Podcast Guesting: Is It Worth Your Time And Money?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we're going to talk about guesting. Is it worth your time and money?

Podcast guesting, and now we mean not having guests on your show. If you're a podcaster already, we mean guests, you going out and guesting on other podcasts. Is that worth it? And you know, here's we have both a guesting program in our business, so we watch it from that standpoint of people who don't have podcasts. Yes. But are working on guesting or podcasters who'd like to guest more, who'd like help with developing programs. So we're looking at it from that perspective, but it's not always worth it for everyone. And that's what we want to talk about is when is it worth it for you? When should you do some more work? And maybe it's a do it yourself model and it's not worth paying for or when is it really worth it for you to pay someone else to help you with that? That's kind of how we're going to approach it today and talk about that.

So podcast guesting is a great strategy. If, and this is my biggest if caveat. If you have a matched audience.

Yeah. If you know other shows out there are serving the same type of listeners that you'd like to have for your podcast, then as long as you know that it can be a great way to raise awareness of your show to people that are already listening to podcasts. And it's that last part that's the key. People that are already listening to podcasts, because you can go and raise awareness all you want to on LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, say, hey, I've got new podcasts. But if those people that are seeing it and becoming aware of it are not the type of people that are wanting to listen to podcasts, raising awareness there isn't going to help you that.

Much or it's going to help you less. It's a smaller percentage when you're on another podcast. Those are all podcast listeners. It's Pretty obvious. So it makes it really clear cut that there's value there if the audience is a right fit match. Now, you know that that's hard to tell, especially in the early days of your podcast. If you've already got a show, you know that you don't really know who your listeners are. And until they start reaching out to you, or unless you're tracking your website statistics and you're really understanding who, who's visiting your website and you have a demographic profile, you really don't understand any of that in the early days. And that's not your fault. That's just how podcasting ecosystem works. And it's, you know, frankly, it's Apple's fault. Like they're keeping the subscribers to themselves, Spotify is keeping the subscribers to themselves, and they're not sharing any information with you. So you don't know any of that in the early days, but you can make some pretty good guesses. And that is because you, you know who you want to reach really well. And as long as you understand who your target audience is, who you really want to speak to, your ideal customer. If your goal is to bring in clients from your podcast, who that ideal person is, where do they listen, what do they traffic, what kinds of things do they buy? I want to know about them and what they're thinking. But I also, you know, where they are in the continuum of learning, right? So if you're doing a 101, they're at the beginning of something. Here we are, we're doing a lot of advanced tactics. So we know that our listeners that we are looking for are already podcasters, at least 90% of them are, and that's really good. The others are on their way, they're making progress. They're not just thinking about podcasting. Right. So we already understand that. So if we go on a show where there's likely to be podcasters that are already podcasters, they are learning advanced tactics for something they, that's great. It's actually really hard for us. There aren't any shows out there who really address that. That's why we're here. That's what we're filling, we're filling that gap. But every time we go on a show, we get podcast hosts who know other podcasters and that helps us. So it's a little bit different, a different model for every person. And that's why it actually isn't very beneficial for me to go invest on other people's podcasts. It's actually not beneficial to us. It doesn't get us a lot of listeners. It gets us a very small percentage of new listeners. And, and it's a one on one thing. I could reach out to those hosts and meet them in another format in another way. That would be more useful to me. And so doing the podcast guesting isn't as viable for me. Now, that being said, we might have, and we see it with our guesting program, right, Tom? We see an authority building program where I need to be seen up next to other people in the marketplace. So I need to be on somebody else's podcast because I need to be seen as an equal and, or a bigger expert than them. And by being on their show I can do that. So there's sometimes another strategy we have to play, especially when you're new to a marketplace and or new to podcasting where you haven't been on a lot of shows prior to starting your own show.

In addition to putting you next to, in terms of authority building, the host of that podcast, there's also an impact of who have the other guests of that show been. They've had other guests that may be even more well known than you and that can elevate you that, hey, you're also qualified to be a guest on that show just like they were. So that's another important thing to consider.

