How To Get Your Podcast Featured in Media Outlets and on TV, with Damona Hoffman

It's October 2018. At this point in time, I've been a podcaster for five months. I've released an episode every single week since launch, and each episode has gotten a few more downloads than the last one. It hasn't been crazy, but you know, it's been nice. The show isn't blowing up, but it's growing a little bit. Most of the listeners are coming from social media and word of mouth, which is cool. But here's the thing. I want this podcast to be a business. I want to monetize it. I want it to pay for itself, and I want it to pay me. I'd love to say that I am a full-time podcaster. And the problem with that is this. At this current growth rate, if the show doesn't start growing faster, it's going to take like 80 years to get to 100,000 downloads, let alone more. I recently brought this up to one of my mentors who was actually a guest on the show. I told them that I was having trouble figuring out how to grow the show. He asked me if I had thought about getting the show featured in the media. In articles on TV, that kind of thing. And I said, well, yeah, but I don't even know where to start with that. Do I just email them? He said, no, that never works. But I do know somebody at Billy Penn, which is Sidebar, a local Philadelphia news outlet. He said, let me see if they're interested in doing a story. I said, cool, thanks. I didn't really think about it too much after that conversation, but sure enough, a few weeks later, Billy Penn emailed me. They wanted to do a story about how I quit my full-time job to be a podcaster. So they called me up. I answered a bunch of questions, and I didn't hear back until yesterday, that is. Yesterday I logged into Twitter and found that they had released the article, and a bunch of people were tagging me in it. It was so cool. Now that was yesterday. Today, I get to look at the download numbers and see if they had any impact. So I take a look. I open up my hosting platform, go to the analytics tab, and wait a minute, this can't be right. My podcast host is telling me that yesterday's download numbers were twice as high as the previous single day record. That's nuts, but there's no way that's going to stick, right? Fast forward a couple weeks. I've released four episodes since the article hit, and my download numbers have never looked back. They've maintained the same number of downloads each day as when the article dropped, and they've been going up since then. This is amazing. How can I do more of this? That was a true story. That happened to me in October of 2018 with Philly Ho. And if you check the show notes, you'll see a link to that very article that I'm talking about. Let's go back in time again. Now, it's August of 2019. Ever since that first article hit, I've been chasing the high of having that podcast featured in the media, but I haven't been able to figure it out a way to make it happen regularly. What am I missing? I wasn't sure. So August of 2019, I go to podcast movement, one of the largest conferences in the country. If not the largest, I'm actually not sure. I go a day early, and I attend a special all day session with the Patreon team, learning how to launch an effective Patreon. So I'm there. The session hasn't started yet. I'm just chilling with my notebook and some coffee, having a protein bar for breakfast. And I notice that the person sitting next to me directly to my right is on a laptop reviewing PowerPoint slides. She's going to be a speaker. I want to talk to her. I'm here to network after all. So I break the ice. Hey, are you going to be a speaker? Still a big question. But she smiles. She says yes. Speaking later about how to get your podcast featured in the media and on TV, I said, oh my gosh, perfect. I'm totally going to come to your session. She smiled again. That'd be great. We continue to make small talk. We tell each other about our shows. We both had kind of recently launched Patreon's, but I wasn't going super well. We weren't really sure how to do it. And just then the session began and we stopped talking. I then bounced from session to session, learning a ton about Patreon, about podcasting, and pretty soon my phone alarm went off. It was time for that session about how to get media and PR. So I checked the event map of the conference, found the room, walked over. And even though I got to the session 10 minutes early, there were no seats available. It was standing room only. I said, holy crap, who is this person? At 2 p.m. sharp, the audience gets quiet. And on the stage, stepped my Patreon buddy, the same person that was sitting next to me just earlier. She immediately introduced herself, her podcast, and what she's accomplished. And I was immediately blown away. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, she mapped out exactly how she has spent the last eight years getting herself and her podcast featured on reality shows, news segments, in-national newspapers, and all over the internet. I was so intensely taking notes that I literally broke my notebook. I still have it. The spine is broken. And after I got home from that conference, I implemented what I learned. And it got my podcast Philly Who featured all over Philadelphia. And that was one of the ingredients that helped take my show past 100,000 downloads and counting. And it was so crazy because it was so much easier than I thought to get my show some serious attention. And that's because it was all broken down into clear actionable steps which were presented in an easy to implement framework by a friend that I had met at a podcast conference. And today, she's here to teach you that exact same thing. