you set up with your guests.

One last thing I should mention is we always plan an hour. I hear some people are like, “I only booked a half hour appointments.” There are technical difficulties. We set up the expectation that it’s going to be no more than an hour of total time, but we want to allow technical problems at the beginning and you want to do this because this is your chance to network with those guests. You want to allow a little chitchat while the files uploading at the end and it gives you a chance to say, “I heard you were organizing this great event. I would love to find out some more information about it. I’m interested in your audience.” This is how we get invited to speaking events. This happens all the time like that. This is your chance to establish a relationship with this high-powered guest you invited on your show so take advantage of it. Don’t cut it short.

I find five to fifteen minutes of time gets burned making sure that they’ve selected the right microphone input in Zencastr and that they’re using a headset. Sometimes they think they’re in a room and it should be fine and when we’re listening to it, there’s a sound surface anywhere on that one. Sometimes we let them know, “It’s not the best. Is there another room you could move to pretty quickly?” A lot of times there is and sometimes there’s not and we go with it. At some point, you have to decide you either going to record the guest or you’re not. You’ve got to deal with sometimes what you have to deal with, but you burn up five to fifteen minutes getting set up, getting ready and then you’re recording. Usually, an interview half an hour, if it’s a good guest that is a lot of good stuff, is enough and sometimes it’ll stretch more. I would say we’re spending 45 minutes of time out of that hour recording our average interview. If it’s an in-depth interview or we’ve had particular challenges, then we’ll use that full hour but that’s about it.

Remember, this is your show. If it was bad and if they were a terrible guest, you don’t have to air it. It’s your choice. It’s your prerogative.

You don’t have to submit it to us. Our team works some miracle sometimes saving some bad audio. If it’s a bad interview, you wouldn’t want to air it but if it’s a technical challenge, we can deal with a lot.

You can always blame it on a technical challenge. This happened. Tom got on and he was awful.

None of you know who he is and he’s never going to see this video. I’m not going to say his name. There’s no reason to bash the guy but he wanted to read a script verbatim. He gave me ahead of time the list of questions he wanted me to ask him which I don’t do but I said, “Let me connect with him anyway and see how this is going to go and see if I can do this my way.” When I asked him questions, it threw him off and he wanted to go back to reading his script and it was so contrived. It was not going to be my show. It was going to be his. There was a little happy accident that he did have a problem with one of his pieces of equipment. The microphone or headset he was using had some serious problems and so we ended up ending the call, but the reality is I never rebooked it with him.

We never sent him a backlink to reschedule.

As far as he’s concerned, it fell through the cracks or my schedule’s gotten so busy or whatever. He hasn’t pushed to come back. Honestly, I don’t want to interview him after that experience. It’s too bad but it’s the way it is.

You can always blame it on bad technical difficulties.

Something must’ve been wrong with your computer. Your track is completely silent and that rarely happens, but it has happened once out of 500 episodes or maybe twice.

That’s why we have call backup. Send us messages because we’re not sure what we want to talk about. It’s going to be a little odd because the Friday that we would normally do this on is the Friday after Thanksgiving, so we’ve moved it up to the Monday.

We had several people and I know I got an email from one or two of you that registered. That’s going to happen, but we’re going to do this anyway. I’m going to keep trying to provide you with more value and help you make your show as good as it can be.

This is not public stuff. This is for you guys are clients only. We were keeping this private to you and that’s why we’re doing it this way. It’s always going to be in the resource section, so we invite you to go there and check it out. You have the links that are being sent to you on email, so you’ll be able to get them there as well.

Just in case there’s anybody who has not noticed it or doesn’t realize that there is a help resources button right on your customer user dashboard, when you go to make a new episode requests and upload them, that’s where you would go to get it and that’s why it’s private. Nobody can get there unless they have a login to our dashboard.

Send us messages about what you would want to talk about next because this is all about you, so we want to make it as useful and helpful as possible to you. What would you want to talk about? Send us a message. We look forward to that. You can send that to Hello@podetize.com or you can send us a message on Facebook.

We have gotten a couple of suggestions for future ones already and we’re planning that. This one was already planned for what we’re doing but we have some suggestions and we’re going to be getting to those for sure.

It sounds good. Until next time and we will talk to you soon.

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