Are you searching for more information on podcast booking services?
Chances are you stumbled on this blog post while searching for “podcast booking service” reviews or the like.
And before we get started, please understand that the reason this post ranks so highly on Google is because we used podcast booking services to rank it!
I’ve said it a million times…link building through podcast guesting is the lowest cost, highest value, most-effective SEO link building tactic on the planet.
Even seasoned SEOs do not understand the power of these links…they still chase one-dimensional links via broken link building, link insertion or blogger outreach.
For those of you that follow me or my blog, you’ve noticed that I’ve been really into podcasting over the last coupe of years.
For many years [insert eyeball roll] I thought of podcasting as a fringe marketing tactic.
Because if I wasn’t listening to podcasts, no one else was either.
Boy was I wrong.
Podcasting is huge and has been surging in popularity.
I’ve never had any digital marketing tactic produce as much bang-for-the buck as I have with a strategic podcast guest booking program.
– Phil Singleton
Then I stumbled onto what I still think is the single biggest bang-for-the-buck tactic in all of SEO and content marketing: Podcast Interview Marketing
Is being booked on other people’s established podcasts really that much better than other link building techniques like guest posting?
Uh, yeah.
It’s so good in fact, that established a separate company call Podcast Bookers to deliver a unique type of podcast booking service design to extract more SEO value than run-of -the-mill booking services.
Down below, you will fine a 90 minute video that we use to training new clients to 10x their return on their podcast guesting campaigns.
But First, What is Podcast Guesting vs Podcast Hosting?
Podcast guesting is when you are booked as a guest expert on someone else’s podcast.
This blog post is primarily about the benefits on being booked as a guest on other people’s and influencer’s established shows, but I truly think to get the full benefit, that you should also have your own show (like I do).
Here is a Summary List of Podcast Booking Service Benefits
- New audience access
- Easier than guest blogging
- Less spammy than guest blogging
- Personal connection with influencer (host)
- High production value content
- More shareable and “launchable” content
- Social cross-amplification on steroids
- Free long form blog posts (via transcripts)
- Increase dwell time on pages (via embedded audio)
- “As Seen On” content for trust
- Online reviews (see video below for how)
- Sales (yes you can get clients)
- Backlinks from host’s episode show notes pages
- More “ripple” backlinks from episode syndication on high authority podcast directories
- New podcast subscribers (if you have your own show)
- Authority / personal brand building (you are introduced as a subject matter expert for Pete’s sake!)
How Much are Podcast Booking Services Worth?
Well, let’s look at the value of what you can get from podcast interview marketing.
This is a spreadsheet that is included in the video below, that assigns a market value to benefits according to retail rates we were able to find for individual marketing service that bring the same value.
Most notably, backlink building services and blogger outreach service cost more for similar quality links, yet you get NONE of the other benefits!
10x Better Than Guest Posting or Buying Backlinks
Here’s the video.
It’s long, around 90 minutes.
But it has all the secret sauce.
You see, getting booked on podcasts is great, but if you don’t have an SEO mindset, then you’ll loose 90% of the value from your campaign.
Podcast Booking Services Training Transcript
Phil Singleton: Hello everybody, I’m Phil Singleton and welcome to the Podcast Bookers podcast guest training and certification course. My name is Phil Singleton. I’m going to walk you through a training session that I think is going to help you get way more benefit out of guesting, that is getting booked as a guest on established podcast shows, which is what Podcast Bookers is all about.
A lot of folks out there provide podcast booking services, but they do so in a one dimensional way. And that is, “I’m going to get you booked on a show. You’re going to get access to this audience.”
Well, that is a great reason to get booked on podcast shows, but if you think of it from an SEO standpoint and all the additional benefits you can get out of this, you can increase your ROI by 10 times or more. And I want to give you some training and some tips and tactics on how you can get way more benefit out of a guesting campaign to the point where really, for me, I realized last year that I’ve been in SEO and Internet marketing for over 12 years. This is the most powerful form of SEO in terms of an SEO tactic or even a content marketing tactic that I’ve ever seen.
I’ve never had anything produce as much of a bang for the buck as I have with a strategic guest booking program. I’ve done this successfully for myself. I’ve been on well over 50 shows in the last 12 months, probably approaching 60. I’ve booked tens of thousands of dollars in new business, but that’s not why I got involved with it. I got involved with it because I saw a lot of benefits from an SEO and content marketing standpoint. I’m going to walk through each one of those so that you can enjoy some of the benefits that I have in terms of using this service and helping to grow your business, your authority and your own personal branding. So let’s get to it.
I actually had this slide up last, and I’m going to show you it again at the end, but I thought, “Hey, let me show this up at the beginning because I think this really will show to people when I say that there’s a lot of value to this, I actually mean there’s a lot of monetary value that we can prove.” And I’ve been trying to figure out ways even for myself to try and figure out and determine how we can increase ROI and if there’s any value that we can attach to these individual benefits that are actually occurring as part of a strategic guesting program.
And you’re going to see things as we walk through the presentation and the course where each one of these individual benefits like a high quality backlink, we know has a retail value of say at least $150 per link that you would get off of say, a show notes page, which you will see later. And if you really get on some of these bigger, higher authority sites and larger shows over the course of a successful longer term grassroots podcast guesting campaign, you can get on some that are going to give you in terms of a retail value, maybe be worth $1,000 or $2,000 a link more in terms of what other actual link building companies are charging for similar quality link, and get a lot more benefits on top of that.
But we’re going to break it down in links in terms of online reviews that you can gain out of this, building your online reputation, the benefits of personal branding and using guesting as one of the quickest routes to authority in building a personal brand. The actual value of having a whole show dedicated to you versus what an advertiser pays for a 60 or a 120 second advertisement on a podcast. So there’s a tremendous amount of value to the extent that an entire show that you’re going to be on is basically dedicated to you where you have advertisers just try and get in there and sneak on there for seconds, if not maybe a minute or two and pay top dollar just to get access to the same audience that you’re getting for your guesting campaign.
If you’re smart about this, like I think that we’ve been, you can actually get very high quality blog posts out of these efforts that can rank really highly if you go about them strategically and doing the right way. You get all sorts of social media benefits out of this, and you can actually get, as I have new clients, which to me has been the gravy. I would do it without it. I don’t put a value on this where, if you’re going in one of our guest blogging programs for say the four shows per month, you’re paying about $165 a show. You’re at least getting $600 worth of value out of each show that you get booked on. And on some of the bigger ones, if you get lucky as, as you do this, your ability to get pitched on bigger and better shows grows.
Really, the sky’s the limit in terms of value in what they can bring to you. But I think the value is much higher than $600 a show, and could be as high as 10 or 20 times that depending on the shows that you get booked on and how your performance and your value add is. We’re going to get back to this value summary at the very end of it because I’m going to try and prove this case. But I wanted you to see this ahead of time. It’s like, hey, when you get involved with this, we’re talking about real money and real value here. This is a very high powered, very effective content marketing campaign.
