Podcast Guesting For Authors: Turn Listeners Into Readers With Tracy Hazzard

Podcasting has been on an upward trend these past few years, drawing hundreds of thousands of listeners every single day. For authors, securing podcast guesting opportunities is one of the great ways to market their books to a much larger audience. Juliet Clark sits down with seasoned media expert Tracy Hazzard, who shares how to find the right-fit podcast to join as a guest. She breaks down the major things to consider when choosing a show, as well as the most effective way to create your own podcast pitches. Tracy also highlights the importance of bringing value to the podcast audience when accepting guesting stints instead of indulging in self-promotion or spending too much on sales talk.

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Podcast Guesting For Authors: Turn Listeners Into Readers With Tracy Hazzard

I’m going to tell you guys a little secret in advance. Tracy made this so content-rich that this is part one, and we will be scheduling a part two so she can split it up and make it really good for you guys. For those of you who don’t know Tracy, she is a seasoned media expert with over 2,600 interviews from articles in Authority magazine, Buzzfeed, and her Inc. Magazine column, and from her multiple top-ranked video casts and podcasts like The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand, one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcast.

Tracy brings diverse views from what works and what doesn’t work in marketing, branding, and media from thought leaders and industry icons, redefining success around the globe. Tracy’s unique gift to podcasting, marketing and branding world is being able to identify that unique bingeable factor, the thing that makes people come back again and again, actively listening, share as raving fans and buy everything you have to sell. Tracy, take it away and do you have slides?

I do. You know me, I always have slides.

I know. Let me preface this for my audience. If you’re reading and you’d like to actually see the slides, go over to our YouTube channel, Superbrand Publishing. If you’re that type of person that you’re visual, you can go over there and watch this episode. Take it away.

Although I’m sure you’ll get it either way, but the visuals always help, and because I’m an AI expert, I spent a lot of time doing some fun visuals for you. They’re going to be interesting and exciting and I created almost all of them with AI, so you’ll have some fun with that as well. Thank you so much for having me, Juliet. There’s nothing I love more than to talk about podcasting in general.

The Power Of Podcast Guesting

Podcast guesting was how I first got started podcasting, and it wet my whistle and got me excited about it. What I did was I hired a company, and this was over a decade ago I hired a company, $1,200, to get me on 10 podcasts, and at the end of it, I made over $1.2 million in contracts with clients that came from those podcasts.

Keep in mind, at that time I was selling high-end consulting. A contract was worth at least $120,000 at the time. It made it easier for me to find people who were interested because podcasting is a pull media, not a push media. What that means is, is that I choose to listen to my podcast, I choose to listen to that host, those shows. That doesn’t mean it’s being pushed to me in a feed and all these messages confusing with personal and professional mixing that all together. It doesn’t happen that way.

When I sit down and listen to a podcast, I’m there to be edutained, to learn something, be entertained, to get some expertise from someone I trust. When you come on as a guest, that means that trust and authority extends to you. That’s what we’re really going to talk about, a lot of that style of podcast guesting.

How we create success by finding the right shows and creating the right pitch is going to be this part one that we’re going to do. Our goal here is obviously to turn listeners into readers. A lot of the advice I’m giving you is how to use a podcast to make sure that you’re reaching out to those listeners who are actually going to buy the book. That’s what we really want at the end of the day, or subscribe on our book page to wait for the book because they’re so excited about it.

Here’s the fundamental differences. Podcast hosts are not traditional broadcast media. It’s completely different. They’re more like bloggers and social media influencers than they are like radio and TV hosts. Just be thinking about that when I’m talking about these things. I’m talking about them because they are digital strategies as well as podcast strategies, not broadcast strategies.

Anyone who’s prepping you for a publicity tour towards radio and TV, absolutely listen to them. This advice is different. Here’s the thing about podcast listeners. They are more likely to be influenced by the personalities and the expertise of their hosts and those hosts guests than they are by someone who just has a large social following. Why is that? Probably because we know that those with a large social following likely bought them, that they’re fake followers, that we can’t be sure they’re real, that the conversion rate goes down the larger the social following is.

I think that’s really important. If you want to do something with your time and you have a really limited time on your book tour, the most important thing you can do is go and guest on a podcast rather than have some social media influencer and work on a program with them to try to get them to boost it out to their followers, unless their social media followers are very active and exactly in your niche. That’s my only caveat for that one.

The other thing is well-known celebrities are not as trusted either. I call this the Tom Brady effect and it has nothing to do with football. It has to do with selling cryptocurrency. When any celebrity, including someone like Tom Brady who really didn’t need the money decides that they’ll go hawk something that’s a scam, that is committed fraud, then we don’t trust our celebrities anymore either.

Why are podcast hosts so trustworthy? It’s part of the key of how we evaluate them. I’m going to talk a little bit about we first have to define our guesting goals because if we find a really tight match between who we guest on, who we guested with, I guess would be a better way to say it, because it’s a collaboration with the host who we guest with and the goals of our book, our niche, why we’re guesting at all. If we bring those two things together, then this is when we can’t lose.

A very typical example is a book author. I’m going to just out him right here because I know he won’t mind me telling the story. I did some work with Kevin Harrington. Kevin Harrington of Shark Tank fame was launching a new book, hired a publicity firm. They gave him a list of twenty podcasts, and because he knew me, because we were part of the same mentorship group, he handed me the list and asked me if I thought any of them were good, what they were worth, what did I think of it?

