Avoid Over-Guesting: Growing Your Podcast Authority First

This is Feed Your Brand with hosts Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey everyone, welcome to Feed Your Brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard, and along with my co-host Tom Hazzard, today we are talking about the pitfalls of over-guesting. That's guesting more than you do your own show. That's what we're gonna talk about, mastering over-guesting.

That's a thing, Tracy.

It's a thing, and we're gonna talk about that today. So mastering guest appearances while prioritizing your own podcast. So because we've been talking about podcast swapping a lot, Tom, where I go on your show, you come on my show, right? There's an equality there. There's a balance to that. But when you're not doing that and you're guesting on a bunch of shows that aren't reciprocating, now we have some imbalance between our show and their show. And between how our name shows up there and its authority ranking, that's what we're concerned with. So that's some of the pitfalls of over-guessing that we're gonna talk about today.

I'm very excited to talk about this, Tracy, because I think there's almost a bit of a cognitive dissonance. People thinking, what do you mean? What does over-guessing mean? You can guess too much. And I bet there's some confusion and uncertainty there that we're gonna shed some light on.

There's never such a thing as too much publicity. Is that what you're thinking?

Like, that's what a lot of people would say.

Any.

Publicity is good publicity. Any exposure is good exposure. But I think we're gonna sort of share that there's some other things to consider here.

Yeah. So what I want you to do is think about your show first. Okay. You're building and investing in a platform of information, of messaging, of authority, of ranking, of search engine optimization, whether it's in Google or the pod player apps like Apple and Spotify and all of those places out there. You're investing in that by doing your show. So even if you aren't investing money, you're investing a lot of time in doing that. So you need to understand where you are with that. Now, I'm gonna assume here that you're at minimum producing a weekly show. If you're producing less than that, you need to balance out the equation of what we're talking about here today. But we're assuming, because that's our advice to you out there, is to produce a consistent weekly show. So 52 weeks a year, you have a podcast episode that airs. You don't have to record them 52 weeks in a row. You can batch record, But you're gonna produce and publish 52 weeks of the year.

You're gonna show up for your listeners on that consistent basis is another way to say it, right?

Exactly. So that's what we're gonna say here. So when we're talking about our numbers and what we're sharing here, we're sharing that as if you're doing a weekly show, change your numbers. If you're doing a monthly, seasonal, change your numbers. Okay? And what we found is, is that there's a balance between promoting yourself and your show, promoting your guests, promoting those episodes, and somebody else doing it. So in other words, when you guest on a show, you're relying on their promotion process as well. Here's the thing, there are a lot of you out there who just don't do a good job of promoting your own episodes. Surprise! Like, right, Tom? I mean, we see it all the time.

Despite our best intentions, there's only so much each of us can do. And maybe we're at a point where we're bootstrapping it and we don't have, can't afford a social media manager or a VA to do some of the things for us. And that's understandable and okay. But then herein lies some of the potential problem, right?

Right. Because if you're not doing a great job of promoting your own show, you guest on a show that does a fantastic job of promoting you, they're gonna outrank you. So now your show is being pushed down. That doesn't mean you don't wanna do it. It means you don't wanna do it so much that you're pushing your show down. You're actually creating this low level of promotion that you're already doing and making it seem even worse because you're posting consistently and constantly. You're getting some amount of credit for that. With the search engines, right? You're producing a show every Wednesday like we're doing right here. We're producing a show every Wednesday. We get some benefit from doing that, from being consistent and constant about it. We get more benefit by sharing and promoting it and by making sure that we're doing everything that we can do on social media, driving traffic and listeners to it, putting it in our newsletters and doing some of those other things out there. But if we're only doing a minimum amount of work and the other person does a much better job of it, the search engine is gonna give them the credit first, and we're getting pushed down in the model of that. So that's what we have to understand is that anything we do that comes above us is doing a better job in promotion is gonna push us down, a better job in search engine optimization. So if you're not titling your episodes well, but they are, you're getting pushed down. So this is important. Now we want a boost from somebody who's bigger than us. That's a really good thing. But we don't wanna overdo it to the point where it pushes us out. So all our work isn't being recognized at all. And that's the concern here. So I found over the last couple of years of doing this, that there's a 1 to 4 ratio. So if you guest on a show that's bigger than you once a month and you produce 4 episodes, you're gonna be perfectly balanced. So you produce 4 episodes in a month and you guest on one. You're gonna be perfectly balanced. If you do a reciprocal, it's an even exchange. Don't worry about it. So if I guess on your show and you guess on my show, that's an even swap. That's okay. We're still even. So now we've lowered it down. So now you could still do 2 guesting spots a month because that one's an equalization between my show and their show. So that's the first step we wanna analyze is saying, okay, how much are we gonna guest? If we're just doing the bare minimum and producing our episodes, once a month.

