216 | Podcast Guests Won't Grow Your Audience UNLESS...

Have you been booking guests after guests for your podcast, hoping they'll bring in new listeners, new leads and new clients only to find that nothing's really changing? You're showing up, you're publishing episodes, you're even landing some big names, but the growth just isn't there. If that sounds familiar, you're not doing anything wrong. You've just been sold the wrong strategy. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps online business owners grow their audience and their business through podcasting. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach. And today, we are attacking one of the biggest misconceptions in the podcasting world, which is do guest interviews actually help you grow your audience and get more clients, or are they just a distraction? In this episode, you're going to learn three things that every entrepreneur podcaster needs to know. Number one, why podcast guests rarely grow your audience, no matter how big their name is. Number two, what actually happens when you rely too heavily on interviews? And number three, how to use guests strategically to grow your business and your authority. Plus, I'm going to break down why even your most famous guests aren't sharing their episode on your show, even though they said they would and what to do about it. So if you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and finally build a podcast that attracts the right audience and converts them into clients, stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. Okay, so if you're an entrepreneur podcaster and your entire podcast is you interviewing guests, I'm willing to bet a few things are true. Number one, you are confused as to why your show hasn't grown more. Number two, you have published episodes of your podcast that you know deep down are not good because your guest wasn't interesting. They were boring. The interview didn't produce anything interesting, but you got to be consistent. So you published the episode anyway. Number three, you are perplexed as to why your guests refuse to tell their audience about their appearance on your show. Or number four, you might even be a little bored making your podcast. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have been podcasting for years every week, they interview a guest and they're starting to have the same conversation over and over again and they're getting very bored. And that is coming across in their content. Well, let's talk about the role that interviewing guests should play on your podcast today. If your goal is to grow your audience and grow your online business. Number one, if you take away anything from this piece, remember this. The guest gets the audience growth, not the other way around. The guest gets the audience growth, not the other way around, regardless how big of a name they are. This is probably one of the most common assumptions that I see when I have conversations with entrepreneur podcasters and they all say like, yeah, you know, I'm going to have a bunch of guests on my show. So my audience will grow. I know what the strategy is. You have a bunch of guests and they grow your audience. And I'm just like kind of biting my tongue for a minute because I'm like, oh, that's not going to work, right? Because it's true. The guest gets the audience, not the other way around. So having guests on your show is not going to grow your audience. And this is particularly confusing to those of you who have landed a couple big names on your show. It might be a dream guest that you had when you originally launched your show. You were like, man, if I just have this person, I'll have made it. I'll be validated and my audience will explode, right? And you interview that person and it might have been cool. Sometimes it's a little disappointing, right? Never meet your heroes. But either way, a lot of times they'll be very polite and they'll say, oh, yes, I'll share this with my audience, kind of as a throwaway at the end of the interview. And you're like, yes, they told me they were going to share. Now my audience is going to explode. And then what happens is they don't share, right? They don't tell their audience. So why is that? Well, remember this. People are only going to tell their audience that they were on your podcast. If your audience is bigger than theirs, that's because them being on your show raises their status and they want to tell their audience that they were on your show. If somebody who has an audience bigger than yours goes on your show, they're not going to tell their audience because it lowers their status for them to say that they were on a show that's smaller than theirs for the most part, bit of a generalization, but you just got to understand how humans work here. One of my favorite analogies here, which is like super ridiculous, but it helps is imagine if you were throwing a concert in your basement and Taylor Swift was performing regardless of what you think about Taylor Swift. One of the biggest names in music right now, right? Okay. So if you threw a concert in your basement and Taylor Swift was performing, do you think that Taylor Swift would tell her audience that she was doing a show in your basement? Now, let me stop you because I know a lot of you're going to be like, yes, she totally would. And yes, she would for like the PR charity piece to be like, look at me. I'm so down to earth. I'm doing a show in my in this person's basement, but that's not what she wants, right? You want Taylor Swift to say, Hey, everybody, I'm doing the show. Come see it. Would she tell her audience in that way? No, she does stadiums. Why would she be playing a basement? Also the sound quality and the show quality in your basement is probably not going to be that great. And that brings us to the next reason why guests are probably not telling their audience about your show. You probably have an amateur podcast. That's it. Your stuff is not good. Your stuff is not excellent. It's okay. You might have optimized this to take you the least amount of time as possible and be easy for you. You might ask basic chat GPT questions that they've been asked a million times. Your video setup might look like you're on a Zoom call in your bedroom. Or you might not have conducted yourself like a professional. You