I looked over the list and I thought, “Okay, I could see why this PR firm pulled it.” It’s like what you would do as you’d go around and figure out all the local news channels, figure out all who has a higher Nielsen rating, scores, things like that. That’s exactly how they did it. They went to the charts and they said, “Who’s ranking high on the charts?” I looked at it and I thought, “I think he’s going to miss something here.” I give him, I think it was 7 shows total, it was under 10, that I thought his publicity firm would never pick, but I thought were completely aligned following this exact model that I’m teaching you now.

I said, “Add these 7 to your list and let’s compare and see how much book sales come from this 7 versus the others.” They did that. They actually put out a different affiliate link so they could track it. The 7 that I gave him, he ended up on 5 of them, not all 7. The 5 he went on sold 3 times more books than all the others combined.

This strategy is very targeted and it means you can actually do less work and get more value for it. This is something really important. When we’re solopreneurs and we’re trying to sell our books, do our courses, maintain our clients, we’ve got a lot going on. We want to make our approach as effective as possible. This is what we’re going to be doing. We’re looking to define our goals. Your goal might be all of these, or it might be heavier weighted in one of them.

That’s what I want you to think, because raising your media authority where you’re bringing yourself up higher in your niche alongside other experts, maybe you’re just brand new to a niche and you want to make sure to establish yourself there. We want to raise that. Maybe that’s a little bit more important than it is to just get more followers on your LinkedIn.

Maybe you really need to sell those books because you want to hit a level at which you could get in international publication deal or something like that. Maybe you have your own podcast or your own video cast, your own YouTube channel, something that you want to grow in addition, because if you grow that, then the book sales will naturally come, or you’re building that list in pre-sale for the book sales. Those are really important.

The reason I put in grow your own podcast, and I mean video cast, all those things that surround that starting from video, audio to blog, is because when you do that, you own your audience. That’s very different. When I have my podcast, I own my audience, Juliet owns her audience, she’s invited me into her audience. You are just visiting. Keep that very clear. That means you’re not reaching 100% of them. That means that you’re at her good graces and her authority matters. Those things are really why we look at that and maybe sometimes why we decide to have our own, because we really need to own that audience so that we can reach 100% of them later. That’s one of those goals as well.

Finding The Right-Fit Podcast

This is the first pass I do. I usually don’t make anyone do this, but you can get out your phone, open a window to the side of it if you’ve got on your desktop. This is normally not something that I want to distract you with opening your phones, but I really do want you to see what this looks like. Although I will show you here as well. When you’re doing your first pass at trying to find a podcast that’s going to fit your goal, so we know our goal, we already determined that, we know our top goal, I’m going to say that, but we have to find a list of shows to compare that against. We’ve got to build this list of shows. How are we going to find these right fit podcasts?

The first thing we’re going to do is open up a podcast app and check the show title and the listing. We’re going to scroll and we’re going to look at the episodes. What we’re looking for here is the key. We’re looking for 100 episodes or more, 30 minutes or more per episode. Someone who consistently publishes weekly, no seasons, no five-minute shows, I know 5-Minute Marketing is a big show, like none of those. We want someone who’s consistent and constant and has a history of it. I’m going to talk about this in a minute, but there’s some overlooked shows, like shows that are brand new, some other things like that.

For the most part, unless they’re absolutely a right fit in some other way, 100-plus episodes mean they’re committed to it. They know what they’re doing and they’re doing something right. You don’t have to think that hard about whether or not it’s a good show. They’ve maintained an audience for over a year, that’s usually what happens or they podcast every single day and they’ve done it for many months. We’ll eventually going to listen and assess the quality. Not until we’ve done these other things and just done a quick check of it so that we don’t have to listen to everything.

When we do that, our number one thing is we’re going to be asking ourselves is, is this host someone I want to be associated with, someone I need to achieve my goal. How’d you like this AI one? I thought this one was quite cute. I wanted a cute troll. When we’re a niche troll, meaning remember, if our goal was to be that higher authority in the niche, then I want to find somebody who’s right above me. Maybe Juliet finds another publisher. I find Pat Flynn who’s a podcast teacher, and actually the person I learned from to become a podcaster, so it might be your own mentor.

You say, “Where did they guest in the last year? Should I go on those shows too?” Remember, you have to add something different, something new, so make sure that you can do that, because you certainly don’t want to go on and be a clone of the mentor that you just are following. Doing that is actually really easy. I can go into the podcast app and I can search for their name and find every show they’ve ever been on and just add that to my list because they probably already did the work.

I’m still going to do it again because I have different goals, but at least I’ve got the list compiled faster. That’s one way to do it. You’re also going to search in Apple, Spotify and YouTube if you want to do video or if you have your own YouTube channel that you want to drive traffic to. You’re just going to compile that list and you’re going to screen out some of the bad show names and other things.

We’re going to do a little exercise. I want you to open your podcast app and I am going to d show you some examples. We’re going to open our podcast app, we’re going to search in our niche and we’re going to dive into the details. This is Spotify. This is what Spotify works in. I already typed it in, I just use this, use this same one if you don’t know your niche and you and you don’t have that off the top of your head.

Do you notice that it’s slightly longer? I didn’t just put time management, I put time management for entrepreneurs. It’s always a good idea to take your keyword and add a qualifier for the audience to it. It’ll get you a little bit better results from what you’re looking at here. You can see Time Management For Entrepreneurs, Mindset Mentor, Perfect-Ish, Systematize Your Life. It’s About Time. That’s a really obviously very relevant one.

