How to become a guest on a podcast, and why you should.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for anyone that has value locked up in an organization, and they're trying to share that by using some low-cost and some effective communications tools. I've been running a public relations firm for over 25 years, and I've been an entrepreneur on 3 continents. What I share in this podcast, I know works. And some of it will be for you and some of it may be for someone else. But I encourage you to listen today about podcasts because podcasts increasingly are for everyone. And with literally millions of podcasts, many of them are the audio product for established media players, but some of them, of course, have been grown by KOLs. The statistics show that podcasts are becoming one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority figure. And to get your message out one-on-one. So let's look at podcasting because we are looking at this for a client of ours who is expanding internationally. Now we are working with them on the traditional media relations, but it occurred to me that podcasting now is a brilliant platform to have in-depth conversations On average, an article that appears in a newspaper or trade press may only be 500 to 800 words long, unless we're lucky. But a podcast of 10 to 20 minutes could be 1,000 to 2,000 words. Okay? But also, we can build a character. We can build empathy. We can build a sense of the personality behind the brand, which is impossible really with an article that's written by a journalist. So I'm recommending to my clients that we get them on some dedicated trade podcasts. Now, the benefit of doing a podcast is that we can position our, our client as an authority figure, but we can also get legacy content. We've talked about that on more than one occasion now, that we've got content that lasts. So let's just look at how we can do that. If it's you and you've got something to say, what I'm going to share with you on this podcast is how how you could become a guest on podcasts, or if you are running a podcast, how do you get guests, which increasingly becomes a problem once we've used up the, the initial network that we might have. Now, why podcasting? Well, podcasting now has reached a number of over 88 million listeners in America alone. The view is that in America, which is still of the largest markets with 35% of all people saying they listen to podcasts, that by 2023, over 160 million, in other words, half of the population of America will be listening to podcasts. Now, in South Korea, 53% say they already do listen to podcasts according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report of 2019. In the UK, it's only 21%. In France, it's 25%. The point is that it is becoming mainstream for everybody. Of course, if you're listening to this, then you're a podcast listener and you know what we're talking about. So podcasting as a medium is here to stay. Over 1 million podcasts. Now we know that there are many, many podcasts that never get off the ground, but some of them are becoming media entities and media channels in their own right. So how do we go about finding the right podcast for our clients? In this particular case, we're looking at B2B, and this is a manufacturing client. So what we've done is we've gone online and we've found through looking at Spotify and Apple, which are 2 of the main platforms for podcasts, which are the leading podcasts. Of course, in this particular niche, there are not that many. We've then gone and done a search on, on Google, and there is a website called blog.feedspot.com, and that has also a list of top 10 manufacturing blogs. Quite niche, but of course, the beauty with B2B marketing and consumer is that we can find niches to drill down to. And that's why in our Speak PR program, we talk about the need to define the avatar, to be quite clear about who we're trying to talk to. Now, if I come back to our particular case, I found on the feedspot.com that there is a, uh, a podcast called Making Chips for Manufacturing Leaders out of Chicago, Illinois. Now, they've only got 821 followers, but they've got 1,600 Instagram And they've got a domain authority of 33. By the way, 0 is a low authority up to 100. And they've got an Alexa rank of 3.3 million. Now these numbers of course may not sound like a lot, but this is a vertical to do with plastic mold manufacturing. Yet the, the statistics, the Instagram, the domain authority, the Alexa rank rank all websites. So you are competing with the Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, uh, podcasts. In terms of domain authority, and those of course have got large consumer reach. So what we can look at is shortlisting, and that's what we've done. We've shortlisted the top 10 podcasts. Some are run by companies, like one is run by Deloitte, for example. Another one is sponsored by HP because of obviously the big data elements in manufacturing, and some are run by publications that have then extended their content into the audio, and a few are run by people that have taken up the mantle— individual entrepreneurs, writers, thought leaders, entrepreneurs. So we're getting a mix. Now, how to get our client on these podcasts? Well, we can go about it a couple of different ways. One is, of course, that the podcast reaches out to the guest. The other is that the guest reaches out to the podcast. More likely, because our client currently isn't known as an authority, uh, in the podcast world, that we have to reach out to these potential podcasts. So we can do that first of all by looking at the profile of the podcast, and they'll all have a desire for quality and interesting guests. So they'll have on their own podcast pages the contact details. Many of them are using a platform like Libsyn, and also with, um, uh, Buzzsprout has links to their LinkedIn and their Twitter and their Facebook and so on. So not so difficult actually, because the whole goal of these podcasters is to be found. But what these podcasters are also looking for is a new audience themselves. As one podcast I heard explained it, really these podcasters are looking for other podcasters to connect the audiences together. And as I shared about the impact of algorithms on platforms like Facebook, the search engines are giving us the information and the, and the websites and the podcasts that we're already looking at. So if we're trying to break into a new market, if you like to hop across the fence into another field, then we're going to need to proactively reach out and get into these other podcasts