Are you considering guesting on podcasts? Or, are you taking every podcast guesting invitation that comes your way without a second thought? In today’s episode, Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard discuss podcast guesting as a marketing strategy and the benefits you can potentially get from doing them. Not every guesting opportunity will reap the rewards you need. It’s important to establish the criteria that align with your purpose and get that right match. With the right interview, the time and money you invest will return in some way, shape, or form through brand reputation, increased sales, listener bumps, or an influx of new subscribers. Tune in to learn more about what you should be considering before you engage in podcast guesting in this episode of Feed Your Brand.

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Podcast Guesting: Is It Worth Your Time And Money?

We’re going to talk about guesting. Is it worth your time and money?

Podcast guesting and we mean not having guests on your show if you’re a podcast already. We mean guests, you going out and guesting on other podcasts. Is that worth it? We have both a guesting program in our business. We watch it from that standpoint of people who don’t have podcast guests but are working on guesting or podcasters who would like to guest more and would like help with developing programs.

We’re looking at it from that perspective but it’s not always worth it for everyone and that’s what we want to talk about. When is it worth it for you? When should you do some more work? Maybe it’s a do-it-yourself model and it’s not worth paying for. When is it worth it for you to pay someone else to help you with that? That’s how we’re going to approach it and talk about that. Podcast guesting is a great strategy and this is my biggest caveat if you have a matched audience.

If you know other shows out there are serving the same type of listeners that you would like to have for your podcast, then as long as you know that, it can be a great way to raise awareness of your show to people that are already listening to podcasts. It’s that last part that’s the key, people that are already listening to podcasts. You can go and raise awareness all you want to on LinkedIn and Facebook and say, “I’ve got a new podcast.” If those people that are seeing it and becoming aware of it are not the type of people that want to listen to podcasts, raising awareness there isn’t going to help you that much.

It’s going to help you less. It’s a smaller percentage. When you’re on another podcast, those are all podcasts listeners. It’s pretty obvious. It makes it clear-cut that there’s value there if the audience is a right fit match. You know that’s hard to tell, especially in the early days of your podcast. If you’ve already got a show, you don’t know who your listeners are. Until they start reaching out to you or unless you’re tracking your website statistics, understanding who is visiting your website and you have a demographic profile, you don’t understand any of that in the early days.

That’s not your fault. That’s just how the podcasting ecosystem works. Frankly, it’s Apple’s fault. They’re keeping the subscribers to themselves. Spotify is keeping the subscribers to themselves. They’re not sharing any information with you. You don’t know any of that in the early days but you can make some pretty good guesses. That is because you know who you want to reach well and as long as you understand who your target audience is, who you want to speak to, your ideal customer, if your goal is to bring in clients from your podcast who that ideal person is. Where do they listen? What do they traffic? What kinds of things do they buy?

I want to know about them and what they’re thinking but also, you know where they are in the continuum of learning. If you’re doing a 101, they’re at the beginning of something. Here we are. We’re doing a lot of advanced tactics. We know that our listeners that we’re looking for are already podcasters. At least 90% of them are and that’s good. The others are on their way. They’re making progress. They’re not just thinking about podcasting. We already understand that. If we go on a show where there’s likely to be podcasters that are already podcasters, they’re learning advanced tactics or something, that’s great.

It’s hard for us. There aren’t any good shows out there that address that. That’s why we’re here. That’s what we’re filling. We’re filling that gap but every time we go on a show, we get podcast hosts who know other podcasters and that help us. It’s a little bit different model for every person. That’s why it isn’t beneficial for me to go and guest on other people’s podcasts. It’s not beneficial to us. It doesn’t get us a lot of listeners. It gets us a very small percentage of new listeners. It’s a one-on-one thing. I could reach out to those hosts and meet them in another format, in another way that would be more useful to me. Doing the podcast guesting isn’t as viable for me.

Podcast guesting is a great strategy if you have a matched audience. Click To Tweet

With that being said, we see it with our guesting program. We see an authority-building program where I need to be seen up next to other people in the marketplace. I need to be on somebody else’s podcast because I need to be seen as an equal and/or a bigger expert than them. By being on their show, I can do that. There’s sometimes another strategy we have to play, especially when you’re new to a marketplace and/or new to podcasting where you haven’t been on a lot of shows prior to starting your own show.

In addition to putting you next to in terms of authority-building, the host of that podcast, there’s also an impact of who are the other guests of that show been. They’ve had other guests that may be even more well-known than you. That can elevate you that you’re also qualified to be a guest on that show just like they were. That’s another important thing to consider.