I’m going to show you what it looks like on Apple. This is what it looks like on Apple when I type that in as well. Time for Living, The Entrepreneur’s Playbook, Peaceful Productivity Techniques, productivity might be one of yours. Organized Coach. These are all really good options that it’s serving you up. What I want you to notice is ignore the top results. What you want to go straight to is where it says shows. You’re going to go down to where it says episodes.

Same thing on Spotify. These are all shows at the top. I think you have to go separate for episodes here. We’ll do that separately. I’m going to click on and open up one that’s in the list called Your Time, Your Way. Okay, that sounds really perfect because it’s mentioning time, time management. This sounds like a really good show. Now I’m going to check out a couple of things about it. First off, I’m going to look at this cover art, which is the cover image here. Think of it like an album cover. I love the name of the show, I like the visual of the show. I don’t totally love the balding White guy, like just not totally me.

Maybe it’s not my audience. Maybe I want to reach a bunch of women. By the mere fact that he put his image on here, it makes me think that he’s really doing his podcast just for his self-serving purposes, and not necessarily for me the guest or the audience. I’m going to go a little further because it still looks like a quality show from this.

The next thing I’m going to do is check this About, and right now this is a huge red flag for me. That is one sentence. There are 4,000 characters to this about field and the only searchable thing in the podcast app, this title, the name, and this about field. Nothing else makes it show up in the search engine if you don’t have really great paragraphs here, if you don’t have a lot of keyword here. It means that he’s not going to show up for a lot of my niche data. That worries me, but I’m still going to check it a little bit further.

This is interesting. Even though his name is here, he’s got it set, so that’s the show name here. That means that he’s putting his show name first some places. Now I’m sorting to think maybe I should give him a shot. Let’s look at all of his content. Here’s the problem, I don’t see a single guest name. He must not have guests on a show. Instantly I learned that this is not the right show for me. This is not going to work, he’s not going to have a guest. If I send an email to him, I’m just wasting my time and his.

Now I’m going to check out another one, clocking out with Raymond Lee. Also a bald White guy, but he’s got a pretty good title. I like the title, but he’s got Clocking out with Raymond Lee. His picture here, it’s a little bit vain. I’m going to go down and do the same thing I did before, and that’s at least a little bit longer, not much longer. Now I got to check it and see if there’s anything in here that aligns with what I want, which it really doesn’t. It doesn’t have time management mentioned in there. It doesn’t have productivity mentioned there. It might not be right for my niche and what I’m looking for.

Over here, he’s doing something right. Even though he has the episode numbers, which are a waste of time, he does have the guest write up Forefront front and center and their topic and their company. Founder of, which likely they’d have author of. He’s doing something right that would actually highlight me. If this was a match, then this would be a good one to add to my list.

I’m going to quickly show you a couple that I found on Apple. This is one that’s really common. 2,000 Books, Book Summaries for Entrepreneurs, 10-Minute Book Summaries, like there’s a bunch of these. What I can tell you is you will waste your time submitting to these. Let some assistant do it. They’re not worth your time to do because they will take any one, usually they charge, but at least what they’re doing here is giving you marketing success, mindset, how to accomplish your desires, the Law of Attraction, the names of the writers.

It’s going to give you some links, but it’s not really going to be worth your time. It’s certainly not going to get you because of how many episodes they produce and how much they do, there’s no way a listener could keep up with 2,000 books. It’s just not possible. I guarantee you they have a very low listener base, but the digital listing might be worth it for you. This is one where you might want to have an assistant do these types of shows.

This one, The Organized Coach, I went to look at her. Nice and decently long. She’s using her character count. She’s definitely worked in targeting and understanding. It’s a little salesy, but at least she’s hitting all the points of productivity, business systems, time management. She’s definitely keyword packed. She knows what she’s doing there. That bodes well for you. The other thing, she’s got the guest names at the end, which is actually a really good strategy for her and for you. She’s giving the topic first, which tells me why I should listen to you if I’ve never heard of your name before, and telling me that first, and then giving me your name or your expertise. This is a really good strategy that she’s employing.

When you click on one of these episodes, you see she’s also giving a pretty decent summary of what’s going on there. There’s also an episode webpage, which she is sending that to her hosting page, not to a website. That’s maybe a little bit of a drawback, but not the worst thing ever. Now here’s one, Penny Zenker, I think Juliet, you know her.

Penny used to have a show that was called Take Back Time. She just like in the last week or so, reset it. She used to have a 4,000-character description. She just reset it. What I found is that, if you notice, she didn’t show up here in the beginning at all. She used to be first. The changes she made to her show made it so she’s not showing up here. It could repair itself in time, but she’s still doing fairly well.

Her picture was not on the cover before, so she was doing a lot of things right and then she decided to change her show following somebody else’s advice, I’m going to say, but you can see the difference here. Do you see how all of these, they draw you in. I want to know what this is. Disconnection. Gen Z. The images are drawing you in. The names are drawing you in. They still have the guest names on them, so they’re doing something really right on that. When you look at them, you’ll see they’ve got a really good opening paragraph, tells you where to go.

This is the important part. When I click this, I get right to a full-length blog with all this information about it. I think the information about the guest is at the bottom, which is good. They make you read the whole thing and about Fiona Lambert. It’s telling you everything you need to know here. This is one of the most important things you can absolutely do to make sure that you’re vetting the show. That’s what we’re trying to do.

