Getting yourself to be a guest in a podcast is certainly a good way to get yourself known more in your space and drive more leads to your business or attract more people to your book, podcast or whatever it is you are promoting. However, it’s not a good idea to approach a guesting pitches like a telemarketer would promote their product. You have to do your homework, do some research about the show and convince the host that you care about sharing some value to the podcast as much as you care for your promotion. Joining Juliet Clark in this conversation is Tom Hazzard, a product design and development expert, experienced podcast host and the co-founder and CTO of Podetize, the largest podcast production company in the world. Tom shares his strategies in soliciting to be a podcast guest, promoting an episode and more. Want to get the most out of your podcast or the podcast you’re guesting on? Take your cues from this industry expert.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Podcast Guesting And Podcast Promotion Strategies With Tom Hazzard

We have another wonderful guest but I want all of you with guesting strategies for your podcast to pay particular attention. Before I introduce our guest, I want to remind you to go over to Super Brand Publishing over on YouTube and follow us. You can see all of the videos of the people that you’ve been reading about. You can see they are real guests. I don’t make them up. They’re real people. Go over and try out our Promote, Profit, Publish Quiz. You can find it at www.PromoteProfitPublish.com and find out how your skillset is lining up for your next book and selling your books, products, and services.

For our guest, I talked to his wife every week and I invited her to be on the show again and she threw me her husband instead. I’m happy with that because I’ve never invited Tom to be on the show. Tom Hazzard is an award-winning strategic product design and development expert, and a forward-thinking entrepreneur with great sales conversion skills. In addition to co-hosting the Forbes featured fast growth WTFFF?! 3D Printing Podcast and Feed Your Brand Podcast, he successfully launched over 250 consumer products raking in over $2 billion in eCommerce and mass-market retailers with his wife and business partner, Tracy.

He believes that the goal of any product service marketing or business launch is to make it sell itself. That is why he often talks about streamlining business processes to keep marketing expenses at a minimum. Tom loves being a podcast host because he gets to meet people from many varied industries. He gets to broaden his perspective from all of the wildly different areas of interest he encounters in works. Isn’t that so true about podcasting? Welcome.

Thank you so much. It’s good to be here.

We’re going to talk about guesting and I told you that the reason I wanted to talk about it is I’m getting many cold requests via email to be on my podcast. It’s evident that none of them have even ever listened to my show and don’t know what it’s about. Speak to that, please.

That’s frustrating. We get a lot of those solicitations as well. Sometimes they’re from other podcasters directly. Sometimes they’re from somebody who has a new book or program that they’re trying to promote. Oftentimes, I find they’re coming from PR agents that have been hired to help somebody with publicity. It’s pretty easy to tell by reading the pitch or lack of pitch sometimes or the solicitation that they didn’t do a lot of homework. You can tell because the pitch is all about them and not at all about you. The podcaster says, “Why should you care? Why is this important to you for your show?”

It’s shocking to me that many people think that their pitches are going to be successful when they do something like that. It makes no sense. You think I’m a podcaster that’s going to be like, “Thank you so much for pitching yourself to me because I am hurting for guests. I don’t know who I’m going to have next week.” It’s usually not that way for a lot of podcast hosts. Any individual entrepreneur or podcaster, you want to get promotion and raise awareness for who you are and what you’re doing. You can pitch yourself to as many podcast hosts if you want. We also have a service that does this for people and does it the right way. I’ll tell you, we do a lot of work over several weeks to get to the point where we’re ready to pitch.

Do you want to be on any show? Unfortunately, PR agents figured, “I can check a box. You’ve been on this show. You’ve been on that show. Let’s check all these boxes.” They don’t care about the fit. Number one, how good a show is it? Is it worth being on it? Is it a good fit for you? Is it a good fit for the listeners of that show to have you on it as a guest? There are many things to evaluate so we take weeks to not only research what shows we want to pitch to. We also want to make sure we’re doing our homework, not only on the guests that we’re pitching and make sure that we present them in the best possible light, but we do our research on the shows.