First: You Must Think of Podcast Guesting as a Virtual Speaking Tour
And I wouldn’t be doing it because anything that I do these days, I’m trying to make sure that I can get a 10 or 20x return on it, and this is certainly one of those tactics that can do that if you do it strategically. If you do it in a one dimensional way, you’re not going to get much benefit. You’ll get some benefit out, but you’re not going to get through the returns that I think I’ve seen over the last 12 months. So let’s get into some background here. First of all, the first thing that I get from a lot of people who are thinking about podcast guesting I think the wrong way is, “What kind of shows can you get me on? I’m I going to get on the big shows?” Like you’re going to hit this one grand slam that’s going to change your life.
…you’ve got to think of a podcast guesting campaign in terms of a virtual speaking tour or almost like a political town hall strategy where you are going out and seeing smaller groups of people.
It’s totally not like that. That’s the myth. If you’re looking, trying to get on a big home run, Tim Robbins show or Tim Ferriss or some other famous Tim out there that’s got hundreds of thousands, if not millions of listeners, it’s just not going to happen because these guys have their own booking staffs. They’re booked out for months, if not years. And they don’t have any problem getting guests that are a lot more famous than you or I are type of a thing. But that’s not really what the benefit of this type of program is. We’re trying to go after established and targeted shows that are within your niche. So you’ve got to think of a podcast guesting campaign in terms of a virtual speaking tour or almost like a political town hall strategy where you are going out and seeing smaller groups of people.
If you think of, if you’ve ever gone out and given a presentation to a group of 50 or 100 people in a room, that’s a pretty good showing. We’re doing that a lot of times in a guesting campaign where some of these smaller shows might only have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or a few thousand listeners, but they’re very targeted, they’re very dedicated and loyal to the host. This is one of the things I think I took for granted in the very beginning, a show host that allows you access to their trusted audience is a very special thing that should not be taken for granted because the people listening in and subscribing to the show trust the host and their content very much, and you just by nature of being guested or having the ability to access it, is a great privilege to be able to be introduced by somebody that these folks really trust.
So getting to talk to somebody for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes, and for somebody that’s actually giving you their seal of approval, that’s the host, great privilege. And something that I think that I probably took a little bit for granted in the beginning. But you need to think about this as a town hall strategy, a virtual speaking tour, and something where you’re trying to build up a grassroots campaign and that you’re getting in front of potentially a lot of your targeted ideal clients and building this up on a weekly or if you’re doing this once or twice a month basis, and there’s a lot of power to doing it this way. But if you’re thinking about, “Hey, I’m going to sign up, what kind of shows are you going to get me on?”
You’re looking at this the wrong way because there’s many other benefits that you’re going to get from being guested on a show and get access on a trusted website with a trusted audience than just trying to get that one time. “Oh, hope I get on a show with lots of people on it. It’s going to change my life,” type of thing. It just doesn’t work like that. So podcast, guesting, let’s talk about some of the obvious benefits, some of the ones that are going to back up maybe that chart that I showed you at the beginning. The first thing, I think first and foremost, again, like we talked about in the last slide, you’re getting access to a highly engaged audience.
Podcast consumers are people that are going to be advanced buyers and ones that want to be educated and learn. And you’re getting access to these folks. Again, they trust the host, trust the show, and trust the website that you’re going to be, and the social media channel that you’re going to eventually be marketed on. But one of the things that I think is absolutely beautiful about this whole type of a campaign is that once you’re prepared and have an idea of what you want to pitch and how you want to educate people in you’re guesting program, the host is doing all the work for you.
You’re showing up prepared, and giving your best 20 or 30 minutes. And after the recording’s done, you say goodbye, and the host is going to do all this work for you to promote your content and drive people back to that page that they’re going to create for you and potentially even your own website or your own gift, your own call to action. So if you think about some popular forms of content marketing, again, I’m an SEO person, and I think one of the things that people still do in terms of trying to get in terms of a content marketing tactic is going to be something called guest posting, and that’s essentially writing blog posts and getting them posted on high quality authority websites where you, again, you can get access to another audience.
And then hopefully earn an organic backlink back to your website that gives you, that Google’s going to pay attention for, and essentially give you credit and work into the algorithm. And over the course of doing it, over weeks and months. You get enough of these links that are going to contribute to better search engine rankings as well. That is a very, very hard, labor-intensive process where you have to pay somebody to create some great content on your behalf, or you have to spend a lot of time on your behalf to do it, then go out and pitch websites that are getting pitched all the time. This tactics becoming very tired and spamming. And it takes a lot of outreach.
And essentially what you’re doing when you give a blog post, the production value’s a lot lower because it’s just ‘a blog post’ that you wrote and you hopefully got a link back into it. Maybe you have a bio credit at the end of it, but it doesn’t have the production value that being guested on a show is going to give you. So a podcast show has a lot higher production value and is a lot more shareable, and it’s almost got this many launchable piece of content than you would get in, say, another form of content, like a guest post, which is really just almost like a raw post in and of itself, that doesn’t quite have the production value or the chance to have as much of engagement or sharing as again, being a guest on somebody else’s show is.
Podcast Guesting is Much Better than Gust Blogging
I mentioned, this is a very popular entrepreneurial website called Entrepreneurs on Fire, hosted by John Lee Dumas. He’s one of the top guys in the podcasting space. So if you already have your own podcast show, you already know John, you’ve probably listened to some of his podcasts. You might have consumed some of his content or taken some of his advice in terms of how to run your own podcast. But it’s really interesting when I talked about guest posting here is, if you look on John’s site, if you were to go out and say, “Hey man, I wish I could maybe find a way to get some exposure on John’s side through on Entrepreneurs on Fire, through a guest posting program.
What you see, what he has in a lot of websites have these days that have any type of authority or value to them. He’s saying, “We do not accept guest posts on Entrepreneurs on Fire. We do not contribute in any other types of blogs around.” You see, another popular form of content marketing is trying to approach influencers and trying to build up a round up post where you’ve got several influencers that provide a quote and aggregating that together and doing maybe a quote for your own website. Again, this is one of those tired things, there’s lots of outreach for, and people are getting like John than any other mini influencer or influencer that’s out there is getting approached, to try and get some content that people can leverage.
This just goes to show you that it’s a very tired tactic and hard to penetrate harder and harder to penetrate good websites and get exposure on them through a guest blogging campaign. Of course, podcast guesting is a lot different, and we’re going to show you this, but I just wanted to give you an example here of how hard a traditional form of link building and content marketing is through guest blogging. And I talked about production value. One of the things a lot of the hosts are going to go out of their way to do is, when you spend time with them, 20 or 30 minutes, a lot of them, I would say that the majority of them are going to go out and create or they’ve got some a graphic template that they use specifically for sharing.
Well, they’re really nice. They go through the effort of customizing them, they’ll get your headshot, they’ll put your name on it, and put a custom title of the show. They’ll send this out to you during the show, and also place it on the show notes page on their website, which we’ll talk about later. You don’t normally see this thing anywhere else, but again, you’re going and spending a half hour with somebody, and they’re going to go through the effort of promoting. And part of the promotion is, a lot of them come up with custom graphics for you that they’re going to use to promote in their social media channels, and maybe even their email newsletters and on their website.