And it's one of my favorite list building processes. So if I'm going to build a list of podcast shows that I want to be on or we want a client to be on, I might want to troll somebody else. So I might want to match up. In my case, I might want to match up Pat Flynn. I may want to be on all those different shows that Pat Flynn's been on. What I found over time is that that's not always a good model because it's a good model to build a list from, but it's not a good model to then go on all those shows. You still want to go and screen those shows. Because he may have a different purpose. Pat Flynn's focus might be shifting and he maybe won't want to be focusing on doing course building and having a whole different model of business than I have. And so his shows that he's choosing to be on might be very different. Or he's. I'm going to say he doesn't care what show he's on. He just wants to be on any show possible. And there are people out there. I would say Pat Flynn's. Not that he's a little busy, but there are people out there who will just be promiscuous with whatever show they want to be on. And they will be on any show and any show, every show that asks them, without screening and without caring about that. So you want to be careful who you're modeling because they may be following that. And then you're just going to waste a lot of your time for shows that they didn't get an effective result for anyway, so. Because you have no way to ask them, no way to know that. So I'm always careful that when I use it to model and build a list, I'm still gonna screen it myself and make sure there's a right fit audience model at the end of the day before I'm gonna choose it. But that's where things go wrong here. So a lot of people think I can do it myself. I can use listen notes and I can build a list. What goes wrong with that, Tom? Tell everybody what we see again and again.

Well, you certainly can. Look, you can do all this yourself. It just would take you an awful lot of time, perhaps, that maybe you should be spending doing. But when you build a list on listen notes, yeah, you're gonna get a whole bunch of shows. But unless you really dig deep and look at them, you don't know how serious those shows are. Are they still publishing episodes today? How long have they been doing it? What are the other guests they've had on their shows? You know, there's a lot of potential pitfalls there. And it's a difference between being on any show or being on the right shows. Right. Which are the ones that are gonna serve you best.

Right. So when we do it for clients, we have a team that goes through our version because we don't use list notes. We've got our own list building process, but which already is screening out the ones that aren't publishing and the ones that aren't doing the things that we already say are make it not great show to be on to begin with. Right. So we're screening out those. Those shows you shouldn't do and that. So our list is better from the beginning and then from there we have a team that actually goes through every single show on that list to match up against your criteria, to match up against keywords that you want to be seen next to, that you want to be able to utilize. Match up as much audience information as we can find out by their website, by their LinkedIn profile, by the podcast episodes that they've done, the other guests that they've had. Like all of that is a part of the vetting process that we do. And so here's what I found is I've worked with a lot of publicists and they've sent me their lists to have me look them over and make recommendations. Would I choose who's missing on this list? And what about these ones? I can tell you that about 80% of their list is built off of. And this is what I've noticed that they do. They go to the new and notable. They go to the top 50 in the business category, and then they make a list of all of those that don't sound cheesy or don't have ugly cover art. Like, that's what I discovered. The most publicists will just look at the COVID art and then make the decision. So if you have ugly cover art, you might want to fix that right now. And so that's a key criteria if you want to get good guests. But it's just. And they'll build the list based on that. And they haven't even made one inquiry listen to one show, checked anything out. And a lot of times on that list, I'll find that there's a bunch of them don't take guests at all that haven't published episodes in a year or more and they're still on their list, and they go out and they send an email anyway without any really understanding of it in their mind. If I send an email and I get a couple of shows that I didn't work that hard, but if you're paying for that, that's not the process. And so if you're doing it yourself and you want to just make it fast, okay, try it. It's hit or miss, and you might get some good results and maybe you won't. But at the end of the day, you might also miss some really great shows because you didn't put a personal message there. And then when you try to reach out back to them later, they're like, annoyed by the fact that you sent them a spam the first time. Yeah.

And the reality is there's a lot of shows that you may have no idea. You may think, oh, that's a great show. I should be on that show. It's a good fit for me. But if you don't do the homework, you don't realize they only have certain kinds of guests. And even though that show would be a great fit for you, what their intent is, you're not the right kind of guest that they want to have on the show.

