Tom Schwab — How To Get Yourself On High-Quality Podcasts

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow chart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hello. Hello. Another episode of Hustle and Flowchart podcast here in your earbuds. Ear holes or maybe just speakers. I don't know. So this is Joe fear here with Mr. Matt Wolf. Yep, that's his last name. And today we're talking to a podcast brother of ours, it feels like, because just like some of these other episodes where we just flow. Tom, Tom Schwab, he basically flowed just like this. So he does a lot of stuff in the podcast world, usually on the side of getting on other people's podcasts, so getting interviews. Whereas, you know, we're coming from the side of actually hosting podcasts. So it's a really cool interview to see both perspectives, but Tom's going to break down everything. I mean, the guy doesn't hold back anything when it comes to. If you are interested in getting on folks podcasts in your niche, getting awareness, growing your network, actually creating trackable ways to drive sales to whatever you might be that you're selling, ideally, higher ticket the better is actually easier for podcasts. That's a little tidbit right there, but Tom's just amazing. So you're going to love this interview if you're even remotely interested in content and podcasts.

Oh, yeah. It's a deep dive on how to get featured on other people's shows and you're going to love it. He's got some really cool bonuses. If you go to interview valet.com flowchart. He's actually put together some bonuses and some some complimentary things to this episode. So make sure you check that out. And also we want to hear from you if you're listening to this podcast. You enjoy it, you want to chat with us, you want to get us on a call. You know, we love talking to people, meeting our audience and getting to know what other people are up to. So please, please hit us up. Go to evergreenprofits.com contact There's a little contact form. It goes to us. We respond to pretty much everybody.

That's true.

That's true. It's true story. All right, be cool. And we'll probably respond to you anyway. All right, let's dive in with Mr. Tom Schwab from Interview Ballet.

See you there. Hey, Tom, thanks for joining us on the show today.

I am thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, yeah. So we got introduced, I think it was from Steve Gordon you reminded me properly the other day when we were talking. I was actually confused because I saw you're on Brad Costanzo, who's a partner of ours, on his podcast too. So it's pretty cool to see you in multiple places.

And I love the connections you can make through podcasts. That whole idea of six degrees of separation.

Oh, yeah.

To me, that's like Y2K, you know, today it's like two.

It is. Oh, yeah. It's literally one or two. And it's funny you say that because Facebook used to have this little, like, calculator thing, and anyone in the world, you could plug their name and see how separated you are from them, and it's. You're freakishly close. Just on social media alone. Yeah, but they took that away.

Oh, it's not there anymore. Yeah, I think everybody was like, two degrees away from Obama and stuff like that. But no, it was really interesting. And, you know, today's episode is going to be. Is going to be a fun one because I think it's just. It's pretty much going to be three people who love podcasts talking about podcasts and strategies around podcasting. So I think it's going to be fun.

Well, let's. Yeah. Tom, we like to kind of kick start with a little background what you do, what got you here, and we'll start kind of picking stuff out from there.

I was going to say that could be a whole podcast right there. Don't go too deep. I started out as an engineer, was a mechanical engineer, and to all the US Taxpayers, thank you for paying for my education. I went to the Naval Academy, and first job out of college was running nuclear power plants. And it really taught me that everything can be taught, it can be systematized. And, you know, when I went into the corporate world and sales and marketing, it always just frustrated me when they'd say, yeah, half the money we spend is wasted. We just never know what half it is. And I never accepted that. So when I started my own business, I was really looking for what could we use in order to make sure that we were doing the things that people loved and stopped doing the things that people loathed. So I had read a book by two smart guys out of MIT called Inbound Marketing. They went on to start a company called HubSpot and loved what they were doing. And so we built up a company based off of using inbound marketing. It was an e commerce company based off. Built that up from a regional player to a national leader, sold that off, and then As I was helping other people after that, one of the things I noticed is that blogs weren't working nearly as well, and they never really did work that well. But one of the hacks we used to use was putting our blogs on other sites, guest blogging, instead of putting it on your site and getting seen by three people, one of them being my mother, getting it on Washington Post, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal. Get that, know like and trust. So about four years ago, I hypothesized you could use podcast interviews that way, and it worked wonderfully. And at first I thought, yeah, it's. It's a fluke. It's the personality, it's the niche. And so we kept trying to disprove it, and it still kept coming up that it worked. So over the last four years, we've refined it. About two years ago, we started a done for you service, which is Interview Valet, that really uses podcast interviews as the content to drive sales and marketing machine. And, you know, I believe that marketing is starting a conversation with somebody that could be an ideal customer. And podcasts are just such a powerful way to do that.

I love it. I mean, that's. I love how you spotted this trend or this gap. Really, it is, because, yeah, I mean, podcasts have now become the best form of content creation and marketing for us to bring new eyeballs or even existing people back into our ecosystem so we can kind of, you know, market differently that way once they're kind of in our realm here.

Yeah, and the thing about podcasting is that it's such a. In my opinion, at least, it's such a frictionless form of content creation. I mean, we get on calls with people and we just have fun conversations that we would love to have even if we didn't record them, and then we get to share that with the world. I mean, it's such a frictionless way of creating content. I can't think of anything better, which is why we've been doing podcasts since 2010.

