How to pitch yourself to become a podcast guest

Being a guest on other people's podcasts is a great way to get your name out there and get your business in front of a brand new audience. When you guest on someone else's show, you tap into the trust that they've already built with their audience and you get introduced to a whole new group of people at once making podcast guesting a potentially efficient visibility play for your marketing system. So how do you go about becoming a guest on other people's podcasts? In this episode, we're going to talk about how you can set up your podcasting strategy, how you can identify the podcast you might want to pitch, what should go into your podcast pitch and how to track the results. I'm Lex Roman, I help creatives make Smarter Marketing Betts, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show

Podcast guesting can be a ton of fun and it can be a great way to talk through some of your ideas, to submit your expertise and to create content that you can reuse in your business, not just for visibility, but for creating leads, closing leads into sales and getting clients to come back for more projects. As you're choosing your marketing plays, I always want you to keep in mind where this marketing play sits in your marketing system, and what I mean by that is are you meeting new strangers? Are you pulling people in who already know you? Are you cementing and closing projects? When we think about marketing, we're often focused on how do we get in front of our potential clients or potential buyers, and I do want you to keep that in mind, but when it comes to something like podcast guesting and many content players like it, you're not going to be facing buyers.

Buyers aren't looking to shop for services on a podcast. Podcast. Listening is a more passive activity. It is something that your clients are doing in their spare time. It is something that they are doing in an ongoing way and that is how they are maybe meeting you or hearing about you and then starting to follow your work. You do want to be aware that this is a slightly longer play and that you are most likely encountering browsers who look like your buyers and may at some point become clients. The first thing you want to do when you're getting started with podcast guesting is set your strategy. You want to figure out who you're trying to reach with these shows and what you're going to talk about when you're thinking about who you want to reach with this podcast. It's obvious to start with your clients, with your end buyers, but I also want you to keep in mind that it could make more sense for you to get in front of partners, collaborators, amplifiers other folks, maybe other professionals in adjacent spaces who could also help you find clients.

This is something to test as you go out to the market and pitch yourself on podcasts. Does it make more sense? Are you getting faster results with a buyer target or with a partner target? In some ways, for creatives, we have to go about things in an indirect manner and build out a professional network where those people are talking to our buyers in consistent ways and can identify those buyer ready moments as opposed to constantly pitching to our buyer. However, it's a logical place to start with podcasts that your clients are already listening to, so you're going to keep top of mind what your clients are listening to. In the next segment, I'm going to talk more about how you figure out what those podcasts are central to your podcast. Guesting strategy is what you're going to talk about, the topics that you want to be known for, that you want to be the expert in.

This is a really important piece that a lot of us get wrong. I know I've gotten it wrong in the past where you want to go and talk about a wide variety of topics on podcasts, and this is not a strategic way to go about this. You want to backwards engineer the topics that you're going to talk about from the services you want people to buy. So you want to think about what does my buyer need to hear about this topic that would make them aware that I have something unique to say about it and that they should work with me to solve it. Let's talk about an example of this. Let's say you're a copywriter and you want to sell copywriting services to medium-sized business owners. The thing that your buyers might need to know is why they need an expert copywriter and can't just put anyone on their team in charge of words.

So one of your topics for podcast guessing might be the difference between any language and the right language when it comes to conversion, and in that topic you might tell some client stories, you might tell something about your personal journey into copywriting, and this can help people understand both who you are, what you're like to work with, and also why they might need your service. The closer you go between what you're talking about and what you sell, the easier it is to sell. So when you're thinking about those topics, you don't want to think about other people like you. You don't just want to think about cool things you like talking about, you want to think about what do my clients need to hear right before they buy from me, and that's what you want to pitch as your topics for podcasts. Also, part of your podcast strategy is your call to action.

What are you going to ask the listeners to do once they've heard the episode? As I talked about earlier in this show, podcast listeners are really in a browsing moment, so they are not necessarily ready to book a discovery call with you. A safe call to action is something like getting on your email list, following you on a specific social media platform where you're very active joining a community that you manage coming to a monthly event. This is where you're moving people into your marketing system and you're starting to build a relationship with them. So what is that pathway where you can build a relationship with someone? Keep in mind if someone is in buy mode for what you are offering, they'll go to your website and they will reach out to you. You don't necessarily need to hard sell people on a podcast. It's not really the medium for that.