This is just proof to show you and say, “Hey look, here’s another benefit of guesting campaign.” A lot of these times in each and every show, you’re going to have a custom graphic that the host is going to do for you or a member of their team. More benefits of podcast guesting. One of the biggest things and one of the reasons I got involved with it is because pretty much every established show out there, the way that they traditionally are going to distribute a new show that you’re going to be on, is they’re going to interview you, they’re going to record it, then they’re going to, mostly if they do it the right way, I think in terms of the podcast host, is they’re going to create a show notes page that has an embedded audio in it, and also has some notes and maybe even a transcription of the show along with the graphic that we saw on the slide before.
Within the show notes page, it’s on the host website on your episode that you’re going to be on. They’re typically going to ask you, “How can we reach you?” And include links to your website or websites, links to a special offer, or a call to action that you should have for the show, links back to your social media or any other resource that you’ve mentioned during the show. So huge benefit, if you think about this in terms of making sure that you mentioned your website and/or websites so that they get mentioned in the show notes and in almost all cases the host is going to link back to the resources that you mentioned there. So you have to make sure that you mention all the links that you want to mention in the show.
Massive SEO value here because those links are eventually going to be picked up by the Google crawlers, and you’re going to get a ‘SEO points’ for these because they’re coming from high quality websites that are going to be in or around your niche. There’s also another huge benefit that I stumbled on after doing the first couple of shows is, you can actually use your guesting program to accumulate reviews for yourself, for your own business. Now again, I’ve been on over 50 shows, probably closer to 60 now. And every case I go after an ask the host, “How was I in terms of sharing knowledge and being a guest on your show? Would you be willing to give me a review on Google or on LinkedIn,” or in some other place where I can capture the chance for them to review the knowledge that I share. And there’s multiple ones there because reviews are huge for many different reasons.
You’re spending that period of time with a host, great way to stack up your reviews in something I think is probably worth the value all by itself, just to the extent that you can get more reviews for your company or business or yourself as part of a guesting campaign. So you can also do something, this relates to reviews in terms of you’re building your own reputation, or in terms of maybe helping a client out that has reputation management issues. When you think about the way a show, a podcast show is structured, the whole show, the whole episode is about you, the guest, you the expert. They’re inviting somebody that has special knowledge to come onto the show to educate their audience or enlightened them with some a new tip or a tactic or some background inspirational story.
Well, because the show is about you, the title often has your name in it. The URL often has your name in it. The content on the show notes page on the host website has your name mentioned multiple times on it. Well, that helps you in terms of reputation management because you will see as you get on shows that have a higher and higher authority, that those pages will start to rank when somebody searches for your name, or if you’re doing this on behalf of a client. And if you’ve got somebody that has reputation management issues, you can leverage this in the background as a way to build up those show notes page on multiple podcasts, and build those up onto the first page for name searches, your own or somebody else’s, and start to push down maybe some of that content or pages where you might be dealing with some reputation management issues from the past.
It’s something that you can help to improve your reputation management terms of rankings right now, but more importantly, for somebody like myself, I’m thinking, I’ve got a way to stack the deck against maybe some reputation things that happen in the future. So the more shows you get on and the better you’re able to snowball yourself onto higher and higher authority, and more shows that have more reach and more authority, the more those show notes page on those sites are going to rank for your name when you rank them. So it’s a great way to stack the search engine result pages, the SERPs, with content from other websites that has your name on it.
Of course, you’re going to get … We’re moving on here into traffic. This is one of the things I think people think in the one dimensional sense. Yes, you get that one launch, you’re going to get access to listeners. You’re going to get traffic to your website show on the day of that launch or when it gets shared. Absolute benefit on this, a lot of times it can lead to direct sales if you’ve done a good job soft pitching what you do, educating and getting people to trust you on the show. It’s just a matter of numbers. The more shows that you do, eventually you’re going to resonate with one of the listeners, and they’re going to contact you and say, “This guy understands me. I need a service like this. I need to talk to somebody like this.”
And all of a sudden. you get a chance to suck them into your funnel or your education process that can actually lead to a sale. We’re going to talk about free blog post, something that I absolutely love and have leveraged to a huge extent for my own businesses. The personal branding thing on this piece is something we need to talk about, and we can’t underestimate the importance of it. A big part of being a successful marketer for your business or as a professional marketer is we’re all trying to differentiate ourselves in terms of building a personal brand and building our own authority as a leader in the space. Well, I think podcast guesting on shows that are in and around your niche is the fastest way for people to build authority.
There’s just nothing else like it because there’s no way to spend this little amount of time to reach an engaged audience. And then again, have somebody blast your name and call you an expert and showcase you on their website and on their show. Nothing really does that like a podcast guesting campaign. The list goes on and on, but even from just going through quick list of bullets, hopefully I’m making a case where I think this is the most powerful SEO tactic that I’ve seen in 12 years. It’s not the only thing that you should be doing, but there’s nothing else in terms of the amount of time that you spend going into any kind of campaign where you can get this many wins for this little time. There’s just nothing else that touches it.
I want to get into the actual value that you’re going to get from certain things that happen as a result of a guesting program. Well, the first thing that you just can’t argue with is when we get you booked or when you get yourself booked, let’s say for example on an established podcast, most of these websites that have podcasts, established podcasts are already advanced marketers, so if they’re doing their own podcast show, they’re likely doing lots of other things that have benefited the website by the time that you get on the show. Just about every show that we see, and that’s an established show that has 50 episodes or more, usually has a minimum DA value of 20 or more domain.
Podcast Website Have Naturally Higher Domain Authority
DA is Domain Authority, and this is a third party metrics that was developed by SEO industry leader, Moz. That’s essentially a measure of a website’s domain authority. What it tells us is how valuable a website in terms of the quality of other links that are pointing to its website. If you have a website that’s been around and you’ve have other people from higher authority websites linking back to your website, you tend that have a higher and higher domain authority. And when a domain authority reaches 20 and higher, the value of getting a link from that website on a DA 20 site and hire has much more SEO value to you.
There are a lot of companies, SEO companies out there that sell out link outreach or link building services, and the way they charge you for that is based on domain authority. So they’ll go out and say, “How is Moz domain authority of 20 to 30?” And if we actually click out of here and going to go do like a search and search Moz domain authority. If I look on this tool here and open the … If I go to my website, kcwebdesigner.com and do a search, you’ll see that my website has a domain authority of 43 out of 100, which is quite decent, high enough for a small business, a web design website.
It’s got a page authority of 52. So I’m way higher than 20, I’m not as high as you’d see like maybe a CNN that might be 80 or 90, but we’re not as low as a website that might be a zero or a 10 that doesn’t do any blogging, hasn’t been around that time or just has an inactive website. But just from a link building value … Scroll back down to where I was, hoops, you get a lot of website and SEO companies that are selling links services, are going to sell you the placement for 100 and 50 to $200, and in most cases even higher. Most of the ones that seeing right now are like 197 to 200 to $300 for a link placement, just for the link by itself.
Just by nature of you getting guested on a show and mentioning your website or your websites if you’ve a couple of different websites and getting that link placed on the host website and in the show notes page, you’re getting a minimum value most of the time of 150 to $200. So again, if we just look at this from an SEO standpoint and say you’re going through Podcast Bookers and we’ve got a $650 a month campaign for you, where you’re essentially paying about $160 per show, just the link that you get as part of this campaign is worth the value that you’re paying to be on the show. And there’s tons more value you’re going to see, but the link building value into the pure SEO value based on what the retail rates for link building as a one dimensional tactic is worth the fee that you pay on your own, or even if you do this on your own direct access.