because they'll have their own listeners, they'll have their own community that may not be finding or being served our content. So we want to demonstrate that we've got a following. Now of course, currently our client doesn't have a following But they do have a website, they have a Twitter, they have a LinkedIn, they have their own followers, but just not in the audio world. So what we've got to do is to help demonstrate the value our client could bring in terms of thought leadership and content, but also package their community so that it'll be interesting to the podcast hosts. Now, why are we going to do this? We're going to do this for a couple of reasons. Of course, one is that we get to position our client as an authority. The second is that the content from a blog post helps with the search engine optimization of our client's website. This is because the content that comes out, the podcast, will have show notes. What I do for this podcast, and many people do, is we take a transcript and then we make that into an article. That article can be shared as a newsletter, as a blog post. I now put mine into medium.com as well, for example, which all help to create backlinks— backlinks from the podcaster to my website and my website to their website, from my website internally to my website on medium.com, for example. Now, the secondary function, of course, is that most podcasts are syndicated. So when I put my content on Buzzsprout. It goes on to the Google Podcasts, the Heart— iHeartRadio, goes on to the Apple, it goes on to Stitcher, and so on, Overcast. So my one podcast gets syndicated across all these different directories, and with those different directories come the links. So what we can do then is by having our client speak and have their contact details and links to their website and to their personalities in LinkedIn, we can build links for them across the internet. The context as well is important because by appearing on the podcast, we are creating a place for our spokesperson within the overall world of the internet search engines. So the search engines, which of course now are powered by AI, start to connect these things together. And what they do of course is they identify that my client is being read about on LinkedIn but also being spoken about on podcasts. So as we know, the key point about content online is that actually it's all connected. It doesn't exist in the silos. And being in a podcast or an article is actually just like being featured, for example, on a YouTube video. Helps to create another cache of content that is good for whether it's Google or Ecosia or Bang Bang Duck or any of these search engines. Same with Baidu. So the original and the secondary links and creating a context are really good. Now, how to get on these podcasts? Now, you can get on them by doing the kind of work that we're doing, which is reaching out specifically to the podcasters. And that takes some, if you like, primary research. But there are also some tools that one can use, or some platforms, directories really, that have been created. One is called Podit. That's poddit.net, and for free you can be listed as a guest. You can also pay to upgrade for just $29 a month. You can put more details about yourself and your show, for example, and your bio and your photographs onto their directory. There's another very comprehensive podcastguests.com. For $10 a month, you could be listed, and they will then start to match you with other podcasts that will be within your category. So you categorize yourself in, for example, manufacturing, or in plastics, or in finance, or whatever, whatever niche that you're in and whatever you can speak to. So podcastguests.com is another great platform. There's another one called Expert Bookers.com, and ExpertBookers.com charges a $4.99 per month to get you as an interviewee on a podcast. It's a fair amount of money, although actually, if you can get onto a good podcast, and some of them, for example, like the The Business of Stories, Park Hal, who we know well. You know, he has some 50,000 downloads per show. Entrepreneurs on Fire with John Lee Dumas has over a million downloads per show. So if you got onto one of their, one of their shows at what equivalent of sort of $250 or £180, if it's the right audience, that could be a fantastic ROI. And you get sort of 20 minutes, and then of course you get your article that you can take away from that, and you get the audio that you can cut and make into little segments. You can use a platform like Lately— trylately.com, for example— which enables you to make audiograms and retweet those. So in the Speak PR methodology, we talk about Storify, Personalize, Amplify, Engage, and To Know. Podcasts are part of the Engage They're part of the content creation and of course amplification. But creating audio, creating MP3 and MP4 of you, your story, how you make your clients into heroes is an indispensable and increasingly possible medium. You can do it yourself. You can do it with platforms. You can go to people that already have podcasts rather than creating your own. And I can tell you, creating podcasts takes a lot of time and effort, but there's some costs attached to it as well, as indeed is the challenge of finding people to listen to you. So work to leverage the existing podcast network that's out there already would be my advice, at least to start with. And that's what we're doing for our client. It will complement the traditional media relations work that we're doing, the LinkedIn profile raising that we're doing, and the virtual trade show attendance work that we're doing for this client. So podcasting is great. There are over a million shows, so plenty to choose from. This key really is to look at the avatar. Who do you want to talk to? And from that, then you can use the tools, the search engines To find out where they are, and then you can either reach out directly or use one or two or three of these platforms to help you to find them, and more importantly, then to become a guest. The preparation for being a guest is a whole new chapter, and I will tackle that on another episode of Speak PR. So for this episode, I hope that this has been useful for you. I'm a big fan of podcasting. I think more and more people are. So thank you for listening. And if you've enjoyed it, please rate it. You can also come to the eastwestpr.com website to get our newsletter. My name is Jim James. So until we do come together again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you become a guest on a podcast and share with me the show.