So Tracy, I've had it happen where a podcasting customer we do production for says, I've got too much on my plate. I'm going to pause my own podcast and I'm just going to go be guests on other shows for the next 3 months. What would you think about that strategy in the context of someone who has their own show, been podcasting, publishing regularly, and then takes a hiatus? Putting, I guess I would say, priority on guesting on other shows.

So here's the second side of things. If you're not doing a good job of promoting your guest appearances, then that is a failure strategy. It will fail just as much. In fact, it will fail more than doing your own show because it's only as good as the podcaster that show that you're going to guest on does a good job in promotion. But because next week they're gonna promote somebody else, they're gonna push you down in their list. You're not gonna stay high because it's not about you. Their show isn't about you, so you're not gonna stay high over there. So your own platform is your most important asset, and if you're not adding to it, then you're not helping yourself. So if you are so busy that you can't produce your own show and you can't promote your guest appearances, then it's a waste of time to be guesting.

And isn't it also true that when other people are promoting you, it's great that they're sharing it on social media, that you're their guest, but they're driving traffic to their show, right? Not yours.

Right. So they're controlling the narrative. They're controlling where it goes to, how they send to you, if they send to you at all. And it will only show up in a fleeting way because they're producing the next episode, the next episode. So it's constantly now old content for them. Where you're not old for your own platform. You're always relevant to your own platform, right? So it makes more sense when you think of it that way. So if you don't embed or add guest appearances to your website, then giving up your podcast to guests is imbalanced. You will lose in the process on the long run. Short term, you'll see the little boosts that are happening, and hopefully you're gonna get a little bit of exposure to someone else's audience. Maybe you'll have a few listeners who come and become clients. So like there's some worth to that, but it's short-lived. It won't last because a long-term residual value is in making sure that those guest appearances add authority to your platform, and that needs to happen in your space. So it needs to happen in your website. So if you're not doing that, at minimum, rethink this idea that guesting is gonna be more powerful and worth your time. It's not gonna be any more worth your time. So if you don't promote better, if you don't embed, and if you don't produce your own show consistently and constantly, you very quickly can over-guest.

I can imagine you're a guest on someone else's show and then they learn, oh, you have a podcast too, and they go check it out and you haven't published an episode in 2 months. That's probably not going to motivate them to give your podcast a try.

Right. And here's the one thing. So this, occurs across Google, YouTube, and the podcast player apps. All 3 places you will end up falling down in your authority ranking, in your search engine optimization, in how you show up. You will lose in the list in all 3 places. It won't happen in Facebook, it won't happen in Instagram, it won't happen in TikTok because that is all a timeliness anyway. So if you're not currently posting something, you're not relevant to their algorithms. So it wasn't gonna happen anyway for you there. But those things have long-term residual value. Google, YouTube, and your podcast app, right? The player app itself, it's search engine. Its search engine doesn't care when those things were posted. It only cares that they were posted and what they were about. So you can stay relevant there a much longer time, but you can't do that if you're not consistently out there. It's just not gonna work. So that's one thing to consider. And the second part of it is, is that guesting is a much more difficult sales model because you have to rebuild your trust every single time you guest. So every single time I guest on a new show, I have to build trust with the host and build trust with that audience. I have to start my storytelling all over again. I spend a lot of time having to go to, to orient them to get to know me. So that they will trust me, right? They gotta know, then like, then trust me. And I have to build that up in whatever that episode is. And that's the only time I have to do that. On my podcast, I'm building trust over time. I can do it on a micro level over time. I can tell you a great story. I can share a case study. I can give you some statistics. I can give you some resources. Over time, you're going to build such trust with me that everything that I share with you comes at a much higher jumping off activity place. So I'm more likely as a listener to take action because I've been listening to you for a while. That's not the case when you're a guest on a show. You have to restart it every single time. So it is much harder to guest and get results unless there's the perfect audience match, the host that already trusts you and gives you the right credit level. It's just harder. So you can see some ineffectiveness in the process. Now, I'm a huge fan of doing both, don't get me wrong. And I, because I produce over 2 episodes a week and I have a ton of content out there, and I use guesting as much as I use having guests on my show as lead generation, collaboration, and networking, it's okay for me to do a weekly guesting spot. But I have such long-term built authority, I have thousands of articles. I have thousands of search engine listings. So I will outrank someone that I guest on 99% of the time.

