Discover the ultimate guest promotion tactics to skyrocket your podcast’s success on this week’s episode of Feed Your Brand with Tracy Hazard and Tom Hazzard. Unveil the power of Ego Bait and how it can exponentially grow your listenership by leveraging your guests’ audiences. Learn the art of website embed codes for cross-linking and website impact, coupled with the right social media tagging strategies to expand your reach and authority. Uncover the secret to resharing and how it ensures maximum exposure for your podcast. Don’t miss this game-changing episode as Tracy shares her proven strategies to elevate your podcasting journey to new heights! Tune in now for all these insights and more!

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Propel Your Show To New Heights With Advanced Guest Promotion Tactics

Normally, we cover great topics that are helpful to podcast hosts everywhere in all types of businesses and promotion issues that you might have. In this episode, we’re talking about just that. This is for you podcasters out there who have guests on your show or have heard about the power of having a guest on your show but haven’t quite dipped into that yet and are thinking about it. For some of you, those of you who might have an entertainment-style show where you don’t have guests, you just have topics. This is maybe the reason why it is so much harder for you to grow your audience. That is because when we use guest promotion, we leverage other people’s audiences.

I’m going to talk a little bit about how you can propel your show to new heights with some of these advanced guest promotion tactics that we use internally. They help grow audiences faster. They have a much higher rate of return. We’ve discovered this the hard way. I discovered this the hard way because I used to write a column for Inc Magazine. For four years, I did it. I wrote over 400 articles and it shocked me how many people would get featured in one of my articles, and then would improperly share the article.

You can imagine if they’re not doing that with publicists, teams, and high-value corporations, and they don’t know how to share properly. Imagine your solopreneur guests, your entrepreneurs, the people who are all on their own and don’t have a team, they’re not going to be great at sharing either. That’s why a lot of these tips were developed and my process was developed. This is what I developed right after writing that article for Inc Magazine. I’ve got a little quote that I did that came out of one of my Inc articles. You can see how it transformed itself into the podcasting world. What happens here is we call this Ego Bait™. The reason we call it Ego Bait™ is because it plays on the ego of your guest to want to share it.

 

 

When I quote my guest and it’s a quote from Pat Flynn that says, “Guest podcasting is the new guest blogging.” He said that on my show and that quote is valuable to my audience and my social media followers because it’s talking about podcasting. What if that’s not his core business? What if his core business is on building a digital webinar platform? This seems like something he said, but it’s not a completely relevant quote to the things he wants to promote. It’s a quote of him talking about himself, so it may be not something that he’s likely to share.

However, the one that says, “Pat Flynn is one of the best teachers, not just for podcasting, but for creating a whole digital business,” is pretty flattering. I stroked his ego there, but not only that, I knew that he was working on building a business that was around building a digital business and not just a podcast coaching platform. I knew this would tap into something that he would want. By doing these things, by highlighting them, or by creating what you would consider to be a testimonial-style quote, you’re creating a higher opportunity for sharing by your guest. That gives you higher authority.

The other thing that happens is, see how my picture and Pat Flynn’s picture, or my picture and Kimmy Seltzer or Ashley Crowder’s picture are side-by-side or top and bottom next to each other, it’s creating a visual side-by-side authority that puts us at the same level. If your guest is someone who’s more important in your niche, more popular in your niche, or a higher authority than you, by using this tactic, you’re visually creating the link between the two of you at the same level. That’s pretty powerful but it goes one step further because I’m saying something about that other person. I’m creating the testimonial or referral in a way. The statement about them, I have higher authority because I’m a reviewer.

 

 

Think about it from a movie reviewer or anything like that. The person who has the most power is the critic, not the actual movie theater, not a publishing company, not the actors. The critic has the most power because they can love it or pan it. That puts you at a higher authority level by using this style of Ego Bait™ quoting. This is essential. This is the number one thing that we do.

Here’s the next part of it. When we do it, we send something we call a website embed code. We do that because it helps to create the proper linking. One of the things I was mentioning when I did my Inc column before, people would link the Inc logo on their press page and link to Inc.com. They would forget that there’s an article that says their name way buried in the publication because they have thousands of articles they publish every single day. If they didn’t connect that exact proper link to that exact featured page, nobody could find out what was said about them.