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your show, get more listeners, and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. In this episode, you're going to learn how you can get yourself and your podcasts featured in newsletters, newspapers, online media outlets, and even on TV without hiring an expensive PR firm and without buying advertisements. Your ticket to explosive audience growth is right here now on Grow the Show. Now before we begin, be warned that what you're about to learn is not a substitute for engaging with your audience on social media and in watering holes. Those two things should always remain the foundation of your growth strategy and you should really only worry about this once you've built that habit. But admittedly, linear audience growth via social media will not be enough to ignite your show into a growing thriving business. To do that, you're going to need some help. And like everything else in life, if you want to learn how to do something right, you need to learn how to do it from somebody who has already done it before. Somebody like Domona Hoffman. Join us now as Matt Shadynexpert and producer and host of The Dates and Mates Podcast, Domona Hoffman. She dishes out advice on her popular podcast, Dates and Mates. Domona Hoffman is a certified dating coach and host of Dates and Mates. Listen to Domona's podcast, Dates and Mates. Domona Hoffman. Domona Hoffman. Domona Hoffman is here and we are going to get her some help. Yes, Domona Hoffman is here, but today she's not going to be sharing relationship advice. Now today, Domona is going to share with you exactly how she established herself as an authority on relationship advice, totally from scratch. As you heard from those talk show hosts, Domona is the host of The Dates and Mates Podcast, but that's not all she does in the world of dating. She's also an online dating coach, she's an LA Times columnist, and she's even a regular contributor on national TV and a regular correspondent on the Drew Barrymore show. Domona is an authority. She is established, which is where many of us podcasters are dying to be. It's okay to want that. But unlike many podcasters I talked to today who are largely driven by their desire to grow their influence and become an authority, which is totally fine, I am too. That actually wasn't the path initially Domona had in mind when she started on this journey. In fact, back in the late 2000s, when she started to recognize her knack for online dating, she had a totally different career altogether. I was working as a casting director in television, I was working for CBS, and I was teaching classes for actors at night on how to brand themselves and market themselves, how to have headshots that really stood out to someone like me, and how to tell their story. At the same time, I was single, and I just found out about this thing called online dating, and I had a light bulb moment where I realized that what I was teaching actors about marketing themselves was basically the same thing that I needed to do on my dating profile. My profile photo was my headshot, and the first day was basically an audition, so once I made that connection, I ended up meeting my husband online, and very soon after people started having me rewrite their dating profiles, and that's now what I've been doing for the last 15 years. Like most of us, the thought of being an online coach or a podcaster didn't even cross Domona's mind back in 2008. I definitely was not trying to become a dating coach. I just realized I had a system and a knack for it because of my background as a casting director and really understanding personal branding and marketing yourself as a product. Domona had a skill set, and she was using that skill set to help other people, and she was so good at it that she had herself a little side hustle, and that side hustle grew completely on its own. It was all word of mouth. It was my friend or my family member came to me, and then when they would get the results, they would refer me to someone else and someone else and someone else, and all that whole time I was still working up the chain in television. Like many other successful platforms, dates and mates initially was built nights and weekends. During the day, Domona was working her way up the chain at NBC Universal as an up and coming Hollywood executive. I ended up getting to Vice President of Programming, which was my dream job, and I got there, and I had my daughter and came back to the job, and it just didn't feel the same to me. Many people who actually achieved their dream role in their career finally get there only to realize that the role isn't as euphoric or fulfilling as they thought it would be. This was one of those times. I remember the moment that I decided I had to leave, and I was watching Oprah's Life class, and she was talking about these transition moments in life, and when you get to that point where you know, you might not know what the next step is, but you know you can't do the thing that you're doing, and you have to make a leap. And I was laying on the floor of my living room and sobbing. Me and Oprah were just sitting there crying our eyes out, and I just was like, I don't know what's next, but it's not this. And it really took, I went through a pretty dark and deep place for about six months after I left, and I started working with a coach actually who helped me really figure out what would it look like if you had your dream job and you were doing your dream, your dream role, and you had all these other things in your life, a husband and kids, what would it really look like? With a new dream in mind, Demona