And that's what I love about it. Cause, like, for me, I can write a blog, but it's homework. You know, I'd rather clean my office or go to the dentist than write a blog. But, you know, I'll tell. I'll talk to people all day long. And I think the technology is out there now where you can. You can create in the medium that you like the best, and then you can repurpose into other mediums because, you know, not everybody is an audible learner. You know, somebody asked me, well, you know, Podcasts now are about 30 to 40% saturation. They said, when do you think it'll get to 100%? I said, television and radio never got to 100%. But I can take a podcast interview, Transcribe it for 10 cents a minute, have somebody clean it up. And now I've got blogs. If I talk long enough I can get a good quote in that somebody can find and make a meme out of it. It's just such a powerful medium.

So Tom, you actually caught me at 10 cents a minute. Where do you get your transcriptions done?

This is awesome. It's 10 times better than Rev.com Rev.com's our go to.

Well, Rev.com opening.

I love that. Great, great business. And they started a spin off business called temi.comt e m I and they transcribe it's all artificial intelligence for 10 cents a minute. Now granted there's some errors there. Punctuation, capitalization isn't always there. But for most of works out really well. And my hat's off to the people@rev.com they were smart enough to realize that man, artificial intelligence is coming. So they actually use Temi inside and that would do the first cut and then they have real life people doing it from there. And you know, a dollar a minute and it's great. But if you just need that, that initial cut, 10 cents a minute and I tell you what, they get it back to you super fast.

I was actually thinking, I was like, holy crap, now I understand why REV fast because they could. Before you even said it. I was like, they could use that. And then their editors just clean it up. I'm like, genius.

Well, it's kind of interesting because we have this, I mean this isn't really the topic we're going to get into today, but we have this process for actually written blog content. We're not huge fans of writing massive blog posts from scratch. And we have this process of we go on a place like upwork or onlinejobs Ph and and hire somebody who can write sort of a good enough content piece for us. And they'll write, you know, we usually go to about 1500 words and we get a good enough content piece, they give it back to us and then we go through and polish it up and you know, add our own little anecdotes to it. But we're not starting from scratch is the main point. We're, we're, we're starting from. They basically did the research and outlined it for us. Maybe the English and Punctuation isn't great, but now we can go in and make it our own. And that is what they've managed to do on a sort of automated basis, which is really fascinating.

I love that.

It is. They're a great company. And, yeah, I mean, you can use other people's skills there. I mean, your flowchart, your work process there. Mine is almost a little bit different. If I get a good idea in the shower, I'll put five or six bullet points down to make a blog. Then I dictate it, and then I send it to be transcribed and then have somebody else clean it up.

There you go.

See, that's more my style. Yeah, I'm more the. Matt, you're more of a writer. I'm more of like you, Tom. But either way, that's the beauty of all this stuff. I mean, content creation should be a breeze if you focus on the medium that just flows for you.

We had one client that trying to get the owner of a company to sit down and write blogs and everything.

That's tough. So his team kept asking him for all of these things, and he finally said, you know, all those topics and all those questions I've already answered on podcast interviews. And they're like, oh, that's right. So they went back and not only did they transcribe it, make some blogs out of it, but they took some of the audio and put that up there, and they even took some of the quotes and, you know, put B roll footage over it. So now they've got videos. So it's just an amazing time of how we can repurpose content and really get out there.

That's actually. You just gave me an idea for ourselves. Matt and I, we actually just hired a video VA to do more social media videos. And we're really good at creating content. But, hello, we have this podcast. You can literally just splice and dice from there, throw some B roll, whatever, and boom, you have yourself all this other content now you can use in targeted ways, which I know you're all about here.

So let's dig into, because I know what you're really good at is to not just go wide, I guess, with all the podcasts, but to really target on the focus, the ideal types of customers that you want to get. I want to kind of learn a little bit about what you do there and how you make that all happen.

Yeah. And, you know, there's a couple things. One is, I think the biggest problem we all have today is that we're obscure. There's A product or service that we currently have that could help people and that they would gladly give us money for. The only thing that's stopping them is that they don't know who we are. So there's got to be some way of connecting with them. And a lot of people say, you know, I'm gonna break through the noise. It's like, no, you're not probably adding to the noise, right? If Apple is buying time, if GM is buying time, to think that I'm gonna break through the noise is laughable. You know, at best, I could add noise. So from that standpoint, it's like, I don't want to break through the noise. I want to get in on the conversation, and the conversation that my ideal customers are already listening to. And as I look back on it, you know, one of the worst pieces of business advice I ever got came from my grandfather. And it. You know, he's. He was my hero, a great entrepreneur, but the only thing that he ever told me that was wrong was he said, choose carefully who you drink with, because you can't choose who you work with. Now, for him, he was a mechanic in a small town. If you came to him with a car, you were his customer. For us, it's so different, right? We've got access to hundreds of millions, maybe a billion different customers, and we don't need to serve all of them. There's, like, that really small subset of people that would love what we do, and we would love working with them. And all the studies show that they're more profitable. The lifetime value is there. They'll refer more customers to you. So I think that the reason that podcasts work so well is that you can talk directly to your ideal customers. Some people will listen to this, and they're like, tom's full of it. That's fine. Doesn't mean they're bad or I'm bad, which is a bad match. Yeah, there'll be other people that'll say, that was interesting and go on with their lives. But there's going to be a small segment that say, wow, that was really interesting. You know, he understands me. He could help me. And I think that's what we really want to do with our. With our marketing, with our advertising, with any way we get out. There is to attract our ideal customers and really to repel those that should be better served by somebody else.