We’ll listen to 1 or 2 episodes. Let me ask you something, Juliet. Would you respond well if someone said, “We were listening to your show recently where you interviewed Tracy Hazzard. When you talked about this in particular, that resonated with us. We have this other guest that we think might also be a great fit for your show because of this?” You give them a reason and some context. Are you going to pay attention to that?

I was on Chris Ippolito’s show. In his show sign up, it says, “Listen to one of my episodes and tell me what you loved about it, and why you think you’d be a good guest based on that.” He would send you to a particular episode. I thought, “I could do that with some of these people who are cold.” For me, a lot of people see Promote, Profit, Publish, and they think that I only work with books. They want me to promote their new book, which may have nothing to do with the show. I love it a lot.

It depends on the show. You’ve got to speak to the host and make it clear that you’re not a number on a list of shows. You are number 23 out of 50 that they’re pitching to or whatever, but there’s an intentional reason why. A lot of people don’t do this because it’s work. It takes some time and some effort to vet shows, make sure that they’re a good fit, and figure out why they’re a good fit. If you don’t know why, you shouldn’t be pitching that show. That’s why there’s some cost associated with it, either your own time and effort. If you have more time than money, by all means, do it yourself. That’s great. We’re all for that. We talk openly at Podetize and our podcast, Feed Your Brand about all of these things and how to do it yourself if that’s what you need to do with your present business or financial situation.

We know you’re going to remember that we provided you that value and when you don’t have time to do it, but you’ve got a little money you can spend, you’re going to come back to us. Our customers value spending a little money to save time and effort on their part, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to try to be cagey about what it takes to do this right because that doesn’t help anybody. It’s shocking to me how many people think that I’m going to respond. The same thing happens to me with business solicitations. If you haven’t had this experience with either pitching yourself to be a guest on a podcast or if you’re a podcast host. I’ll be shocked if you haven’t had some of these solicitations come your way that is clearly generic and not personal.

It’s the same thing with business solicitations. I get all these lead generation and marketing companies emailing me every week. The way that their messaging and their email are worded, you would think that they have surveillance monitoring in my office. They somehow know that this is what I need to make my business succeed. It’s like, “You don’t know a thing about my business. Why don’t you ask a question or do a little homework and communicate something with some context?” That’s the whole point here. The great thing about podcast hosts is to an extent they’ve all probably got an ego because they’re putting themselves out there, and there’s a range and there are levels. Some people have a larger need for self-worth than others. They’re speaking. They’re not shy about giving their opinions and speaking their truth, their mission, their vision or whatever it is. You can play into that a little bit.

A little ego play goes a long way and says, “You don’t want to be on any show. You want to be on my show. Let me hear more about that. Tell me more about me.” People respond to that. It’s not about being disingenuous and playing to their ego when something’s not a fit. It’s not going to make sense if you’ve got a medically focused podcast and you’re trying to pitch somebody that is talking about innovations in tech, software, venture capital market or something. It’s not going to work so there has to be some relevant angle, but you should be pitching that. We create a one-sheet for our guests that we’re pitching. In case people don’t know what that is, it’s a marketing document. It’s a PDF, usually one page. If you’ve got somebody that has many things that need to be communicated about them, you could do two pages, front and back type of thing.

Usually, it’s one page where it is marketing the guest. It’s a little more generic because this one sheet is not tailored to who you’re pitching to necessarily. It is giving a lot of important background on the guest, a little bit about them, who they are, but more importantly what’s in it for you the host, and what topics do they speak on a regular basis. Usually, we’ll include 5 to 7 different topics that they speak intelligently on. Even if you wanted to focus on something different, at least you understand a bit more of the background. Here’s the other thing we do that’s more about what’s in it for the host, we give their social reach or their total reach numbers.

That might be they have 10,000, regular listeners a month. Even if they only have 1,000 regular listeners a month or 500, maybe they’ve got 5,000 connections on LinkedIn. Maybe they’ve got a Twitter following that’s over 10,000. You don’t know so we’ll find where all those numbers are and those credibility factors. We’ll put them together into a number of their total reach and let them know that their appearance on your show is going to be promoted to that entire list.