decided to go all in on the thing that was truly bringing her joy, helping people find love like she did via online dating. If she was going to go all in and make her coaching business a full time gig, she would need to get more clients because if you want to truly grow, you can't simply rely on word of mouth. So she wondered, how am I going to let people know that I do this? How am I going to share what I know? And this is how dates and mates was born, but it wasn't a podcast quite yet. I started my own blog first to demonstrate that I had content that was worth reading, sharing, talking about. And I did that for a long time, multiple times a week I would post SEO rich articles, but I established myself initially just from traffic to my website as an authority in my category. Part of the challenge early on was determining what that category was. Initially, I was thinking dating and relationships, let's be as broad as possible. I can cover anything from wedding trends to dating apps. But with time, she learned that it's actually harder to grow an audience when your focus is that broad. So she narrowed it down. I've really started to hone in on the fact that I always began as a dating profile writer. My expertise is in modern dating and everything that comes with that from texting and chat communication to first dates, to dating apps. And with that, she established her authority pretty quickly. Today, 10 years later, well, you know where she is now. She's living that dream. So how did she do it? How did she get the word out and build an audience from scratch? I was hosting reality shows. I was doing TV segments on, you know, local news, national talk shows. That sort of thing. The funny thing is she started doing this in 2010 when most of the country hadn't even heard of podcasts, including the TV hosts themselves. They always say, what do you want to be credited as? What do you want to plug? And if I said my podcast, they would look at me sideways. It was like, what? So I had to say radio show then, or I had to not mention it. It was such a different, different landscape. Today? Well, things have changed. Join us now as Matt Shadynexpert and producer and host of the Dates and Mates podcast, Mona Hoffman. She dishes out advice on her popular podcast, Dates and Mates. The Mona Hoffman is a certified dating coach and host of Dates and Mates. Can you imagine how powerful it would be for your podcast to be mentioned on TV in newspapers and in other media publications? Do you want to learn how to do it? All right. Then let's go. Step one. First to just remember, it's not about you. It's not about what you want to put out in the world, like what does the audience need or want to hear right now? So once again, like everything else, you must serve the listener first, above all else, and do things that will make them happy. So how can you stay in tune with what your audience wants? Well, we'll cover that more in depth in an upcoming episode, but the Mona learns what her audience wants by listening to them. People send me questions all day every day. So then I'm really hearing, what do you want to know? What do you want this content to be about? And then I can really deliver on what the audience is looking for. So like everything else we do here at Grow the Show, it all starts with being very specific about who your audience is and why they love to listen to your show. And yes, we do this because if we don't know who our listeners are and why they love our show specifically, we won't know how to make them happy. And by the way, we also won't know how to find sponsorships. But also, this understanding of our listener base will make it way easier to know what outlets our future listeners are currently paying attention to. And through that, which outlets we should partner with to turn those future listeners into current listeners. So again, if you have skipped episode two of the Grow the Show podcast, this is not going to work. But if you haven't and if you have a good understanding of specifically who your listeners are, then you're ready to learn how to get yourself and your podcast featured by big media outlets in articles and on TV and it all starts with the pitch. The pitch is the same whether we're talking print, whether we're talking TV or whether we're talking podcast. What is the hook? What are the four to five talking points? Why are you the person to tell this story? First you need the hook thinking of their audience. What does their audience want to know right now? Note that this is different than your audience. Your audience will contain people who also fit into your audience, but those two audiences won't be one of the same. Think of Van Diagram. There will be some serious overlap. For example, Grow the Show Accelerator student Anna Deermann Cornick has a podcast about time management for busy women called It's About Time. Anna has had tons of success growing her audience by being featured by outlets catered to women in real estate. Her audience is busy women who want to learn more about work, life and balance and that is similar to an audience of women real estate agents, but not exactly the same. I guess not all women real estate agents want to learn about work, life and balance. It's true. So when Anna's pitching one of those outlets, she'll lean into the real estate angle and write a catchy headline about real estate. And by doing that, she is appealing to that outlet's specific audience. Domoana does the same thing. I do a lot of live news and talk shows. Those are not long lead. Those are immediately what is happening right now. Like I just got booked this morning for ABC local station. If I was