I love it. And, yeah, I mean, our form of content creation, our content marketing, the purpose we put content out and blog, sorry, blog posts, but also podcasts, like this is to segment and is to start to whittle the people down that we really want to do business with or go deeper down the, you know, the rabbit hole with and give them with targeted advertisement comes after, you know, a blog post, email, chatbots, all that fun stuff. But it could all start with the podcast.

Content is king, but context is God.

So how do you. How do you do this, then? So, you know, if someone wants to start a podcast or they have a podcast, how do they not become obscure? You know, but also. But maybe it's. Is it find a niche. Find a very specific kind of vertical within podcasting. For inst.

Yeah, for us, we focus more on, like, the. The guest side of it. So while I've been on over 1200 podcasts, my hat's off to you guys. I have never done a podcast yet. It's hard work, and everybody that says it's easy has either never done it or never done it. Well, I really think. I think it's being yourself, being authentic, attracting the people that resonate with you. Don't say, I want to be just like this podcast, but only different. You can spot those right off. And the other thing that I'm really seeing that's resonating a lot more is authentic dialogue. Early on, it seemed like people were doing very formulaic questions, so they'd ask the same questions to every guest. And, you know, that's. It was easy for the host, it was easy for the guest, but it got interest or got old quickly. And you even see some established podcasts that have changed the format.

Yeah.

To me, the podcasts that.

Are most engaging, that are building their audience, and also from our side, we're seeing much better conversions with them are the authentic dialogues.

Right.

So what we're talking about here, if we were sitting down, having a beer, we'd be talking about the same thing. If we were at Denny's right now having breakfast, we'd be talking the same thing. And that best podcast is almost like sitting in the next booth to some really interesting people and just listening. And it'd be rude to turn around and stare at them, and it'd be rude to get in on the conversation, but you just sort of sit there and listen and think, this is interesting.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was essentially our mission with this podcast is to get on calls with people that we would love to have calls with anyway, people that we find fascinating, that we have a lot in common with, and just have the chats we would have with them if we weren't Recording. And you know, if we're doing that, why, why not just let others be a fly on the wall in that conversation? Why not put it out there for others to hear? So, I mean, that, that was really philosophy going into podcasting. And you know, we've, we've, we're going on almost nine years of doing podcasts, not this specific show. We've changed formats and branding multiple times over the years, but we've been doing podcasting for about eight years now. This is our longest running one.

Right.

But that, that was our mission. Our mission was let's have great conversations with people we'd have and have the conversations with anyway and then just allow others to tune in on them. And so far that's resonated really well. It's helped us create an audience. And now when we go out to events or you masterminds or networking things or, you know, whatever the latest conference is, that's what people seem to know us for now. People are always coming up going, oh, it's you guys. I listen to your show and it's turned into this, this machine of its own that we can't even, we can't even slow down anymore.

It's, it's been interesting. I mean, you know, I learned so much from our clients and the feedback they give us. And you know, we've got some software service customers that, you know, they know their, their numbers and they know how much cost of lead acquisition is and cost of acquisition is down to the penny per channel. And they're just amazed at the, at the numbers that they're getting for podcasts or even like coaches, they're reporting that when somebody hears you on a podcast and they've heard you for 30 or 45 minutes, that's a warm relationship. It's weird because, you know, they, they show up ready to work with you and you have no idea who the person is, so that it tends to close so much quicker. And that first sort of sales call, if you will, is them selling you, why they should work with you. And it's weird, but podcasting is so intimate.

That's actually, it's great you said that because that was actually an analogy. Just at a talk we did last week, Matt and I is explaining our content process, but just podcasts are great in general. Is that instead of prospecting for sales or having your sales rep, are you cold calling or just trying to hit your list, your email list all the time, Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, fill up my application. So you know this, they're actually coming to you. You're not trying to just like push them in there or shove them. You actually can self select because. And you can be very particular with who you work with. And we've never been able to do that with anything else than podcasts or very targeted content creation.

Yeah, yeah. The world has changed. There's a great tweet out there from Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of SEOmoz and later became Moz. And he said the best way to sell something today is not to sell anything, but earn the awareness, trust and respect of those you might serve. And that's so true. You know, when you said self select, our customers are self selecting us. Sure, that's really cool.

That's the best. I mean, that's literally what our company turned into about seven months ago or so. Evergreen profits. We sold. We sold a lot of different products before, but we consciously chose to just totally put the ax on that and turn everything free. And, you know, we have our consulting, advising, all this, other partnership deals and things we own, but we weren't going to go out there and just start pitch, pitch, pitch that whole product launch thing. But we give everything away in forms of these pieces of content and everything else we do and opportunities. And the money has all grown since making that shift without any friction. You know, it just comes to us without us trying to prospect.

Yeah, it's definitely. It's good stuff.

There is no better time to be alive or I think be a business owner or starting a business. You know, there's a lot of problems in the world. But, you know, going back to my grandfather, a bad day for him was when he had to bury a child. A bad day for me is like when my Internet goes down and, you know, here we are talking, you know, video calls, and they're free and, you know, corporations couldn't have done that, you know, 20 years ago. It was expensive. I mean, here we're running an agency with 18 people, all geographically diverse in the United States, and I pinch myself. It's like 20 years ago I would have to be living in London, New York, maybe LA to run this, and now I get to live in Kalamazoo, Michigan and do it.