We’re vetting by diving into the details, looking at those episode descriptions. I didn’t touch on ratings and reviews. They’re absolute junk. Just ignore them. Don’t get caught up in them. Somebody who has some is good. At least they have some. You make your list. Here’s a really good example, too. Remember when I said we were going to look at the cover art? This is the cover art. This is my least favorite show. If you’ve ever heard me talk about it on any of my coaching calls or any of my podcasts, I hate The Drink with Kate Snow. It is a terrible title in this day and age. It doesn’t make any sense.

She’s a legitimate broadcaster on I think NBC news or something like that. This is a terrible name for a show. It was a pandemic show and she kept the name and she should have changed it. Think about it carefully based on your niche. This I know is one of Juliet’s authors, the Great Drinking Reset, Becoming Sober, Curious and all of those things. Actually, a really big and important topic is an audience that is resonating with a show called The Drink going to be your audience. This is something you want to think about. “Is this resonating with my book?” Maybe, though, it is an audience of people who are a little overwhelmed with their drinking and it’s sober curious fodder because they’re all attracted to this title.

Maybe it’s actually even better for you. I think it could be really great for something called The Mindful Mocktail because, obviously, you’re enjoying this environment, but maybe you don’t want to drink. That might be really great for you as well. Thinking about these two, thinking about your book and thinking about the name of the show, does it make sense for you to be associated with you and your show associated with the name of this show?

Thinking about that, you’ll find some that you just want to cross off your list. The number one I don’t want to be associated with is ones that are all about the host, the Dr. Lewis Newsome Podcast, the Tracy Show. I don’t want any of those because what does that have to do with my niche and my content? Time with Tim? What is that about? I have no idea.

Unless you know that Hillary Silver is the influencer you want and you need her and her audience, the last show you want to go on is one named after the host. Absolutely. The other thing is you want to be really careful. The thing about the Five Minute Marketing is, is that what you’re about or do you want somebody to actually read your book? Five minute shows and book reading are not going to be aligned.

Reading a book is an in-depth model of content consumption. Five Minute Marketing is for people with the attention span of a gnat. We don’t want that. We’ve got to make sure these show titles, these images, I obviously chose one with all pictures of people on it because that’s another thing. Do these resonate with your target audience? Does my target audience all look like this? Chances are they don’t. Just by having the picture like that, you’re eliminating a section of audience. You need to know if you want to be associated with these hosts and the shows. This is some of the easiest things. We can judge a book by its cover. We can judge a podcast by its cover art.

Are Paid Guesting Worth It

I want to talk a minute about paid at guest appearances because you’re going to come across them. When you reach out to some shows or you use an assistant or you use a PR firm, they’re going to say, “I can get you on the show for $250.” Here’s the thing, if you’ve ever been sold a pay to speak event, these are just like that. The reason you are paying, which is crazy, is because they want more people in it who need to be there.

They don’t already have the authority to be there. You’re going to be amongst a lot of other people who don’t have the authority you need. Your association is already lower than you need it to be. If that’s your goal, then pay to play is not the place to go. If your goal is just a whole lot of backlinks and where you’re listed in tons of places, then maybe paid appearances are the way to go.

We really want to check and make sure you’re getting enough value for the amount they’re charging you. Am I getting what I’m paying for? Are they promoting me? Are they sharing it or are they expecting me to not only pay for it but do all the sharing and bring all the audience to them? That happens a lot. The other thing, if someone’s asking you to pay, I guarantee their listener stats are falsified, they’re overstated. What you’re not seeing is that they might be being paid to increase downloads, but that doesn’t mean that they’re increasing listeners or listen through. If they don’t listen through, they’re not going to learn about your book. That’s really also important to understand.

The number one question I ask myself is, who’s going to benefit more you or the host? It’s usually fairly obvious in the language or the pushiness of their sales process. Here’s a really good example. A friend came to me and he said, “I’m being asked to go on The Chris Voss Show.” That’s the name of the show. He claims to have over 30,000 followers on YouTube and I forget the number of downloads, probably 100,000 downloads or more., hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads on his podcast. What do you think? “It’s only $250, so it’s not a lot of money.”

That’s what he said to me. I said, “Okay, let me check it out for you.” The first thing I did here was go, “The math doesn’t add up. If he has 32,200 subscribers and he’s published 8,800 videos, a lot of videos, it means he’s pumping a lot of people through it and they all look like these ones where you see no cover, you don’t know what the niche is. Hopefully, he’s done a fairly good job of titling, boosting hotel revenue, get on the job and organize. Look at this view stat, 9 views, 17 views, 37 views. This is not a show that’s doing well. If you have less than 10,000 subscribers, you should be seeing, on average, 10 to 50 views per show. That’s what this looks like. If you have less than 100,000, but between 10,001 and 100,000, you should have 100 to 500 views.

That’s where he should be at. He’s not driving that level of traffic. Additionally, when you’re dividing 32,200 subscribers into 8,800 videos, on average, he’s not even close to getting 10%, which is where he should be. We know that likely, this subscriber base is fake. If he’s faking his subscriber base here, he bought his YouTube followers, which is really common, then he’s probably not telling the truth about his podcast either.

