HOW TO BE A GREAT PODCAST GUEST

Doug Morneau’s Tips:

How To Be A Great Podcast Guest
One interview can lead to another
It offers third-party validation and credibility

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Well, welcome back listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today, we’ve got a bit of a different topic. I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately, and so I thought, hey, I’m getting the calls and the emails. So, might as well just address the topic and get it out there, and hopefully, provide you some value. So today’s topic is how to be a great podcast guest. Before I start, I want to just let you put your mind at ease and just answer maybe some of those thoughts that first came to mind when I said that, and is that, why would you want to be a guest on a podcast?

Well today, with everybody being mobile and the numbers for podcasts steadily climbing, the number of podcasts that people listen to around the world, while they’re driving, commuting and at work continue to increase, it really is earned media. So earned media being that you didn’t have to pay for it. You didn’t have to run an ad. You don’t have to buy any Google ads or Facebook or retargeting ads. It’s an opportunity for you to talk about you, your company, your superpower, and that service that you offer, and the people that you serve. It offers third-party validation and credibility. The other thing you need to remember is that one interview can lead to another.

So it can lead to interviews on additional podcasts. It can lead to interviews in other media. Interviews for print, say, a newspaper and magazines. Also, potentially, blogs and radio. So, I just want to encourage you that if you haven’t done it that you might consider adding this to your media mix. In days where people are saying, “Hey, I need to get more bang for my advertising dollar,” or they have less dollars to go around, you may want to consider that this is a valid place to start. If you think about a podcast, every interview style podcast needs great guests. So, the topic today we’re going to cover is, how to be a great guest.

But before we get there, I just want to give you an example of something that happened just recently with me in the last few weeks and tell you maybe what podcasts, podcasters and/or the media are looking for. You need to remember when you’re reaching out that people aren’t sitting back waiting for you to contact them, to pitch them your story or to have them run an ad for you. They’re looking for value. And so, in this example, I was just interviewed last week on a podcast called Your Hustle Radio, and I didn’t spend my entire time talking about my new email marketing book.

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When Luke interviewed me, he interviewed me because he was referred to me by another podcaster who shared with him that I had helped one of my clients generate $40 million of investment using email marketing. And so, he was really interested in how did I do that, and could I share that with his audience, and is that something that his audience could do? So that was the focus, and yes, we did get around and mentioned at the end of the podcast that I was in fact just ready to release my new book 3 Big Lies: How to Generate Leads and Sales Using Third-Party Email Lists.

But again, that was not the primary focus. The focus there was really to provide value and provide information for Luke’s listeners on his podcast. So if you want to get an idea of what I’m looking for, for the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast, the topics I’m looking to cover, as you probably know if you’ve listened to the show before, are all things marketing. So, I’m looking for best practices. I’m looking for your methods and your systems and the tools and the technology that you use for marketing. So that doesn’t mean that you need to own those tools or those technologies or just trying to share with our listeners how they can increase the ROI and get better conversion on their marketing and advertising.

So I’ve been asked, well, what’s my guest avatar? Well, I guess I’m really looking for someone who’s a specialist in at least one tactic. Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a specialty. You couldn’t be an agency or a consultant that works in a variety. But what you may want to do is narrow it down and look at the marketplace, and where the demand is in the marketplace, and where you think … Where are your superpowers? My superpowers clearly are in email, email marketing, and list rental. So when I go forward, and I’m looking for an opportunity to speak, I know that I have a lot of talent and a lot of experience in that area that sets me aside.

So, I don’t try to compete in areas such as social media. That’s not to say that social media isn’t a great topic, or that’s not a topic where you’re a specialist in. If you look back on some of the history and the previous podcast guests that I’ve had on, you’ve seen that I’ve had a couple social media people on as well. So I’d say, be a specialist in a specific tactic whether that’s email, email marketing, social media, maybe it’s content and/or writing or copywriting. It could be video or video production. You could be another podcaster, or you could be teaching people how to podcast or how to use a podcast to drive sales for your business.

You could have a specialty in a search engine optimization or maybe online advertising of some form whether it’s a pay-per-click or Facebook advertising or retargeting, remarketing. Maybe your special superpower is PR. So you know how to reach out and get your clients media coverage, or you may be the vendor. You might be the service, the software vendor that marketers use. So you might be an email service provider where we host our list, or you may be a blogging platform. You may have design software that people can use to create the graphics, or you may just offer productivity hacks, software and systems and best practices.