That's so cool.

Now, what kind of results are you seeing? Let's kind of shift a little bit into discussing going and getting on other people's podcasts and the benefits of that. What sort of results are you seeing and how are you selling clients on the merits of going and getting on other people's podcasts?

Yeah, and that's a great question. We always look at it for one thing, return on investment. Not only the investment of money, but even more so the investment of time. And what other medium can you go on and talk to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people? Michael Port called it a digital stage one time, and he said the largest stage that he'd ever been on. And here's a guy that's probably keynoting for tens of thousands of dollars, but he said the largest stage he's ever been on is a podcast. So, you know, there's that exposure brings opportunity, but we've got other people that are doing it for other reasons. So like virtual book tours with the podcast interviews. Great way to get a book out there, right? You can record them all before the book actually launches, have them go live when the book launches and get a big spike. So that's a great way to do it. Other people just want to fill the funnel. And it's a great way to just get out there all the time to get new traffic, new leads, new customers from that standpoint. And it's a very systematic approach. Another strategy people use is just the SEO. We've got some clients that are just doing this for the backlinks.

Whenever Google changes their algorithm, backlinks, clean backlinks have always been a trusted source on there. And think about it, every time you're on a podcast interview, they're going to throw you a backlink. And some of these podcasts, you know, I could go to the Kalamazoo Valley Community College that they had a podcast right now. I would die to be on that.

Oh, yeah.

Because it's probably going to be like a edu backlink or the government's got some on, you know, different subjects, and you get a.gov backlink that is gold.

That's not a bad idea.

That's very true.

Yeah. I mean, we. We search podcasts by, you know, their Alexa, the popularity and their moz for the authority. Other things. People, if you've got a podcast, the best place to find podcast listeners is listening to other podcasts. So it's a great way. We've worked with a lot of clients to either start their podcast or really launch it to the next level. And then the final one, the strategy that we have is sort of an exposure strategy. Somebody called it a Dory Clark one Dori Clark strategy one time, and I'm like, I love that, but I don't think I can use her name on that. Idea was, if you don't know Dori Stories, you know, Very super bright woman, intelligent, but she was unknown. And she just got out there and she was everywhere. She was blogging, she was talking, and within about 12 months of a lot of hard work, everybody knew her. She had books out there and everything. So exposure brings opportunity. And, you know, no matter where you are, here I am in, you know, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, it really exists. And, you know, I can, I can get on any place I've been in podcasts, you know, in Australia, around the world. And this is really how we've grown our business completely.

Yeah, I love it. And it's funny, I can always tell when sort of a big name is launching a book because I'm an avid podcast listener as well as a podcaster. Right. And you know, when I tune into Smart Passive income and Lewis Howes and Mike Dillard and James Altucher, I can always tell when a book is about to come out because Tony Robbins will be on all of those, or Gary Vaynerchuk will be on all of those, or Tim Ferriss will go on all of those. And it's like, oh, all right, this person must be coming out with a book pretty soon. So you definitely see that virtual book tour thing quite a bit now. And it's clear that these authors that used to use more traditional mediums to get their brand out there are realizing that this is equally, if not more powerful. Like they're, they're a. It's, it's not only like if somebody goes on a TV show and talks about their book, I've heard a lot of times it doesn't really move the needle that much for them because, you know, it's, you're talking to a very, very general audience where if you go on somebody's podcast and you talk about your book, that podcaster is essentially endorsing you just by having them on your podcast. Right. There's like an implied endorsement there that I have this person on my show, therefore I think there's somebody you should be listening to.

We've got a client that's a news analyst for one of the big stations, one of the big networks, and he lives in Washington, D.C. there, and probably two nights a week you can see him on television. But he loves podcasts. And he says when he does a three minute piece on the news, there's an hour in there in the car, there's an hour in the green room, then he gets on. And if, if the person interviewing him doesn't talk too much, he might get to talk for two or three of those minutes. And then he drives an hour home. So he's like, it's four hours to get two minutes of exposure. Now, granted, it's great exposure, but he can't really talk about anything on there. And he loves going on podcasts, and he can do them from anywhere. He did a podcast interview one time where he had to step out of the green room to set up and do a podcast interview. And he had people in there like, what are you doing?

I love it.

And they're like, that's amazing.

That's. I mean, it's just so smart. And if you think of podcasting, it's also evergreen. You can, you know, we can repurpose all this stuff, but then you can start driving traffic to that podcast. And not only SEO, but paid traffic. I mean, we boost every single episode to our audience and some other interests, you know, depending on the guest, and sometimes even the guests will do that. So it's just a great brand awareness. And it's like this whole ripple effect, it just goes and goes.

Yeah, that's one of the things. We've got to set the expectations with our clients, especially if they're used to, like, paid advertising where you put a dollar in the slot machine and you get immediate payoff on it. Well, that's a spend. So if you buy some Facebook ads, yeah, your traffic's going to go up in the next five hours. But then what happens? Whereas I look at content and specifically podcast interviews as evergreen, we've got our oldest. Shouldn't say he's not the oldest, but he's our most tenured. He's been with us the longest, is out four years now, and he still gets traffic, leads and customers for interviews that he did four years ago. You know, I'm sure if he ever did a newspaper ad or a Facebook boosted post four years ago, go. It's not giving them any value today.

Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Well, I know you have this service, but I'm curious. So if someone were to want to get on someone else's podcast, because we get hit up with all these literally daily, and they're usually stock emails. They go to our support desk, so then they have to get filtered by our support lady, and then the good ones reach us, and usually they're still not that great.

I imagine most. Most people who have podcasts have some gatekeepers in place, because once your podcast gets a little bit more traction and more and more people listen to it, you know, people are chasing you up all the time to be on your podcast, and you do have to get more and more selective of. Of who you want to put in front of your community. So what, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to get in front of some of these larger audiences and they actually want to get the attention of the podcaster?

Oh, then that's a great question. And everything I learned I share openly. I really believe that podcast interview marketing will be as big as Facebook marketing or email marketing five years from now because it works so well. So I'm just all about having people do it better because a lot of people are doing it really poorly and either destroying the industry or not getting good results with it. I probably get a pitch once to twice a day to be on my podcast. I don't have a podcast, but they.

All start me up.

Dear Tom, we love your podcast and would love to be on it. It's like, if you're gonna lie to me, tell me I'm pretty.

So if you want to be on a podcast, just in your mind right now, flip the seats, put yourself in the host position. Why do they bring people on their podcast? It's people they want to talk to, people they want to introduce to their audience and their friends. Right? So how do you get to be that person? It's not doing robo pitches, and nobody likes a cold call. So first of all, I always tell people, and I wrote a book on this, I'll give the book away here. I just want people to learn from it and it's start in a relationship. So the first thing to do is find out the ideal podcast. You don't want to be on every one. There's 300,000 podcasts out there, and the vast majority of them are a total waste of your time if your ideal customers aren't on there. So pick five or ten that you think would be great, and don't start with all the great big ones. You got to work your way up before you hit Broadway. So listen to those and think, what could I offer this? What could I offer their audience? What could I offer the host? Then.

Make sure that you show the host some love. Right? Every host, if you leave a rating and review, they will know who you are. They read those and that's how other people find out about the podcast. Take some of their social media, comment on it, repost it, retweet it. Then after you've done that, after you've earned the right to have that conversation, then reach out to him and, you know, say, hey, Joe and Matt, I love the podcast. I really enjoyed this episode. I Listened to this episode with Tom Schwab from Interview Valet, and that guy was crazy. But, you know, that's. That's neither here nor there. Then, you know, tell them, hey, here's something that I think I could offer your audience that would be a value to them. Don't start off with, hey, Joe and Matt, I've got a new book, and I would like to use and abuse your podcast.

It's not the way that works. And so then once you get on the podcast, your goal is to make the host look like a genius for inviting you. Right. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about jab, jab, jab, right hook. Probably missed a couple jabs. I look at it as serve, serve, serve, ask. Right. So keep putting out value there. There's a podcaster that. Oh, Doug Sandler from Nice Guys. I loved what he said. He said, never promote yourself. He said, if you do a good job, the host will promote you more than you ever could.

That's right.

And so from that standpoint, there's a lot of people that have gotten on podcasts and either did an infomercial, a sales pitch, or were rude to the audience and the host, and all of a sudden, that recording either got lost or something happened to it and he never saw the light of day.

Yep. I mean, doing podcasts for several years now, you definitely know how that goes. There's a few episodes that have literally never, ever hit the feed.

Yeah.

For reasons like that.

But we're not gonna name any names. Sometimes the date magically changed or something happened. We're like, you know, if we get a. If it's a bad episode, that's one thing, but if it's one where you know it's gonna be a sales pitch coming, you're like, well, here's kind of a funny.

A funny story that's super relevant is we actually had somebody come to us, pitch us to be on our show, and they did a good job with their pitch. And we said, sure, let's. Let's do it. We scheduled a date. Then we actually went and listened to this person on two other podcast interviews that they were on. They gave almost zero value to the audience. And the whole podcast, they just kept on pitching. They just kept on coming back to their service, coming back to their service. And when we actually tuned into those other two podcasts, we went, okay, what are the. What's the likelihood they're going to do the same thing on our podcast? And, you know, we mysteriously were no longer available for the recording date that we originally Scheduled and told them we'd reschedule in the future, which will probably never happen. But, you know, hopefully that person's not tuning in because they probably know who they are. But. Oh, well, maybe you'll learn from this.

The flip side there, too. Right. So Steve Gordon introduced us from the unstoppable CEO there. And, you know, I had met him through another podcaster. And so from that standpoint, if you do a good job, they'll help you and introduce you to other people that could benefit from that. And then I'll pull back the curtain here on how you can really get business results from it. As far as giving people stuff that's helpful to them, I sort of tease that out there that I wrote a book. If people want it, I would say you can buy it on Amazon, but I give more of them away because I would much rather have people learn how to do this. So try to add value there and things that people can take the next step with you, you know, give them a reason to go to your website to check something out, you know, make it easy for them.

Yeah.

So before going any further, how would someone get this said free book from you? Well, can they go to your website or. Yeah.

Okay, here's.

You can plug that now if you want.

Well, I was gonna say, let's pull the curtain back 100% here. All right. Our studies have shown that when you're on a podcast, you never want to send people to your homepage, because think about it, you've never seen me before, you've never seen my website, and.