But the whole point of it is you can assign or you can see monetary value for each length that you’re getting. So this is not a hidden value, this is something that’s out there. There’s proven fee rates and fee structures out there that will charge you for getting a link from a third party website. And we know based on what other people charge that getting a link from an established show is going to bring you each length that you get. It’s going to get you a minimum value of $150 per length that you get as a result of that show notes page. I’ll give an example here. I was on, again, I like you mentioning this, but I’ve been on many podcast shows for the last 12 months.
This is an interesting site, Active Campaign, some of you guys may have heard of it, professional marketers have, small businesses, maybe not so much, but this is a famous email driven CRM. A lots of people are using it, very fast growth, high tech company that a lot of marketers and small businesses use. Very high domain authority of 75, probably higher because I did this screenshot awhile ago, but a domain of authority of 75 … And this is an interesting backstory here because when I actually wrote the book, SEO for Growth with John Jantsch, who’s actually have got, of course a lot more influence and authority than I have, we actually approached these guys to say, “Hey, we’ve done this.”
The CEO, actually give us an endorsement for the book. I said, “Would you mind as part of our content marketing strategy for the book, SEO for Growth, can we offer you a guest post on the website?” And we were rejected. They wouldn’t let us give them a guest post for their blog on the site because they weren’t doing it, didn’t have a program, it wasn’t in the … or maybe they just didn’t, it’s just their policy not to accept it. But anyway, over a year or so ago when we went with a guest post, then they said no. As part of the podcast guesting campaign, when my booker approached them and said, “Would you have Phil Singleton as a guest to talk about SEO in the show?”
Here I found a way to get onto the website and now as a guest on the show, I’ve been able to get the same benefit, if not a ton more by being a guest. Now again, the post that we were going to put up was just a random educational posts that didn’t have a whole lot of information about me. On this show that I was on, you can see actually the whole episode title is, Finding Success Using SEO with Phil Singleton, a web designer, an SEO expert, Phil Singleton. So they’re actually saying, and by them it’s not me saying I’m an expert. It’s the third party in the host that’s reaffirming your personal branding and your authority.
Podcast Hosts Promote You as an Expert
When somebody else says it, especially when it’s coming from a higher domain authority site with a larger audience like Active Campaign has, a lot more weight and a lot more value because all of a sudden the people that are hearing and seeing this as it gets shared, they’re saying that I’m the expert, not me. Huge branding and authority building that goes along with this. And again, it’s not just a post that I was able to get onto their website with an author bio, the whole episode is about me and it’s mentioned in a couple of different sites. The same things are going to happen to you as you get guested on other folks’ podcast shows.
But the reason I pulled this up is to say, “Hey, I purposely,” and you should be doing this too as part of your campaign. “I purposely ahead of time know what sites I want to mention.” Of course these are all sites that belong to me, that I own or co-own. Each one of these cases, I mentioned Podcast Bookers, I mentioned SEO for Growth, which is a book that I wrote. I mentioned kcwebdesigner.com, which is my services website for internet marketing and website building. But if you look at this and break it down, a DA 70 has a minimum value per link of $750 a site, I got three epic, epic links on here that if you multiply them together, very conservatively just by getting booked on this one show, I got over $2,000 worth of value.
If I were trying to go out and try and have somebody else do this for me, I would’ve had to pay them two, two and a half grand to get this kind of value. Again, just this one show. I got these ‘free’ as part of it, in addition to me getting shared in their email, on their social media, on their iTunes and episode, within their website, on the show notes page. In addition to getting a whole page written up about me with the full transcript on it, I also got three high valuable links. So this was an absolute home run, but it just goes to show you that there’s real value within the links that get shown in the show notes pages.
You have to be very deliberate and you have to make sure that you have great calls to action so that people are going to want to push them to those pages. And that you mention them and you’re purposeful in how you mention your website, and maybe you mention it a couple of different times. These hosts is going to give you several opportunities, especially at the end to mention where people can contact you, but be deliberate about where you’re sitting. If you have multiple websites, if you got a book website, if you’ve got another a funnel website you can send people to, mention. Find a way to naturally mentioned them throughout the dialogue. So you’re doing so in a non “salesy” way, but one that incentivizes the host to add those resource links on the show notes page when it’s published.
Extracting the most wins. Again, I think I’m talking about this and as you’re seeing this and as you’re saying, “Okay, what shows can I get on the beginning?” And now we’re breaking this down saying, Hey, it’s a lot more than that. It’s about leveraging the host website and making sure that you’re deliberate about the things you talk about and the things that get posted up on the show notes page.” One thing you want to think about this whole process and you can see that I’ve done this as we’re halfway through this presentation, is you want to make sure that you keep what we would consider like a Google or an SEO mindset.
Optimize Your Podcast Talking Points for SEO
Make sure that as you go through and you’re getting guests on other people’s shows that you’re thinking about the words and the phrases that you’re saying. You’re thinking about how can I make sure that this next show that I’m going to be on before I talk to somebody, after I talk to somebody, the actual content and things that I say within the show that I’m thinking about things in a way they’re going to benefit me in multiple ways and not just about that one dimensional, “Hey, I’m going to get a shot at … A certain group of subscribers are going to listen to me when the show launches.” And that’s it.
And then as you’re thinking about it, and as you see shows get launched and as you see things get shared and as you see show notes pages from the host get published, think about ways that you can learn and tweak and repeat it so that you can continue to get more and more value out of your guesting campaign, because you will get better at it over time, you will build up more influence. You will think about ways, and this is a really important thing that I want at the end to get more value out of it. Let’s go through and break these things down one at a time.
Get Decent Podcast Equipment for Your Interviews
First thing, equipment. You got to have great and decent equipment. You’re going to have a Skype account. Go to Skype.com, they’re free, get yourself one. Over 50% of the podcast shows that you’re going to be on, are going to want to record you on Skype. Some of them will do it on third party recording systems like Zoom or Zencastr, but you’re going to have to have a Skype account because virtually half or more people are going to want to contact you through your PC, through a headset on a Skype account. If you don’t have any kind of headset, get one now. One of the ones that most podcasts show are going to recommend that you get is a Logitech ClearChat.
Go do an Amazon search on this, they’re all over the place. I think they cost anywhere from 20 to maybe $35. But if you do H390, it’s a USB connection, plug it right into your laptop or your desktop, you sound really great and the hosts are going to appreciate that. And you’re going to sound really good too when you’re on it for a very low cost. Don’t try and do it through your speaker, I wouldn’t try, and if you can help it through just the earbuds on a phone, invest in a ClearChat headset if you want to bust out and do a little more research and get something a little bit better.
There’s lots of stuff out there, but I’m going to recommend that virtually for all of our clients anyway, that they invest in the Logitech ClearChat H390. And make sure you’re in a really quiet space because like I said, if you’re in a place, don’t try and do this in a coffee shop. Don’t try and meet with your podcast host in a noisy office space or in a conference room. Give him your full attention, if they know that you’re in a quiet space, they’re going to know that you really thought about this and you appreciate the drama show. Give the host your full attention, don’t try and do emails or any other type of work that you’re going to do on this.