pitching them, I would have this already ready to go. Like I would say LA Times columnist talks COVID dating trends because that's the thing that I have that makes it a hook that's unique. And you might say like Philly native has figured out a new way to like whatever that you're talking about. Yeah, whatever it is. So yeah, the catchy headline is the first. Then you also need supporting bullets that express what you're going to be saying if they book you for that topic. Quite simply, this is the who, what, where, when and why? Who is your story about? Where is it happening? What's happening? Why is it important? And then bonus why? Why are you the person to tell this story? That's it. It's quite simple. At the end of this episode, I'm going to tell you about where you can find a cheat sheet that Domoana made that you can use to make sure that you are crafting the perfect pitch. In the meantime, now that we know how to pitch, how do we know what to pitch? What should we write about or talk about in order to get media coverage? Where do we even start? So there's basically three ways to get you or your material covered. You can either catch the headline, create the headline or be the headline. And I do this in a lot of different ways. Catching the headline means you are talking about something that's already happening. So something that's in the news right now, something that is happening seasonally, that is a story that would happen whether or not you were there. This is an opportunity for you to be a source and for you to add to the dialogue. So where can you go to catch the headlines? Well, simple. Just go to the people who are writing the headlines. If you follow a couple of journalists like look up the editors of your favorite newspapers or magazines, and you'll see what different hashtags they use when they're looking for a source, maybe you start following one of the, I don't even want to say a today show because it's like not super realistic, but you start following your local news anchor or producer on Twitter. And then you start to retweet their tweets and engage with their posts and respond to the news that's already happening. Then you start to become more of a person than just a follower. You become someone that's adding value to the conversation. And then you can switch from being a fan to being a source. The other thing that I use a lot is Harrow, help a reporter out. Harrow is a great place to see what other headlines are already happening in your category. I don't use it regularly now that I'm more established. But when I started, I would check twice a day. They'll send out queries from journalists who are looking for sources. And so it doesn't take a ton of time to just scan through and see if there's something that fits your category. But again, I was scanning through, as I do like once a week, I'll scan through because a lot of times the same things will come up. And a couple of weeks ago, I saw that Cosmo was looking for women of color in the dating niche to be a source for a particular article. So right away, I sent the pitch. I led with all the stuff that I do and who I am very succinct, very direct. I ended up getting picked for that article. I did an amazing job. That's the other thing. Do your best work every single time. So I did an amazing job for her. Almost all of the media that I do, I'm asked back again because I deliver, I think through the content for their audience, what is their audience need to know, what's going to be helpful for them. And I make their job really, really easy. So then she came back to me and was like, Demona, I have another article. I think I commented on like three different articles that I gave a quote to. And so then I was like, okay, I have this podcast. I have a resource that could help us build this relationship. So I reached out to her. She told me, oh, I have this book, by the way, coming out, do you want to do any promotion about it? I have this book for Cosmo. And I said, why don't you come on dates and mates? So tomorrow, I'm recording an episode with her. So I'm giving back to her by promoting her book and also further strengthening that relationship between us. It's all relationships, everything. It's all relationships. And really remembering that they're people, they're people with their own work life balance issues, and with their own interests, and really trying to connect. And that was always something that took me from the time I was a casting director and a TV executive and producer. I was always about building meaningful relationships, not just talking to the chair. You're not talking to editor of Cosmo. You're talking to this person and trying to get to know them, appeal to their interests, see what commonalities that you have, and see how you can be of service to them. Yeah. Just help people. Just ruthless generosity will get you everywhere that you want to go. Sure. But, you know, it is not entirely selfless, of course. Sure. It doesn't end up benefiting you, but you want to find something that's mutually beneficial. But really also thinking of your podcast as a tool. And even if your podcast, like at the beginning, you know, maybe I had like a thousand listeners, maybe I wasn't making a huge impact, but for those thousand people who were hearing it, that's valuable. So going to people that you want to talk to and offering them an opportunity to chat with you on the podcast and reach a new audience, that's a win-win for you both. You're spending some time catching the headlines, helping out journalists and building relationships. You'll be ready for step two, creating the headline. Creating the headline means you are actually