151 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #9: Podcast Guesting

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach and today we are on part two of level three of the podcast success ladder. Level three of the podcast success ladder is growth yesterday was part one of that where we talked about social media and today we are talking about the other half of the one two punch that makes up my favorite and in my experience the most successful podcast growth strategy and part two is podcast guesting. Now there are many reasons why podcast casting is a great way to get listeners to your show and you might have heard some of these reasons. First of all when you are a guest on another podcast 100% of the people that you reach via that strategy are confirmed podcast listeners because the only way that you can reach them is through them listening to a podcast and that's actually not true on social media. About 40% of people that you reach on social media don't listen to podcasts and you're probably not going to get them to start or at least our strategy can't be built around getting people to start listening to podcasts because it is such because it is such a routine medium on top of that when you're featured on another podcast you're reaching all of those people while they are listening to a podcast which is important context is everything. The closer in time you reach a listener to the moment they're actually listening to a podcast the more successful your strategy will be because there's less friction and there's less work for them to do to start listening to your episodes all they have to do is click on the link in the show notes or search your show and start listening. They're already doing the thing that they usually do when they listen to podcasts so it's much easier for them to switch over and start listening to yours compared that to other strategies that reach a person when they're doing something else right when they're not doing whatever they do while they listen to podcasts in order for them to actually tune into your show you're relying on them to either subscribe or remember that your show exists or stop what they're doing and go listen to your show right now and it just doesn't work that way so when people discover you while you are being a guest on another podcast 100% of the people that you reach are confirmed podcast listeners and you reach them while they're listening to a podcast so it's really easy for them to immediately check out yours to other reasons why podcast testing is so powerful the first is networking if you want to be a successful podcaster it's going to be faster easier and more fun to grow if you make friends with other successful podcasters they can give you tips they can give you support and they can give you shortcuts and finally being a guest on other podcasts is one of the most leveraged ways you can grow your podcast audience because you spend about an hour being interviewed depending on the size of that show you reach potentially tens of thousands of people and that episode after it's published has the potential to bring you more listeners literally four years especially if it's a good episode that people return to it's possible that that single hour can be bringing you more listeners to three even five years from now really really high leverage stuff now it's true that you might have already tried podcast guessing as a growth strategy to grow your show and you might have gotten sub part results that's common and so here are a few reasons why your podcast guessing strategy might have failed you so far first off you might have taken the spray and prayer approach where you send as many podcast pitches as you possibly can and they're vague and you just pitch pretty much any podcasts whose email address you could find we see this a lot where people have their executive assistant just send like a hundred thousand pitches and those pitches rarely lead to meaningful audience growth because they are so untargeted and unpersonal second you might have appeared on a couple podcasts but those podcasts don't have any listenership so you appeared on shows that really don't have any listeners so this game is not just about being a guest on other shows it's about being a guest on the right shows and if you spend your time guessing on shows that have extremely low listenership well you're probably not going to get many listeners to your show because you're not reaching many people another reason why podcast guessing often doesn't work is because there might be improvements to be made in your skills as a guest and so to get listeners to tune into your podcast you really need to be a strong engaging guest you need to have engaging storytelling you need to deliver clear and useful value and you also need to have strong calls to action at the end when they say so where can people find you you need to know how to send them to your podcasts in a way that's actually going to get them to want to check out your show those are all skills that you can develop and if you've spent no time trying to improve that you might have been a lackluster guest and you might have gotten lower results another thing I see all the time is podcasters you know try podcast guessing in a totally random way so it's not systemized and it's just something that they kind of do every once in a while this is a strategy that works the best with consistency so just like you've learned how to be consistent publishing episodes right every podcaster knows you need to be consistent when you publish you want to develop the same level of consistency with podcast guessing where just like you're like I publish an episode every week come hell or high water you want to say the same thing about podcast guessing I get myself featured on podcasts every single month no matter what it's something you never stop doing another thing I see that's sort of related is that folks just give up too soon I'd be like oh you should try being on other podcasts and they're like yeah I tried that and I'm like oh how much what did you do and I'm like yeah I sent like 20 pitches and I'm like oh did you hear back no did you follow up with anybody no did you try changing your pitch at all no you said 20 pitches don't hear back and give up probably not going to be a great way to grow probably not going to work setting 20 pitches one time is not enough and there have been times where I have tested pitch language with a hundred pitches a hundred was the test so you just need more volume and you got to stick with it okay so how can we then craft a podcast guessing approach that avoids the pitfalls that I just listed well we reverse them we do the opposite so instead of sending pitches to every podcast that has an email address we send targeted pitches we focus on shows that align with our audience not just any podcast out there we also want to make sure that we focus on quality appearances over quantity yes I'm going to talk about how you want to aim to achieve a certain quantity but we also need to ensure that we are spending our time wisely we are aiming for shows that are at our audience level or ideally higher and are targeted right are likely to have future listeners in them so we want to be thoughtful with the shows that we appear on also we want to train ourselves to be outstanding guests we want to focus on delivering captivating stories valuable insights and compelling CTAs for listeners to then check out your show we want to do this as a part of a system where you bake regular pitching and guessing into your weekly or monthly routine it's