It’s the year of our lady two thousand and nineteen and the most common question that your friend Kai gets asked is a riff on
How do I get on podcasts? I want to do a podcast tour!
Which, honestly, is a great question.
Podcast guesting continues to be a great way to reach a market and audience, demonstrate your expertise, promote your book/product/services, and grow your audience and leads.
Today? Let’s talk about, at a 50,000 ft view, how to get on podcasts.
A podcast tour is similar to any other outreach-based marketing campaign
First, make a list of prospects
You want your prospect list to be a small, targeted list of up to a dozen or so shows. You want these prospects to be podcasts that
- Accept guests
- Match the target market you want to reach
- Are currently publishing and releasing new episodes
- Match your current expertise, positioning, and specialization
Why just a dozen? Because you don’t want to overwhelm yourself.
As always, there’s an article from me in the archives to help you make a list of podcast prospects: Podcast Prospecting.
Then, write your pitch
You want to have three or so topic ideas to share with the podcast, similar to
I can help teach your audience about
TOPIC A:
TOPIC B:
TOPIC C:
Which topic would they be most interested in?
By putting in three topics, you transform your pitch from a yes/no choice (“Do I have this guest on… or not?”) to a selection of yeses (“Which of these topics do I want this guest to explore?”)
In my half-decade plus of helping clients get on podcasts, a selection of yeses helps — a lot.
Here’s an article from the vault on “How do you write an email to get on a podcast?” — Podcast Outreach Email.
Next, send your pitch to the podcast hosts
This step is all about taking action. Take your prospects and send them your email pitch.
Finally, remember to follow-up
You need to develop a habit of persistently, politely following-up every week until you get a “yes” or a “no thanks.”
Your outreach isn’t done when you hit “send” on your first email. That’s just the start of your campaign.
If the host doesn’t respond to your first email, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested. It means they’re busy and didn’t (yet) have time to respond to your message.
You need to follow-up. 90% of your success will come from your follow-up. After all, if you don’t follow-up, how important could your message be?
Here’s an article to help inspire you to become a follow-up fanatic: Follow Up.
We’ll dive in and answer your questions, like:
- What should you say in your initial email?
- What do you say in your follow-up emails?
- How often should you follow-up?
- What should you include in your pitches?
- And, most importantly, how do you find a list of podcast hosts to reach out to?
Excelsior!