writing or recording the material yourself and that you are generating it. Well, you could generate it and then it could turn into a bigger story, but you are generating the discussion yourself. So an example of this, I found out from a Facebook friend, she was on Bumble and she was trying to find love. She ended up matching with Travis Barker from Blink 182, who was like one of her crushes. Yes. It was like one of her crushes and she was really, really excited. And then on Bumble, you have 24 hours. Once you send the initial message, he has 24 hours to respond back. So she was like, what's going on? He hasn't responded. And then she's like, checking his location in the app and it got like borderline cray cray. And then she was like, wait a minute, celebrities are always posting on Instagram. So she goes over to his Instagram and then sees that he was doing a promotion for Bumble and he was like, match with me on Bumble and you can win tickets to my concert. So not only did she not win the tickets to the concert, she did not actually have a love match with her celebrity crush. And I heard this and I was like, dang, that really sucks for her. But then as a content creator, I was like, that is a story, 100%. So then I started to work backwards. Who would this story be right for? And I was like, it has to be somewhere where people might actually match with a celebrity. So I was like, it has to be probably LA or New York. And then I started to hone in on who were the actual outlets that would pick up the story. New York Times, LA Times, LA Mag. And I ended up pitching it to two of those. And within minutes, I heard back from maybe a couple of hours, but the same day I heard back from LA Mag. We want the story. And so I ended up writing the story for them. And again, it was a driver to my podcast. It was about the content that I'm already an expert in. And then at the end, it's written by Domona Hoffman, host of the dates and mates podcast. So that's creating the headline. That's of course the most labor intensive, but I love making content of any kind. And the other cool thing about writing content for a magazine and newspaper is that you actually get paid to create it. So you're getting paid also to promote your podcast in a way. Wow. Yeah. Win-win. Finally, after some time catching headlines, creating headlines, and establishing yourself as a go to authority in your niche, you'll be ready to be the headline. When you want to be the headline, the story should be coming from your own experience or expertise. So I start thinking about Valentine's Day pretty much as soon as we get into fall. I'm already thinking about what am I going to pitch for Valentine's Day? What is the angle? And then why am I the person to tell this story? So I might have a special system that I figured out that I'm releasing to them as the story. I might have a personal story that I want to share, or I might have a story of say a client that then gets me into that topic for that time of year. If you're like a solo podcaster or duo podcaster and you have a topic that you discuss, this works really, really well. If you're more of a branded podcast, you almost need to identify a spokesperson with the story because the story is really, really important to everything. And then once you have the repository of content and you have clips and you have links that you can send people to to demonstrate your work, that's when you can even start to think about major media, well, first local markets and then ultimately national markets. By now, you've done the work to be featured as a source in articles and newsletters. You've built relationships with journalists and you've even provided them with some scoops. And you may have also started getting some press yourself about you. All the while you've been creating and collecting a bank of content that proves you're an expert and you've been saving them in one place, be it Google Drive, a Dropbox, even just a note or a Google Doc. If you keep all of the examples in one place, next time when an opportunity comes up to level up your media exposure, you have proof of your credibility. Ideally, you want to think of this as a multimedia content creation laboratory. So you are writing content, you are also doing videos and you don't necessarily need to have clips of you on talk shows or on morning news shows to be able to book that sort of media, but you should have some sort of video component and it doesn't have to be long because talent bookers and producers have really short attention spans anyway. I can say that because I was one. So if you can't grab them in the first 30 seconds, that's pretty much it. Like anyone who even just pitches my podcast, I will look at their materials. First of all, if the pitch comes in and it doesn't have any supporting materials, if it's just like, you should interview this psychologist. How do I know if you're boring? How do I know that that you're qualified like you need to have backup? So either reference an article that that you wrote or that you were quoted in and then a clip so I can see what you're like on air or a link to other podcasts that you've been on. Some sort of source material that's relevant to the kind of thing that you're asking need to book you on. Beyond that, you also need to have a really good story. Have the reason why you are pitching and really, really think that through clearly. I'm in a pretty crowded market right now. When I started as a dating coach, nobody had ever heard of a dating coach and that was pretty new. So it was a little bit easier to get my foot in the door. But even then, like I ended up having a talent booker who I paid to