You won’t do it in the beginning because you’ll probably be amped up, but as you do more and more of these, you get more comfortable, and there might be some more motivation to try and sneak in some work. But your headset, they’re going to pick up everything and they’re going to hear those mouse clicks and they’re really not going to be very appreciative. And again, I just want to reiterate, getting on somebody’s show whether they have 50 or 5,000 or 50,000 subscribers is a true privilege, and you want to take advantage and not take that for granted, and take advantage of every opportunity that you get and give your full attention.
Make Sure Your Website Is Up To Date & Professional
Number two, your website is key, it has to be up to date and it has to look good. Lots of people that contact us on Podcast Bookers, they’re not going to consider you. If they’re good, they’re going to look at you. We’ll talk about how we present you and having a one sheet so you look professional, but your website has to be up to date, has to look good. You have to be proud of it because nobody wants … The hosts are going to try and drive people to your social media channels and your website. And if they can’t be proud of where they’re going to send you to, then they’re going to be less likely to want to book you on your show.
But not only that, you’re going to lose a huge opportunity, if you don’t have a great website, it’s got great content, great call to action, and it looks at least professional. I’m not talking about an award winning website, but there’s a lot of people that just have a half bake website with not a lot of great content on it. You’re going to lose a huge conversion opportunity, you’re going to lose that opportunity for a sale if somebody come is driven to their website and like, “Who is this person? They don’t even have their own website up. But here they are being pitched or speaking to me as an expert and their website really looks like it was done 15 years ago and they haven’t invested in any kind of content.”
I think before you consider any content marketing campaign, especially a guesting campaign, you’re going to want to make sure your website is in order, because I can guarantee you, the host is going to take a look at them, and anybody that’s interested in what you have to say is going to come back to that and you’re going to lose a real opportunity if you don’t have your site set up. So make sure it’s professional. I’m not talking to scare people away and say you have to have an award winning site, but it should look professional, be error free, load properly and not look like your nephew did it 10 or 15 years ago. It’s got good content, it’s plain I’m sure it’s fine.
But make sure you load up on the know-like-trust factors, read up on Duct Tape Marketing and in StoryBrand, and make sure that you’ve got some of those conversion factors on your website. So anything where you can show your book or your ebook or testimonials or trust badges or anything that proves and reinforces your authority is really going to be impressive to those listeners that actually do a little bit of follow up and come to your website, either to cash in on your giveaway or your ebook or download or whatever you’re giving as a call to action at the end of the website, or just thinking about you as a potential person that can solve one of their problems or someone to potentially hire.
And you got to make sure your website’s set up for lead capture. I think I didn’t do a great job of this in the beginning, but then I saw, “Oh my gosh, I’m actually getting clients off of this. I got to make sure that I’m set up and I’ve got something really attractive to incentivize people to come and leave their email.” And the better you get at this, the more you’re going to get a higher return off of potential clients from this. This is an important thing to do, pre-booking and post show, and just keep improving on that.
Make Sure You’re On-page SEO Is Tight So You Get the Full SEO Benefits of Podcast Booking Services
You are getting a lot of SEO benefit out of this, so take another look at your website and making sure it’s set up on page for SEO factors because you’re going to be getting some great backlinks, and if you don’t have your website set up the right way, you’re not going to get the full benefit of this great SEO activity and signals and links that you’re going to be getting. Just take another look at your site and make sure that you’ve got it up to speed because you will get a higher return on it if it’s set up right.
We’ve got a one sheet here, mine I’m actually redoing it. This is one of the things that we will do for you as part of setting up for the podcast guesting campaign, but it’s a really super important thing to have because one, it looks cool. It’s great for personal branding. As we pitch you, as you get pitched to potential show host, nine times out of 10 they’re actually going to look at your one sheet and scroll through it. But I think what’s really powerful about a one sheet is that you have the opportunity to draft up two or three sentence of your bio, which nine times out of 10 is what the hosts read at the beginning of the show to introduce you.
Create a High Impact One-Sheet
I can’t explain how this is, I can’t emphasize enough how important this is to be able to put words into the host mouth as they introduce you, because again, you saying it is worth just about nothing, but when somebody else says it and quotes you as an expert or says some of the things that you’re great at, has a huge, much more value into it. And you have the chance in your one sheet to be able to craft and put words in somebody else’s mouth. And again, it all feeds into the SEO personal branding authority, making you sound like a more interesting guest or somebody that’s got something interesting to say or some an important tips or advice in terms of educating people. And also just being able to spin and craft where you want the direction of the interview to go.
A lot of these guests that are out there, established shows, they’re always looking for somebody that’s interesting to the extent that you can actually give your own suggested interview topics and actually again, frame the questions in a way that you’ve got a way to give them some ahead of time. A lot of times, these folks, if you’ve done it the right way, we’ll ask these questions, or ask something in and around what you provided them with. And then down below to anything you’ve got in terms of trust factor, a book, an ebook that you might’ve written, awards, anything where you can show them to be like, hey … Because again, these people, they have their shows, if it’s an interview based show, the onus is on them to be able to consistently provide interesting guests.
And your one sheet is that one opportunity where you can show people immediately that you have something to offer, and it’s kind of that one selling point and again, there’s lots of different places up in this one sheet that we can help you out with, but a lot of it’s also on you in terms of the things that you want to talk about, so that you can frame and steer the interview into topics and questions that will help you get your message out in a way that educates people. So the interesting super important, make sure that you’ve provided the proof that you have on anything that’s out there in terms of your accomplishments and what might be interesting to that audience. And you’re going to frame the topics and the questions.
Again, down here, we’re making sure that people see our contact information and some of the links that are down in here are included along with the contact information. You want to make the topics and the questions broad enough so you’re not zeroing too much on just one type of audience. Because for instance, in my case when we’re talking about web design or SEO or any type of internet marketing, I could just zero in and say, “Hey, you know what, I only want to talk to people that have an audience of web designers or SEO folks.” I really don’t want to do that. I can open this up and say, “You know what? I can talk to anybody that’s got an audience of any small businesses.”
And if their audience list is about people that want to write books, well, I can write how to leverage your book to make sure you get more SEO benefits out of it, or supposedly they have restaurants, there’s all sorts of ways. If you make your topic relevant to a broader base, you’re going to get booked on more shows. So even on surface level, it might not look like, “I’m an SEO web design guy, why would I want to get booked on a show that largely has restaurant folks or restaurant owners? Because I have an angle for them, and if my topics and questions are broad enough, I can frame this in a way where I can add value and still be interesting enough to that audience. And that’s what you’re booking and trying to do in this grass roots strategy, is try and get out there and get in front of people in a way that we can reach as broad an audience as possible.
Share Your Best Tips, Advice & Actionable Tactics
Pre-show number four, remind yourself to teach and share your best info, and this is your one chance to make an impression on this particular group they’re getting interviewed on. Never ever sell on anything, don’t try and be sneaky about it or pitch too hard during the middle of the show or spin the host questions into something that doesn’t fit into what you’re trying, your agenda, what you’re trying to sell. Use that at the end, almost all the time, the hosts are going to say, “Hey, tell us what you’ve got going on right now, or how people can contact you. Any kind of special offer, that kind of.thing.”