Checking A Show’s Online Visibility

Do some basic math. It’s not hard to figure this out whether or not it seems like it’s getting good traffic and it’s worth $250. I would say if he had 250 views per person, it might be worth it. Remember, we built that list. Now what are we going to do with it? This is the key. I can do this in five minutes per show. It’s worth doing. Even if you’re going to say, “I’m going to do five applications to a show. I’m going to send out five pitches a week to different shows.”

You can do this so quickly. You can do this in a half hour. You can have your whole thing vetted and your email sent and hopefully, you have your template prepared ahead of time. You can do this in 30 minutes a week. Send out five. The hit ratio should be higher. She should at least get 2 to 3 of them without thinking guarantee you right now, if you’re using any of the email bath systems. The AI systems or any of these virtual assistants who are doing it, they’re not getting 1 out of 100 as a hit ratio of what they’re sending to. That’s why they’re sending it in a mass blast way. You send it yourself. That’s also a key we’re going to talk about. You do it this way, you’re more likely to get results.

What am I going to do once I have those names on the list? If I were looking at that show Take Back Time, I’m going to Google it. I’m going to Google the host name and the podcast name and see how well they’re showing up. If they’re showing up on the first name on Google for more than just their website and their social media because usually their LinkedIn or other things are showing following, we’ll show up on that first page.

If they show up for things like an article for their blogs, for their podcast shows, for any of those things, for videos, then I know that they’re doing something right on the promotion side of things and I know that I’m going to show up properly. The next thing I want to do is, is check that and see if they actually have a website that’s showing up on that first page. Click it from Google and go to it. Check it out. If they have a blog and they’re posting their episodes in that blog, it’s a big bonus and you should just probably say yes at this point as long as you felt it made the list and you got this far.

Next, you want to assess the digital guest value. If it has a blog or a podcast page, are they at least featuring the guests somewhere? Do they have a link to your book, your landing page, your social? Are they at least highlighting you somewhere in that? Even if they aren’t, as long as there’s a link mentioned back to the guests that they have on the show or your bookman name shown somewhere, then you’re getting enough digital guest value.

We can do a lot of the heavy lifting on the other side, on our own websites, on our own podcast page, on our own book page, I should say, because you can highlight the podcast on your book page. You can take a quote from it. There’s lots of testimonials and authority you can still use even if they’re not doing the best job over here, as long as there’s at least one link.

If social media matters to you, you want to go and check their socials and the engagement. How and where they promote matters more than the number of followers because remember, I said a big social following is not as valuable as you think that it is. If they’re in LinkedIn and I really want a business audience and I want LinkedIn, then that’s great. They’re already in the right place. If they’re in LinkedIn and there’s getting a lot of commenting or thumbs up, um, engagement hearts, whatever that might be, if there’s some engagement happening on the post, it’s not crickets, then it’s worth it as well.

Checking Your Own Ego

The other thing we want to do is check our own ego. I had you check the ego of the host. The picture’s on it, their name’s on it, that’s their ego. Here, you want to check your ego too. I couldn’t break Kevin Harrington of it. I knew it at the beginning. I knew he had a big ego, so I knew he wasn’t going to just dump that list of 20 for my 5, but I did know that I could get him to consider the 5. That’s what you want to do. Open up your mind to the fact that bigger isn’t better. I don’t need to be on this celebrity name. Brand shows. What I really need is to sell some books. What I really need is to raise my authority. What I really need is to grow my list and grow my audience.

If that’s going to happen on a smaller micro influencer show, then that’s where I need to be to get the job done. I care about the audience engagement, not the size of it. I care about that targeted reach and I care about the focus of the show so that I can get better conversion, and because I’m giving a smaller host or a micro influencer a chance because I am going to collaborate with them, I’m going to build a relationship that they’re going to remember me, they’re going to refer people to me. I’m going to build niche connections and I’m going to increase my authority. Those things are going to matter.

The other thing of it is that there’s ego on the other side. Remember, everyone claims to be a top podcaster and anyone can be a bestseller. They can also be a top podcaster. You can rank on any minor little chart and claim that you’re a top podcaster. You can also make it for a day and then people put that on their website and they claim that forever.

Not everyone is really a top podcaster. In fact, almost every podcaster that’s consistently publishing now is already in the top 5% of podcasts because there are so many podcasts that don’t publish anymore. Downloads do not equal listeners when they say they have so many downloads or so many streams. A statistic was recorded by downloading the show didn’t mean they listened to it. A stream, which is typically on Spotify, means less than one minute was played, which is the exact same stat as YouTube measures for a video. A video considers a view less than one minute of playtime as well. There’s no understanding in any of the stats of how the play through goes.

I’ve never seen anyone publish their play metrics. In order to access play through, they would have to know how to go way in the back end of Apple and bring it to the forefront. Just a little tip and excitement, we just got permission to put that, to pass that through from Apple into our stats in our platform. That’s going to be happening in the near future. Juliet, your show’s finally going to have play through on it and you’re going to get to see that. That’s pretty exciting.

That play through on podcasts on average, just so you understand it, unlike YouTube and unlike any other media type, the play through on podcast is on average 70%. The play through on YouTube for one minute is only 10%. Only 10% of all the views that were recorded get past that minute. That’s crazy numbers. Low numbers. You’re actually going to do really well getting on a podcast. Just trust that if I’ve got 70% play through but there’s only 1,000 listeners as opposed to 10,000 views on YouTube, I’m still going to do better.

