What are the Certified and Easy to Use Podcast Guest Schedulers Now

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Hey everyone, welcome back to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host and today I want to go over a very important subject for podcasters. And actually the advice I'm going to share with you today is going to be very valuable for many different people, not just podcasters, but in particular for podcasters when it comes to booking your guests and trying to make it easy for yourself to collect all their data that you need to collect in order to create your full podcast, your blog post to be able to put all the information necessary into maybe if you use a service to help produce your episode, to gather all the things that are needed in order to create the best podcast title, the best podcast description, things like that. There is a very important tool that I wanted to talk about today because I've been really surprised lately how many podcasters I've encountered who are not using this tool and they're doing things in a manual way that is just taking up so much of their time and then it leads to inconsistency of gathering all the right data and they end up burning a whole lot of time. And I know many podcasters, if you're at all like me, you don't have a whole lot of time to burn you. Sometimes it's all you can do to figure out what topic you want to do for your next episode or what guests you want to interview. Soliciting them and so getting them to say yes and then recording the content is really all you should be doing. So booking your guest and then conducting the interview, recording the episode is sometimes all you have time for. And so when it comes to a lot of these details, you, you need a good tool or I think should be using a good tool. So what I'm talking about here is guest booking calendars or guest booking schedulers. I don't know which term is more accurate, but I'm talking about using a tool to send your potential guest to a link online to book a time on your calendar to conduct the podcast interview. Now, I'm sure many people, many of you listening to this podcast, are using some kind of a Calendar, scheduling program for appointments, for sales, calls for any kind of virtual meeting that you might have. And there's a lot of really good tools out there that you can use for that. There's ones like Calendly and Schedule Once and some people just using Google Calendar and as many different tools that you could use. And even if you are using them, that's great. But one thing that I find that is largely overlooked, especially by many podcasters, is how you can use some of those tools to gather data and to actually make your guest provide you all the information you need to be able to provide, either to your podcast producer if you're using one, or to your virtual assistant if they're going to be helping to coordinate things on your website or for the publication of the podcast or your shownotes blog post or maybe your long form blog post. I just thought I would share with you what we do, and as an example, and I would also recommend that many of you consider using a tool not just in the primary way it's intended. I think even a lot of time people don't realize that in a booking calendar program, it's not just limited to finding an available time on your calendar that you have made available that you can go. And there's free time available when you want to make yourself available to book a guest. Certainly that's its primary function and it does that very well. But I'm talking about actually using your booking calendar to do more work for you and save you time in the future.

In this episode, I'm not going to express any kind of recommendations or preference for one booking calendar software over another. That's really not my intent or my purpose here. I think there are many great tools out there. If you just simply Google booking calendar service or booking calendar program software or scheduling software, anything like that, you're going to find a lot of great tools and you'll find some great blogs with pros and cons that take a deep dive into the tech or the capabilities of each one. My point today is to share with you as a podcaster in particular, how you might consider using some of the more advanced capabilities of a booking calendar program to make your life easier, to help actually your guest to provide in many ways do a lot of the work for you in terms of providing all the data and information on them that isn't just sending multiple emails and requests for information. They don't provide it. You got to chase them down for it, all that sort of thing. Because, you know, in the early days that's How I did it. And it's probably how most of you did it. Even if you had a booking calendar where, okay, you're booking a time that you're both available to have the interview, that's great. But when it came to, you know, oh, hey guest, can you please send me your bio and your headshot and your social media accounts and what email would you like to publish? Or do you want to publish an email, have us publish it in your show notes, things like that. I used to do it manually where I just send an email and then everybody's busy, they don't get to it in a timely manner. And I would end up chasing guests down for it even after the interview is done, having to try and catch up with them and get this information before the episode would publish. And it would just burn up a lot of my time and it wasn't fun doing it and I would forget to do it sometimes. And so you record the interview and I'm scrambling to then, oh, I gotta get it to my producer, I gotta upload, oh, I gotta provide all the information. And sometimes I would get it to my producer without providing all that information. And they edit the audio and they're trying to do the show notes blog. And then I get emails from my team bugging me to get the information from the guests that they need to properly identify them, either in the podcast description or in the blog related blog, all that sort of thing. So it was driving me crazy. And it's like, hey, there had to be a better tool. Well, fortunately, you know, I have Tracy on my team and she is all about systems and automation and things like that. And so we, I say we, but I really should say she because I need to give her most credit for doing this. But, you know, found a system that worked really well for us. And in our case it's a scheduling software service called Schedule Once. And their website will be in the blog post with a link on FeedYourBrand. Co, where you will find all the blogs for our podcast. So don't forget to go there and if you don't know them, you can get a link right to them. But the real benefit of using a service that has some more advanced capabilities is that it can do a lot more than just book the time that your guest is you for the interview, whether that's on Zoom or Skype or GoToMeeting or however you're doing it remotely. But it also can require your guest to fill out a form and provide all this information that you need and not Only can it require them to fill out a form, but in order for them to actually book the appointment, it won't book it until they complete the form with at least whatever the required fields are that you require. So, right then, in order to book the appointment. And I think this is good because it's kind of during sort of the honeymoon phase, when I think of it as the honeymoon phase when you've got a guest who agrees to be on your show. And right then they're