It’s one of my favorite list-building processes. If I’m going to build a list of podcast shows that I want to be on or we want a client to be on, I might want to troll somebody else. In my case, I might want to match up Pat Flynn. I may want to be on all those different shows that Pat Flynn has been on. What I found over time is that it’s not always a good model. It’s a good model to build a list from but it’s not a good model to then go on all those shows.

You still want to go and screen those shows because he may have a different purpose. Pat Flynn’s focus might be shifting. He maybe doesn’t want to be focusing on doing course-building and having a whole different model of business than I have. The shows that he is choosing to be on might be very different or he doesn’t care what show he’s on. He just wants to be on any show possible. Pat Flynn is not that. He is a little busy. There are people out there who will be promiscuous with whatever show they want to be on. They will be on every show that asks them without screening and caring about that.

You want to be careful who you’re modeling because they may be following that and then you’re going to waste a lot of your time for shows that they didn’t get an effective result for anyway because you had no way to ask them and know that. I’m always careful that when I use it to model and build a list, I’m still going to screen it myself and make sure there’s a right fit audience model at the end of the day before I’m going to choose it. That’s where things go wrong here. A lot of people think, “I can do it myself. I can use Listen Notes and I can build a list.” What goes wrong with that, Tom? Tell everybody what we see again and again.

You can do all this yourself. It just would take you an awful lot of time perhaps that maybe you should be spending doing other things. When you build a list on Listen Notes, you’re going to get a whole bunch of shows but unless you dig deep and look at them, you don’t know how serious those shows are. Are they still publishing episodes? How long have they been doing it? What are the other guests they’ve had on their shows? There are a lot of potential pitfalls there. There’s a difference between being on any show or being on the right shows. Which are the ones that are going to serve you best?

When we do it for clients, we have a team that goes through our versions. We don’t use Listen Notes. We’ve got our own list-building process, which already is screening out the ones that aren’t publishing and the ones that aren’t doing the things that we already say they’re not a great show to be on, to begin with. We’re screening out those shows you shouldn’t do. Our list is better from the beginning.

From there, we have a team that goes through every single show in that list to match up against your criteria and the keywords that you want to be seen next to that you want to be able to utilize. We match up as much audience information as we can find out by their website, their LinkedIn profile, the podcast episodes that they’ve done and the other guests that they’ve had. All of that is a part of the vetting process that we do.

 

Here’s what I found. I worked with a lot of publicists. They’ve sent me their lists to have me look them over and make recommendations, “Would I choose who’s missing on this list? What about these ones?” I can tell you that about 80% of their list is built off of and this is what I’ve noticed that they do. They go to the new and notable. They go to the top 50 in the business category and then they make a list of all of those that don’t sound cheesy or don’t have ugly cover art. That’s what I discovered. Most publicists will just look at the cover art and then make the decision. If you have ugly cover art, you might want to fix that right now.

That’s key criteria if you want to get good guests. They’ll build the list based on that and they haven’t even made one inquiry, listened to one show and checked anything out. A lot of times on that list, I’ll find that there’s a bunch of them that don’t take guests at all, that haven’t published episodes in a year or more and they’re still on their list. They go out and send an email anyway without any understanding of it in their mind. If I send an email, I get a couple of shows that I didn’t work that hard. If you’re paying for that, that’s not the process.

If you’re doing it yourself and you want to make it fast, try it. It’s hit-or-miss. You might get some good results and maybe you won’t but at the end of the day, you might also miss some great shows because you didn’t put a personal message there. When you try to reach out back to them later, they’re annoyed by the fact that you sent them spam the first time.

The reality is there are a lot of shows that you may have no idea of. You may think, “That’s a great show. I should be on that show. It’s a good fit for me,” but if you don’t do the homework, you don’t realize they only have certain kinds of guests. Even though that show would be a great fit for you, what their intent is, you’re not the right kind of guest that they want to have on the show.

It’s not just that but there are a lot of us who have applications for our show on our websites. If you’re skipping that application process, I’m going to ignore your email because you don’t have enough attention to detail. You don’t care about my show and you’re not interested to be on my show in particular. It says that you’re going to be willing to be on any show. That’s also an issue when you go through this. That’s why I’m careful and I never send out those emails without checking out the shows first. That takes time but it’s worth it in the end. The results are worth it and that’s what we want to show you.