book me on news segments, just to get that initial tape. And I remember the first one, she booked me on, she put me on a panel with three other people because she was like, I don't even know if you can really talk on camera. And it was like, I drove from Los Angeles to San Diego, put myself up in a hotel, got up at the crack of dawn, paid for my own hair and makeup, just to sit in a chair and say two sentences to the camera because all that five minute segment was split three ways. But that little clip was enough to get me my next opportunity and my next opportunity. And so I'm constantly updating my clips and my reels and making sure my calling card is representative of where I am now. And that my pitches are all topical. So I'll send pitches throughout the year, depending on what's trending in the news, what I'm working on on the show that I think will be relevant or things that are happening in my own, my own story. So do you have any sort of, I guess now or before as you were really grinding to build this out? You said before people kind of come to you now, which is great. I still grind though. I still still still grind love that. That's the thing. Like everybody is like, Oh, must be so easy. Like how do you do this? And I'm like, I literally spend about four hours a week still on marketing and PR activities. Yeah. Well, specifically PR activities and and relationship building and all of that. So that was the next question. Like how do you structure it into your schedule? So is it like on your calendar that you say, Hey, I'm doing these things. I'm building relationships. I'm on Twitter commenting and retweeting and, you know, coming up with ideas for pitches. Like is that how you structure it into your week? If I was a more organized person, I absolutely would. And probably should, but I'm a Sagittarius. I can't do that. Fair. I'm a Capricorn. So I'm like, you know, for you definitely do that for me, I have to go spontaneously. Yeah, it's not really as strategic as I could. And now I'm thinking about all the opportunities I could get if I was a little more organized with it. It's more just, I just do it, Kevin. I just do it pretty much. Um, I look at what's happening in the month. And then I start to plan out what kind of media I want to approach. Yeah. I'm always communicating on Twitter with journalists and following people. And then I also will reengage with, so we do the headlines that is part of my format every single week. So I'll have a format where I'll retweet the article that that story was based on. And then I always tag the actual journalist as well, because you might not get retweeted or seen by LA Times. But with this particular editor, they might notice you. I did a story on woke fishing, which was broken by vice. I commented on it and did a story on woke fishing for my dates and mates podcast. And then I was contacted by refinery 29, which is also a sister media outlet to vice to ask me if I would comment on woke fishing for another article that they were doing. So it's like this web of interconnectivity that you just kind of need to jump into and tap into. I also am constantly like right now, I have a running pitch of about five topics that are current right now. So when I saw a friend of mine is doing a podcast that's really successful in my category, she just launched it. And I'm like, great. I would love to be a guest on your show. And she says, here's my email, pitch me some ideas immediately, not two weeks from now, but immediately when that door opened, I was ready because I had already done my pitches before. And out of the gate, the next morning, I sent her four pitches of these are topics. This is an article I wrote about race and dating. Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to talk about the election and how politics are affecting dating? Do you want to talk about COVID and how that's affecting dating right now? Do you want to talk about cuffing season? I am so ready at any point with the opportunity so that the minute the door opens, I'm there to walk in it. In 2019, a different door opened for Domona. She had the opportunity to take over another podcast for the accounting company FreshBooks. That podcast is about entrepreneurs and business owners, which is a far cry from dating and relationships. So with this new opportunity, Domona had the chance to find out whether her system of growing a podcast audience actually works for other shows. What I learned was that my system works universally and I'm not tuning my own horn. I'm just just reaffirming what I've said that I think we had something like we grew the podcast. I think 400% from the last season. Wow. Doing some of these same things that I was already telling you about focusing on the content and then focusing on the relationship building distribution channels, marketing, PR, all of that stuff. Right. So I know that it works because now I know it's repeatable and I haven't just done it on my own show, but I've done it on another show as well. With these skills and the system that Domona has built, she's now ready to expand her reach and credibility outside of the world of dating was a very deliberate move. Like a lot of people were like, what? You went from doing a dating show to doing an entrepreneurship show, but I am an entrepreneur. And they were looking for someone who could connect with other entrepreneurs on their level and who could produce a damn good show. So it ended up that it was the right opportunity for me and it's not random. I very strategically looked at my career as the dating expert podcaster that everyone was thinking of me as. And I was like, I think I want to broaden, I'm not just