What you want to do instead is make sure that people stay in touch after they've heard the show. So those are the three things that you need for your podcast guesting strategy. Who are you targeting? What are you talking about and what action are you having them take? Now let's talk about how to identify the podcast you're going to pitch. The best way to do this is by asking your clients, your connectors, your partners and your supporters, what are you listening to? What kind of podcasts are you listening to around insert your industry or insert the subject matter that you're talking about. You can also Google podcast plus industry keyword or podcast plus expertise asking around can help surface some shows that might be smaller where you should still pitch because they might have a pretty engaged audience. You don't necessarily need to be pitching the number one podcast on Apple.

You can still get in front of a very valuable audience in a small arena, so you want to start asking around getting those recommendations. You can also hop into Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube and type in the kinds of things you think your clients might be searching, what kinds of topics might they be looking for, and you can see what kind of shows are covering those topics. Now, another trick you can use here is podcast directories. Directories like pod match podcast, guest.com, radio guest list and matchmaker fm can help you connect with relevant podcast hosts around the area of your expertise. You'll set up a profile there and in some cases you'll even get inbound outreach from podcast hosts who want to have you on their show. Out of all of the ones I mentioned I'm most familiar with Pod Match. What happens on pod match is you set up a profile, you share what your expertise is, you tag yourself with topic tags.

You can include a couple samples of interviews that you've done in the past, credentials, background, experience, links, et cetera, pod metro, surface shows it thinks are relevant for you to pitch, and they do the same thing on the podcast host side, so you'll get inbound outreach from podcast hosts who want to have you on their show and you can send pitches to relevant shows that come up in your feed. Pod match is really cool. It's a little bit like Tinder where it'll show you shows and it'll have you accept or decline and it'll get a little bit smarter about the kinds of opportunities you might want. When it comes to pitching yourself for podcasts, as you're getting these recommendations, as you're cruising these directories, you want to vet these shows. You want to see are they putting out the show regularly? What kind of episodes have they been covering?

You want to look into the host, see who they are, understand maybe their motivation putting out the show and what they're most interested in having on the show. You want to suss out whether or not this show is relevant to what you want to talk about. You want to see if the host might be interested in the topic that you want to pitch. Now it goes without saying or maybe it doesn't, but you should listen to some of the episodes of the shows that you want to pitch, so as you whittle that list down with a couple cursory searches and looks at their landing page, looks at their show notes, you want to start listening to some sample episodes and you want to see do you like how the host interviews? Guess, does the host's style match the way that you want to talk about your subject area?

Is the host very confrontational? Is the host super friendly and open? Are there certain questions that they ask over and over again as you're looking at the different episode titles when you're vetting a show, you also want to keep an eye out for if they've covered the topic that you are interested in speaking on. Ideally, they haven't covered that topic before or they've covered it maybe in a different way. You're looking for an opportunity where it makes sense for you to be on that show because it's a gap that that host has not yet covered about 10 episodes in the low energy leads. I got a pitch from someone who said, Hey, Lex, I noticed you haven't covered public speaking yet as a lead gen strategy. I'd love to come on the show and talk about that, and I accepted that pitch. It made total sense to me. We hadn't covered that on the show. It is something I think people are interested in hearing about and so it made sense in the context of what I'm trying to provide my listeners. As a side note, I want you to know that I'm planning a five day referral challenge for us right here on the Low Energy Leads Show. We're going to be talking about how you can amp up referrals going into 2024. We're going to break it down into five discrete activities and I'm going to walk you through it step by step. Stay tuned right here on the podcast or get on the newsletter to make sure you don't miss it,

And that brings us to part three, how to pitch yourself and your topic. If you Google around, you'll find lots of podcast pitch templates that you can use. In my mind, keeping it simple is the best policy. You want to start with a very simple template that includes three things. One, the topic you want to talk on and why it's a good fit for their show, two, your expertise, and three, a link to a recent interview. Let's break these down a little bit. The first thing you want to cover, and this is the most important thing to include in the pitch, if you only include one thing, it should be this, what you want to cover and why it makes sense in the context of their show, how does it apply to their listeners? How does it advance their goals? As a podcast host, you want to demonstrate in this part of your note that you've listened to the show that you've thought about this and that you have a considerate pitch here.

This can be just one or two lines and it's going to be something like, Hey, I listened to your show. I love that you're talking about X topic. I also think your listeners would want to hear about why topic, which is the topic you want to cover, and I'd love to come on your show and talk about it. Then you're going to move into your expertise. You don't need to put your whole resume here. You don't want to barf out a bunch of credentials. You just need a couple lines. Why are you an expert in this topic and include a link to your website, your LinkedIn so they can dig more into you. You might say something like, I've been doing this for X amount of years, or These are some of the clients I've worked with or these are some of the interviews I've done in the past.