So when I’m looking for guests, I want someone who’s going to be a great guest. So, somebody who again is a specialist in one specific tactic whether it’s software or solution, and I’m looking for a great story. I mean, think a little bit in advance as you’re starting to put together your pitch, and you’re saying, “Hey, should I do this? What would make me a great guest?” What’s a story or a case study or an example that you can share? If you think back to the podcast that you listen to and you enjoy right now, I’m pretty sure that you can agree that there’s someone’s sharing a good story, something that you can relate to and there’s usually an aha moment in there whether it was somebody’s success or somebody’s win or a new method of doing something.

I’m also looking for someone who’s willing to work at least as hard as me at promoting their podcast episode. So one of the things that I decided to do very early on was I wanted to make this podcast a great experience for you, our listeners, but I also wanted to make it a great experience for our guests. So one of the things I do to try to make this a great experience for our guests is before I set up the interview and have them on the show, I make sure I send them the list of questions so there’s really no surprises. My goal here isn’t to embarrass people or to trap them or to do anything that would put them off.

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My goal really is to bring value to you, the listeners, and the better prepared that my guests are by knowing the types of questions and topics in the way that we’re going to conduct the interview, I think the better content that we can produce. Now in terms of what can I do for my guests, we create special graphics for each episode. We transcribe all the notes. And transcribing the notes, and this is something that I hadn’t realized when I first started, is that it’s provided this with a lot of SEO juice. If you think of search engine optimization and having good content that naturally flows with good keywords that a podcast like ours that runs 30 to 45 minutes will generally be 5,000 to 6,000 words.

So that’s great for SEO. In the show notes, I make sure I’ve got all the contact information for the guests, all their social media sites. It’s all embedded in any resources they have. So that’s one way I add value to my guests. The other way is that I post it on social media. So I use a number of tools for social media, and I post it quite heavily for the first week, and I post it on my LinkedIn page, my Facebook page, my Twitter page, and I posted over all the different daytime segments to make sure that over that week that there’s at least a chance that everybody, regardless of what time they’re on social media, has a chance to listen.

So when I’m looking for someone that wants to be a great podcast guest, I’m looking to say, are they willing to promote the show as hard as I’m willing to promote the show? I’m often asked, well, what’s the best advice that I could give somebody that wants to be a podcast guest? So I guess one of the ways I think to get your head into this game and this space and understand maybe how to create a pitch that will get you the invite and land you the interview is just imagine for a minute that you’re listening to your episode. So this is you, this is your episode, you’re sitting back, you’re taking the train to work, and you put on iTunes, and your episode’s on.

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So how would it sound? How would your episode make you feel? Now, would you be excited about the message and the information shared? Would you be thinking, “Man, this guy is really smart. I need to hire him, or I need to find him, or I need to look at the show notes”? Would your episode be so good that you would want to share it to others? Would you want to tell your friends and your co-workers, “Would you want to share it on social media”? Or would you want to push it out in an email, say, “You got to listen to this podcast episode. It was really good”

I think back of many different podcasts that I listen to, and over and over, I find episodes that I just absolutely fall in love with, and I share them with my peers because I think this is really good information and they need to hear this. And, were you generous with the information that you shared? So as you think about it, really, people are looking for information, and they’re looking for education, and maybe they’re looking for entertainment. So, did you provide that when they listened to your episode? What you don’t want to do is tell people, “Well, if you go to my website, I can provide this to you.” You really want to show off.

This is a chance when you get to tell people what your superpower is and how you serve your customer and your audience in a way that they can relate to. And there’s no guarantee, obviously, that they’re going to phone and they’re going to hire you, but they’re sure going to think of you as the expert in your space. So I think if you think that way, and you kind of get your headset in, your mindset rather, into what you were sounding like as a guest and what you want to take away for the show, it’ll help you start the thinking process of what it’s going to take to be a great podcast guest. Now you can create your pitch.

And then, remember, your pitch is really focused on the benefit of the listener and the show that you want to be a guest on. While your background is important, it shouldn’t be the main focus. So you want to show me or show your podcast, podcast you’re trying to get on, that it’s good for their audience and it’s good for the show. Don’t just tell me who you are. We’ll figure that out. But you really need to think of the end users, which are the listeners of the show and the podcast host, because they’re looking to have great guests to keep retention and to provide value to the listeners.

So that’s all I’ve got for you this week. I would strongly suggest that you follow up with us. Feel free to sign up for our email newsletter. We normally get an email at about once a week. If you’re not following us on iTunes, don’t be shy, feel free to subscribe and leave us some comments or leave us some feedback. And so, have a great week, and we’ll catch you next time.

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