170 | Send These 2 Emails to Get Featured on Top Podcasts

If you want to get featured as a guest on big-time podcasts, you have come to the right place. Today, I'm going to map out for you the podcast pitch strategy that has gotten both myself and my clients featured on some of the biggest podcasts around. And if you've already tried pitching yourself to other podcasts and you've found that most of the time you don't get a response and the times that you do get a response, it's from amateur shows that have no listeners, then I've got great news. I'm about to show you a better way. Once I do, you're going to find it way easier to get invited onto big-name podcasts because your pitch is actually going to get a response and it's going to stand out from all the thousands of other crappy podcast pitches out there. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach, who has worked directly with over 400 other podcasters to help them grow and monetize over the past years. And many of them have grown shows larger than my own. And after devoting my life to helping podcasts grow and monetize over the past five years, I can tell you two things for certain. Number one, hands down my favorite and the most tried and true way to grow a podcast audience is by getting featured as a guest on other podcasts or otherwise collaborating with other podcasters. And the second thing I know for sure is that I am not the first person to say this. The cat is out of the bag when it comes to podcast casting. Podcasters and nonpodcasters have all figured out that getting featured on other shows is a free and really effective way to spread the word about yourself and your products and what you're doing. And because of that, most podcast hosts are inundated with hundreds of cringy and horrible and out-of-place podcast pitches every single week. And chances are if you've tried and failed to get yourself featured on podcasts regularly, odds are your pitch is also probably tired and cringy. And I don't want that for you. So today we're going to fix that. And by the way, at the end, I'm just going to give you my pitch template so you can have it for yourself. If you want that, the link is in the show notes. But if you want to get the most out of your podcast pitching efforts, be sure to consume this all the way through. Because once I show you my two-step targeted podcast pitch, you're going to think, oh, duh. I can't believe I was pitching the old way. Sounds good, right? But what is the old way? Well, if you have your own podcast and you want to see the old way of pitching in action, all you got to do is open up the inbox of the email that's connected to your podcast feed. Because when you do that, what are you going to see? You're going to see tons of pitches that look like this. Hey there, Chad Bradson here. I just want to say how much I love your podcast, your guests, and the value they bring are truly outstanding. If you're open to it, I would love the chance to share my story with your audience. After dropping out of high school at age 16, I found myself living out of my car. Now, 30 years later, I've made $10 trillion while working only four hours every 10 years. If you have me on your show, I think I would be able to bring tremendous value and inspiration to your audience. Could you send over your calendar link? Oh my God, that makes you want to puke, right? But here's the thing. I bet you've gotten tons of pitches like this. And how do those pitches make you feel when you get them? You delete them right away, right? So why, then, are you surprised that when you send the same type of pitch to another podcaster, you don't hear back from anybody? It's because your pitch, unfortunately, makes other podcasters want to puke as well. But don't worry, the problem is not you. The problem is your pitch. Your pitch is making you sound like Chad Bradson. If you want to get your podcast pitches accepted and get invited onto big shows, you gotta sound human, real, authentic, and awesome. So how do you do that? Well, it's quite simple. You do the opposite of what Chad Bradson does. Let's break it all down and review Chad's bad pitch to see what's wrong with it and how we can turn it upside down and actually get featured on amazing shows. First off, Chad kicks off the email with a lie. He says, hey there, Chad Bradson here. I just want to say how much I love your podcast. Your guests and the value they bring are truly outstanding. Chad has never listened to your podcast and you know that for a fact. So Chad kicks things off by making himself an obvious liar. Do you want to invite an obvious liar to be a guest on your podcast? No, then Chad moves on to pitching himself and his inspirational rags to Rich's story. If you're open to it, I would love the chance to share my story with your audience. After dropping out of high school at age 16, I find myself living out of a car. Now, third years later, I've made $1 trillion while working only four hours every 10 years. Now, what Chad conveniently forgets to mention here is that the reason he was able to drop out of high school at age 16 was because his dad was a multi-millionaire and that car he was living out of was a G-Wagon and he was only technically living out of it for a week while his four bedroom penthouse in Miami was being fumigated. Okay, either way, when Chad does it this way, he just sounds so pretentious and unoriginal, right? Do you want to feature somebody pretentious and unoriginal on your podcast? No, do you want to sound pretentious and unoriginal when you pitch yourself to be on other podcasts? No, and actually, the secret to pitching yourself in a way that is awesome and authentic is actually not by pitching yourself. I'll explain that in a