kind of excited about it. You've sent them your booking link, they go and click and go there. Oh, they pick a time. Oh, that's great. I get a time and that'll work on my calendar. But before it'll book it and send them all the confirmation they have to complete this form. And so while they're happy and excited about it and they already have spent the time to go and do the booking, they will right there be prompted, hey, you need to provide all this information. So it's the really the best time to do it. And so ScheduleOnce is a, I would call it pretty advanced online scheduler or booking calendar that you can do customized forms and collect all this information. And so I am going to share with you on the blog post for this episode at FeedYourBrand Code, a screenshot of the exact form that we use to book guests on this podcast. On feed you'd brand and you can see all the information that we collect. I'm going to run through it here with you just briefly so you get an idea of all the additional things that we collect, aside from the normal. I mean, obviously there's your name and your email address. Your company name, that's not a required field, but your phone number, which is required. Your website URL is required. Your bio, this is really important. Get them to put their bio in there. You know what, even if they just post a link to a webpage on their site that has their bio, that's okay too. But most of them will actually just go and copy that text from wherever their bio is and then paste it right into the bio field. And this is a required field. The bio is required. Headshot or company logo? I prefer headshot. But some people, though, who don't have a good headshot would at least provide a company logo. This is a required field. And then there's a button they push. It'll open up the file browser window on their computer and they can go and find their headshot and upload it.

Then we get into social media links, their Facebook link, LinkedIn link, Pinterest link, YouTube. And those are not required fields because not everybody has those same social media platforms or really uses them. So there's another field we have here which is topics for discussion, and this is an opportunity for the potential guest to write in what they think that we should be talking about or what they think we should ask them about in the episode. It's not a required field because as a good podcast host, we should all be doing a little homework and research on our guests and be ready to ask smart questions. But I do put it here, and honestly, most of the time I find guests do fill it out and provide what they would like to talk about or what they think we should ask them about. And we put another field here that says anything else we should know. And again, that's not required. So this form gathers all that important information. It makes the guest do the work for you. I have never, in gosh, I want to say, at least 400 podcast interviews over the years. I have never had a guest refuse to book on my calendar. Booked to be a guest because they had to go and fill this out. They don't express any dissatisfaction or unhappiness with having to fill it out. The reality is they're the ones that know all this information the best, and it shouldn't take them very long to fill it out, but it saves me the time of going to try and get it from them later and have multiple emails back and forth. And then also, where is all this information? Do I have to search my email inbox for a series of emails in order to gather it all? I mean, that would be nightmarish, too. So the great thing about a program like Schedule Ones, and as I said, there's others, there's Calendly, and there's many other programs out there that I know other people use, and they may be perfectly fine, and some of them have advanced capabilities, too. In a little later in this podcast, I'll tell you the major reason why Tracy and I use Schedule Ones, and there is a key distinction why we do. Like I said, I'll get to that in a little bit. But using this kind of program together, all that information is so helpful that there's always a record of it. Not only does it book it in your calendar, and we do use Google Calendar to connect our calendars, but I tend to use ICAL on the Mac in general for where I have my schedule that I'm going to look at every day. So it makes a calendar entry in Ical for me, with all the information on the guest, the contact information, and allow all that information, the bio, their headshot, there's a link to their headshot in my calendar entry. So my one go to place after I've recorded the episode and I'm gonna upload it to my producer or Dropbox or whatever. When I upload it to my producer, there's a form that I fill out with all the information about the episode, including things about the guest. So right there in my calendar is that one place where all that information is. I know where it is. I can click on it. If I click on the headshot, link it, download the headshot from schedule once to my downloads folder on my computer, and then I can upload it wherever I need to, save it or store it, whatever I need to for my podcast production. Same thing with the bio, I can just copy and paste it right from the calendar entry. All the website URLs, all that good information is right there. So that makes it very convenient. But you also have the capability to use a really advanced tool like Zapier. And when this form is filled out, if you have any other service or system or database that you want to save all that information or have that information copied into, you can use a tool like Zapier to copy it from there to another system. And you really start automating things at that point. So that gets really exciting. And while it involves a little bit of advanced setup, it's really a one time thing. Then when it's done, all you have to do is give your potential guest a link to your booking calendar and then everything else is automated from there. So there's one other really critical thing that we do include in our form. And it's another thing we get a lot of questions about from especially new podcasters when they're setting up their show and they're wondering, hey, do I need a release form from my guest? Because I'm recording them on video or I'm recording them on audio. And I would say, yes, that's a very good idea. And then people ask, well, what kind of a form do you use? Where can you do it? Well, what we've done is we've integrated that again right into this booking calendar form. There's a statement here in ours that says, I understand and accept that the interview will be recorded. And that is a required field. And it has a checkbox. Acknowledge and accept interview recording. We've defaulted that to checked because if you're not willing to be recorded on our show, there's no point in you booking this appointment. So why would we allow them to submit a form without checking it? And just for convenience, we don't want to annoy them when they go to submit the form if they forgot to check it, that it says, oh, you forgot to check this box. So we've made it convenient. But it's right near the top of the form. It's sort of, as they say in the world of web browsers, above the fold. It's not something they need to scroll down far on the page to see. It's right up front and center. Hey, remember you being recorded? And I think that's sort of obvious for most people to book a podcast interview, but still we're getting their consent to record them right here in the form and that always works really well for us.