You can soft pitch and soft sell offer that you have, but really, the today’s content marketing is selling by teaching. Nobody wants to hear your pitch, they want to hear your inspirational story, they want to hear your tips and tactics in a way that’s going to help that audience grow or get better or improve their businesses. Ahead of time, spend a couple minutes, read the host website bio, know a little bit about them, where they’re from. You don’t have to spend too much time because one of the things about podcast guesting is that we don’t want you to have to spend a lot of time.
What will benefit about doing this is that you can spend five or 10 minutes pretty show, get up to snuff, show the host that you care enough to know their name, know where they’re from, maybe listen to a couple of minutes of a podcast or two ahead of time so you can hear their voice and say something. A lot of times I’ll listen to part one and I said, “You know I listened to your last podcast and you actually mentioned this.”A lot of those kinds of little touches go a long way in terms of making a connection with the host because of all these benefits that we talked about, one of the things that we’ll talk about later on, I’ll make sure, I’ve included this part of the presentation is, if nobody else listens to any of these shows, you’ve got a unique opportunity to spend 20 or 30 minutes with a person who’s listening to you for that period of time.
Try To Create a Relationship with the Podcast Host
So it’s a great way to make a connection and meet a new person, a new person that maybe collaborate with, that’s going to have your undivided attention during the show, to the extent that you can try and reach out and prepare a little bit and show that you’ve looked up this person and that you cared enough, I think to make a note of something special about their background or experience will really make an impression, and I think set the ground works out for a great interview. Like I said, listen to parts of recent episodes, know where they’re located. I always ask a little bit about the audience.
Even if I can figure it out from a five or 10 minute review of the website ahead of time, you can always ask about at least how it breaks down and say, “Hey, I listened a little bit of your show, it seems like your audiences is this. Is that right? What’s the background? Is it business owners as a consumers, is it the moms, the dads, or mostly female?” Anything you know that will help me angle the show to that group is great, but you should actually also do it, like I ask a lot of time because, I use the same stories and a lot of the same advice, but I will try and re-craft the answers a little bit that I give to make sure that I’m trying to specifically speak to who their main audience is.
That I think is the big benefit of pre-show, is spending a little bit of time ahead of time, getting yourself through routine that you have an idea who their audience is and then you frame your answers or your story to the audience instead of just repeating the same story or answers over and over again. Oh, this is one of my favorites, intentional mentions. Make sure, and I actually did this in part of my own podcast, so I’m big into gasoline, but I’ve got my own podcast show right now, but be purposeful if you can about mentioning other books or other influencers or even other companies you might want to work with. One of the things I’ve done I think that’s worked out for me really well is, use an influence or using the example of somebody else, and mention a company that does something really well as an example.
And when it comes out, when the show comes out and launches, as you share on your social media channels, you can say, “Hey, check me out on this podcast. We talked about this subject, we also mentioned some great companies like ABC Company and this influencer that wrote this book. And a lot of times if you do one or two of these tags on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or maybe on Facebook, you’ll get a share or a thanks or some Kudos because you reinforce that company or that influencers status, and they like to be mentioned. That’s part of the nature of it. So if you can make notes about some of the other folks, it’s another way for you to amplify the benefit of your guesting program because you’re drawing other people and using them as an example within the interviews.
If you’re a little bit more intentional about that, something that’s very easy but something that a lot of influencers and companies are going to like because as everybody likes to get a shout out. And then when they come on and about, again, social tag these when they go live, and is everybody going to retreat a re-share when they’re mentioned? No, but you’re going to be surprised because a lot of them will, and a lot of them will be thankful. Call to action. This is probably one of the most important things to have because if you’re looking at a guesting campaign as a way to get direct access to new clients, and you should because it will happen if you do it right overtime, is to make sure that you got a very good call to action and a reason for somebody to visit the website. Free Ebook offer, free consulting, half hour talk.
Have a Great Call to Action Ready at the End of the Podcast Interview
I’ve done a couple of them, I’ve actually raffled off either free books or even gift cards as a way if I know the audience is super targeted enough to make sure that I get that targeted click back to my website. But the more deliberate you are about having a call that say, if you go to the end of an interview and just say, “Oh, I’m going to interview, my name is Phil Singleton, follow me on LinkedIn, go to kcwebdesigner.com. That’s good, and that’s okay but it’s a lot more compelling if you go and say, “Hey, I’ve got something really special for your group today, John. What I’ve done is on my website, I’ve created a special page, and if you go to this link, you will fill out this form and I will give you a copy of this book that sells for 1595 online or a free website review or whatever it is.”
But the sexier you make that call to action the better chance you are to get somebody to get to that page, and the better chance you are to be able to tag or pixel them or get them to fill out that form and get them into your education or your sales funnel. So whatever you do, make sure that you stay disciplined and try and improve that call to action over time because that’s going to be one of the biggest bang to the bucks, and one of the big higher ROI items. You can actually grow your customer base by leveraging on people that are actual listeners on the show you’re going to be on.
Have Your Podcast Resource Links Ready
Resource strategy. I’ve mentioned this already, but I want to make sure that you’re very deliberate about the sites and the links and the special offers that you do. And that, make sure even note those down every once in awhile. I’m even getting into better habit right now of being very specific about mentioning a specific blog post on my website or one of my other websites or making sure that I send them to a different site every time and mixing it up if you’ve got multiple websites, And really trying to customize that offer to the extent that you can really, really helps because again, the more you customize it for a given audience, the better chance you’re going to have it actually getting a sale out of it. And then just provide these links with SEO in mind.
I come from SEO, so every time I’m on a show, I’m thinking of, “I want to make sure I get a great backlinks.” So I never forget this, but one of the things I see about a lot of guests booking services or a lot of people that do get guested on programs is, they’re thinking about SEO last. You’re losing a huge opportunity to get massive value out of this, and you just don’t want to do any show without thinking or having SEO at the top of mind on this. And I think if you write it down and make it a habit, you will get that, but you just don’t want to forget about that piece of it.
Now, one of the things that I’ve done is I actually have gone at the end of every show, I send a couple of different emails back to the host. And I want to make sure that every time somebody does a show that if they didn’t hear it or didn’t pick up the links that I mentioned, I will send them this. I’ve already got pre-prepared, so the links that I want to have mentioned are on here. In this case, “Here’s somebody that we work with, actually, I would consider almost like a barter client. They got a SEO for growth, we’ve got Podcast Bookers, which is our own website, KC Web Designer, which is mine. Actually I’ve a different SEO website where I put my gift link on this one.”
And then I put a link to my LinkedIn page, one, two, three, four, five, six deliberate links that I want to, and I sent this to them. And not only did I do it and it helped me make sure that I’m getting extra links on their website, the hosts really appreciate it. John Lee Dumas, he said, “Man, that’s awesome. Perfection. Jim, make sure all these get in the show notes, all, A-L-L. I just took the extra step of reaching out really in the effort of trying to make it a lot easier, but also trying to make sure that I’m going to get the SEO benefit. And this is just one of those things when we take that extra step, you are sure to get a lot more SEO points out of it.