Maybe they have an email list that’s got 5,000 or 10,000 people. It doesn’t matter what it is. The point is, what’s your reach? That’s a little bit beyond the subject matter, hopefully being interesting to the listeners of their show and that it should relate somehow or maybe be in alignment in some way. Even if that’s a stretch, at least to know that, “We don’t just want to suck the value out of you podcast host and get exposure to your audience. Truthfully, we’re looking to promote, but at the same time, we’re going to promote your show to our list.”

As long as you do some homework on the show, present why you’re pitching their show and it needs to be clear that it’s not generic. You’re sharing what’s also in it for them. Sometimes people who are promoting a book are willing to give away 100 copies of the book and they can promote that to their listeners. It’s like, “For all of you listening, the first hundred that go to this landing page and sign up, get a copy of the book,” or something. I’m not saying that everybody has to do that. I’m not saying you have to pay to get placed. That’s not the point. What value are you going to provide their audience? It’s another angle? What’s in it for them?

Podcast Guesting: You can tell if somebody only cares for promotion and publicity if the pitch is all about them, not about you, the podcast host.

That is so true. I’m going to give you an example not what to do. I reached out to somebody on LinkedIn. I’m sitting there Sunday out golfing and here comes this calendar link. Somebody booked on my calendar. I reached out to him on email and LinkedIn, “Why did you book on my calendar?” “To be on your podcast.” They went and looked on my website but I’m an invite-only podcast. For me, I reached back out and I said, “We always have a pre-interview to make sure that you’re good,” and they were completely insulted by that. It’s that pushing us on things like this. How do you get around that? How do you be assertive but not aggressive?

Unfortunately, every different person and their personality, biases, preconceptions, and what they’ve experienced is always going to play into this. I don’t know that there is an answer that’s going to apply to everybody. It usually shows a podcaster that’s a little naive. If they think that just because they’re a podcaster or maybe they’re not a podcaster but because they have a book, they think they’re a big name in their industry. They’re assuming you should want to have them on the show. That’s a rookie error if you haven’t been on a lot of podcasts or you haven’t pitched yourself to a lot of them. You’re going to find out quickly what works and what doesn’t.

To assume that people are going to accept you as a guest on your word without vetting you at all, or assume that maybe they do a podcast and because of a podcast, they’re offering you an interview swap, that you’re going to agree and accept that with no preconditions or not checking them out, it is naive. Early on in my podcasting journey, we’ve experienced it all. It was on the WTFFF?! 3D Printing Podcast. We have 600 episodes that we’ve done of that show over a number of years.

We’ve had people we’ve invited on our show that were horrible guests. We’ve had people pitch themselves to us. Early on, we did not vet people as much because we were looking for guests. We’re like, “Do you want to be a guest on my show? Great. Let’s do that.” We interviewed them, then Tracy and I would look at each other after and we’re like, “We can’t publish this. I can’t save that interview.” Here’s why I say it’s a naive thing for them to put off in any way that you’d want to have a pre-interview or vet them. The first thing we’re going to do if you have a show is we’re going to listen to your show. If your show is lousy, I don’t know that I want to have you on my show because that’s going to reflect on me as the host.

We had somebody who asked us to be a guest on their show and we went and listened to their show. I’ve never been afraid to be one of the early guests on a brand-new show. Some people won’t do that. They have criteria. If your show hasn’t been out there at least six months or a year publishing weekly consistently, they won’t want to be on your show. That’s okay if they’ve set up that criteria. Maybe they have many different shows that they’re a good fit for. They have to prioritize and they only want the mature serious shows. That’s okay.

I’ve never been afraid for the most part to be an early guest on a show because I know from my experience that statistically, those first few episodes of a show are going to get the most plays out of any episodes they ever publish. Maybe people that are reading now are thinking, “Why would that be? I don’t get it.” You’ve got to realize podcast listeners are binge listeners for the most part. They’ll find your show and try the latest episodes.

They’re going to see, “Are you still publishing today? How often are you publishing? You’re publishing weekly. Let me listen to the latest 1 or 2 and see if I like it.” If they like it, they’re going to go back to the beginning, especially the first half dozen episodes. Even if later they skip ahead and they don’t binge through all of them. They’re going to listen to the first half a dozen because they want to see what you’re all about and what’s the intent of the show. Listening to those early episodes can also inform them a little bit of how you’ve grown now to what you’re publishing now.