So now I want to share with you why we have decided to use schedule once. And this is really important if you have a co host situation. So Tracy and I are co hosts of this podcast and most often record episodes together. She would be recording with me today except she's a little under the weather and is coughing and got her voice, really not in her best voice and really has lost most of her voice right now. And we have a couple episodes that are going to be that way because I'm recording a few episodes today. But that's okay. That happens. The great thing about a co host, I love the dynamic of us having a dialogue about things, but we want to continue to produce content and it allows one of us to record when the other one's unable to. But the critical thing is an online scheduling program, booking an appointment for a podcast interview that has both of us on it. It needs to check both of our individual calendars. And not every booking scheduler program will do that. You need to make sure when you're choosing a booking calendar service to subscribe to, and some of them are free and some of them are paid, and you need that capability. You have a co host. And I know there's a lot more podcasts that we're seeing out there that have co hosts. Coordinating both of your calendars is a tricky thing and some of them will not do it. We each have our own calendars. We use Mac computers and we have ICAL on our calendars, but we also use Google Calendar through a Gmail account that has connects all of our calendars together. I think is the best way to say it. It connects them together. And in order to have a scheduling program, be smart enough to check Tracy's calendar and see when she's free, and then check my calendar, see when I'm free, and then show only the available times when we're both available. And that's not an elementary thing for your average and maybe free booking calendar program. It also is something, though, that we have to pay for. So whereas if you're just an individual and you're a solo host on your show, you may very well be able to use one of the free programs and some of them will have capability to fill out forms and some may not. But you certainly don't have the complication of having to check two different calendars to find all available times in the next few weeks or month or whatever it is. But in our case, we need to. So. And the other thing is, because Tracy and I are not only co hosts on one podcast, we're co hosts on actually a few different podcasts and then Tracy's a co host on one podcast with somebody else and not with me, that we have many different booking forms. We have one for the feed you'd brand podcast, and I forget if I said it in this episode already, but I've taken a screenshot of our booking calendar form and it's going to be on the blog post@feedyourbrand.co. so you can go see it. You can see exactly everything that we do. But we have one for feed you'd brand. We have one for wtff, which is another podcast that was actually our first podcast. We have one for Product Launch Hazards, which is another one related to the Amazon product selling industry. And Tracy has a new podcast that she's a co host with, with somebody else, not me, someone out of New York named Monica Proffitt. And this podcast is called the New Trust Economy. And they talk about new innovations and opportunities in the blockchain and a little bit of cryptocurrency, but more just the blockchain, really. Tokenization, things like that. Very exciting stuff. But in any case, we need a different booking calendar form for each of these podcasts. And then we have bookings for other things related to business that I have bookings that are sales related. Tracy has bookings for consultations. So we in schedule once. It's a very robust system and is really what we need because we have so many different kinds of bookings that we do for different purposes. We want each one to appear unique to what the purpose is of that meeting. And it's got to coordinate multiple calendars. So we actually pay quite a bit every month. I have to admit, I'm not the financial person in the business, so I don't know. But I think we pay a significant amount every month to schedule once to be able to have all those forms and customization, and it works incredibly well. I have to say. We've used the same one for several years now and we keep making changes to it and improvements to it and it is very, very good for our purposes. So I certainly do like it. I'm not going to assume it's perfect for everybody. I'm sure it's not. And there are lots of other good products out there I'm sure to use. I'm more talking about the capabilities for different situations that I need and that I think you may need in your situation. Clearly there are lots of options. Shopping around makes a lot of sense. Just make sure it has all the capabilities that you need. And really, again, coming back to what I said in the very beginning of this episode, my main point and purpose here is to just to make sure that as a podcaster you're not spinning your wheels and doing more busy work than you need to in order to do your show. I would much rather you spend more time concentrating on what you're going to talk about. Making great content, certainly finding great guests, but spending time repeating some of the same tasks over and over again to book guests or to gather all the information and be able to provide it to your team, your VAs, your employees, your producer, whatever. That's not stuff you really want to be spending a lot of time on over and over again every week. Or maybe you batch your episodes and you record once a month, whatever it is. So we always love to hear from our listeners and if you have any other comments or ideas, just let us know. And also obviously remember, you can go to the blog post at FeedYourBrand Co to see the screenshots of our booking calendar and get links to any of the different services or things that I talked about today on this episode. So I hope that was useful for you. Thank you so much. I'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom on Feed. You'd brand.