We’ve created a process and we do this where we’re sending them an exact link to the blog post with that Ego Bait™ image and it’s all connected so they could drop it properly onto their website. If they don’t know what they’re doing, we gave them code. They can give it to their web developer. If their web developer goes, “That’s easy,” they drop it in. Two seconds later, it created the proper linking.

 

 

The most important part that it’s doing is creating this cross-linking. That gets your website impact because you’re showing up on their website and cross-linking to you. They’re showing up on your site. You’re creating that very obvious connection between the authority that you’ve built between the two of you through the podcast, but you’re creating that in web linking as well. That gives you powerful web rankings, which is the most important thing. It also gives you this visibility. When you start to show up in those rankings, it validates your authority level, which is important in this world of AI. You have a higher human authority level.

This is something that Google considers a power play when you have this cross-linking between two websites. Of course, added the video, added the audio, and you’ve got all those things going that say you are connected and this isn’t a fake link. This isn’t one of those sleazy little gray hat or black hat backlinks. This is a real connection between the two of you. They treat that much more powerfully and they give you higher rankings, which means that your podcast is getting seen. That blog post is likely hitting the top ten or on the first page of Google even one of the top three up there. That’s going to create a higher opportunity for you to be seen and for your podcast to be found, especially audiences who are already fans of the guests that you had on your show.

The next level of that is we’ve taken it and we’ve created an image that shows authority. We’ve put it on our website. It’s very important. Now we got to bring social media to it. We got to create social tagging and collaboration because if we don’t tell people who are in our image or who we interviewed and we don’t tag them, we don’t reach their audience. We then don’t grow our listener base by using their audience. You can do this in two ways. The proper use of social tags is @ tags and #. Use both. It depends on your social media platform which one is more powerful, but for the most part, use both # and @ tags.

 

Let’s say somebody isn’t powerful on LinkedIn. They’re great on TikTok, but they’re not powerful on LinkedIn and they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, use the hashtag of their name. Use an @ whenever you can because that creates a direct profile-to-profile connection between the two of you. On some social media like Instagram, you can create a collab by tagging them. By doing an @ in that person, it creates a message back and forth to them asking do they want to collab with you. There’s an automatic sharing of their audience. All of the people who are subscribed to them, members with them, or like them create that type of connection for you so you don’t have to do all the work.

That’s wonderful and it’s a super easy way for you to make the connections between the two of you on social media and maximize the audience that’s going to see your social posts. Of course, the last one that I don’t want you to forget is resharing because sharing it once is not enough. Just saying, “I had this guest on my show” and then never doing it again is not maximizing the power of what you’ve created. Your podcast lives on. It stays in that feed and it still gets listened to month after month. Imagine, if you could maximize that connection between the two of you, you could keep reminding people who are new to you, who joined your social profiles, who found your podcast, and how important that episode is.

We can only do that if we share it enough. Resharing is caring. That’s how I look at that. It also builds a better long-term relationship with your guest, which is going to get you more. I have something I call the 42X sharing plan. I’ve maximized this thing. You can get 42 different shares from 7 types of posts. That is powerful. I create 7 different posts and styles. The Ego Bait™ is one. Video clips, I create a couple of those. A quote graphic might be another. By the time you’re done with it and you’ve got it now rematching in Evergreen, you can have up to seven days a week of posts.

When we use guest promotion, we leverage other people's audiences. Click To Tweet

Imagine if you have 5 social media platforms, 7 different shares a week, 42 times, you can grow it even more. Also, consistency is key in the sharing algorithms on social media. If I continue to post once a day every day on my social media without having to create more than seven, to begin with, but I can keep repeating that across the plan, then I am going to be more likely to tap into a great algorithmic boost on social media as well. Consistency and constancy work on web linking, websites, and Google Power. It works on social media and in the algorithm for podcasts and videocasts as well. Everywhere you go, your number one goal is to be consistent and constant. This is a way to do that.