That you're probably coming from a mobile device, so the traffic bounces real high. So if you went to interviewvallet.com flowchart and that's the address that I use there, and said, hey, you can find the book there. Well, the first thing that you're going to see, and you can check me on this is the artwork for the podcast and a picture of Joe and Matt. And so it's going to be there. So the first thing that loads is a trust seal. Right. E Commerce, we call them trust seals. It's a tacit endorsement. Then there's some boilerplate, and then there'll be whatever offers I talked there, all my social media will be there, a picture. If you just want to figure out what's this guy look like, you can go there. And so the idea there is that you're moving them from just being a passive listener to an active visitor and giving them reasons to go there. And the thing is that we're recording this in 2018. Right now, somebody is listening to this in, like, 2022.

Seriously?

You're right.

Hello. Hello. Welcome to the future. Welcome to the past, whatever it was. If I send them to my homepage, I guarantee you that homepage is going to change in the next four years. So if I talked about an offer that wasn't there, that traffic would just bounce. So better to just send them to.

A dedicated page 100% too. I mean, we have guests that we interviewed a year ago that some of their links are already broken, and I've had to go through and swap out links from stuff that no longer works because people pivoted and changed their business model and stuff like that. So, I mean, that's. That's definitely true. And obviously the secondary benefit to it is you now have a sort of direct response element to this episode that you were on. You now know exactly how much traffic you receive to your website from this episode because you have that special landing page.

And you can even to the point of attribute the traffic of figuring out which podcast interviews were a base hit, which one were home run. If you want to get really meta on it, you could even work into your nurturing campaigns and always mention how they. How they learned about you. Right. Because if you always mention somebody they like, somebody their friend, it's sort of that halo effect instead of guilt by association. It's the tacit endorsement every time there.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And I mean, just. Just coming back to, like, how to actually get on other people's podcasts. I'll just speak from our experience, because every once in a while, people do get through. Our gatekeepers, our. Our support. People actually pass them through to us because they think it's. It's valuable. And the qualities that we usually find in there is a. They typically tell us they're a listener, and they can sort of prove it by linking to an episode and telling us what they liked about that episode. That's something that we see a lot that gets through to us is, hey, I loved this episode with Tom Schwab. My favorite part was when you talked about how to get on other people's podcasts and this specific tactic, you know, the more specific you can prove that you've actually know what our podcast is about, the better. But also the thing that's also really worked well is when people give us like four or five bullets and say, here are some topics that I'm absolutely passionate about, and I love talking about it. And based on past interviews that I've heard. I think these will really resonate with your audience. And when people kind of use those handful of elements, they get our attention.

And you think about it, most of us are writing emails on our laptop or our desktop, but we're reading them on our phone. You want to make sure you give people a reason to say yes, not a one to say no. So don't send a long email. Make it to the point. Put links in there. Right. Put your LinkedIn profile so they can just click on it right there and see you. If you've got a book, click on that. If you, you know, click to your website, something like that, just make it easy for people to go through and say yes.

Now, do you have. I mean, I imagine the advice would be fairly the same, pretty much, but, you know, up leveling podcasts, like, if I wanted to try to get on someone's bigger podcast. Does your advice change at all, or is it kind of the same advice?

Would you say it's still the same advice? And I always warn people that we have never seen a direct correlation between the size of the podcast and the results from it. Right. There's that whole idea there's more fish in the ocean, but if you can find a barrel of fish, go there every time. And, you know, it's more of an ego thing. A lot of times that I want to be on the big podcast. Well, sometimes the reason they're a big podcast is because it's a very diverse audience.

True.

So when you're talking and you're giving examples, you can't be very, very specific. I mean, I learned this early on. When we first started this, I did it as a online course. And what I found is that, you know, people didn't want the online course. They wanted, you know, either a book to read or they just wanted it done for you. But I was on a big podcast, and, you know, it was more of an ego stroke. It was like 40,000 downloads. Well, from that I sold about two dozen courses. I was thrilled with that. Shortly after, I was on a podcast and the host told me that she got 350 downloads per episode. And I'm like, that's okay. I think it's a great, great audience. I sold 100 courses from that. And so from that standpoint, there's more fish in the ocean. But, man, there was a barrel of fish there. I knew exactly who I was talking to, could use those examples. And I'd go there every time.

I love it. I love it.

That's really cool. Yeah.

I mean, the way my brain works is I like to systematize everything. So just to kind of give you a peek behind the curtain of our podcast, we actually only podcast one day a month. We batch record. So we do back to, back to back to back podcasts and we try to knock out a bunch of podcasts in one day. Then we take those recordings, we put them in a Dropbox, we have an audio editor and we have a show notes writer. They access them from the Dropbox, they do their thing. And Joe's even mentioned in the past that, oh yeah, I forgot we even have a podcast sometimes because they're just, they just roll out and we only focus on it one day a month.

Month.

Right. So I'm very much a systematic mind. How do I. How do I make things as frictionless as possible? And that's how my brain works. And one thing that Joe and I have actually always struggled with a little bit is we want to get on more podcasts. We want to go out there and find other good podcasts to be on and make it more of a frequent thing, because we do really see the power of it. But the fact of the matter is we've never figured out how to sort of systematize the process of doing that and make it something that just kind of happens without friction. If there's a little bit of effort behind it, we get a little bit of pushback. We kind of go, okay, let's move on to the next thing. So I was wondering if you can kind of speak into that, a little bit of maybe some little tips people can do to make sure that that is a consistent effort of theirs.