might have been late for the interview. The number one no no is that your guests should never arrive first. Or worse, you reschedule the interview. This is a big one amateur podcasters get nervous. A lot of resistance towards doing an interview and interviews are not super urgent. So I cannot tell you how many times I've been scheduled to be on someone's show. And I felt like I was doing them a favor by being on their show. And the morning of I get a, hey, sorry. There's an emergency. Can we reschedule? I'll admit in my earlier days, I used to do that. I would panic and I'd be like, Oh, today's not the day. And I would reschedule not the move. Do not reschedule. So if you have an amateur operation, if you don't conduct yourself like a professional and take your show seriously, that's going to show up in your show. Your show is going to seem amateur and it would lower your guests status to tell their audience that they have been on your show. But again, remember the guest gets the audience growth, not the host. So most guests are coming onto your podcast so that they can grow their audience. They are not there to help you grow yours. Okay. So am I saying you should never have guests on your podcast? Absolutely not. Podcasting is a wonderful medium where guest interviews and conversations can be transformative. But what I am saying is that so when should you bring on guests? Well, there's two scenarios where it is a good idea to bring on a guest to your podcast scenario. Number one, you want to learn from that person. You genuinely want to learn something from the guest and have a conversation with them or number two, the guest has something that you already know, but you want your audience to learn. So this happens for me all the time. I might go to a mastermind or an event and see a speaker and be like, Oh, I need this person to share this with my audience and I'll go and invite them on my show to basically share what they just shared with me. I kind of get to double dip there because I get them to share with my audience what they know and I also get to ask follow up questions and stuff like that. But either way, the only time you should ever have a guest on your podcast is when either or both you genuinely need or want to learn something from that guest or that guest has something that you want your audience to learn. And so this changes your perspective of decision making from, let me have this person so I can grow my audience or I can get people to buy something to let me interview this person so that I and or my audience learn something. Ironically, you will get more audience growth and more clients if you do it this way. That is the filter to run every potential guest through. So famous people who have a huge name, should you have them on your show? Well, is there something that you want to learn from them? Do they have something that your audience should learn? Then yes, if no, then no. Here's another one that I got all the time. What about my clients? Should I interview my past clients on my podcast? Yes, that can be an incredible way to generate some case studies and show your audience the work that you can do for them. And there must be something that you want to learn from them or they might have something that you want your audience to learn. So as an example, in a previous episode of Grow the Show, I featured Nicole Holliman, who is a previous client of mine. She joined my program to grow a coaching podcast of hers. She used some of what I taught her to launch another podcast about a book series with her sister and that podcast in 90 days got over a million downloads. And since then, both of their audiences have absolutely exploded. They're doing it full time, really, really cool example. I interviewed Nicole on Grow the Show specifically for two reasons. Number one, so I can learn even more how they took the things that I taught them. And implemented them and they worked and also anything that I didn't teach them that they implemented that worked, but I also wanted to share that story with my clients to say, Hey, here's an example of using this process and using this framework to launch a podcast that can absolutely work. What I would not want to do is interview a past client and just make that interview about how great my program was or how awesome or smart I am. People see right through that and it doesn't make a good episode. So from now on, what I want you to do is for every guest that you are inviting onto your show, no ahead of time. What are you looking to learn specifically from that conversation? And or what does that guest have that you want your audience to learn from that conversation? Stop thinking about, can this guest grow my audience? Because the guest gets the audience growth, not the host. However, having said that, there are things that you can do to leverage the guests that come on your podcast to grow your audience. So let's talk about what those are. Number one, if they have a famous or well-known name or face, you leverage their name or face in your packaging and your promo material. So it's not like their name and face is going to bring you an audience. You use their name and likeness to promote your episode and their name and likeness gets people who know who they are, who come across your content online and be like, oh, this is interesting. You see this all the time with really big names right now in the online marketing space and an influencer space who currently have, you know, a lot of momentum around their face. You'll see people post stuff all the time using them to get attention. So what that looks like is make some clips with that guest and put those clips out. What I always say is clips from a recording are not going to grow your audience unless you have either or both a famous face or a fancy space. You can also use images of that person online to get more reach with your social media content. And if you're on YouTube, absolutely, you should use that person's face in your YouTube thumbnail. My interview with Pat Flynn on Grow the Show, which aired I think about a year and a half ago is to this day one of my best performing YouTube videos. It gets views every single week. And it's because I've got an amazing thumbnail with Pat Flynn in it that says, if you're a new podcaster, do this. And so people watch the video