a relationship expert, I also want to do other content in the lifestyle space because I just love talking to people and hearing their stories. So I really encourage people to plot out where not just where you are right now, but where do you want to go? Is that thought of rebranding myself as a lifestyle content creator? Really started at least a year and a half ago. Like I changed my LinkedIn, I started pitching for different kinds of content and really started to focus on on broadening out the material that I could create that was within my control, not under the dates and mates banner, but separately. Even since that time, since I took over the FreshBooks podcast, which was a little over a year ago, I've now had a lot of other opportunities in the lifestyle space that I wouldn't have necessarily known were there if I wasn't brave enough to take that leap and step into an unknown, unknown space. I love that. And I think the flip side of that that I like to just call out is that a lot of people want that level of broadness in their quote unquote expertise, right, in their exposure. Everybody wants to be, you know, whatever, Joe Rogan or, you know, whoever, that's interviewing a wide variety of people. But the key is you make one thing work really freaking well first. And then there will absolutely be opportunities to expand in the future. That's been my opinion. And when I teach folks in the accelerator is to start small, think big, but start small, really just nail it for one specific group of people. Don't worry so much about being labeled as the blank guy or gal. And you go from there, you start with one group, really make it work. And like the Pied Piper, you will collect other things along the way. Do you agree with that? It's funny. You mentioned that because when I was a casting director and I would teach those classes for actors and marketing themselves, I would say, you have to get people to think of you for one thing before they think of you for everything. And I really encouraged people to sort of narrow cast and have headshots that were very specific that would tell their story and have a very clear sense of character. And sometimes people would push back on that because they're like, but I am a trained actor. I also am a trained actor. And now I'm podcasting. So I'm glad that you have your trained actor experience, but you're in Hollywood now. So you have to really, like you said, find your audience, find your niche. And then when people see what they can do, then you can broaden out. And I'm very happy to be pigeonholed as a dating expert, like the people that know me as a dating expert, I want them to think of me as their dating expert, the best dating expert for them. And also, for my own creative outlets, would like to, would like to explore other things, but that doesn't negate now their arena that I've been most known for as well. And I still keep serving that audience too. I mean, that's the thing, like people hate that when they help build you up to that point and then you abandon them or it's like, oh, well, great. Now you're hosting this other podcast, like you don't want to do dates and mates anymore. So I'm always really conscious of continuing to serve my audience. And that's another reason why even when I had two reality shows that I was filming, I still did my podcast because I was like, this TV show is going to come and go. But the audience that has been with me the entire time that listened to my show when no one else knew who the heck I was, when I didn't have any letters or accolades after my name. Those are the people that I need to continue to speak to and to continue to serve. So there you have it. The three steps to getting yourself covered is number one, catch the headline number two, create the headline number three, be the headline. And when you pitch for these opportunities, you must include a hook, your talking points and why you are the person to tell the story. So with this information, what can you do right now to help your podcast accelerate its growth? Well, two things. Number one, make a list of 10 journalists who cover your topic, cover your niche and simply start engaging with them on Twitter or LinkedIn. Don't ask them for anything. In fact, help them out, catch a headline, send a scoop, retweet their stuff. Just say hello. By doing that, you'll be digging the well before you're thirsty and pretty soon they'll start coming to you as a source. Then download DeMona's perfect pitch guide. It's a document that she crafted to help you in putting together your pitch so that you will most easily get yourself and your podcast featured. To get that document, join us in the Grow the Show Facebook group. Once you join that group, you will see an announcement post at the very top of the group that has the PDF that DeMona has put together and graciously shared with all of us so that we can craft our perfect pitches right now. And by the way, when you join us in the free Grow the Show Facebook group, I and other podcasters will be there to give you feedback and help you craft your perfect pitch. If you liked the show before you head to another podcast episode, please, please do us a huge favor and rate and review that really, really helps us to bring in amazing podcasters like DeMona when they can see that people are listening and getting value from the podcast. So please do rate and review if you are on Apple Podcast. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was produced, hosted and edited by me with editing and associate production by Catherine Nails and post production by Max Graham. Grow the Show and Q9. My name is Kevin Schmidland. Until next time.