Yeah. And from that standpoint, exposure brings opportunity. So always, always look at that and say, how can I continually go out there? And you're right, the way to do it is a system. And if you. We've had a lot of clients that came to us and said, well, it doesn't work, or I've talked to people and says, I've been on a bunch of podcasts and it never worked. And you start to listen to them and it's like random podcasts, no calls to action. There was no system behind it, no follow up, they weren't prepared all the rest of that. So it's like anything else. If you build an engine and you leave the transmission out, it's not bad that on the car, it's just you didn't build it right or, you know, taking a recipe, you can't leave pieces out. And some people will say, well, I just Want to be on the podcast? I don't want to prepare for it. Well, then you're not going to have a good interview. Or I really don't want to go to the effort of doing those offers and sending people to a dedicated page because if they're really interested, they'll find me. I'm like, okay, give it a try. See how it works for you.

It may work for you, but I know what we have tested over hundreds and hundreds of clients and over thousands and thousands of interviews. Three calls to action. A small, a medium and a large always work best. And people will say, well, no, it's got to be one call to action. No, digital marketing is one call to action. And I would not argue with that. But being on a podcast is more like selling from the stage. You need to meet people where they are. So, you know, for me, a good small call to action is, hey, here's the checklist that I use for all of my podcasts to prepare for it so you don't have any mistakes. Good, that's a small call to action. The medium call to action can be, hey, you want the book? Here's a free copy of the book.

It's more of an investment of their time on that. And then the big call to action is always, hey, if this resonated with you, if I can serve you in any way, let's jump on a call. So from that standpoint and just really trying to find the system in that, I love that.

So with that soft or the lowest, I guess the easiest call to action, would that typically be like in your case, your scenario, it would be a PDF of some sort. Would that be on like the show notes so it's less friction or you give them a URL, then you're just like, hey, just go download to direct download.

Actually what we would always want to do is drive them back to our site. So, you know, in the show notes I would ask, don't put just interview ballet.com put interviewvallet.com flowchart because you want to get them there. And some people will put it behind.

An opt in form. I never do that for the smallest one. It's like if you're not truly interested, I don't want to start having to nurture you.

But the other thing about we call them welcome pages because it's not a landing page. We've tested this also. You don't want to send somebody there and hey, either give me your email address or leave now. If you want to look around the site that's fine. So really it's more like a custom homepage than it is a squeeze page.

I love that. So the welcome page. Yeah, that literally has all those trust elements, everything you said. So it has that soft call to action, just a download link on your domain. The other thing or the book is an opt in. And then obviously there's an opportunity to work with you as a service or bigger level that just makes perfect sense. And you could track all of that and you could follow up. Like you said.

One of our clients.

Wrote a book called How Digital Marketing Is Ruining youg Business Guy by the name of Bill Troy. And I think people will look back at that book a decade from now and say that was the first one that said the emperor has no clothes. But I loved how he said that big fish don't swim through funnels and whales don't click on a podcast. You know, if you're selling a high ticket item, a relationship thing, they're not going to go through your, if they want to buy, they're not going to go through your, your nurturing sequence through three or four months. No, they just want to go there and, you know, speak with the wizard. They want to speak with the wizard and come with credit card in hand. So.

That's right.

That is so interesting because, you know, just from our, from my perspective and just how I operate, I know that if I listen to somebody else's podcast and I go, man, this guest is really, really good. I really love what he's talking about. I, you know, I might go invest some money with him because I want to learn more from this person. I don't think I've ever gone to the Show Notes page, clicked over, gone to an opt in page, entered my email, got on his list, went through his sales funnel and then finally decided to buy. No, I decided I like this person. Maybe I'll shoot them a direct message, see if I can get a hold of them. If I can't, maybe I'll shoot the podcaster a direct message and see if they'll make a connection for me. Or I'll tap my network and find out who knows that person who could make the connection. I'll jump on a call with them and I'll bypass all of that stuff you were just saying.

That's right. That's true. I mean, I've. Yeah, I mean that. And that's. Isn't this the best thing? Because you're teeing up these high ticket sales, you know, grand or ten grand or even higher. It could be A total partnership that they want to bring you in the fold for equity or rep share or something like that. We've experienced all of that. And it's this connection. I think sometimes when creating, or at least someone getting into content, it's that dedication that it takes for them to consume content. Podcasting, it's so personal. So it's just that higher, higher touch that you're looking for.

Yeah. And some people have said, well, does this work for everything? And we've tested it for a lot of things, and I think it works best for relationship sales and high lifetime value. So if you're just trying to do a transaction, there's easier ways to do it. So we've done some virtual book tours with fiction books, and it was really hard to do.

Right.

If you're selling a fiction book and you're going to make $2 off of the book, that's a hard way to do it. Especially, you know, your next book is going to be out in another four years. That's really tough. Or if it's just, you know, just a transaction. But if you really want to build somebody with a lifetime value and a relationship, and to me, that's what business is.

Sure.

Then it's a great way to do it.

That's amazing.

I love it. Now, are there any topics around podcasting and getting on other people's podcasts that we haven't touched on but that you'd kind of want to dig in on a little bit more?

Yeah, I guess, sort of. The ugly side of it is that I said before, there's a lot of podcasts that aren't worth going on. And I don't mean they're bad people, but you may want to just look whether or not you really want to be on there. There's something called Pod Fade, and everybody wants to start a podcast, and then they realize how much hard work it is. If you have not left a rating and review for this podcast, podcast, please do so. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Right. Because here I am, I've got the interview, and they say, yeah, it's just their VA's do it. Well, they're still paying somebody to do it.