You’re not the same with your first few episodes than you are now, but those episodes are going to get the most plays. If I want to get the most exposure as a guest, I’m never afraid to be an early guest on your show. However, I am going to listen to hopefully at least your first or second episodes. We got this solicitation from someone who on paper looked good. When I listened to the show, the audio quality and the production quality of the show was so poor that I did not want to be associated with that. I didn’t want to lead others to have a false impression that because I’m willing to be a guest on that show, that was not worth listening to. I felt it was a poorly executed show. That doesn’t happen as much as people whose intent and vision aren’t in alignment with mine.

It’s rare that it’s from a technical perspective but it happens. It’s like, “I’m sorry. I can’t be on that show.” We refused. I’m going to check your show out. I’m going to listen to it if you’re inviting me to be a guest or you’re wanting to be a guest on my show doing that solicitation. Honestly, don’t you think that people will be much more inclined to say yes if you’re giving them a custom invitation, clearly not a cookie-cutter email? Also, they are commenting intelligently on something either you said in one of your episodes or something that another guest said or something that shows that you’re not a number on a list? Your chances of getting a yes are so much better. You mentioned what are some of the things not to do and what are some of the don’ts. We’ve talked about some of them.

Don’t assume anything. That’s an old cliché. Of course, they’re going to want to have me on the show. If they did any research on me, they’ll know that I’m the foremost expert in this or that I have a huge following in that. People’s lives are busy. You may be a big deal in your niche but do they know it? Are you going to assume they should know it? I don’t think you can do that. You’ve got to make it easy for them to say yes and break down those objections. If you approach it any other way, where you’re assuming they should know or if they should bother. You’re asking them to do work to consider you and get you on a show, that gets pushed to the pile of maybe if I have some free time and I want to get to this and vetting them, maybe I’ll do it, versus one that you’ve greased the wheels and made it easy for them to say yes. That’s not a problem.

Another thing that you can do is let’s say you want to go for somebody well-known. You think this is your whale and you want to be a guest on their show or maybe you could do the same thing. You want to invite them to be a guest on your show. To me, you’ve always got to have an angle that convinces them somehow not only that you’re worthy, but where there’s some proof for them. Social proof of some kind that would make them more inclined to say yes.

What I mean by that is let’s say I don’t know you, but I know somebody else that knows you. I talked to that person and I asked a few questions about you. In having that conversation, I find out something that I didn’t know about you that would be useful. Even if that person isn’t going to endorse you or make a direct referral, which if you can get that, that’s obvious, you should do that. I didn’t think I needed to say that one. Someone is not going to make that personal pitch but you talk to them.

I’ll use you as an example. Let’s say you know somebody in your neck of the woods in Utah that you don’t know them so well but know enough about them. We have a conversation and then I pitch them directly. I’ll say, “I was talking with Juliet Clark and I thought after talking to her that you might be interested in this type of interview on your show,” without putting words in your mouth. Anything that gives them a little context that’s grounded, even if it’s not a direct referral that it’s something that they can believe is happening and it is showing that you care that’s related to their show. You don’t necessarily have to have somebody directly making an ask for you, it feels more familiar to them. The more comfortable they are, the easier they’re going to say yes.

Tracy and I had that. I reached out to someone to be on my show and he mentioned that he had interviewed Mike Michalowicz and would I like an introduction because Tracy and I were working on Mike’s book. Here’s where the social proof comes in. He made the introduction to me. I said, “Tracy and I are working your book.” He booked my show three months out. I introduced him to Tracy who has a lot of social proof and he booked hers the following week. That’s the kind of social proof that you’re looking for. That guy suggested to me, “You should talk to Mike.” Mike was a great guest. I wouldn’t have reached out to him on my own because he is well-known. That was one of those instances where it all worked out. Somebody introduced us and said, “You guys would be a good fit. You should talk.”