something that you constantly do and again just like you've systemized publishing consistently you systemize guessing consistently and you keep doing it it's not a one time thing podcast guessing is a part of the machine you just never stop as long as you're podcasting you are collaborating with other podcasters as well and so to achieve all of these things I've invented a framework called targeted podcast pitching and here's the idea you send five pitches per week to targeted podcasts always across the year that amounts to 250 pitches if you get a 20% take rate which in my experience is on the lower level usually you'll get a higher take rate but if you get a 20% take rate where they accept your pitch and invite you onto the show that brings you to 50 guest appearances per year which averages to one per week which is totally doable and by the way you can do it that way where you space it out to one per week you could batch it and just do four you know just pick a day every month that you do four interviews or you can batch it even harder and pick three days every three months where you do 12 and just like pick three days I'm doing 12 podcast interviews and then you don't have to worry about it for a whole quarter you can spread it out however you want but the idea is 50 guest appearances per year will be what brings you the hockey stick growth that you want if you are performing well as a guest and you're picking the right shows to guest on and so that's how the framework works and there's two secret ingredients to this audience growth recipe that really make it tick the first secret ingredients is how to find and how to select the targeted shows to pitch so instead of googling or swiping around to find shows to be on what you want to do is reverse engineer audience growth by researching the guessing patterns of your previous guests your idols your peers your favorite influencers and your favorite authors all of these people have been on other podcasts before so instead of just googling around by category and trying to find shows and making a best guest we pick one of these people so let's say it's a guest that you've had on your podcast before whose episode has done really well maybe it was a dream guest of yours or if you don't feature guests you can pick one of the other category of people it can be a peer it can be an idol it can be another influencer in your space it can be an author whatever someone who has a decent sized audience and who has done podcasts guessing before then using Apple podcasts Spotify or one of the podcast databases like listen notes or refonic you research the other podcasts that that person has already appeared on so you just search their name and see what guest episodes come up boom you then have a list of 20 to sometimes 50 or more shows where the following three things are true number one that person has already vetted that that podcast is worth going on number two that show is more likely to have the right audience for you because you chose a person that has a similar audience to you to reverse engineer audience growth from and the number three and most importantly you already have a foot in the door because again let's say that you use the past guest of your podcast to do this research you and these 20 to 50 other podcasters have had the same guest so you can say hey Kevin here we both had Alex Harmosi on our show wasn't that awesome by the way and then you send your pitch so with this you'll never have to send a cold pitch ever again which reminds me let's talk about the pitch which is the second secret ingredient of this strategy you see when most podcasters pitch themselves to be a guest on other podcasts they tend to pitch themselves or their story as the topic of the episode so they'll say you should have me on your show so I can share my story with your audience right that's just oh it's so icky so instead of doing that and being one of the countless and being one of the countless millionaire CEOs who has their assistant pitching their incredible story of rags to riches to every podcast they could find instead of doing that pitch a specific episode topic so you're not pitching yourself you're pitching an episode topic pitch what you can share and what useful information you can provide to that podcast audience just like how we talk about our show in our episodes we want to talk about what featuring us as a guest on a podcast will do for its listeners not what you will talk about but what that will do for how it will impact the audience what will they be able to do what will they be able to have what will they be able to achieve and you can take it the next step and go ahead and pose the specific question for the podcaster that you're pitching to that your episode will answer right so you can use the stuff that you've learned earlier on in this audio course and you put that into your pitching and so if you're in the business world think of it this way pitching yourself to speak on other podcasts is kind of like pitching to speak at an industry conference right so you would never pitch yourself to a conference and say you should let me do a session about my story right that be so weird nobody would ever read that pitch instead the conference wants to know what is going to be the topic of your talk what will the audience take away from your presentation podcasters want to know that too so instead of pitching yourself pitch a specific topic you can cover and expand upon in service of the podcasters audience basically do as much of the work for the podcaster that you're pitching and say here's what you can title the episode here's what questions you can ask me here's what your audience is going to get away from the episode the more you can do and the more you can paint the picture of what a great episode it will be the more likely you will get yeses especially for the bigger shows which are inundated with thousands of pitches every day so there you have it that is targeted podcast pitching you send five pitches per week you aim to be on one show per week across a year and by sticking with that for at least three months you're going to start to see your download numbers go up and when you combine this strategy with the social media summary strategy that we talked about yesterday you have got yourself a sustainable one to punch audience growth strategy and from there getting the download numbers that you want and how big your audience gets is just a matter of continuing to do those two things when you publish new episodes continue to post awesome social media posts that summarize it and provide some of the value like a free sample and at the same time continue to send 20 podcast guest pitches per month that's it it'll take just a few minutes and get featured on four podcasts per month that have your future audience listening to them today combine those two things make it something you can sustain long term and bought a Bing you now have a show that is growing month over month you see your downloads increase you understand why they're increasing and you're ready for level four which is monetization and that's what we dig into tomorrow I'll see you then by the way if you want the written versions of these lessons emailed to you for the remainder of this 12 day period so we've got three days left and you want that go ahead and go to 12 days of podcast growth dot com that's one two days of podcast growth dot com the link is in the show notes and I will send you emails with written versions of these lessons so you can save them and refer to them later all right I'll see you tomorrow