A lot of these publicists have come to me. They’ll bring me their list and say, “What’s missing? Side by side, what would you choose?” There are a handful of heavy-reach shows that they think they can do. Let’s say get on The Joe Rogan show. First off, it’s incredibly difficult. You have to go through layers and layers of it. A publicist is great at being able to do that. They can tap their network of other publicists, production assistants or anyone that they can to get in the door there. If you’ve got a list of shows like that, hire a publicist. Work with someone topnotch who can do that for you because there are so many layers to get through to get onto that show.

You definitely want that if your list is full of those types of shows but your list should also be full of types of right-match shows, the audience match. A well-known celebrity author and I can’t say his name but he came to me with his list and asked me to look it over with his publicist and so I did that. I looked it over with her. I gave her a list of ten more that I recommended that were too small that didn’t make her top 50 criteria. I explained to her, “These ten I know are a perfect match for your author. I know they’re right for him. I believe, at the end of the day, they will sell more books than these other shows you have in the top 50.”

That’s exactly the results that happened because the conversion rate on some of those smaller-sized shows that didn’t happen to make the top 50 list but happened to have a lot of episodes and good guests on it, matched all the right criteria for the right type of people his book was trying to reach. That made a better list at the end of the day for him. They were able to get all ten of those shows without any problem because he was a big get for them. It was a good play for him. At the end of the day, it sold more books off of that list often than it did off the other list of ten. I don’t even think he got on 50% of the other list.

At the end of the day, you might miss guesting on some really great shows because you didn't put a personal message there. Click To Tweet

When you think about it, Tracy, this has to do with understanding who you want to reach, what the right shows are, what’s a good fit and what’s not going to be a good fit. That takes work. You can figure that out and do it yourself but it’s going to take work. You got to do some digging. You have to listen to a couple of the shows. You got to look at their website and research it. You have to find out, “Do they have an application for guests? Do they not?” If you do that work, you’re going to be able to come up with a list of ten shows pretty easily, maybe even twenty or more, that you can get on in a reasonable amount of time.

One example would be a show that is widely known ClickFunnels Radio. We all know ClickFunnels is a tool for building sales funnels. We had someone who is an SEO expert who wanted to be a guest on that show but had never listened to the show and didn’t do some homework. What they found out was it is an absolute requirement, if you’re going to be a guest on ClickFunnels Radio, that you are a ClickFunnels customer, that you use their product.

Even though this person was a widely-known SEO expert and had lots of valuable information to share with that audience, in terms of subject matter wouldn’t make a difference if they were a ClickFunnels user or not but that is very strict criteria of ClickFunnels Radio. If you’re not a part of their ClickFunnels community using their product, you’re not going to be a guest on their show. That’s the way it is.

I have the same rules on my show. I have done 25 episodes or more. You have to post consistently and constantly every single week. You can’t do seasons or other things unless you’re into your 4th or 5th season or you can’t come on the show. There’s a bunch of rules that I have in my place. However, on occasion, I violate those rules. How you get to that person to get that is you’ve got to make personal contact. One person who escaped through that process and made it without having a podcast show at all is Mark Herschberg.

Mark Herschberg is known as Hershey on Clubhouse. I bumped into him in a club room. He told me that he was about to hit his 100th interview as a guest. He is an author. He has the book, The Career Toolkit. It’s a great book with a broad reach. He researched 100 shows that he wanted to be on. He did all the work himself but he vetted every single one. As he did it, he would do twenty shows, learn something and then pick the next twenty based on what he learned. He grew and grew. I had him on my show. I was his 99th interview. We thought that was fun to do.

What I learned from him about podcast guesting was brilliant. If you’re not invested in the process, even if you’re hiring someone to help you with it but if you’re not willing to do a little bit of the work in guiding them when they send you back some shows and giving them feedback on those shows, when you guest on some shows, give them some feedback again that re-informs them so the next set of shows that they get you are even better, if you’re not participating in that process in some way, shape or form, then you are wasting your time but podcast guesting has a great return on investment.

We know that. We can see listener bumps from being on the right shows. We can see listener bumps happen. Mark told me that he could see sales bumps. He could see the click-through rates like clicking on the links to head it to his book profile on Amazon. You can see that his book profile in Amazon was hit and that a bunch of people came through. He could sometimes see it before he even got a notification from the host that the episode had aired. You know we sometimes publish 2:00 in the morning and the guest’s notifications or you don’t send out your emails until 9:00 AM or 8:00 AM to let people know that their episode has aired. We all do that.