This is a lesson that everybody in business for themselves in any way needs to learn and understand if you haven’t learned it already. You need to at least learn how it applies in different ways and not just the obvious way. When you go and pitch yourself to be a guest on someone’s show, it doesn’t matter what you say. It matters what others in the world say about you or have said about you. That’s social proof. You could tell me that you’re the best thing in America all you want. If I haven’t heard of you and I don’t know who you are, I’m going to approach that with a bit of doubt and skepticism until I see otherwise. How are you going to convince someone that you are worth more than a casual glance and moving over to the inbox? What is that little folder in your email inbox?

Spam?

Spam or it’s like, “I don’t have time for it today but I don’t want to trash it either.” The reality is, I never look at the things in that folder. To get in that folder, they’re probably pretty much dead to me at that point anyway. Still you’re like, “I don’t want to delete it. Maybe there’s something there, but I don’t see it yet.” It gets in limbo is what it does. If I then provide a piece of information that’s maybe a quote of somebody who’s got a little testimonial quote even or something, or what’s even better, if you can get a testimonial video. They have these programs where you can include these little video clips in an email. There are a few different services that do something like that, but you have to make it small so it can go in email, or provide a link to it in an email because sometimes those things don’t get through spam filters.

It’s like, “Tom was such a great interviewee or such a great guest on my show. His episode has gotten more attention than most of my other recent episodes.” It doesn’t have to be just that, but it could be many things. It could be about what you do or about something relevant to your book or whatever, but somebody else saying something about you that makes you look good and makes that guest think, “I might be missing out if I don’t book this person.” You’ve got to give them more and don’t assume they’re going to do the work because they’re not. I don’t have time. Nobody has time to do the work.

Podcast Guesting: Don’t be afraid to be an early guest because statistically, the first few episodes are going to get the most plays.

I love our friend Scott Carson and what he does. He has a whole page on his site that is devoted to the shows he’s been on. He’s putting their cover and their link. What a great way if somebody does check you out and they go over, there you have it. That might be a link that you include because they can listen to you being a guest on someone else’s show.

You should definitely do that after you’ve been a guest on a bunch of shows. You’ve got to show not only that you’re giving the host of that show exposure. Not only in social media, I agree on your website and anything you can do to demonstrate when you’re on a show, you scream it to the world as much as you can. They’re going to know you’re going to do that for them, absolutely. That’s a good point, Juliet. I can’t believe we haven’t covered that yet.

That does bring me to a point, I can always tell as a host, who is a user and who is a collaborator. You guys do my podcast. You put together my materials. We send them out to every single person and I can tell from the people who share it and share it frequently versus the people who are like, “I was a guest and thank you so much.” They don’t share at all. You have to be willing to share those interviews.

I’ve been becoming a little more aware how much of a gap there is with some people between what they easily could be doing and should be doing and what they are doing to promote themselves and to promote others. It’s shocking to me. You brought it up and I wasn’t going to be too self-promoting here and hopefully I’m still not. I’m trying to provide real value here. The reality is for every one of our clients that we’re producing their podcasts, for every episode that we produce, there are about 8 or 10 different pieces of material or elements that can be used to promote every episode on social media, email list or however it is that you want to promote.

You’ve got different graphics, a blog post, quotes from within that blog post, you’ve usually got a video or a video clip. Some people think it’s an optional thing to get audiograms. Here’s the point. I’ve had people who come to us and they’ve been podcasting for six months or a year. They feel like they’re not getting enough value out of it. They’re not getting enough exposure. Maybe they don’t have as many listeners as they thought it would have. The first question I asked them and this has happened to two different people. I asked them, “Tell me about your social media promotion strategy for every episode?”

A lot of them say, “I post prior to the episode coming out a couple of times about who’s coming out and when it comes out.” First of all, that’s the wrong strategy. You’re not promoting to a live broadcast that’s coming up and if they don’t tune in at that time, they’ll miss it. That’s not podcasting. That’s more like you’re promoting the big game that’s going to broadcast on Sunday night and you want to make sure everybody knows so they tune in to watch it live. That’s a bit of a different thing. With podcasting, promoting ahead of time can frustrate people because you’re saying, “I’ve got this great guest,” and you have to wait until next Tuesday to get it. When podcasters see you promote something, they want to click and get it now. Promoting something before it’s out is a waste of time.