I’ve got this social sharing plan for you that shows you. I’ve got it two ways. I’ve got the blank for you to fill in and it gives you an idea of how it works. You can plan out your social media channels. You might only have one social media channel to start with. That’s okay. Do what you can. As you add one, you can add one to this chart, and you can add the third, and you can continue on.

You can always get this straight from the chat here. If you’re in Zoom and one of our clients on Podetize, you’re able to get that straight in the Zoom training that we’re doing and livestreaming from. If you are a Podetize client, you can reach out to the success team or the help team and get this. We have a tip library. We have YouTube livestreams and the tips will be also downloadable from all of those as well. You can go to Podetize.com/Tips and be able to forward it right there to get that. These are here for you. If you are not one of our clients, you’ll still be able to access it and see it.

 

I am going to share with you the filled-in one now so you can see what this looks like and get a better view of it. I’ve got your schedule up here. I would do one post a day. I’ve given you Twitter or Threads. It is the same thing because whatever you do on Twitter, you can do on Threads. That’s the new Instagram version of Twitter. If you’re interested in finding something new on that, this is one. They do recommend more than one post a day over on Threads, mind you, and they do recommend that on Twitter as well. You could do seven times a day. It’s totally up to you what you want to do. If you’re going to go all in on Twitter, do seven posts a day, and do nothing else, go ahead and do that. The choice is yours.

Instagram, 1 post a day, 7 days a week. I’m giving you the frequency and the schedule here for all of it. I’ve also linked through. When you go to the PDF, you’ll be able to link through to the images of what these look like or our descriptions of them. You’ll be able to check out what one of these looks like. What does an Ego Bait™ guest look like? What does episode art look like? What does the quote graphic look like and the video clip? You should know what those are, but you can see what they look like from an Instagram, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok view if you want. The video clip for 1 to 3 minutes is typically used on LinkedIn as in a different place.

My seventh one is in Evergreen. Remember I told you before that I always want to make sure to re-promote podcasts. I’m resharing episodes that have already happened. When I go down and you could see how nicely filled in this is and it’s got 42 different shares of the episode, what I’m doing is I’m offsetting it. If I start with Ego Bait™ on a Monday on LinkedIn, I might post it on Twitter on Tuesday, Instagram on Wednesday, and Facebook on Thursday. I’m not sharing the same post everywhere on social media. I’m sliding it here by a day.

Resharing is caring. Click To Tweet

It’s the same posts and the same type of shares. They’re just move so that they’re not happening on the same day everywhere. I think that’s a mistake that people make. I might be on LinkedIn and Instagram on the same day. If I see the same type of post with the same language and the same information as you, I’m like, “They’re papering it everywhere.” You’re also missing out on an opportunity to understand where is your boost coming from.

If you’re getting more of a boost from posting an Ego Bait™ on Monday on LinkedIn and you see more followers from that, it starts to tell you what’s working and what’s playing. Within each channel, you can look at your statistics and analytics there. That’s going on there. Because some of these channels don’t use video clips that are over a minute or some of the other things, you might see on my chart here that I’ve done two Evergreens in those cases. I do two Evergreens on Twitter and two Evergreens in Pinterest and TikTok. That’s because they don’t allow these longer videos. Instead of that, I reshare something else and it gives me an opportunity to share some more because TikTok and Twitter are busy. Resharing more frequently over there is not a bad thing.

That’s how it works. It’s super easy for you to plug this in by using our blank version that I’ve got for you as well. You’ll be able to download those right here in the chat for those of you on Zoom. Again, Podetize.com/Tips to all of you watching this on the livestream or tuning into it in the show. If you’re tuning into it in the show, go check out the videocast. That link will also get you straight there.

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in to Feed Your Brand. I’m Tracy Hazzard. I will be back next time with a special guest. I’ve got an author expert coming in to talk about how you use podcasting and author platforms. I’m super excited to have Juliet Dillon Clark on next week with us. She’s going to be on next week, and then we’ll be back Tom and I will be back on the other side of that with a joint topic together. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. I’ll be back next time right here on Feed Your Brand.

 

Important Links

• Inc.com
• Podetize.com/Tips