little bit, but let's get back to Chad. And Chad's pitch, he moves on to make us a promise. If you have me on your show, I think I would be able to bring tremendous value and inspiration to your audience, value and inspiration. Wow, nobody's ever promised that before. What does that even mean? Chad clearly has no idea who your podcast audience is, what type of value they're looking for specifically and what even inspires them. If anything, if you have him on your show, he's going to inspire them to unsubscribe. Finally, Chad's bad pitch has the big nail in the coffin, which is, could you send over your calendar link? Oh my gosh, you pretentious a-hole. Chad is so amazing, so inspiring, so badass that obviously he's honoring you by asking an hour of your time. Here is the sad part about all of this, though. This pitch is going to work for Chad because Chad knows that there are hundreds of thousands of active podcasts, and most of them have very little listenership in our amateurs. And those amateur podcasts have no standards for who they invite on their show. So Chad's going to hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines at two bucks an hour to send to this pitch to a hundred thousand podcasts. A lot of them are going to say yes, and he's going to be booked solid for years. But that is not the worst part. The worst part is that you are going to get this pitch from Chad, and when you get it, you're going to scoff and not respond. However, you are also not satisfied with the amount of podcast downloads that you're getting. And you've heard from people like me that podcast casting is a great way to grow your podcast. So you're going to decide to give it a shot. And when the time comes for you to pitch yourself, guess whose pitch you're going to go to in your email and copy word for word, Chad's. And guess who's not going to get featured on any significant shows that actually have your dream audience already listening to them? You, because you made yourself sound like Chad. But the good news is you're not Chad. And because you're listening to my voice right now, you're never going to sound like Chad again. So how can you send podcast pitches that get tons of responses and get you featured on significant shows that bring you audience and sales? How can you avoid being a Chad podcast guest? And instead, be a glad podcast guest. Well, it's very simple. Like we said before, you're going to take everything that Chad does, and you're going to do the opposite. First off, you want to be selective with the shows that you're pitching. You don't want to spray and pray like Chad does, sending 100,000 pitches to any podcast email you can come across. You're also not going to land on big time podcasts by sourcing guest opportunities from tons of forums and apps. Don't get me wrong, those forums, those apps, they are awesome. They are a great way to get started with podcast guessing. But the biggest and best shows have their pick of the litter when it comes to podcast guests. They are not asking people in Facebook groups to come onto their show. Now, I for myself have developed a whole process on how to identify the right shows to pitch. And I call it targeted podcast pitching. And if you want to hear me talk through that, just listen to episode 129 of Grow the Show, wherever you listen to podcast. Now, picking the right shows to pitch yourself, too, is so important that my team actually does this research for my high level mastermind clients, where we just give them the list of the high level shows for them to collaborate with. If you're not in my high level mastermind, first of all, you should consider it. But if not, just go listen to episode 129, and that'll map out how we do that research for our clients. Secondly, the other second big mistake that Chad makes here, and you probably have made this, too, is that Chad sends the whole pitch in the first email. He goes straight for the jugular. It's just, hi, you don't know me, but will you have me on your podcast? It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's go to dinner first. Come on. Here is why that actually shoots yourself in the foot. When you send your whole pitch in the first email, what is the singular question that that email is asking? Which, by the way, this is a tip for getting more out of any email that you send, ask yourself. This message that I'm sending, what is the one question that this email is asking? Is that question easy for the person to answer quickly? Because if not, if it's not easy for them to answer, or if it's uncomfortable for them to answer you, they will not answer you. And so when you pitch like Chad and just pow, send a pitch, totally cold, that email is asking this question, will you have me on your podcast, yes or no? Now, imagine that you got that pitch email from Chad while you're on your phone in line at the grocery store, quickly checking your email. You read the pitch, and even if you're even a little bit interested, are you gonna stop what you're doing and hold up the whole line to the grocery store and respond? Yes, Chad, oh my gosh, here's my booking link. You, blah, blah, blah. No, you're not gonna do that. More likely is you're either gonna be like, ugh, gross, horrible pitch. Or you're gonna be like, huh, that's interesting. Let me think about that. But then what happens? It's your turn to check out at the grocery store, and you forget to answer. Or you do remember, and you just put it off for a couple of hours, which become days, which become weeks. And eventually you never respond to Chad. This is why nobody is responding to your podcast pitches. It's not because they didn't get the email or because they're jerks. It's because you asked them to give them a decision