Oh, yeah.

So Pod Fade is where somebody starts a podcast and then, you know, before the tenth episode, it dies off. And you don't want to be interview number seven when they stop paying the hosting bill at number eight, it's a waste of everybody's time. And chances are, unless they've got a good audience, unless they've been doing it before. There's probably not a lot of listeners, maybe that first 10 episodes. So a lot of times we'll have people that reach out and say, would you be on my podcast? And either they're just starting it or they've only got, you know, six episodes. It's amazing. Sometimes we'll say, well, I'd love to. Could you follow up in 90 days with me? And the podcast doesn't exist in 90 days, so that's something to look at from that standpoint. And then, like I said before, just don't always focus on the biggest podcast. Focus on the ones that your ideal listeners are actually listening to.

Love it.

Is there a good way, really quickly, Is there a good way to. And obviously, you can kind of start going down the itunes list or stitcher, all that stuff. Is there the most effective way to kind of figure that out, say, for a specific niche? Let's call it accounting. If someone's like a bookkeeper or something. I know there are podcast search engines out there that are a little better than, say, itunes.

There are, and there's new ones popping up all the time. One of the ones that I really like now is called Listen Notes.

Okay.

And if you go to there, you can search by name, you can search by.

Different things in the show notes. So even if you say, hey, I'm sort of like this person and I heard them on a podcast, well, put their name in there and see what other podcasts they were in. That's a great way to do it. Or put in accounting, and all the accounting podcasts will show up there. So it's a great way to do that. And like I said, don't go after a thousand podcasts. Find five podcasts you can be on, get on a couple of those, and at the end, if you did a good job, ask them, hey, do you know any other podcasters that I might be a benefit to their audience?

That's right.

Love it, Love it. Now with the listener valet or the Interview Valet. Sorry.

What sort of services do you provide for people? What do they get if they were to sign up with you?

Sure. So we're a concierge level done for you service. So our. Our business model around Interview Valet is you're the guest. We take care of all the rest. And I always say, our clients give us the best copy. Had a client early on, he said, I love working with you because Sinatra only sang. And I'm like, okay, what's that mean? And he's like, well, Sinatra could have done A lot of things. But he wouldn't have become Sinatra. He wouldn't have made the impact and the fortune that he did. He said, so I look at it as there's certain things that I can do and bring the best value. And he said, my best return on investment of my time and my money is just performing. And so we work with authors, speakers, coaches, emerging brands and we've got a team of 18 now in the US all us based and geographically remote and we do all the steps. So we're out there prospecting, finding the right shows, pitching, getting the host to say yes. The preparation both for the guest and the host, the performance, that's the only thing you can't outsource. But we provide our clients professional sounding equipment, equipment and teach them the best practices and then we make those it's progression. So we make the welcome pages for them to send the traffic to. And then finally the social media promotion because every podcaster wants their episodes promoted. So really it's a very scalable system that we have. And I always say it's not art, it's not magic, we just do it and we do it with excellence. That's really our zone of genius. And if you want to see how it's done, it's all laid out in the book podcast guest profits. But we really focus on doing it with excellence and getting the best return on investment for our clients.

I love it. You're a true engineer.

That's a good thing. This is amazing. I think that's the hurdle that a lot of people just want to get over. And if you're there willingly and you have these dialed in systems proven out and you have great connections as we know you do, it's a no brainer and might be something that Matt and I look into as well.

So to kind of wrap it up here is there we ask, we try to ask this to every single guest. Is there a book that you refer to often in that just resonates really, really deeply with you maybe on a personal or business level that you want to share here?

Yeah. And actually it's been so influential in our business. It's called Play How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets. It's by one of the co authors is Christopher Lockhead. He's a client and has become a friend and a mentor. And the whole idea is.

Instead of working on your brand, work on your category and be the category king in that sort of that idea of, you know, find your own way in life, just don't Follow somebody else's. You know, if I say that I'm, you know, the best lawyer in the world, well, it's either me or the other million lawyers that are lying.

Right?

He challenges on that and he's like, you know, I would say, well, we're sort of like a PR agency. We're sort of like a marketing agency. We're sort of like a dating service. And he's like, oh, you're not. It's a different category. It's podcast interview marketing. And he's got a new book coming out this summer called Niching Down. This is going to be awesome.

I love it. That's the kind of stuff that we love to hear too. Yeah.

Interviewvallet.com Flowchart is where you want to send them after the show.

Yeah. If you go to interviewvallet.com flowchart everything Joe, Matt and I talk about will be there. I'll put the checklist list that we use and all of our clients use before all their podcast interviews. I believe it's stupid to learn from your mistakes. Learn from somebody else's. It's less painful.

Love it.

The book will be there. You can get a free download of podcast guest profits, how to grow your business with a targeted interview strategy, and then finally my calendar link there. So if anything that this resonated with you, I'd love to talk with you and see how we might be able to help.

You're a stand up dude, Tom. And I know just from our first conversation we had the other day, you were very, very cool to talk to. You gave a lot of info. So definitely the free stuff is very valuable. I can only imagine the done for you stuff you do is just out of this world if you're actually serious. So go check them out. Interview valet.com flowchart thank you, Tom. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

All right, talk soon. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now right now before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.