Trust that and don’t worry and never ask a podcast host for their metrics. It’s a waste of your time. You’re never going to get anything that’s useful or believable. I’m going to take a quick little break here and just do a checkpoint. Does anyone have any questions before I hit into the perfect pitch? It’s a little shorter section. I know I gave you a lot, so I want to make sure I’m touching base. Does anyone have any questions about this vetting process and really discovering shows that are going to be right fit for you? I’m going to let you manage that, Juliet.

Who raised her hand? I didn’t see.

It’s Carrie West.

Do you have a question, Carrie?

I do. Thank you. First of all, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. You have me glued to the screen. My question is, are you available for hire?

We don’t do guest placement at all here, but I do have some resources for you that I’m going to share at the end that will be useful. I consider that they do the job in a much more automated way. I also do have someone great. If you want really handholding, you want to do something, she’s not overpriced, but it’s a little more premium handholding service. I do have two resources for you.

Carrie, we have tours as well. We have the former Simon and Schuster bookers who do our booking,

I want them all. This is absolutely brilliant. Thank you.

Four Steps Of Successful Podcast Pitching

You are welcome. I’m going to move back on and we’re going to go, because I don’t see any questions. We’re going to go to talk about the perfect pitch. What we really want to get is your message, their mic and to connect personally. That’s what we want. We want to make the show really about us. We don’t want to have this show where we’re coming on. If you’ve ever watched the radio shows, the TV shows, it’s like there’s 5 of you and they’re like squeezing you all into 30 minutes. This is very different. There’s not a lot of sound bites. It’s really focused on you because we chose a show in our list that’s 30 minutes or more. You’re going to get much more time and attention. That is really going to help you get a little deeper into your message and make that connection with the audience.

We have to remember that we’ve got to leave these sound bites and that PR training that we took for radio and TV behind, because this is not mainstream media. Most of these podcast hosts are independent. They are entrepreneurs building their businesses, building their influence, doing this all on their own. Very few of them are associated with a network.

Less than 1% of all podcasts out there are associated with a network. With those shows, you won’t get through by sending an email. You have to know the booking agent. You’ll have to go through that. You’ll need one of those book tours in order to get that accomplished. They’re very different. Most podcasters, the majority of them are independent. If you can find a way by your pitch, by how you reach out to them to make their job easier and be aligned with their goal of podcasting, you’re going to land yourself right into that interview seat without a problem at all.

Here are the four steps that I use for successful podcast pitching and I get a pitch probably like 4 or 5 a day to my shows. We don’t take guests on our show. We only take experts, partners like Juliet. That’s it. Juliet comes on every couple of months. We don’t even take guests on our show and I still get pitches because that’s how bad they’ve done their homework.

We have done our research, we already got this. In our research, one of the things that we want to do is make sure we find the host preferred contact method. The podcast show has an email address sometimes. It’s usually something like info@ or hello@ or theshowname@gmail.com. It’s usually something like that, which means it’s probably going into some big large spam filter or some assistant.

I really want to find out how to reach them best. Usually, you can find that on their website if they’ve got a contact form, if they’ve got a real email address listed there. What social media platform did they list first? If they list LinkedIn, then maybe I want to go and I want to use LinkedIn direct message to contact them first, assuming, of course, I can friend them on LinkedIn and connect up with them.

Think about your method for how you’re going to reach them and try to find the best email address or the best preferred contact method that gets more directly into their inbox. That’s really important. Secondly, don’t send a mass email because if you send it personally, it’s going to get caught by the spam filters. They get tons of pitches like I was just talking about that all come from these bots or these farms of assistants that do this.

They’re always generic. They always sound like form letters. Even the ones that say, “I heard your show with so-and-so.” They always pick the wrong guest. I can tell you that. You can always pick the one that’s like, “I loved your show with Kevin Harrington on it.” I’d be like, “That was the worst episode ever.” It was the least aligned one.

Usually, they’ll pick the most celebrity guest, which you will if you’ve a podcast host. You will know that they did the worst job of promoting the show for you. It probably was all about them. You didn’t get what you wanted out of it. When somebody mentions that, it shows you that they’re only concerned about that celebrity status and their authority and not concerned about your show or your audience. It’s usually a no right there.

That’s what we want to do. We don’t want to show we listen to the show. That’s what the other guest experts tell you. It’s like, “Mention something specific from the show.” Okay, but not something that’s not relevant to what you can bring to that audience. Use it as a way to show how your perspective, how your experience can really add more value to that audience, can add more value to the show.

Raise the stakes for them and give them something that they likely want or need that that guest didn’t give them or that topic didn’t cover. These are important things. Bring the relevance on it. Don’t give them sample topics. Don’t give them sample questions they can ask you. Give them something that shows that your perspective or experience is going to add value to their show and their audience. If possible, give first. Forget the pitch letter.

This is how I do it. I go to someone and say, “I’d like to invite you on my show.” I give them something first or, “I’d like to write an article about you. Do you think I could do an interview with you?” Giving them something of value first that shows you know how to promote will be an automatic kick in of the Law of Reciprocity and they’ll ask you back. A podcast swap is what we call it when I go on Juliet’s show and she comes on my show. It’s a podcast swap. We are sharing our podcast shows.

The stats show that a podcast swap is 56% more effective for whatever your call to action will be on that show. Why is it? It’s because it’s super easy for a podcast listener to go and select another podcast show because they’re already in the app listening and like it and follow it and then listen to some of the show and then because they listen to your show, they bought your book. It’s a cascade of getting them into your audience faster and getting them onto your list faster. That works. That’s one of it.