Well, and not just that, but there's a lot of us who have applications for our show on our websites and if you're skipping that application process, I'm just going to ignore your email because you're obviously don't have enough attention to detail, you don't really care about my show and you're not really interested to be on my show. In particular, it says that you're going to be willing to be on any show. And so that's also an issue when you go through this. That's why I'm really careful and I never send out those emails without checking out the shows first. And that takes the time. But it's worth it in the end. The results are worth it and that's what we really want to show you. So a lot of these publicists, Tom, have come to me and they'll bring me their list and they'll say what's missing? Side by side, what would you choose? And look, there's a handful of heavy reach shows that they think they can do like let's say get on the Joe Rogan show. Well, first off, it's incredibly difficult. You have to go through layers and layers of it. A publicist is great at being able to do that. They can tap their network of other publicists, production assistants, anyone that they can to get in the door there. If you've got a list of shows like that, go hire a publicist. Really work with someone top notch who can do that for you because there are so many layers to get through to get onto that show. You definitely want that if your list is full of those types of shows, but your list should also be full of types of right match shows like we talked about before, the audience match. So a well known celebrity authority and I can't say his name but he came to me with his list and asked me to look it over with his publicist. And so I did that. I looked it over with her and I gave her a list of 10 more that I recommended that were too small, that didn't make her top 50 criteria. And I explained to her these 10 I know are a perfect match for your author. I know they're right for him and I believe at the end of the day they will sell more books than these other shows you have in the top 50. And that's exactly the results that happened because the conversion rate on some of those smaller sized shows that didn't happen to make the top 50 list but happened to have a lot of episodes really good guests on it, it matched all the right criteria for the right type of people his book was trying to reach that made a better list at the end of the day for him. And they were able to get an old 10 of those shows without any problem because he was a big get for them. So it was a really good play for him at the end of the day. Sold more books off of that list of 10 than it did off the other list of 10. And I don't even think he got on 50% of the other list.

You know, really, when you think about it, Tracy, this has to do with just understanding who you want to reach, understanding what the right shows are and what's a good fit and what's not going to be a good fit. And that takes work. You can figure that out. You can do it yourself, but it's going to take work. You got to do some digging. You have to actually listen to a couple of the shows. You got to look at their website. You got to read, research it. You have to find out, do they have an application for guests, do they not? If you do that work, yeah, you're going to be able to come up with a list of 10 shows pretty easily, maybe even 20 or more that you can get on in a reasonable amount of time. But, you know, one example would be a show that is widely known, ClickFunnels Radio. I think we all know ClickFunnels is a tool for building sales funnels, right? And we had someone who's an SEO expert who wanted to be a guest on that show, but had never listened to the show, didn't do some homework, and what they found out was it is an absolute requirement if you're going to be a guest on ClickFunnels Radio, that you are actually a ClickFunnels customer, that you use their product. So even though this person was a widely known SEO expert and had lots of valuable information to share with that audience, that really, in terms of subject matter, really wouldn't make a difference if they were a ClickFunnels user or not. But that is a very strict criteria of ClickFunnels Radio. If you're not a part of their ClickFunnels community using their product, you're not gonna be a guest on their show. And that's just the way it is.

So I have the same rules on my show, have done 25 episodes or more. You have to post consistently and constantly every single week. You can't do seasons or other things unless you're into your, like, fourth or fifth season or you can't come on the show. Like, there's a bunch of rules that I have in my place. However, on occasion, I violate those rules. And how you get to that person to get that is you've got to make personal contact. So one person who escaped through that process and made it without having a podcast show at all is Mark Hirschberg. And Mark Hershberg is known as Hershey on Clubhouse. And I bumped into him in a club room and he told me that he was about to hit his hundredth interview as a guest. He's an author. He has the book the Career Toolkit. Great book, really broad reach. He researched 100 shows that he wanted to be on. He did all the work himself, but he vetted every single one. And as he did it, he would do 20 shows, learn something, then pick the next 20 based on what he learned. And he grew and grew and grew. And so Adam, on my show, I was his 99th interview. And so we thought that was kind of fun to do. So I was his 99th interview. And what I learned from him about, about podcast guesting was just brilliant if you're not invested in the process, even if you're hiring someone to help you with it. But if you're not willing to do a little bit of the work in guiding them in, when they send you back some shows, giving them feedback on those shows, when you guest on some shows, give them some feedback again that reinforce them. So the next set of shows that they get, you are even better. If you're not participating in that process in some way, shape or form that then you are actually wasting your time. But podcast guesting can have a great return on investment. So we know that we can see listener bumps from being on the right shows. We can see listener bump happens. Mark told me that he could see sales bumps. He could see the click through rates, like clicking on the links to heading to his book profile in Amazon. So you can see that his book profile in Amazon was hit and that a bunch of people came through. He could sometimes see it before he even got notification from the host that the episode had aired. Because you guys know we publish sometimes two in the morning and guest notifications, or you don't send out your emails till 9am or 8am in the morning to let people know that their episode has aired. Right, we all do that. And so he would get the guest notification, but he would already start to see the traction because that episode was airing around the world. And so he could already see people doing it and starting to buy the book. So he was seeing the direct results from his guesting. And it became so important to him that he's going to continue doing it into for another year. I mean, and that's pretty amazing results is that you can see such direct linking to happening and it continues over time. Of course, he says he can see steady growth over time because the episodes don't get always listened to right away. But he does see that bump every time a new guest spot happens. So really, really high return on investment. So if he can see that on book sales, which is a lot harder because you have to leave the app and go buy a book, then you should be able to see that from subscribers shifting over and checking out your show, listening to an episode and hitting the subscribe button right within the same app. That's a whole lot easier.

