Ego Bait: The Psychology Behind Sharing and How to Get Podcast Guests to Share Your Show

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard, promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hey, this is Tracy and Tom on feed you'd brand podcast and today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things that we've ever done in our business. It's just like such a cool idea and such a cool tool and it's been so effective.

That's what I was going to say if you didn't. It's been tremendously effective.

Yep. We call it Ego Bait, which is a nod to our good friend Ken Kortright. So I gotta give him credit for the name, but the tool is all ours.

Yeah, he had a different reference to egobait for something else. But what we're talking about is egobate for guests that you might interview for your platform, whether that's on video or audio in a podcast.

Right. Or if you're a blogger or an article writer like I am. And that's how I developed this. This is like you feature somebody in your article and you want to follow up with them and you want them to share it. And so that's what we're talking about. And so part of it is a little planning ahead of time. That's how you do it. So you're thinking about what you're going to say about that person or, or about that company. And then part of it is the way that you follow up with it. And that's sort of the tool side of it. So we're going to talk about it in the two pieces of it. So let's talk about what Ego Bait in broad concept is. Egobate is us saying something so flattering to the person's ego that they can't help but share it. Or saying something so wonderful about them that they will absolutely share it and embed it in their website. That's the key part there.

Or it also might be something really brilliant that they said as they were interviewed. Right. How they answered a question, a quote from them.

Yeah, but the problem with doing that is that it doesn't always work as well with that view as it does when you say something about them that is flattering is that you don't always want to post up your brilliant quote on your own Facebook page, you don't always want to add to your website your own brilliant quote that you said when you're quoted somewhere, right? But when you do it in context of so and so said this in Ink magazine, right, Then it sounds like it becomes a little bit better. And so you can do that. So you gotta try it both ways. It depends on your audience. It depends on the ego level of the people that you're talking about. And two, but if you want them to share it with their audience, it's way better for it to sound like a testimonial that came from you or something flattering that came from you, okay? Because you have authority as the podcast host, the article writer, the video host, or the TV show host, whatever you want to think about it like that, okay? So it's way better when you say something like inc. Magazine calls you the best thing since sliced bread, right? So it's way better to say that than it is to say it about yourself.

And what guest isn't going to want to let the world know what you said about them, right?

And that's the whole point here. So you're interviewing. Whether you're interviewing them in your articles or interviewing them on your podcast or your video cast, you're interviewing them for a reason. Because they have an audience that may match who you want to brand cast to, right? Who you want to get your message out to. So they have an audience that matches it. So them not sharing it doesn't help you. So especially when you're in the stage of not charging people to be on their show, like there's a difference because we do have some clients and stuff that make you pay to be on their show, right? You're paying for their endorsement, essentially. But in this case, we're talking about free. So it's free. So then if they don't share it, it didn't help you enough.

And what we found over years of doing this for ourselves, and we have three different podcasts that we host, but one of them has been for several years and over 500 episodes, is that when we would provide a guest the link to the blog post, the link to the show on itunes, or where to subscribe, and all this and ask them to share it with their followers, with their audience, or their list, they wouldn't always do it. And it's not that they didn't like us or didn't want to. It's just they get very busy. So what we found is that creating this ego bait. And we'll explain how we do this and what we create them, right? It's a motivator for them. It's just a little something extra to say, oh, I really got. I want to put that out there. I want to post that.

That's too cool. It looks really great, right? And so this really started because I was writing these articles and I really wasn't getting enough shares on them and enough views on them. And I was very frustrated by that because, to be honest with you, an article in Ink magazine is a gift to your business. And not saying that I'm the best writer on earth, but the fact that I feature you and you don't pay me to do that because I'm not allowed to accept money for that. It's a gift. And for you not to share it, which helps me get more views on my articles, is not very reciprocal. And I found there was a worse problem with PR firms than there was with individuals, which was really a big aha and frustrating to me. And so I stopped taking, I stopped taking pitches from PR firms, okay? Basically, they would do an immediate share and that would be it. It would just stop there. They wouldn't go further. They wouldn't put a link to it on their website. They wouldn't go and do those things. And, and so another thing is most people don't follow up and check, right? You don't check to see your guests shared it. You don't check to see the person who wrote the article about it shared it. And they don't always tag you, so you don't always know that they shared it. So we also had a follow up process in which our assistant would go and look for that a week to two weeks after and then send them a reminder. And so we'd already had this reminder system built in, but we were still having trouble getting them to do it.

Right? So enter the concept of egobate.

Enter the concept of egobate. So it started out with I wrote an article about the 10 best innovation podcasts because I write in the innovation section of Inc. Magazine. So it would be the 10 best innovative podcasts that I found out there. And what I did was I created for each one of those podcast hosts, I created a comment that I made and I purposefully planned it when I wrote the article that I would be able to take this quoted sound bite out of there. So when I wrote what the podcast was about, I was writing my opinion about them. So you would see that I would say that this is one of the best podcasts to find this out or Whatever.

Or to learn.