He would get the guest notification but he would already start to see the traction because that episode was airing around the world. He could already see people doing it and starting to buy the book. He was seeing the direct results from his guesting. It became so important to him that he is going to continue doing it for another year. The pretty amazing result is that you can see such direct linking to happening and it continues over time.

 

He says he can see steady growth over time because the episodes don’t always get listened to right away but he does see that bump every time a new guest spot happens. It’s a high return on investment. If he can see that on book sales, which is a lot harder because you have to leave the app and buy a book, then you should be able to see that from subscribers shifting over, checking out your show, listening to an episode and hitting the subscribe button right within the same app. That’s a whole lot easier.

Tracy, you’ve laid out the value well. “Is it worth your time and money?” It certainly can be. Everybody has a different goal for why they want to be a guest but if you’re willing to put in some time, even if you’re going to hire someone to pitch you, to show you in the best possible way, to figure out that list of the right shows to pitch to, you’ve still got to be involved a little bit. This can’t just be, “Tell me where to show up and record with no involvement or prep.” That’s not going to be very successful.

Don’t forget about the post-production and sharing side of things. If you’re not repurposing and sharing, then you’re not being a very good partner with that podcast host and you get annoyed when your guests don’t share. You need to be good at that sharing part. You have to remember that a lot of the guests aren’t as good at putting out graphics, links or the email that gives you all those pieces of information. There are a lot of hosts out there who don’t do that well, don’t have a support team and don’t use a service company like Podetize. They don’t have that in their process to be able to utilize that.

You may have to do more work to share their show but keep that in mind that’s just as important as doing it for your show. Don’t forget to do it or have it included in your packages of whatever you buy. Have your publicists do it. We put that in as part of our package for a reason because it’s an essential part of making sure that you get the value from the time you spent searching for the show, finding the right one, being on it, booking it and getting on it. All of those things, we want to make sure you get the full value out of it. Sharing, adding it to your website and doing all of those things are critically important in the process of getting full value for the time and money you spent.

Even if a podcast host that you’re a guest on their show isn’t doing a good job of sharing it, that’s disappointing but you’re still reaching their audience through the podcast and you can still share it. You get a lot of material out of it to be able to share it but you might have to do a little more work.

We hope you’ll consider podcast guesting as great, not just a launch strategy. A lot of people think of it at the launch time as, “I want to go on some shows to get visibility for your new show.” It’s an ongoing thing. You may not have to do it at the same pace when you launch because you’re not trying to get that type of exposure but I’m always looking for new shows that would be a right fit audience for me and then I’m making a connection to those people. You can do it gradually over time. Make sure you’re employing the best practices and the best process of finding the right fit shows, doing the good sharing of what you’re talking about and doing decent pitching in the middle. Let’s make sure we’re asking the way we would like to be receiving as a podcast host.

I found it interesting that Hershey has done 100 in a year and he is going to do another year. That’s an average of two a week.

He batches them. Sometimes he was doing two a day. He did a whole bunch at once because he knew that they would be filtered out over time. He was trying to make sure that he had as many in those early days of his book launch as possible.

 

That’s the one thing I’ll ask people with that you have to be aware of. You have to realize that when you engage in a podcast guesting process, you have no control over when your guest episode appearances are going to publish. They will be at random times. Some people record so far ahead. You record today and you’re not going to be on for 2 or 3 months. Others, you’re going to be on within two weeks. That is random and not predictable. You have to be prepared that this process is a long game. It’s not a short, quick hit.

Also, remember that so many episodes are binged-listened to and listened to at various times in the future. Sixty percent of your show catalog of your listens every single month is on the back show catalog. In my appearance on Pat Flynn, I get reached out at least once a week from someone on LinkedIn, who connects with me, asks me a question or does something. We get clients from that all the time. They trickle in as people catch up, listening to those episodes or have just found his show and find me within that. It serves you in the long run. If it’s the right show, then it’s going to continue to pay dividends time and time again into the future. It’s a good return on investment.

Check it out and get into it, whether you do it yourself or you get some support. Thanks for reading, everybody. We’ll see you next time on the show.

Important Links

• ClickFunnels Radio
• Hershey – Mark Herschberg on Clubhouse
• The Career Toolkit
• Show – The Essential (And Really Effective) Podcast Guest Skills No One Taught You With Best-Selling Author Of The Career Toolkit, Mark Herschberg
• Amazon – Mark A. Herschberg
• Pat Flynn – How to Create Bingeworthy Content with Tracy Hazzard

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