Lastly, it helps to show that you're actually a good speaker, so including a link to a recent interview, including a link to a video or audio file can help them just get a sense of what kind of speaker you are and ideally kind of interviewee you are. If you've ever done a podcast spot before, you're going to want to include this so that they can see what you're like on a podcast. Now, once you send those pictures out, you'll hear back from some of the hosts and you can always follow up. If you don't hear back, follow up one or two times to see if they got your note. Emails are getting really buried these days so you don't have to just send and hope that they receive it. Don't be hesitant about following up to make sure that they saw it and that they actually give you a yes or a no.

If they're interested in having you on the show, they'll send you what they need, which might include a bio and a headshot, and often they'll ask you for your call to action. This is the thing that you want to promote on the show and it usually goes into the show notes, which is why hosts will ask for it out the gate. What's cool about this is that it's also an opportunity for you to track the results of your podcast guesting efforts. By that I mean if you give the host a specific landing page or a specific code that their listeners can use to access your website to access an offer to get on your email list, then you can track whether or not those listeners took that action you wanted them to take. I do want to touch on how to track the results of your podcast efforts because even though I have glossed over the actual podcast interview, when you're setting up your interviews, you're booking your interviews, you're going to want to keep in mind how you're going to track their effectiveness before you get on the mic.

There's three main ways that I've seen this done. One is by having a unique landing page url, so your website slash podcast name one is by using a discount code. You hear this a lot with global brands or national brands. When they do podcast spots, they'll use a code so that they can track which shows are actually paying off. Last thing is your website analytics. If the podcast itself has a website, if the podcast host actually has a unique landing page that your episode is going to be on, then you can actually track did people come over from that landing page. The tricky part about that is that not all podcast listeners are going to go to the podcast page. They might jump from something like Apple or Spotify straight to your website, and that becomes untrackable without the landing page or the code. The last thing you can do here, and this is a bit of an aside, is you can look for it in lead tracking forms or in dms.

You can look for it in more of a soft way where leads might mention, I heard you on this show, and you can ask, how did you hear about me, and sometimes they'll surface a specific show that they heard you on. I do want you to know that you can track the effectiveness of podcast guesting, and I would advise doing this towards the beginning of this strategy to prove that it's something that you find valuable and to see how easy it is to track, but I wouldn't over index on tracking your podcast guesting efforts because in some ways, podcast guesting is an untrackable marketing activity. Sometimes people will listen to you on the show and it will take months or years before they come back around into your orbit, or maybe they'll do something really small like follow you or get on your email list, and then they'll totally forget that that's where they came from.

They'll totally forget about you for a while, and then they'll come back into your orbit years later. There's also some magic that happens with podcast hosts themselves where you're doing some intentional networking with those podcast hosts and deepening relationships with them so that they might become partners or amplifiers of your work, which can be untrackable until they send you a direct referral. Now, when it comes to activities like this in your business, you might say, well, Lex, I don't want to do stuff that's untrackable that I'm not sure is actually benefiting me, and I absolutely hear that, so you have to decide, how long am I going to try podcast guesting? What do I expect the results to be? What's the most trackable result that I can get, and what am I going to let go of that? I just may not know how it's going to come back to me?

With marketing activities like podcast guessing and many content plays to me, it comes down to do I find this fun enough to keep doing it, or am I going to put it on the back burner and see if I can find something that pays off faster is more trackable or that I find more interesting? Lastly, I just want you to keep in mind how to be a good podcast guest by sharing the episode, making sure that you're promoting and interacting with promotions that the host is doing on your behalf and that you're leveraging that piece of content as a closer in your business, not just for visibility with their audience. Send it out to your email list, reshare it on your social networks. Make sure that your clients and leads are seeing that interview as well. Think about the ways you want to leverage podcast guesting and what you could get out of that episodic content in your business beyond just being introduced to that host audience and take it for a spin, run a marketing test and see if you like podcast guesting as part of your marketing playbook.

If you found this episode valuable, I really hope you'll consider sharing it with another creative entrepreneur. You can always leave a rating and review. That helps me get the show out there by bringing it up in search results. If you like this episode, you should also check out the episode I did about why partnerships are my favorite small business strategy. I think that it is really undervalued how much we gain from building professional networks of people who spend more time with our buyers than we do. I break it all down in that episode. You can find it anywhere you're listening to this one.

Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.