Your Livestream Show Guests Will Love You For This

If you have a livestream program, a web show, if you have a video podcast like we do, an interview program or a talk show, no matter what definition you want to give to your show, it's in your best interest to make your show guests love you. Because if they have a great experience, they are likely to tell other people in their network about your show. And it gives you as the show host an opportunity to get more people on your show, maybe even guests who are at a higher caliber of bigger audiences. And that ultimately helps you get your message out to more people, as does it help your guests get exposure to more people. Sheryl Plouffe here, video strategist. Today, we are talking about how to really, um, get your guests to love you. And your live stream guests will love you, um, for the things I'm going to be talking about today. I think it's important as a show host to think about all you can do for your guests. And I'm going to really break this down into a few different components of how to make your show guests love you, and it'll culminate with the tools that we're using on how we do this. So let me start by framing this around What do your guests want? Like, I mean, let's just think about that first, right? What do your guests ultimately want? Why would anyone want to be, um, you know, coming on your show in the first place? Well, I think if you are also a guest on other people's shows, as am I, let's just think about that for a second. We want to be on other people's shows, and your guests want to be on your show because they're looking for exposure. Right? They're looking for exposure. They're looking for eyeballs. You know, in the attention economy, it's really, really key. You have to be in front of people all the time and reminding people that you exist. So, people come on your show because they want exposure. They want visibility. They want brand awareness. They want people to be aware of who they are, what they represent, and they want to share their ideas. With the world. They are also wanting to get in front of new audiences. That's why we all speak because we want to get in front of new audiences. And I mean, if you're just talking to the same 3 people every single day, which we sometimes see in more traditional networking scenarios where people— it's the same club of people who are meeting every single month and no one's really expanding their horizons and meeting new people. That can often be a problem. It's a real detriment to a business owner because you really need to be getting in front of new audiences of people. Brand awareness, as I mentioned. Also, one thing that your guests are really looking to do is they want to look smart, right? They want to look smart. They want to sound smart. They want to really make an impact with their message. And if that's true, then you as the show host have a very important role to play as you bring guests onto your show. They also want to have content that they can share to their platforms. This is a really important concept because it's not a, you know, yes, they come on your show and they get the exposure to your audiences and that's great. But they also want to and will at the end of that interview segment, show, episode, they're going to come back to your platforms and they're going to want to share that content that you've now produced that they are featured in to their platforms. Why? Because it shows them out there in the world. It shows them and it helps to get their message out. And they want to let their own existing audience know, look at the stuff I'm doing. So they want content shared to their own platforms. And traditionally, how that's done is if you know you're on a show, you would go back to that person's platforms and you would find it. You don't have to kind of hunt for it, usually hunt through their feeds and then share that out to your audiences. And then that's fine, that works. But there's a better way, which I'm going to be sharing with you in this, in this live stream today. But really what your guests want is they want to, they want to look smart, they want to look accomplished, they want exposure, they want visibility, they want brand awareness. They want to get in front of new audiences and they want to have content that they can share to their existing audiences. So, if that's true, and by the way, you can chat and leave comments. I'm happy to— Hello! I see some thumbs up. Great! You can ask questions as we go along in this live stream, by the way. So, if that's true, you know that they want all of those things. What role do you play as the show host to accommodate that? How can you give them what they want? How can you as the show host give them what they want? Well, I think that it comes down to having at least some baseline skills around interviewing if you are indeed doing an interview-based show, which is the premise of what we're talking about today. I think you want to have some baseline skills around asking good questions. You know, nothing bugs me more than Well, maybe a few things bug me more. But nothing bugs me more than when someone, a show host, writes out their list of questions and will not deviate from that list. Right? They'll have like, 'Question 1, question 2, and I'm going to ask them in this chronological order no matter what.' You know, I would prefer to see you being more fluid. And part of that has to do with being a good listener and being really able to carry on a conversation in real time. And having, like I did when I was a broadcaster, you're having a conversation back here in the back of your mind about all the technical and the logistics of what's going on and your producers in your ear and all of that. But other words are coming out of your mouth. And I think it's a skill set that develops over time. Asking good questions of your guests is something that you can do to give them what they want. You can be a good listener, an active listener. Listener in the conversation. You can also do your research, you know, do some research on your guests before they arrive on your show so that you can ask good questions. You want to make them feel comfortable as well. One of the things that I love to do, and I did this when I was a reporter, when I've been on location and I've had to interview people on the street, I would just say, hey, listen, we're just going to have a conversation here. You don't have to perform. This isn't about acting. You don't have to be anything but yourself. And I often will tell my guests that before they come on our show, Cash In On camera and to make them feel more comfortable. You want to make the process of them being on your show easy. And you also want to be thinking about multi-platform promotion online, right? How can you give them what they want? Well, they want the content that they're going to be appearing on to be visible in as many platforms as possible. Right? So, those are some things that you can do to give them what they want. Give your show guests what they want. So, as it relates to making your show guests love you, it's thing one is to think about what it is that they really want. And thing two is to think about, well, how can you give them what they want? And listen, we could unpack each of these little things that we've talked about, all these little items. We could unpack probably each of them in an entire live stream. But I want to give you today some thoughts around how you can make your show guests love you so that it, it improves the quality of your own show. It furthers your own goal of growing your show. I would hope that if you're starting a show and you want to, you want to grow it, you want more audience to come and be loyal to your show. And