You are going to get your pitches 56% more effective as well because there’s something in it for them immediately without you having to pitch them anything else.” You can come on my show and I’ll come on your show if it’s a fit.” Invite them first to yours. It will almost always be a fit or you’ll very quickly discover, “I didn’t want to be on that show.” It’s super easy to discover that. You’ll spend about five minutes into your interview and you’ll know.

I have had so many pitch fails, it’s not even funny. By the way, there’s the telltale sign that the image to the right is an AI-driven image because there’s some garbage language in there. I don’t know what skill orgy is. There’s a lot of garbage content and that’s where you’ll find it. Whenever you see words in a AI-driven image, it’ll be spelled wrong. There’ll be something that’s a made-up word.

I see that actually in the pitches as well. I see a lot of spelling errors. I see a lot of these dumb things that happen. I have a show called The Binge Factor and usually, the pitch will insert the show name. It’s like a form letter and it inserts the name in it. “I’d like to invite you. I’d like to read your podcast or I’d like to be on your podcast the,” and then it’ll insert The Binge Factor. You have a double the, and if my show was called The Binge Factor Podcast, usually, they’ll also put the word podcast on the other side of it.

It’ll say podcast, podcast. It’s a clear sign that you didn’t take the time to email me directly and it’s in the trash. The other one is, “I’m in the top 5% of some Amazon list somewhere.” Trash. “Attached is my media kit.” No one will ever open a PDF that is delivered to them in an email. No one will ever open a file. No one will click links. They will connect with you first before they even decide to click the link. If you don’t put the information in the email, they will never read it. Everyone’s afraid to get a virus nowadays.

“I’d love to be on your show to talk about me, my bestselling book, my stuff.” Okay, that’s obvious. That’s why you want a guest, but it shows that your focus is you and not my show. This one, “Would you enjoy a convo with a Facebook ads game changer,” where they overstate like this innovator. They use these generic but overstated terms.

“I’ve made $1 million by being a guest on shows.” What does that do for me, the host? I guarantee you, every show you’ve talked to, the host is not making $1 million.” Trash. This is what happens when we write like this. Don’t overhype, don’t overstate. Make it personal. Make it real. Make it about the person you’re emailing, the post, not about yourself. I mentioned no one downloads anything. One sheet or one webpage. I suggest webpage. Usually, they’re not too afraid to click a link that says TracyHazzard.com. They realize that sounds like a real thing. It’s not disguised in some Google drive or something like that where something’s going to download and download to my computer. This is a way for us to make sure that we get what we want.

On that webpage, it can look like a one sheet, it can be a part of our regular website. It can be a hidden page one that we only send with pitch letters that we don’t actually have on our regular website in the navigation bar. The things that it should have are just these three things listed here. You should actually have two bios. You should have a short, concise, 150-word bio so they can use it to introduce you.

You should have the longer bio, like Juliet used here. She used my longer bio because you’re an audience of intellects authors, you want more details, sometimes they want more details. It also gives you a chance to pull out some things that are much more relevant where you can use the short bio as just something that you do when you use the promotion side of things. Three to five images, obviously you want a profile image because I want to use it in all my promotion tools.

You give them some active images about you at a book tour, you signing books, you speaking on a stage, those are great images that they can use in social media promotion. Just make sure you have clear copyright approval from the photographers for all images. We’ve seen it happen where an author thought they had rights to their profile image that was on the back of the book and they didn’t, the photographer did. Make sure that you have all of those rights before you go to use them.

Make sure on this page, all the links for them to find your social channels, your book page, everything that you would want them to review and see. Make sure all the links are right there and very clear. This is a super simple, easy page to put together and it will more likely be clicked or someone will type it into the search engine and make it something that they will actually review.

Give The Best Interview Ever

A one sheet is a waste of time right now. Not that you don’t need them for other media tours and other things that you do, but for podcasting, you don’t need them. Now if you get the interview, remember you’ve got to serve throughout that interview. You’re going to keep staying focused on the audience. It’s what we’ve been talking about. Focus on the host and the audience. Understand what’s matters most to them. Keep serving that up, serve that up in the pitch and continue to serve that up in the interview.

Use really good equipment. My mic sounds great and my camera sounds good. This is not expensive stuff. This mic is a $60 microphone. Make sure you have a laptop, a good webcam. I don’t have a good webcam. I actually have a separate camera on it. This Podetize.com/mic will lead you to the best and worst microphones so you can see what really works. The one we choose here is because it’s so simple, so inexpensive. I’ve had this mic for five years. Its quality is great, it doesn’t die. It’s worth every penny of it.

Be original, personable, conversational, repetitive promotional soundbite stuff works for TV. It does not work for the podcast. The number one thing I don’t want you to do is heavy sell your book. I don’t want you to say, “Buy the book to get the answer,” when they ask you a question. I have had podcast guests who are authors who come in and just say, “It’s in my book. You have to buy my book.” Do not do that. If you give them the answer and remind them the full stories in the book, that’s perfectly okay.

Serve them. Give them these pieces. Give them these little bits because everything’s out of order. When I read your book, the story is clear and it’s in order. I say this to you, I am an expert podcast host. I’ve had over seven shows that I’ve hosted, but I am a prolific reader. Sometimes I read close to 300 books a year. It is my love language, reading books, so I do understand what heart and all the things that you’ve put into it, but not giving what’s inside there isn’t going to make me download it and buy it. When you give me brief glimpses to the beauty of what you built, of what you wrote, I’m more likely to click through and buy your book. That’s what we want to have as goals for you.

