September Smith 0:00 – What if I showed you a process to consistently get high value content that showcases you and your business? Get it created for you with almost no work on your part? And then have it featured on your behalf on media platforms, where people actually come expressly to find content and solutions, just like yours. And you get all that for free? That’s what strategic podcast guesting will do for you. And that’s what the Podcast Guesting for Business Growth podcast is all about. I’m your host September Smith. In this episode, I want to talk about what you need to do to make podcast guesting work for you.

0:40 One of the biggest misunderstandings about being a podcast guest is that once you’ve done the interview, you’re finished. You have done everything that needs doing. Generally the people that have that impression are also the people that comment I went on a podcast once, but it did nothing for my business, because they were missing this one thing. This misapprehension was made clear to me for the 100th time. Just recently, when in a guest response when she was notified that her episode was dropping soon, she wrote, “I look forward to seeing what you do with it”. Like, it was not in her best interest to be promoting her feature interview where she came off like a rock star.

1:22 In a parallel universe, another phenomena is playing out on the other side of the fence. And that is that podcast hosts are all wondering why the guest put in a great interview. But when it comes out, they do absolutely nothing with it. Anytime anybody posts in any kind of podcast hosting group about that, you’re sure you’re going to get dozens and dozens and dozens of people very emphatically asking that very question.

1:47 Most podcast guests who aren’t podcasters themselves, don’t know what it takes to make an episode successful. And most podcasters are assuming that they do know and are, inexplicably, just uncooperative.

2:01 There is a communication breakdown here, and in this episode, I want to try to fix that.

2:06 So podcast guests, unless your interview went totally sideways, and you’re too mortified to acknowledge it, that podcast episode featuring you as the expert in the authority in some of the most persuasive marketing content that you could possess is just sitting there. Think about it.

2:24 If you had walked into a studio and hired a company to produce a 30 minute feature interview, spotlighting you and your brilliance, you will be on the hook for at least a couple $1,000 that content, you should treat it as if it’s got that same value. Because it does make the most of the episode, tell people about it, highlight it, showcase it, get it on your website, post about it on social media, share the podcast show and posts. Use the episode as part of your speaker sheet and or your media reel and leverage the hell out of it.

2:58 Work with the host and their team to co promote it. One of the big overlooked benefits of being a guest is that you get in front of the network of that host and show not just the audience. When you do not collaborate with them to co promote your episode you are missing the opportunity to be seen by and connect with hundreds or 1000s of people in their social media networks. Your interaction engagement or lack thereof on the post spotlighting you impacts the algorithmic success of those posts. When you do nothing, you are almost guaranteeing the failure of that promotion of you. Why would you do that?

3:37 First rule of PR. When someone is taking the time to announce “Hey world, check out this amazing person!” You acknowledge that, you show up and you engage to further attract and appeal to that audience. Doing nothing, being absent, and apparently aloof, sends an unintended message to both the host and to the audience and the host network. And that message sounds a lot like “I don’t care about this. This is unimportant to me”. If you don’t even appear to care about this episode featuring you. Why would anyone else

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Particularly when you are the face of your business and brand, the promotion time of your episode is a great time to get found. Be Your most engaging self interact. You have no idea how many potential clients might be out there watching you.

4:28
The day your episode drops is a big marketing opportunity for you. While there’s no guarantee that your host is a stellar promoter, you can make the most of this opportunity with the following co promotion pointers before the day, make sure you connect with the host and show on all social media platforms.

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Follow the podcast on your favorite platform. Subscribe to the show if there’s a YouTube channel.

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Know the day and time your episode drops. Know the links to your episodes.

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This information should be available a few days before the drop date. And know which channels the host is going to promote your episode on.

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Listen to your own episode to remind you what you liked about the conversation, and then talk about it on social media.

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On the day, here are a couple of very specific things that you can be doing.

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One: do your own posts on your social media channels, linking to your episode, and tagging the host and the show, in your posts. Talk about why the conversation was of interest to you. And this gives you a chance to suddenly talk about the value you offer. What you enjoyed about the conversation, and who would be of interest to and or what’s in it for them. Don’t just write, I was so honored to be interviewed. Or thank you so and so for having me on your podcast. This is marketing, sell it, you need to make people want to hear what you had to say.

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Two: keep an eye out for notifications about the host posting about the episode and tagging you immediately respond and engage on their post. The algorithms on all platforms are positively impacted when the people tagged respond, and it generates more interaction. Conversely, when you’re tagged and just like it, or worse, do nothing. The algorithm sees this as an indication that this is a low quality post and it decreases the number of people that it shows it to. It’s in your best interest that as many people as possible. See this post about your episode.

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Three: engage with any comments on your post or on the host pose to start a conversation through the comments. This is a great opportunity to connect and to let people know who you really are, which is the whole point of your marketing ever right?

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Four: share the host’s post a few days later to further engage your audience who might not have seen or been shown your original post. Do not just hit Share. When you share, it is actually seen by the algorithm as opposed and a post with no text is judged to be a low quality post by the algorithm. Low quality posts get minimal distribution. Tell the algorithm that this should be shown to people, preface your share with your own comments.

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Five: on your own posts to ensure algorithm triggering activity on it. Tag people in the comments that you think are relevant to the issue and will respond and engage on any ensuing activity.

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Six: if the host is creating an episode webpage about you in your episode, share that in a separate post and or link that in your own website or a blog post. Again, don’t just share, tell people why it’s worth their while. And

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Seven: share the episode to your email list with some engaging and enticing descriptions about what’s in it for them if they listen, if you did it right, telling the right brand story on the right show. They will learn a whole lot more about you and connect more deeply through that one episode than a year’s worth of emails. This is powerful content.

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Some ongoing things that you can be doing to really leverage that podcast episode potential is to repurpose chunks of the content.

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Post about the episodes every couple of months. Don’t worry, no one’s going to notice. And you’ll catch people who missed it the previous time.

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Make sure you add it to your website, add it to your media reel, and reference and link to it in future articles or blog posts. By doing this promotional work, you are really doing the work for you. But you are potentially building a deeper relationship and alliances with the host as well who will be very appreciative.

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As you might be thinking this whole post launch promotional work has a lot of moving parts. How are you or your team going to remember exactly what needs to be done to really get the most value out of your podcast guesting once your episodes are published.

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The best approach is to create your own unique standard operating procedure for this activity, what I call your Make it Pay Marketing Plan. That way, there’s no need to try to remember what needs doing or who needs to do it when each new episode comes out. This “Make it Pay Marketing Plan” is one of the final portions of my podcast guesting program where I take people through the five major steps that they need to put in place to successfully use podcast guest appearances to grow their profile their audience and grow their business. It’s key to your media success. And that includes podcast guesting, and all other media.

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Thanks for being here. I hope you got some value from this episode. I very passionately believe that podcast guest appearances done right is one of the biggest opportunities available to us right now to build our brand plan. Jeff flag and start building a media presence that establishes our authority and expertise.

If this is something that you would like to have working for your business in 2022, make sure you subscribe and follow and join us for our free virtual events that we do every second month to help you figure out how you can be using other people’s podcasts to explode your presence and credibility and reach the audiences that need to be hearing you