The only exception to that is if you’re starting a brand-new show, and you want to raise awareness and build anticipation that the show is going to launch for the first time on such a date. That you could do, but I still would only do it a week before the launch. I would not do it months out. You’re going to frustrate people, “Do you mean I have to put this in my calendar and remember that I got to go back to look?” No, this is a waste of your promotion efforts. Wait until the episodes are published in general. When it’s published, you should be posting every single day. If you’re doing a weekly show, every single day after it’s out for the week until the next one publishes. At least promote once a day on each of the social media platforms that you are strong in. I’m not a Twitter guy. I don’t like Twitter.

I got off Twitter long ago. It’s too toxic.

Some people like it so it’s fine. If you’re a Twitter person, by all means, promote on Twitter, but I’m more on Facebook and LinkedIn. On those two platforms, I’m going to post once a day at least, and sometimes I might post twice a day because I’ve got 8 or 10 things to do over the course of a week. I can alternate which one I’m doing on Facebook and LinkedIn, which is the same one in both places. Who cares? Promote something about the episode every day for a week. If you’re not getting enough listenership, you need to hold a mirror and look at yourself first and say, “Am I doing everything I can do?” It’s not like you have to be a slave to this doing it every day, there are tools you can use to schedule all these social posts. You can spend a solid hour probably a week planning it out, scheduling it, getting it all done and let it go.

If you have enough budget, do what I do and hire someone else to do that for you. I don’t have time to do all that, but I’m going to make sure it gets promoted. To me, this is the easiest thing to evaluate a show. What’s your promotional strategy? What are you doing? Are you making enough noise? Are you raising awareness? That’s one thing and what that does is it demonstrates to others who might have you as a guest if they look at your social feed and see all these posts about not only all of your guests on your show, are you also promoting your appearances on other shows? I’m shocked at the gap that exists. They have a staff, support, and all these materials and they’re making one post for each episode once a week on one social platform, and it wasn’t the strongest social platform either. We’ve got to rewrite this plan. To me, it’s a low hanging fruit.

It definitely is and the problem is a lot of people don’t have a content calendar. I hand mine off to the VA to post the next month at the beginning. In September, my girl is putting October’s. Every week I have an old episode on Monday, my new episode on Tuesday. I have my book in between on Wednesday, but on Thursday and Friday, I’m promoting old episodes of somebody else’s podcasts that I’ve been on. I’m always rotating that in so I have something posted every day that helps everyone.

Here’s another thing that you can and probably should do. We’re doing this guest program with a lot of people and usually, they have something they need to promote. I had one who I was talking to who has a book launching January 1st. They’re planning months ahead. I’m like, “That’s great.” They want to be a guest on all these shows. First of all, they’re already starting too late to be a guest on 25 shows before January 1st. They started a few months ago because it takes time to do it and do it right. We can jump through some hoops and go and do our best. Here’s the thing that’s the big opportunity and potential big miss here. You’ve got this book and you want to promote it but you’ve got to go and make it clear that they’re going to get as much exposure from you as you’re going to get from them. There was another point that has escaped my mind and I apologize. There are many things running through my head as we talk about these things. I had a bigger and better point.

That’s okay. I’m going to throw a point in here. January 1st is a horrible time to release a book. I always recommend that it’s either November for the Christmas rush or late February or early March because people have a stack of books they’re reading already.

Isn’t that interesting? I wouldn’t know that because Tracy and I have a couple of books that we’ve written that still have not been published. They’re sitting on the sides.

I’m aware of that.

I know, but the podcast world is different. We see some of the highest listenership in December and January because people download a whole bunch of stuff that they want to listen to when they’re on their holiday break or whatever.

Especially when they want to avoid their family. Let’s get that in there.

In most years when people are traveling a lot, they want things to listen to on the plane or in a long car ride or something. Car rides are usually when I binge listened to a ton of podcasts. I always enjoy doing that.

Podcast Guesting: Unless you are starting a brand new show and you want to raise awareness and build anticipation, it’s not a good idea to promote a podcast episode ahead of its release.

The point is you’re trying to get them on shows now and if people are like me, I’m interviewing you because I had an opening now but typically, I’ve already recorded through December. I’ve got all of those lined up and sitting there. It’s the same with what you guys are doing. You’re trying to book and people have their plans already.