it's a process that happens over time, certainly. But when you have the right tools, when you have the right strategies in place, it can be that way. And so, if we know those things, what they want, how we can give it to them, what I would recommend that you really think about are, especially as it comes, as it relates to one of the points I made, which is sharing content to their platforms, they want exposure. One of the things that we do with Cashing on Camera is we give our show guests— and I did a whole video on this on my YouTube channel where I talk about how we get 2 to 3 times more views of our video podcast. You can find that video on my YouTube channel where I go in depth on this concept. But sharing content to their platforms is really going to be one of the key, key things. To their want and desire to be on your show. And what we do is we give our client, or rather our guests, an option to use a very special feature within the live streaming tool that we use, which is Restream, which is what I'm using right now. Allows you as the show producer to live stream your show to up to 30 platforms at the same time. That's what we use. It's what I'm using right now. And how we like to do it is we'll give our guests the option to use a special feature called Restream Pairs. And Restream Pairs allows you to— well, not only you, but your guests to reach a wider audience because they're going to be using this feature to broadcast the show that they're on that you're producing to their audiences in real time. And there's no cost to them to do that, which is pretty cool, right? So you can now say to your guests, hey, if we set this up— and it's very simple to set up, it's so simple to set up. They just need to have a free Restream account, which they can totally sign up for. In fact, I'll put this on the screen. So you could do something similar to what I'm doing here, right? Is you could encourage your guests to get their free Restream account and just simply set up where they want their appearance on your show to appear on their platforms in real time. It's really that simple, and it's a very exciting feature. It's one that we've been using for, for some time now and absolutely love it. So that's how we go about doing it. What we're really doing is we are creating a world of creating shareable content, and we're making it super easy for our show guests to share that content out with their networks. And that's how we're approaching making our guests love us, is by giving them the option. They don't have to do that, but I would highly encourage— I do highly encourage— and a lot of them are very intrigued because they're like, wait a minute, you mean I can get a free account Yes. And I can set it up to go to up to 30 platforms of my own. Yes. Of the content you, Cheryl, are going to create featuring me and making me look smart. Yes. Okay. Yeah, let's do that. Why wouldn't I? You know, and so this is something that you could also do for your guests. And that is what can make them really love you because their experience on your show will be unlike the experience that they have on other shows that are— and nothing against audio-only podcasts, I'm a huge fan of audio. We repurpose our live streams to an audio podcast. You know, a lot of people are producing their shows by recording, by pre-recording things on Zoom. There's a lot of post-production involved in that, and it can take many, many, many, many hours per week and can also off often reduce the amount of content you can produce because it's so cumbersome. But a lot of people do that, no, they'll produce it on Zoom and there's like all the post-production that has to happen in order to get the end result. That's why we live stream. That's why we do the show live so that we can circumvent and avoid all of that post-production. So Restream is a really powerful way to do that. And then the cool thing is, let's say you are the show host. As is indicated here on the left, right? You're the show host, but you can have up to— this image is showing 2 guests, but you can have up to 9 guests on your show. It's entirely up to you. So imagine, and we've been talking today here about how to make your show guests love you, kind of more along the lines of like one singular guest. Imagine if you had 9. Imagine if you had a show and you did an episode and you had 9 guests, and each of those 9 guests said, yeah, sign me up, I'm gonna just— I would like to broadcast the content you're creating to my platforms in real time because it doesn't cost me anything and I get content on my channels, up to 30 of them. And you have 9 of those people doing that. Hello, right? So it can be a really powerful strategy to use. So it's something I highly encourage show hosts to give some consideration around, is getting going with Restream. Now you as the show host, you know, have to have an account and have to have the ability to provide your show guests that option. But there's a huge benefit on the back end for you as the show host to do that because your show guests will love you. And when your show guests love you, good things happen because they will tell their colleagues, tell their network about their experience on your show. And guess what? Those people may well want to be on your show. And now all of a sudden, you have a waiting list of people who want to be on your program. And it's a snowball effect that can happen. But it starts with you as the show host. It starts with you, right? You need to embrace the technology that's available. It blows my mind when I Think about, you know, even if I think 5, 8, certainly 10 years ago, completely different world we live in today. The technology is right. It's mind-blowing what can happen and what you can do at your fingertips in real time. And it makes the, uh, it makes having a show attainable and it makes show growth attainable. For all of us. And that is super exciting, especially for someone like me who comes from broadcasting and comes from like a 25-year history of that. I managed a news department at one point of 17 people across Canada. You know, it's, it's amazing to me what kind of technology is in our fingertips and available and accessible to us today. This type of technology was really reserved for networks and TV stations way back in the day, and now it's available to all of us. And that's really, really exciting. So, I hope that this has helped you today. Some ideas around how you can really make your show guests love you so that you can, you know, create content for your show guests and do that on their behalf for free. It doesn't cost them a penny. So, that's an exciting prospect and something I really hope that you'll take to heart and will integrate into your own show production. If you have questions about this, by all means, you can follow me on Instagram. You can send me a DM. By all means, do that. I'm also on Facebook. I'm a message away and would love to hear your feedback on this. If you have questions, you can go to CherylPlouffe.com. Simply send me a message. I would love to be able to help you out further. But I say Reach stream pairs is really one of the key things that we've been doing with success to make our show guests love us. And of course, that helps you to grow your show. I hope it's helpful. Let's have a continued conversation around this. If you're watching this on YouTube, there is another video around this one that talks about video podcasts and how we've been getting more views on our video podcast by leveraging the audiences of our guests. And that also relates to this same tool. On that note, have a fantastic rest of your day and get out there and cash in on camera. Get out there and keep producing your show. I hope to connect with you soon.