How to Get on a Podcast: Guesting your Way into the Limelight

Podcasts have been a popular medium for years, but what is the best way to get on one? How do you know if someone will want to interview you? How can you promote your podcast guesting skills effectively so that people notice and accept your offer to be interviewed?

In this article, we’ll answer those questions and more! This post will give you all of the information needed so that being a guest on a podcast becomes an easy and fun experience.

Understand the Audience

This is important because you’ll want to make sure that the podcast host’s audience will enjoy listening to your content. You can reach out to them beforehand, or if they have a large enough following on social media then you could potentially look at their followers and see what kind of people are following them. This would be useful information for figuring out whether or not this particular person has an audience who might benefit from hearing about your product/service/topic of expertise.

Do your Research

Once you’ve decided on a particular podcast, make sure to listen to the episodes they have already put out. How would this person’s audience benefit from hearing about what you do? How does it align with their values and beliefs? Do some more digging; read through their social media posts, look up other articles/information that they might have written. This will help give you an idea of how well suited for each other your company is with them as podcasts are often about sharing knowledge or information in order to educate people (or entertain them).

Be Helpful

Whether you are trying to get on a podcast or not, you should always be helpful when it comes to your industry. If the person you are reaching out to have questions about what they do and how their company can improve, answer them without expecting anything in return. Helping someone else is one of the best ways that people notice our behavior and appreciate us for being good human beings – plus if they ever need help with something down the line then this will make it much easier for them to come back to you as a resource since they know that you already have some level of familiarity with each other.

Offering Value

The best way to gain exposure as a podcaster is by offering value first, then asking if you can be interviewed on their show after they have had time to test out what it would be like working with you. When applying this tactic, use email marketing software such as Hubspot to prevent spamming hosts and/or listeners of other podcasts related to yours since everyone has an inbox online nowadays. This will help ensure more emails are opened and responded too. How do I get my name associated with high ranking shows? Be persistent but don’t annoy people- remember rule number one, understand the audience and know which hosts and shows would best fit your brand.

Promote Yourself

Promote your appearance everywhere! Promoting is not only about how many people listen but where they are listening from. Once traffic starts coming into your website or blog posts via podcast listenership that means there may also be social media followers who will see what you’re up to too.

Don’t Expect Immediate Results

Just because one person likes what they hear, it doesn’t mean that everyone will. Some hosts are very selective with their interviewees so don’t become discouraged if the first podcast host you reach out to isn’t interested. The more often you ask for an appearance/interview, the higher chance of being accepted somewhere down the line as long as there is something valuable offered up by each individual who comes along after.

Don’t Give Up

Persistence is key! The more you ask, the better your chances of success. It’s never a waste of time to ask for something, even if it doesn’t work out. It’s better than not trying at all which will make the situation worse in the long run.

Remember

Podcasting is an art. It takes time, energy and lots of practice! Be patient with the process; don’t give up after one host rejects you because there are plenty more out there who might love what you have to say too. If this industry seems like it’s not for you then maybe think twice about pursuing it since it’s usually something that requires a lot of passion for success but if you feel like it’s something that could be a good fit for your brand image then maybe go ahead and try it out!

I hope that this article has given you some idea of how best to go about achieving the goal of becoming popular within your industry. If there are any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

John Lawson is one of the most trusted and experienced eCommerce professionals in the industry. John is the founder of The Ecommerce Group, which he started in 2011 to share his knowledge with other entrepreneurs in the industry. It’s the oldest eCommerce group on Facebook with over 8,500 members from around the world!

John speaks at conferences all around the world, including Retail Global, South by Southwest, Etail, Digital Summit, Hubspot Inbound, Ad-Tech and more. He also writes for several international publications such as Power Retail, Small Business Trends and Disrupt Magazine.