Setting Up Your Calendar & Follow-Up

So a lot of things that we've been talking about today involve preparation, but a lot of this also doesn't have to be time consuming. So it is a little bit more time consuming when you're prepping it and setting it up initially, but after that it should get smoother. So calendar and email preparation are two of those things. We need to do them once, but once we do them, we create a more professional booking process. But we also gather more information that helps us with our post production so we aren't disorganized and that doesn't take longer for us. So taking your time to do the preparation now will save you a ton of time later. It'll save you a lot of emails back and forth and annoying your guests to the point at which they don't want to share you and they don't recommend you. That's another way for you to get great guests is to ask your guest who else should be on your show. And so if they've had a great experience, they're more than willing to recommend you to someone else within their network. So let's talk a little bit about this calendar and email preparation. So get booking, you want to get to that booking, right? You want to get them into that booking calendar as soon as possible because then they're locked in and they're going to be on your show. So that's why I use that card and that's why we get through that fast pace to be able to make sure that I'm booking them as fast as possible. I don't waste a lot of time back and forth. I definitely do not waste time going, well, tell me your availability and I'll tell you mine. That's ridiculous. You want to go straight into a professional calendar. You give them your calendar booking link and you say, hey, either you or your assistant, find a time that works for you. Be professional about that. Get a booking calendar. You want to prepare an invitation and follow up emails. So once they go through the booking calendar, you've got this follow up that's going to happen that reminds them what's going to happen. It sets them up, it preps them for everything. And then we call something called ego bait. And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. Ego bait them to make sure that they're sharing you post interview. So oncehub. So this is an example. I just shared this with you. FeedYourBrand Co guest reminder that if you link through to that and I didn't ask you, I will cancel you. But you can check it out there. You can try it and see how it looks and see how it works. You can check out the process by which we do once. Hub used to be called schedule once. So you may have heard that before. But if you're going through that, you're going to see that. So I have this page. It's a hidden page. It's only when I give somebody that card that I refer to, then they get this and they get to see how it works. And they're scheduling right into my calendar and they know what's blocked out, what's not. They know when they can book. I give people multiple months to book out. I keep it really open. We like OnceHub because Tom and I need to both be available. So when you have multiple calendars, it can get confusing, it can get complicated to be checking both people's calendar and make sure we're both available for this interview time. So we do also set out time slots. Remember when Tom was talking about recording tips and recording times a day? And we can't record when our cleaning people are in here, when the lawns are being mowed or when the trash cans are being picked up. So we block out those times of the week and we never take interviews during those times. And so no one could book into them even if they wanted to. Now the only thing, the only time that we don't do this is a lot of times I'll do this when I have an international guest and I just had one last night who's in Hong Kong and I know I'm going to have to be up late or I'm going to have to do beyond my normal work hours and beyond my calendar work hours. What I typically have them do is just book in at the most convenient time possible for them. Then I will tell them, let's agree to. I'll move it two hours later and I'll stay up for you or I'll wake up early for you or I'll do that. And so you move the calendar invite, but it gets them through the process so that they're actually booked in and they're able to. And they're able to get all the email, follow up and everything like that. The other one we have is calendly.com Potteriz Tom, you can check that one out as well. That's a calendly one that I just created just so you can see what it's like. Questionnaire. Both of them have questionnaires and that they're. We're screening them and asking them questions. Now, the calendly one is a questionnaire for someone to book a time. So if you wanted to book a time through that to just talk to Tom, you can. That's more for an inquiry booking. The one that we have for feature Grant here is very clear towards getting guests and ask for their bio, their headshot, ask for the information we're going to need to prepare so we know who we're interviewing. And so we have all the information, their website links and everything that they want to share with us, their social links as well. But everything follows with a follow up template. So I'm not going to go into the great details of all of that right now because we are providing them to you. We're providing you with the exact language we use, make sure that you customize it for you. But we've got email tips, so we're giving people tips of we'd like you to have headphones, not with a mic, we'd like you to get a professional mic if you can be in a room. So we're giving them the same recording tips that we gave you, so we're asking them to help improve the sound as best possible for us. And if you are doing video, just one tip, make sure that you're very clear in your tips and in all the emails that you are not just recording a podcast but you're recording video. Also, it can be a problem for people who want to have their hair done and want things to be perfect. They don't like the idea of doing video and if they were not prepared for for it. So all of those email Templates are@poditize.com Bootcamp offer and I want to really make sure that we're kind of up to speed here because I went through a whole lot here in this section. You can post on Facebook and post in other places as well to reach out to us. Helloodotize.com is also an email address of which you can ask questions. But I want to make sure that we're really covering everything that's coming up. So we've got a big next set. So thank you all and I'll be back.