Exchange Online Reviews
Oh my goodness. Now this is my very favorite one. Ask for reviews. This is huge. If we wipe out every other benefit on a guesting program or getting on a show, this again is one of those things that just by itself is worth the time and effort and maybe money that you’re spending, but at the end of every show, you want to make a special ask. You want to send an email in real time and you want to offer to review the host as well. Every podcast host out there, established shows that have 50 or 100,000 listeners down to the ones that are just getting started, maybe 50 or a 100, they all want more iTunes reviews. They all want more reviews somewhere.
So if you give them an opportunity to say, “Hey, would you mind reviewing me as a guest on your show? I would love to reveal you too.” And you can start to stack your reviews up on LinkedIn or Google+ in a way that will change your business. I say, I don’t want to sound too salesy or over the top, but I’ve gotten over 50 new reviews on my own properties and it has been a game changer. I send this template, “Hello there, host. Thank you so much once again for having me on your show. If you would consider it, would you mind leaving me a positive review with respect to being a guest on your show and the value of knowledge shared? If so, please send through this link.”
I have my own review funnel that I send, you can make your own or somebody can help you make it like us, but this is a fabulous, very easy thing to send something to and redirect people to where you want to send them. “If I can reciprocate by leaving a review somewhere, please let me know. I would love to do so. Thanks again, Phil Singleton.” I send this literally at the end of every show while I’m still on the show, after they stop recording and I tell them I’m going to do this. And a lot of times, I send it while they’re still there and I ask them, “Did you get it?” So you still get them when they’re really hot and tell them it just takes a few seconds and you’d like to give them an iTunes review. Super awesome way to get more reviews for your business.
If you go to the website link that I just show you, ours is a review funnel, which is a single page, it sends them right here. If you click this, it send you right after where I want to send you. I think in this case, it goes to Google+, but I can send them to LinkedIn, I can send them wherever I want. I can send them to Facebook, but I’m still trying to boost up my LinkedIn and Google+ reviews. So I send my review funnel which is right here, so if they click onto this, they land on this URL. If they click on this fifth star, we send them right to Google+ and it’s kind of a thank you and that makes it really easy. That’s an example of one that I got and here’s John Lee Dumas gave us one.
This is third review he has ever given because nobody ever asked him. I asked him, Phil drop value bombs, entrepreneur on fire. What a guest.”Great review I got up on Google+. What’s really, really powerful about getting these reviews is once you get reviewed on a show of this caliber or any caliber, we as a podcast booking agency, when you tell us this, we can then take these reviews and use them to get you on better shows, so the next times my booker goes out and tries to book me on shows, they say, “Here’s Phil, he’s an expert on SEO. Here’s what he likes to talk about, here’s his one sheet. By the way, here’s a couple reviews that John Lee Dumas and Josh Patrick said when he was a guest on their show.”
Now all the sudden I look like a great guest, which makes it easier for me to almost snowball my chances on getting on higher and higher caliber shows, and you’ll do this. My first couple of reviews are on smaller established and as I’ve done more, I’ve been able to use that to get on better and better shows. This is huge. It’s huge to get the Google review, it’s huge to reuse the Google review as part of our own guesting outreach. I then also use this review on other places, like my website to show other people that some of these influencers have said great things about me. This review strategy is huge and it all comes from just a strategic guesting campaign.
And nobody that I know has gone out and used a guesting campaign as a way to have a proactive review management on online reputation management strategy. This is killer. This by itself is worth every penny, anything that you would spend, and it really makes an outreach program probably worth like $500 to $1,000 of show if you do it right versus spending a 100, $150 to $200 a show, whatever it takes you to get booked on it. Just tremendous value. But again, almost everybody that I know, every booking program out that’s out there does not stress this. And this is a killer return on investment.
Re-purpose the Transcript (with the Podcast Host’s Permission)
And if you don’t do this after every show and ask for a review and then you find ways to recycle it, you are losing a tremendous piece of ROI from a program. And this, I can’t stress this one enough. Free blog posts. Again, the gift that keeps on giving. Most hosts and most shows that you’re going to be on, will not take the effort, time and effort to transcribe the audio into a text file. So they’ll do a review, they’ll do a summary, they might write up 250 or 500 words about the show, and then they’ll provide the links and then they’ll use that page on their website, that link on their website is what they’ll use to share out on Twitter and social media and even in their email blasts and things like that.
One of the things that I’ve done as I noticed, hey, people aren’t doing this, but there is a content goldmine in here. And I asked the first show that I was on, I was like, we talked about 40 minutes, “If you’re not going to use the transcription notes, would you mind if at my own expense, I went and transcribed these up on Rev.com, which is a place where there’s human transcribers that you pay a dollar a minute, and they will transcribe and edit, an edited form of a interview and send it back to you in a word document that you can then use as a blog post.”
This is unbelievably awesome. I’m going to give an example of this, I’m going to block out of this. let me give you an example of like the first one that I did. If I go to Google.com and I do SEO benefits of podcasting. Oh, it’s great because we have one of these shows come up, actually Podcast Bookers comes up in the position zero in the knowledge box, but the number one organic is actually on my website. And all of this blog is, it’s a blog post, it ranks number one globally. I took a show that I was on, which is the WordPress Chick, here’s the original show.
I was a guest on this show and she chose not to transcribe it and I asked, and I took this show and she said it was okay, and I transcribed it and I put the transcription notes up on my page and I turned it into a blog post. I made a little graphic, I pulled out some quotes, I put backlinks in it. I put some page titles and some other … And I kind of dress it up a little bit, and this ended up being like a 10,000 word, the post is huge. And this transcripted podcast of somebody else’s show that they weren’t going to use, I repurposed it and made it into a blog post on my show, and of course, I gave full credit back to her website and actually point back to the site, but I got a free long form blog post from this show.
Get a free blog post, most hosts don’t transcribe, ask the host if it’s okay to transcribe it. You can go on Temi.com, which is an automated way the transcript … I’m not too crazy about Temi because it’s not human edited, so it does a pretty good job of giving a raw file and it’s like 10 cents a word. So it’s like for three bucks, you can get a podcast show transcribed, but too much editing for you to go through, but if you to rev.com, that’s actually a dollar a minute, so a 40 minute show will be $40. Most shows are 20 to 30 minutes. If you think about 20 or $30 to transcribe something, dress it up and use as a blog post on your own website, it’s a great way to get a free blog posts out there as long as you’re going to be willing to take the time and optimize it like I’ve done, and don’t forget to optimize and do that.
If you’ve got a weekly blog content struggle or you want some long form content on your website, I wouldn’t completely substitute transcribing some of the show hosts you’re going to be on for bob, but that’s a great way to get some new content in a different form on your website. And if you do it right, you can actually get the post to rank. I’ve got several cases of this where the shows that I’ve been on have been transcribed and turn them into blog posts and now they rank for moderately to even some, fairly competitive keywords. That was part of the demo on there, but I’m going to actually show you again, if I come out and do, on my own podcasts, let me show you a competitive one where I went and did one just recently for my own show. And I did like attorney SEO tips, I think it was.