Unless you’ve got something compelling and interesting, podcast hosts will change their schedule or break in their schedule, push everything else out a week, or maybe put in a bonus episode. It will happen but you’ve got to have something very timely, controversial or relevant that’s worth it to them to break that schedule. Assuming they will do it for you is another big rookie error. They’re probably not going to do it for you. They’ll do it if it’s in their interest or in their listeners’ interest. You’re right, that’s the problem. Podcasters have schedules. Just because the timing is right for you doesn’t mean it’s going to work for them. We have a lot of people like you, Juliet, that already recorded out into November and December.

The idea that you’re going to get new interviews recorded now from late September to somehow recorded in October and November in time to publish them in December before a genuine book launch is late. Are we willing to try? Yeah, sure. We’ll do our darndest and try to make it seem to them. Some people will say, “I’ve got a book launching this date,” and that might mean, “If I don’t publish your episode before then or around that time, I’m going to miss out on the wave of interest in your book for my show.” Sometimes, you can convince some of that, but not always.

That’s so true and you guys sent me Mark Victor Hansen. He’s a big enough name. I moved. As far as promoting books, I made space for Malin Svensson, but I’m producing her book and she’s Jane Fonda’s personal trainer. You better be a pretty big name to expect people to shift.

You can maybe hope, imply, suggest and beg maybe to be like, “Do you think Jane Fonda might post about this book?”

She did endorse it. We’ve got a lot of great endorsement from big sportscasters who’s on that show with Jane Fonda. The comedian. There are Frankie and Johnny. I don’t know what it is.

I don’t know that one.

She’s one of her clients too. Lily Tomlin that’s who it is. She’s got a lot of great clients. That’s a great example of the person you would be willing to shift for. Keep that in mind. If you want a podcast, if you’re not that kind of guest, chances are you’re not going to talk somebody into shifting.

You have to decide. Put yourself in the shoes of this podcast host. Some of them might be so big that you’re not going to be speaking with the podcast host. They’re going to be some other gatekeeper in between you and that host. You need to present to them, what’s in it for them? Why is it going to be worth their while to have you as a guest, first of all? That’s the number one thing you want to do to be accepted as a guest on the show, but then once that happens, if you have a preferred time period that you want this to be published in, what’s in it for them to do it on your schedule and not theirs?

Sometimes the more famous somebody is or the bigger name they are, not only the harder it is to reach them, but the worse they promote it. It’s weird. You’d think, “A big name. They’re going to promote this. They’re going to have so many people following them. Everybody’s going to see it,” and they are terrible at promoting it. They don’t do it. Others have employees whose job it is to promote it and if you make their job easy, they love you and they’re going to do it. You’ve got to think about not only your own interests. That’s the biggest message that I would say in this.

Clearly, you want to be a guest on shows. You have a purpose and a need. That’s great. I respect that and I believe that’s true. If you focus on your needs, you’re not going to achieve the results you’d like to achieve. You’ve got to focus on and think about what their needs are. What’s in it for them? How can you help them achieve their goals? Also, stroking the ego thing is important and it works. It doesn’t have to be that transparent that you’re stroking their ego but show that you care, and you did some homework.

There’s got to be some context there as to why you’re pitching their show. Even if it’s a personal story and somehow you can relate it to something they said in their show, you’d be surprised there are so many ways to do it. It’s so tragic when I see people fall short on this. It almost makes me want to go and do a Facebook Live talking about what not to do sometimes. Not that I want to give the person any exposure because I won’t use their name. I won’t give them exposure, but let’s use them as an example. Maybe that’s what I was thinking about earlier.

When we talked about how to promote each episode, another good thing you can do is to go on Facebook Live. If you have the LinkedIn live thing, if you’ve been one of the people that approved for that, any of the social platforms, whatever your platform is, where you could go and do a quick live video, go on there live for 60 seconds. It doesn’t have to be longer. It could be 2 or 3 minutes if you have enough where you can say, “I published this episode. It’s a fantastic interview with Juliet Clark. You’ve got to check it out and here’s why,” then drop the mic. Don’t make it overly long, but in the comment to that post, put a link to where they can listen to the episode. That better be on your own website somewhere. I’m telling you that now. Don’t send them out to iTunes or anywhere else.