in the first email that you said them. And they're either not sure so they don't respond or the answer is no, so they don't respond because nobody likes to say no. So how do you solve this problem? Here's the key. You break your pitch into two separate emails. Now, like I said, I worked with more than 400 podcasting clients to help them grow their shows over the past four years, and what we do is we track our average pitch response rate. What that means is, what is the percentage of pitches that we actually get a response from on the first email? Now, when you pitch like Chad and you send the ask in the first email, you can expect a 1 to 2% response rate, meaning that only one or two out of 100 pitches will get a response. Not a yes, a response. When you split it up and do the two pitch system that I'm about to map out for you, your pitch response rate raises from 1 to 2% to 20 to 40%. Meaning out of every 100 pitches that you send, you get a response from 20 to 40 of them. That is a 20 times to 40 times increase just by making this one simple change. And so what is the simple change? How do you do this? Well, here's what you do. In the first email, you don't ask if you can be on their podcast. You don't even ask if they're interested in having you on their podcast. You ask them how they prefer to receive guest pitches. I'll say that again. You ask them how they prefer to receive guest pitches. Why? Because of what I just said, how do you prefer to receive guest pitches? Is a much easier question for them to ask than will you have me on your podcast? That's a question that they can answer in line at the grocery store. And when you do ask that question instead, you'll usually get one of four responses. They'll either say, you're in the right place. Send your pitch here. Or they will CC a team member on to the email thread, which is the proper person to pitch. Or they will send you a form to fill out to some shows have a process for collecting pitches. Or they'll say that they're not taking pitches right now, which is great because you didn't waste your time pitching a show that's not taking pitches. All of those responses are great because they are responses. The goal of the first email that you send is not to get a yes, it is to get a response. And the key when you do it this way is that you have not only started a conversation and gotten a response, which is getting you one step closer to landing a spot on their podcast, but most importantly, by asking this question, how do you prefer to receive guest pitches, you've shown that you are a real and considerate person, which out of the gate will make you stand out from the crowd. But we're not done yet. There's one other thing that we wanna do in the initial email that we send out. We want to truthfully say how we came across the show. So don't do what Chad did. Don't lie about how much you love their podcast if you have never listened to it before. Nobody wants to feature liars on their show and they're gonna know your line. Instead, simply say I found your show because, and then honestly tell them how you found their show. If you searched for it, say that. Your show came up when I searched for shows about blank. Now again, for those in my high level mastermind mastermind master of the show, you'll actually get the name drop a real mutual connection that you have because that's how my team does the research. But again, if you don't do that, you can just say, I found you because you had Pat Flynn on your podcast. And I love Pat Flynn. That's it. You don't have to lie about listening to the episode. And while we're here, I'll answer a common question that I get about pitching, which is how much personalization should I do? Should I listen to five of their episodes before sending my pitch? No, you don't have time for that. And this is another reason why the two-pitch system works so well. You save that level of personalization and research for the 20 to 40% of shows that actually respond to your initial email. That way you're still doing personalization. You're still saying, hey, here's why. I think I might be a great fit for your show, but you're not wasting your time personalizing pitches for shows that are just gonna ghost you anyway. Now, once you get a response from the first email, and they point you in the right direction of where you should send your pitch, here's what you're gonna do next. You send your second email, which is where you're actually pitching yourself to be on the show. But remember, we don't wanna be Chad here, so we gotta do the opposite of what Chad does. Like, remember this? He said, if you're open to it, I would love the chance to share my story with your audience. What's wrong with this? Well, the mistake Chad made when pitching himself is that he pitched himself. He pitched his own story as the topic of the episode. We as podcasters get enough of those crappy pitches. And when we get one like that, what we really want to know is, what is Chad's story going to do for our audience? What is our audience going to get from Chad's story? When Chad says, I would like to share my story with your audience, he's implying that our audience will be able to learn from his story. And by hearing about how he went from silk ragged to riches, maybe our audience will be able to do the same for themselves. That's what Chad is implying. But the problem is, this is too indirect. If you pitch your story as the topic of the episode, you are implying the value that your story will bring to the podcasters audience. And the podcaster is not gonna put two and two together. Instead, you want to be explicit about it. You should curse, I'm just kidding. What does that mean? How can you send an explicit pitch instead of an