Now what? You got the interview. Now what? You’ve got to share it. You’ve got to get long lasting SEO value. You’ve got to get value on your website, testimonials, all the good things. You want to get some social collabs. That’s what we’re going to talk about next because I couldn’t fit it into this hour. It was much too long.

Promote Your Book With Promocast

Some of the other things that we have is if you want to start a podcast, go and talk to my partner, Tom Hazzard, Podetize.com/inquiry. Make sure you tell them that you came from Juliet’s community. You can also catch our coaching call, which we talk about all kinds of things marketing. Juliet is our guest, so you may want to check that out. If you go to Podetize.com/events so you can see what’s coming up next. You can also find that on our YouTube page. Juliet, I’m going to show you, because Tom gave me a mockup of that Promocast that we’ve been doing. I’ve got a little mockup of it.

If you guys don’t know what Promocast is, Tracy has been testing Promocast for a year and a half on podcasts. She did have some authors in that mix who had some pretty extraordinary book sales. One of them, a psychic medium, 30,000 in sales. Our salesman Bill is going to be reaching out to most of you o that you can see what this is all about. We’d love to have you guys join. Tracy, do you want to talk about the metrics on, or do you want me to?

I’ll let you do that, but I’m just going to show you real quickly. Imagine if you were in an app, you were playing in some app, like it was popular news app and all of a sudden, an ad plays. The ad is down here at the bottom. See how fun that is? It’s a little fifteen-second clip about your book and you can use it to also promote. You can use your own voice with a soundbite of something you said, a fifteen-second bite of something you said on another podcast.

You can use your podcast guesting in this area as well. We put those out on mobile apps everywhere. We can’t target them and say they’re only going to be on finance apps or health and fitness apps. It’s a broad-brush approach, but the number of views we are able to get them on and the amount that it costs, it’s so cheap, is really worth it. The results are coming through.

When we do it, we’re doing a three-month package. The three-month package is $2,600. That includes your ad spend, it includes your setup, but you’re guaranteed 500,000 impressions a month. One of the ones we sold was a parenting book and they ask, “What if it ends up on an archery app?” We’re like, “People who do archery are parents.” Don’t discount because it’s not targeted because you’re getting more exposure outside of your normal genre networks on it. The typical results are 300 to 600 clicks a month. Those aren’t purchases, but there are 300 to 600 more people that are seeing and developing interest in your book on that.

You can send them straight to your book landing page or even to something that’s just a longer video or a longer piece of information.

We’re typically sending people either into Amazon or directly to a page to buy your book. We have a lot of authors who like to mail the book out with a personal note and give a little gift with it. Either way, we are seeing extraordinary results and nobody else is doing it but us.

Yeah, we have this exclusive deal and we beta tested it form and then we developed it so that it only uses our feed system. We’re actually the only ones who can provide it. We created our own connection through to doing this.

Episode Wrap-Up

FYI, I’m not going to get into the details on it, but we are testing something else. Tracy is with authors. A couple of our authors are going into it. It is really extraordinary, what you’d probably call your digital twin. Somebody actually answering questions and looking at your material and getting feedback in your own voice. Anyway, Tracy, thank you. Did you guys have any questions on any of this? I know some of you probably have to go. We went a little long.

We’re going to get that part two. We’re going to set it up. That part two is all about promotion. Here’s what I’m going to tell you guys. I invited someone here who pitched me. He was an investment banker. I’m all about authors and marketing. I invited him because obviously, he doesn’t know to do his research on the pitch. I wanted to throw that out there because a response you’re probably going to get is a not very kind one if you pitch and you haven’t demonstrated that you actually know anything about the show on there.

I’ll make sure that Juliet is completely allowed to send you. If you ask for my slides, I’ll make sure that I download that and give you guys the PDF of it so you can have that. You can read all the details. I try to keep it packed with enough so that the slides share stands on its own without me. Hopefully, that will still work. It’ll trigger your memory as to what you’re supposed to do.

If you guys want to talk to me about the app we just talked about, just go jump on my calendar, ChatWithJuliet.com and we’ll get it up and going.

We’ll actually do a little segment on that when we do this on whatever date we set up. We’ll do a little segment on how you use things that you do on guesting in a Promocast version so you can see it.

Thank you, guys. Tracy, this was great. This was so informative.

I try to pack it in for you.

I know you do. Alright, thank you.

Important Links

• Tracy Hazzard
• Superbrand Publishing on YouTube
• Podcast Microphones: What are the Best (And The Worst Ones, Too)
• Podetize Strategy Session
• Podetize Events
• Podetize on YouTube
• Promote, Profit, Publish Strategy Session

About Tracy Hazzard

Tracy Hazzard is a seasoned media expert with over 2600 interviews from articles in Authority Magazine, BuzzFeed, and her Inc. Magazine column; and from her multiple top-ranked videocasts and podcasts like The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand – one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts. Tracy brings diverse views from what works and what doesn’t work in marketing, branding and media from thought leaders and industry icons redefining success around the globe. Tracy’s unique gift to the podcasting, marketing, and branding world is being able to identify that unique binge-able factor – the thing that makes people come back again and again, listen actively, share as raving fans, and buy everything you have to sell.

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