You’ve got to keep and make sure your turf is where they go to get that information. That’s for many reasons, we’re not going to go into it now. That would be maybe a different episode someday. Go live, live stuff is getting pushed to more people that follow you and connected with you. You do that on a regular basis for not only your own shows but your appearances on other people’s shows. When you’re doing that, you don’t just say, “I was on Pat Flynn’s podcast. We had this great discussion about this.”

Instead of sending people to Pat Flynn’s website or to his show on iTunes or whatever, you send them to a link on your website or a landing page on your website that has that information. Maybe it’s where all your other guest appearances are, like what you were saying Scott Carson does. People will see, “Look at all what they’re doing to promote other people’s shows.” When they do a little homework on you, they scroll through your social feed, “Look at all this. There’s a post every week or maybe more than once a week about their appearance on other shows.” That’s again going to show them you’re not a passive guest. You’re an active guest. That’s the thing I was forgetting, Juliet. Thank goodness, I was upset. I was like, “You’re going to have to edit that out of the podcast.” It’s not good.

I don’t edit it. You guys do.

I know but would it be an odd cut but now you could leave it in. It builds some anticipation. Is he going to remember or is he not?

Where can we find you if we want to find out more about the guesting strategies that you guys are putting together?

Podcast Guesting: Put yourself in the podcast host’s shoes. What’s in it for them? Why is it worth their while to have you as their guest?

For the guesting strategy, you’d want to go to Podetize.com and under the Services tab, there is Podcast Guesting there. On that page is a whole thing that talks all about all things we do. It’s more than pitching you to these other shows. There are a lot of other things that we need to do at a foundation level to make that work well. Also, we haven’t even talked about it on the backside of it. When your guest appearances on other shows publish, there’s even more than we do to give you the guest value from their show, on your website, social media, and other places. It’s a significant program. That’s where I would check it out, Podetize.com.

While we’re doing that, before we go, I’m going to see what the URL is. It’s under the Services tab and it definitely says that. That’s where you would find out. We also talked about guesting on our podcast Feed Your Brand, which is at FeedYourBrand.co. That’s a little odd one because it’s not .com, it’s .co. Tracy’s podcast, I’ll throw a shout out there. It’s The Binge Factor. It also talks about a lot of these similar things. Keep that in mind. It’s Podetize.com/guest-podcast-services. That might be a little too much for people to remember but it doesn’t matter. It’s on the Services Tab and guest program. It’s there.

Thank you for being on the show. This is the most we’ve ever talked. I talk to your wife every week and you’re in the background.

We would talk if we’d see each other at physical events, which nobody is having anymore.

That’s true. Thank you very much and we’ll talk soon.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Important Links

• Super Brand Publishing – YouTube channel
• www.PromoteProfitPublish.com
• WTFFF?! 3D Printing Podcast
• Feed Your Brand Podcast
• Chris Ippolito
• Podetize
• Mike Michalowicz
• Scott Carson
• Facebook – Tom Hazzard
• LinkedIn – Tom Hazzard
• Mark Victor Hansen – Previous Episode
• Malin Svensson
• The Binge Factor
• Podetize.com/guest-podcast-services

About Tom Hazzard

Award-winning strategic product design & development expert, Tom Hazzard, is a forward-thinking entrepreneur with great sales conversion skills. In addition to co-hosting the Forbes-featured fast growth WTFFF?! 3D Printing Podcast and the Feed Your Brand Podcast, he successfully launched over 250 consumer products raking in over $2 Billion at e-commerce and mass-market retailers with his wife and business partner, Tracy.

He believes that the goal of any product, service, marketing or business launch is to make “it” sell itself, that is why he often talks about streamlining business processes to keep marketing expenses at a minimum. Tom loves being in podcasting because he gets to meet people from many varied industries and because he gets to broaden his perspective from all the widely different areas of interests he encounters at work.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• superbrandpublishing.com
• Promote, Profit, Publish on YouTube
• Follow Juliet on LinkedIn
• Take the Quiz!