implicit pitch? Well, imagine that instead of pitching yourself to be featured on a podcast, you're pitching yourself to speak on stage at a conference. Would you pitch that you are going to talk about yourself in your talk to the conference goers? No, and if you're doing that by the way, that's why none of your pitches are getting accepted. You don't want to pitch yourself as the topic or your story as the topic. You want to pitch the topic of the talk. And a lot of times when you pitch yourself to speak at a conference, you have to fill out a form and they ask you, what are the attendees of your talk going to learn? What are the three things they're gonna take away from your session? Now, when you give your talk, yes, you share some of your story, but that is not the purpose of the talk. The same thing is true here. Instead of pitching yourself and your story to be featured on a podcast, you pitch your topic and the takeaways, what people can learn from having you on the show. This completely changes the way that your pitch feels to the podcaster that you're pitching. Because when you're pitching yourself and your story, it feels like you're asking for a favor. Hey, will you have me on your podcast so that I can access your audience and get them to buy my stuff? Instead, if you pitch a topic that is well thought out with explicit value, it feels like you're doing the podcaster that you're pitching a favor, not asking for a favor, but doing them a favor. Why? Well, when you give them an explicit topic with points, valuable points, you have just handed that podcaster an episode topic on a silver platter. They're not going to have to come up with what to talk about on their show for the next week. You've done the work for them. Awesome. So instead of it feeling like you're asking them a favor to feature you, it feels like you're doing them a favor by giving them a content topic. Now, as I said, while you're doing this and while you're pitching your episode topic, you want to include what specifically your audience will get from learning about your topic, not what you will talk about, but what the audience will get from what you are talking about. What will they be able to have after hearing you talk? What will they be able to do after hearing you talk that they can't do now? Who will they be able to become after hearing you talk that they can't become now? This is the opposite of what Chad did in his pitch. Remember, he said, if you have me on your show, I think I would be able to bring tremendous value and inspiration to your audience. That is super vague. It means nothing. You want to be specific with what you're going to bring to the table. Finally, you wrap up your pitch not by being a pretentious jerk and asking for the booking link, which is super presumptuous, but by asking a specific question, and that question is this, do you think this topic would be a good fit for your podcast audience? Here's why this is key. You want them to respond to the email so that you are not left hanging in the ether. Again, the goal is a response. And if you ask them if you are a good fit for the podcast, and it's not a fit, or they're not sure, they're not going to answer you, they're going to ghost you, because they're going to feel bad about rejecting you. But if you instead ask if the topic that you proposed is a good fit, you make it so that they are rejecting the topic instead of you, which feels better. And it makes it more likely that they'll actually respond and say, actually, no, I don't think that topic is a fit. And if they do say that, if they say that the topic isn't a good fit, the door is still open, because then you get a chance to suggest a different topic that is better fit for their audience. But if they say, you're not a good fit, it's over. All right, so we have covered a lot today. You've learned why Chad Bradson's pitches are so icky, and you've learned not to pitch like him. You've learned a better way to pitch, which includes splitting your pitch into two emails, asking first how they like to receive pitches. That's the first question that you ask. Being honest about how you came across their show, pitching a topic instead of yourself, being specific with what their audience will get from your topic, and finally ending your pitch with a clear question that is easy to answer. Do you think this topic would be a good fit for your podcast audience? If you want to get my email pitch template, go ahead and click a link in the show notes, and you can get access to that. But what's also in the show notes is the YouTube video version of this episode. And at this part of the episode on YouTube, I'm actually showing you the pitch, where you can actually see the words, and you can see the template and how I use it. So if you want to see that in action, click the link in the show notes to go to YouTube video, where you can actually see me using the pitch. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now, I have a quick favor to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast, and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating, and if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show, because it helps us land bigger guests, and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five-star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten, and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by podcast boutique, and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast, and if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with podcast boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them, because I spent no time editing this episode, and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schviddlin. I'll see you next time.