because they know Pat Flynn. So that's number one, use their name and likeness when promoting your episode or packaging your episode and people who know who that person is already will click on it. What that isn't is publishing a post on Instagram with a not famous guests headshot that post is not going to do well. It's not going to do you any favors. So don't post that. The second way that you can grow your audience by having guests is by making a post on social media about the episode and tagging them. So if you're posting reels, that's doing a collab post on Instagram. You can collab with somebody where you post a reel. You add them as a collaborator. And then if they accept it, that real will be shown to their audience as well. So that's a great way to access their audience on LinkedIn. Simply tag them. If you tag them, that post will show up in their audiences feed, even if they don't approve it, even if they don't give you permission. So do that. And the third way is if you post to your Instagram stories and you tag that person, they can repost the story to their audience as well across the board, though, what it isn't is giving them social media content and thinking that they're going to post it. They're not. I'm telling you right now, it's too much work. They're not going to do it. And also usually the social media content that you give them isn't good. It's super amateur. So they're not going to put it on their feed because it doesn't look good, right? So the number one thing to do is to make your own post on your own social media and tag or collaborate with them in hopes that they will show it to their audience or the algorithm will show it to their audience. The third thing that you can do is a podcast swap. So this is for the guests that you have on your show that have a similar audience size. So you interview them and they interview you on their show. And again, if you're being interviewed on their show, you get the audience. But that's extra work. So for all three of these strategies, understand that there's extra work that you have to do to leverage the guests that you've had to grow your audience, not the other way around. They are not going to do anything to grow your audience. Why would they? They want to grow their own audience. Now, once again, I am not trying to poo poo guest episodes altogether. They can be fantastic. They can be a great way to grow. If you leverage the strategies I've just shared with you, but if you are an established CEO or entrepreneur and you're doing all interview episodes and those interviews, you know, are not that great. They're super mid, they're super amateur, start doing solo episodes that shares your knowledge and your experience. Number one, number two, start inviting guests on your show that you are excited to interview that you're really jazzed about having a conversation with. If you are not jazzed to have a conversation with a person, do not interview them. My hope is that this is going to reinvigorate your guest episodes and show you how to actually grow your audience. And then one more note for all you solopreneurs out there. There's one scenario today where I would say it is a good idea to do all guest interviews. And that is if you are a solopreneur or a new online coach who is still developing your core framework and still developing and offer and how to get people a result. So in the earliest days of Grow the Show, I was a successful podcaster who decided to help other podcasters. And while I had done the thing myself, I didn't yet have any teaching frameworks for how other people could do it. So the way that I developed those teaching frameworks were number one by working with people and then asking me questions and me telling them what to do and doing that enough times to notice the patterns. But number two, going out and interviewing other successful podcasters to understand what frameworks they use. And through that, I was able to develop my own. So if you're a solopreneur or a new online coach who's still just like you don't have tons of material to do solo episodes about yet or you don't have tons of frameworks of your own, then go out and interview others. And have people on your show and get momentum that way. So that's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. My hope is that this has shed some light on guesting strategy for your podcast. If you have any additional questions or if I said something you disagreed with, let me know in the comments. If you are on YouTube or Spotify for the rest of you, I'll see you in the next one. I have two things for you before I let you go. Number one, real quick, if you've ever gotten any value from the show, please, if you haven't yet, leave us a five star review. I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day. So please, please, I would love to hear from you. It really, really helps us. And then the second thing is if you are a podcaster who needs help with production, if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet definitely set up a conversation with podcast boutique, they are the team that I've been working with for five, six years. They're my most trusted production agency. And recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about. They call it record and forget I've been using it for months. It is amazing. You just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you. They create titles, show notes. They can make it into an amazing YouTube video, clips, and of course, high value production. So the content editing piece is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time. It is unbelievably good. All I do is record. I send it off to them. They handle the rest. And by the way, they are also closely in lockstep with me. So any time I discover something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast, I immediately share it with them. We work to implement it with my show and then they implement it with the other shows that they work on. So if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or post production or if your current post production team isn't cutting it, maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises, which is very common. Check out podcast boutique you can go to podcast boutique.com. Let them know that I sent you. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.