Sure is. Well, I think, Tracy, you've laid out very well the value. Is it worth your time and money? I mean, it certainly can be. Everybody probably has a different goal for why they want to be a guest, right? But if you're willing to put in some time, even if you're going to hire someone to pitch you to show you in the best possible light to figure out that list of the right shows to pitch to, you've still got to be involved a little bit. This can't just be a hey, tell me where to show up and record with no involvement or prep. That's probably not going to be very successful.

And don't forget about the post, right, the post production side of things, the sharing side of things. If you're not repurposing and sharing, then you're not being a very good partner with that podcast host and you get annoyed when your guests don't share. You need to be really good at that sharing part. And you have to remember that a lot of the guests aren't as good at putting out graphics or putting out links or putting out the email that gives you all those pieces of information. There are a lot of hosts out there who just don't do that well, don't have a support team, don't use a service company like Potter Ties like they don't have that in their process to be able to utilize that. So you may have to do more work to share their show. But keep that in mind that that's just as important as doing it for your own show. So don't forget to do it or have it included in your packages of whatever you buy. Have your publicist do it. We put that in as part of our package for a reason, because it's an essential part of Making sure that you get the value from the time you spend searching for the show, finding the right one, being on it. Right. Booking it and getting on it, all of those things. We want to make sure you get the full value out of it. So that sharing, adding it to your website, doing all of those things, are critically important in the process of getting full value for the time and money you spend.

Yeah. I think even if a podcast host, your guest on their show isn't doing a good job of sharing it, that's disappointing. But you're still reaching their audience through the podcast and you can still share it. You get a lot of material out of it to be able to share it, but you might have to do a little more work.

We hope you consider podcast guesting as a great, not just a launch strategy. A lot of people think of it as, at the launch time that I want to go on some shows to get visibility for your show, your new show. But it's an ongoing thing. You may not have to do it at the same pace you do it at when you launch because you're not trying to like get that type of exposure. But I'm always looking for new shows that would be a right fit audience for me, and then I'm making a connection to those people. So you can do it gradually over time. Just make sure you're employing the best practices and the best, best process of finding the right fit shows, doing the good sharing that we are talking about and doing really decent pitching in the middle. Of course. Right. Let's make sure we're really asking the way we'd like to be receiving as a podcast host.

Yeah. I really found it interesting that hershey has done 100 in a year and now he's going to do another year. So what's. That's an average of two a week. Right.

He kind of batches them. So sometimes he was doing like two a day. So it was like really he did a whole bunch at once. So. Because he knew that they would be filtered out over time. And so he was trying to make sure that he had as many in those early days of his book launch as possible. Right.

So that's the one thing actually as maybe I'll ask people with that you have to be aware of. You have to realize when you engage in a podcast guesting process, you have no control over when your guest episode appearances are going to publish. They will be at random times. Some people record so far ahead. You record today and you're not going to be on for two or three months, others you're going to be on within two weeks. So that is kind of random and not predictable. So you have to be prepared that this process is really a long game. It's not a short quick hit.

But also remember that so many episodes are binge listened to and listened to at various times in the future. 60% of your show catalog of your listens every single month is on the back show catalog. So we get like my appearance on Pat Flynn last October. We still pretty much I get reached out at least once a week from someone on LinkedIn who connects with me, asks me a question, does something. We get clients from that all the time. They just trickle in as people catch up listening to those episodes or have just found his show and find me within that. So it really serves you in the long run. And if it's the right show, then it's going to continue to pay dividends to time and time again into the future.

All right, I agree, Tracy.

Why good return on investment podcast?

I think so. It is a good return. So check it out. Get into it. Whether you do it yourself or you get some support. All right, perfect. Thanks for listening everybody. This has been Tom and Tracie Hazzard. We'll see you next time on Feed your brand.

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