In fact, we find our podcasters who have their own show and are producing and publishing on a regular basis at least 1 episode a week, and some of them do more than 1 like you a week, they very, very often outrank their guest for their own name, their own business name, their podcast name when they're a guest on their show. So this actually can flip if you are doing a certain volume of not only your own episodes, but also guesting. It can really flip and it's much more beneficial to you than it is to them for you to guest on their show. So it can be the inverse, but it really does have to do with, like you said, Tracy, consistency, constancy, and a proportionality, really, right?

Proportional, right? That's why you said like this balance between the two. So I think of it like a 1 to 4 ratio. Okay. If I have 100 episodes, I really shouldn't be guesting more than 25 episodes. So like, think about the balance of content, 1 to 4. So this is just one of those out-there things that most of you won't discover until you were like, wow, that really didn't work for me. And I gone all this time thinking I was like building my brand with guesting and it wasn't working. So this is one of the reasons we are looking at that gap, those patterns that are happening throughout everything in the marketplace, and starting to see where the optimization— where you should be spending your time and energy, where you should be spending your money for that matter as well, right? We're out there taking a look at what's working across many, many, many types of podcasters, many types of marketing, many types of models, and we're seeing what's working and that's what we're bringing you here. And so this is one unusual view. I'm very sure you won't hear this from too many people unless somebody like really spent a year over-guesting. Now I have had some people, we have had some people who the only thing they ever do is guest, or they do a book launch and it's like a blitz of guesting where they do like 50 guest appearances. Those I am not discounting as a publicity blitz strategy. If you're going to do that, that's a purposeful thing. I'm going to sell a book and I'm going to sell as many books as I can, and I need exposure with as many audience members as possible. Go do that, but understand that it may have a short-term downgrading effect to your podcast, and you're gonna have to come back up on that and work to balance that out later in the year. Just understand that that's gonna happen to you.

That's a really good last point, Tracy. I mean, there are some good reasons why you want to do a blitz and you want to drive a certain amount of people to buy your book on the first day it's on Amazon. There are reasons why you would do that and you should try to do a blitz, but we're always about the long-term value, what's in your best interest as a podcaster, and that's the lens that we're looking through this and talking about it today, the perspective that we're bringing to it. There are always other good business reasons why you might put a variation on what we're suggesting, but day in, day out, what you have outlined and what we've been talking about today is going to be in your best interest.

Yeah. And I know I said to all of you early on to do like one per month, right? Like 12. The thing is, is that you don't need to, because they don't always air in the timely manner. Like sometimes it's 3 months before that one airs or whatever. Just say, set out to try to do about 12 guest appearances a year and let them fall where they may. It's okay if you end up with 2 in one month and then spread out a little. It's not going to harm you in that. It's just sort of the overall balance of looking at you doing 52 episodes versus and comparing that to 12 guest appearances. So having that balance of that. So do not worry about that. And don't worry if you do 13 or, you know, 11 or whatever. Like, don't be really exact about it.

This isn't a hard and fast rule. These are recommendations based on our experience for what will work best, right?

Yeah, guidelines. Take them as guidelines, right? Tips, ideas, things to try. But as we're going into planning for next year, which we're— as this is live streaming, of course, when you hear this on the replay in Feed Your Brand, all of you listeners out there may get this a little bit later, but we're always thinking about what's our plan for next year? What are we going to do? Am I going to do 52 guest appearances? Am I going to do 12? What is my plan for this so that I go in with a better intention of what I'm going to accomplish coming out of it? So that's why we're sharing this to you. So think about that, the pitfalls of over-guessing. Make sure that your time and energy is really well spent in giving you the best long-term residual value.

All right. Sounds like great words to the wise. Hey listeners, you can find the links to anything we've discussed today and more information on the blog post at podcastersunited.org.

So thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with Tom Hazzard here on Feed Your Brand. We'll be back live one week from today for those of you listening to the livestream. And for those of you listening to the recording, we'll be back a week from now too with another episode posting in Feed Your Brand. Thanks everyone.

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