To learn this or whatever it was. And it was my viewpoint on that. And so. But I was calling it the best podcast, the most useful podcast. I, like, had all these different words, so they never sounded like I said the same thing twice, of course, across the 10 podcasts. And of course, I believe that, like, I listened to them. This is something true that I was saying. It's not blowing smoke. So anyway, when I did that afterwards, I not only said, hey, you were featured in my article, because they didn't know they were featured. Right.

This was an unsolicited thing.

This was an unsolicited thing. Hey, you were featured in my article that I wrote. And I thought that you might like to share this with your audience. Here's a graphic. And so I put out a square and a rectangular image that had my quote of what I said about them in it.

And didn't it also have the ink logo?

It had my image, my photo and the ink logo. And it looked like a bubble, like a quote, like a bubble out of the top of my head. Right. That's what it looked. Right. And so I would share that with them. And I think it had a little icon of their podcast so that they would see that you see some ingredient of their brand in it and. Or it was matched to the colors of their brand. Like, so I did one or the other. I sort of played with it a little bit, and I got 90% of them to share it. So there was like one or two who obviously were a little unsophisticated, and they didn't have their website in order, social profiles in order, and you could tell. So they started sharing it, and it was doing really well, and it was getting reshared, so it was getting retweeted a lot and other things like that. So I was getting a lot more views on that article. So it was really serving my article well. And so that's what you want. You know, you were drawing people in. I was getting now more readers. That's what I want. You might want more listeners or more viewers. Right. So that's the reason for.

Or just more social shares.

Or more social shares. Right, exactly. So you would get that. And so then what I also did was I would post it out, of course, in mine and tag them. So they would then reshare that within there, and I spread them out and I would have them so that they would go out over the course of a couple of weeks and they would be spread out and then it would repeat again. And so I actually do repeat fairly often, like once every three weeks or so. I repeat some of those in my evergreen social feed. It's always there because it's visually impactful.

But now, since you experimented with this and we learned from it, now we've adopted this as a standard practice for our brandcasting new business, right?

So you immediately get a link. You know, hey, your blog post went live, your podcast went live, your video cast went live. Here are the links, and we always send them only to one link. Keep that in mind. This is extremely important. The link that you provide to them should only be the blog post at.

The end of the day on your website.

On your website at the end of the day. It shouldn't be on itunes. You shouldn't be sending them to YouTube. You should only be sending them all to the same link. So you provide one link that they share and it should be the blog post itself.

But then we also provide them an ego bait graphic. So understand this. Every single episode that we produce for our clients and for ourselves of a podcast, video cast, whatever has an ego bait graphic with this quote, with this statement about them and reference to the show that they were on and the information on where they can find it so that they want to share that on social media.

Right? And so it's visually, it looks nice, but there's words, but it's not very long. That's another thing. It's probably like, you know, I don't.

Know, a sentence or two.

A sentence is probably too long. I mean, it might be a phrase. Yeah, it might be a portion of a phrase. I would say you probably want like seven words or less or something if you can. Right? If you can, 10, maybe.

Some can be long.

You don't want it to be too small, right. You don't want it to be too much to read, right. Think about those inspirational quotes that are out there on the Internet or whatever. The shorter does better, they share better. So thinking about it from that standpoint as well. So I have our friend John Livesay and I called him the product whisperer. And so I wrote that in my article and he shared that so many times over the thing and then eventually over the time since I wrote the article, which was almost a year ago, probably now, and he also included that quote on his book, on the COVID on the COVID of his book. So it profoundly impacts people seeing who I am and my brand, as well as helps him give him a high value testimonial.

But there's still more.

But there's still more. So what we found in following up with people, so that was great. They were sharing it on social media and they were doing all of that. But you have an article in Ink magazine, right? That's what this was starting with. I was like, there's an article written about you. You were featured in Ink magazine. So how many of them put it on their website, on their press page or on their about us page or whatever and had a link back to the article, Right? How many referenced that?

And it wasn't too many, right?

It was like less than 10%.

Right.

So I was like, well, that's ridiculous. Out of all the articles I've written and I write six a month and all less than 10%.

And all the social media shares you got out of it, right?

And still getting less than 10% and putting it in their website with what should be a high value backlink, if you've ever heard that term before. Right.

And that's an important term to understand because it is one of the key measures of a good website is how many backlinks you have. You know, websites are ranked and Google really ranks them. But there are other companies that have tools you can use to see the rank of your website. And out of those 1.2 to 1.4 billion websites out there, where do you rank and you want to be ranking as low? Meaning Obviously website number one would be the best ranked, right?

And out of 1.2 billion websites on Google, you're number one. That would be awesome.

That'd be awesome.

I don't even know who Google is probably number one.

But you want to be as low as possible. So you want to be in the single digit millions, like the seven figure or less ideally. And then even the lower you are closer to a million, the better you are. But one of the key statistics that is used to rank websites is how many backlinks do you have? Or what they say is what is your valuable backlinks? What is your backlink profile?

Right? And so this is something else to understand about backlinks. It's like if they just said I was featured in Inc. Magazine and they had their logo and it clicked to inc.com it's actually not serving them well as their website and it's not serving you well because, well, for me, in my case, they would have completely missed my column, the article. So it's not helping me at all. It might be helping Inc, but it's not helping me. So you want to get them specifically to go to one of your pages within your site. Not Just your main domain name.

Right.

So you want them to go to. In our case, It'd be like brandcastingyou.com ecobaitpodcast or ecobate episode, whatever you called it. Right. And so you'd want them to link to that particular episode that they were featured in or to that particular post that they were featured in. So how do you get them to do that? Because maybe they're not the most tech people and they're maybe not communicating well to their tech person to do it, so they're not providing the proper link to them.

So how do you make it easier for them Foolproof to give you the most valuable benefit, the backlink? How do you make it easy for them to do this? Because if you make it easy for them, they're a lot more likely to do it.

Okay, so we created embed codes, okay? It's coding language that you just send over to your web developer.

Or if you do create your own posts on your own website or ever adjust things on the press page of your site in WordPress, a lot of people do that. That's not super techie. A lot of people do their own stuff. It's a string of HTML code, right?

So if you're in WordPress, you have the visual tab or the text tab. You basically would click on the text tab and copy and paste this in there. And then. And immediately it would work and it would give you the graphical image of the testimonial or the ego bait graphic. Right? But it would automatically be linked and have everything. So when somebody clicked on that graphic, it's backlinking to the exact right spot on your site.

On your site, it's actually sending the people that click on it to your site. And then if they want to go out from that, like if there was still something on itunes or something on YouTube or whatever, or like you did on Inc. Magazine, you could go out to it from there. But they're coming to your site first. That kind of link is very valuable. You want as many of them as.

You can get and you want them on all those subpages. So the more they hit into the blog areas and into the other pages in your website and not just your main domain, the more powerful it is and the more powerful and valuable those backlinks are in the eyes of Google.

Right. So you provide the egobate graphic to your guest and they share it on social media. Wow, that's a great thing. You provide them the link to the blog post and they hopefully share that on social media, which is going to bring them back to your website from social media. That also is a link of sorts that's out there on social media.

Right. You don't want to have failed to provide them the link that you want them to use and them to just find you on itunes. Find that article, find it, whatever and then just share it. That way you want to give them exactly where you want them to go.

Right. And then you provide them this embed code that they can use on their website. Some people will put it on their press page, some people will put it in a blog post that they're writing about something relevant to what you viewed them about. And some might put it on other pages on their site like the about.

Us page or something.

Really doesn't matter. I mean it'd be great if they put it in multiple places, but at least if they put it one place on their website, any place, it will link back to your site. And not only is that just more free exposure and marketing for your brand and your website for anybody that traffics their website, but. But in the eyes of Google it has value and it will raise your ranking lower that number closer to number one in terms of where you rank amongst all those other websites.

But this is not self serving. I just want to be really clear about that. This is not self serving to just you. When you're pushing this out, it's not like they're making advertising messages for you. It's giving them the same associative power because as you rank higher, so do they. If in that backlink value it goes both ways. So by doing that you're getting the association to them being featured and you writing a great testimonial for them. And their backlink power, their link up powers, they were mentioned here, is valuable as well. So it goes both ways there. There's no reason to think that this is self serving. It is not.

Well, I mean it's just getting them.

To do it right.

Mutually beneficial is really what it is.

Yeah, you're just getting them to do it properly for both of you to benefit from.

You sort of helping them get out of their own way, making it easier for them rather than saying hey, could you this link to your web developer and could you have them put it on your website and link back to us? Oh, and here's the graphic. Can they load it into the media library and also put that right near the link or above the link? You don't have to worry about all that. The embed code does it all in one thing and it's really in the world of website building and revising, adjusting, it's really easy.

Right. So in the blog post for this episode that we're going to do, there's an example of it that we've done for Speaking Empire and we've done it both ways, where you can see the sort of web, when you brand it for Speaking Empire, it doesn't look quite as much like a testimonial as it does when you brand it. Like you. And so you started thinking about the differences between whether or not they'd be willing to share that. It looks like they wrote it and they posted it about themselves, which isn't always as valuable or as third party endorsement as you would like. So I wrote an article about Dustin Matthews and so this is the ego bait that comes from that particular article that I wrote. But you'll be able to see it and then we'll share with you how that works. You can click through and you can see where it goes. So you'll see where the embed code is working.

Yeah, that's a legitimate embed code from our site to their site.

Yeah, it's actually. The embed code will go straight to the article on Ink. Yeah, because that's what is. That's what it is. Yes. The embed code will send you to the Ink article, but we'll also have a link to their site so you can hear from them as well, if you're curious. But this is the case in which this was a high value for them and they really loved it when we shared it with them. So anyway, we want you to take a look at that. That's@brandcastingyou.com in the blog post from this episode. You can find that under the podcast link that says feed your brand. Or you can go to FeedYourBrand Co and it routes you right there. And also you can find it on social media because we will be pushing it out in this episode and we're on social media primarily at Facebook. Eedyourbrand.

Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with another piece of this great big platform puzzle.

Platform and content puzzle.

This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

You'd brand.

It.