Here’s a show that’s only a couple weeks old on “local attorney SEO tips“, pretty competitive keyword. I’m one, two, three, four, five, five, mid page five, two weeks out on this, where I actually took one of my own podcast on this and then I transcribed and turn it into a blog post. Within two weeks globally, I’ve gotten into a top ranking for a fairly decent longterm keyword. So just that in an of itself, getting a free posts out of this is a huge value. You can do it for your own podcast, and I believe that you should, but there’s no reason why you can’t ask one of the hosts on one of the shows that you’re going to be on if it’s okay.
And I wouldn’t go out and transcribe a show unless you get permission, but I always ask, I said, “Hey, listen, I noticed you don’t transcribe your shows, would you mind if I transcribe this show and put it on my website and I’ll give you a backlink back to it?” And I’ll do it. I usually tell people I’ll do it a week or two or a couple of weeks after the show, so their initial episode launch goes out first and then we get a second one, maybe two weeks or a month later where the show is almost going to relaunched on my website when I do a blog post using the transcribed audio.
Create an “As Seen On” Section on Your Website
Repurpose some of the stuff on your own website. I’ve aggregated some of the shows, I’ve used some of the audio files, like when you can go on and give an example even on this site, on my site here, anytime there’s a show notes page, like this is my own show notes page for my own podcast, typically, what you’re going to do is embed the audio file from somewhere like Libsyn or wherever the host is the show or the audio file. We can always go onto some of these players and click, where you can grab the embedded file like you would on a YouTube video, and you can take that and then actually embed the same video on your own website. So this is easy to grab.
Somebody could take this, put on their website and all of a sudden, this little player here would show up wherever you’d want it to. Adding, if you didn’t do a blog post and you’ve been on somebody’s show, I’ve taken some of these rough gun and use some of the embedded video and use them to dress up blog posts or pages on my own website, because one of the cool things about having embedded audio on your website, when somebody clicks it, they stay on your website longer. Well, dwell time on a webpage is an SEO ranking factor. So anytime you get some rich media like this, like an audio file where somebody, it doesn’t take too many people to click it to whereas if they’re on their website and they stay on longer, it’s a strong, strong signal to google that the page is valuable and they’re more likely to rank it, the longer people stay on their website.
We like to use, when I say rich media up in here, to the extent that you can use a video, because a lot of times these podcast hosts will actually, they’ll video record you, they’ll audio record you, and you’ll have a chance to embed both these types of files. You can reuse them on your own website or on other pages and get more on page SEO value by reusing and repurposing some of that content.A lot of professional podcasters or professional content marketers will start to take some of the shows that they’ve been on and create a page on their own website, and they’ll show like, “Here are some of the shows that I’ve been featured on.”
And all of a sudden, you can start reusing some of those podcast graphics or just even the logos from the shows and start to show like I’m thinking of doing, “Hey, you’ve see me on some other shows. I’ve been on Entrepreneur on Fire, I’ve been on Active Campaign, I’ve been on Duct Tape Marketing. I’ve been on some of these other WP Elevation, some of these other shows that have a large following within their niches. And for sure, I think I’ve mentioned this once already, using reviews that you get on your website are huge, because one of the things you want on your website is anything where you’ve got third party people saying that you are great at what you do.
And when you’ve got a podcast host saying that this expert came on the show and provide a great educational content, that’s great supplementary testimonials also to have in addition to your own clients, and more third party social proof that you can use to stack your website up to make it more compelling and improve your own conversion rates. Again, this is 10 things we were going through that it’s just one of those gifts that I think keeps on giving, but you have to think about this in terms of an SEO mindset and make sure that you’re on the lookout to extract as much value as possible.
When your episode goes live on a show, obviously, one of the main benefits for both the host and yourself is that your cross leveraging your social media channels. So you’re getting access to their social media and they’re getting access to yours. One of the things the host is going to want to do and one of the reasons that they feature you and make a custom graphic is so that you’ll also maybe in your email newsletter and your website on your social media channels, when the show goes live, you’re going to do your best to make sure that you amplify it in your channels while they amplify it in theirs.
And when you go out, when they post up on there, take a little extra time to go and say, and throw up on LinkedIn, wherever they are, and they post it up there, thank the host on the post where they’re amplifying, “Great opportunity, loved the show. Thank you so much for letting me share whatever you shared on the show.” Because part of this, having a proactive, cross sample amplification on both sides is a way for you to get more value, but also show the host that you are a good guests and also just makes you appear like a another good guest that might want to invite you on the show.
One of the things that I learned at the very end or towards the end of doing 50, 60 shows is that, oh my gosh, if I would have only had my own podcast way back on the first show, I would have had access to the ultimate groups of people that are already podcast consumers. I kick myself now because I have my own podcast called the Local Business Leaders Podcast, and there are about 10 episodes launched into it, but I just started launching it this year in 2018. Had I had that as a call to action on my website, I’ve already been in front of thousands, I think probably tens of thousands of podcast consumers. Whereas if I had my own show, I would have been picking up subscribers since the very beginning.
Create Your Own Podcast
So if you do this and it’s successful and it will be, if you commit to a longterm strategy onto it, at some point, you’re going to realize the same thing and be like, “Gosh, if I only had my own show, if I only realized how easy it was to produce my own show, I could have already had my own built in audience like myself. I could probably have my own subscriber base of maybe a thousand or 5,000 or even 10,000 subscribers that if I only had a podcast for them to subscribe to, I could have just picked them up because they liked what I had to say when I was on the host podcasts.” You’ve done this 50 times, picking up a thousand subscribers probably would have been easy. So you do get like an oh my God level, oh my gosh level access to ideal clients and to people that are already podcast consumers.
So at some point it, you just get into this self realization. It’s like, “Gosh, I need to have my own podcast.” And if you’re smart enough, like I wasn’t to start one now, it’s ideal, but then I think a lot of people are already just thinking of this as sloughed fringe marketing tactic, which it’s not, it’s about as mainstream as it gets right now. The fastest way to get, and it’s also all sorts of things with launching your own podcast, which have just absolutely blown my mind, but it’s a natural progression from guesting. And the one thing that I think of having my own show that’s been unbelievable is, we tried to do our own outbound sales 90 % of our stuff comes from inbound leads and I just figured “Hey, you know what, we do a great job, we’ve got great reviews, we do a great job for our clients, if I only try a little of this outbound selling and I just told people we existed and showed them our track record, we’d have so many more ideal clients.”
Well, we did that, hired somebody for three months. They were on the phone for 30-50 phone calls a day. We got one meeting and no calls, because people just didn’t want to be, call somebody up on the phone and are like whatever your pitch is, it sounds like you’re selling them something. Well, when I started the Local Business Leaders Podcast, I named it that for a reason, now all the sudden, when we do outreach for a CEO of an ideal client and we call up and say, “I would like to interview your CEO on the Local Business Leaders Podcast,” we go from 100% rejection to like almost 90% of being able to book a client on the show. A perfect way to gain access to people, a perfect way to gain access to folks at the C level, great way to give them an enormous amount of value and spend 20 or 30 minutes on the show.
And having your own podcast is just a mind blowing outbound/inbound technique that on top of all the other benefits that it gives you, what’s blowing my mind is the access to people is about the easiest thing you can imagine when you’ve got a podcast, I think that’s launch strategically. Think about that as you’re going through guesting campaign. If you really get into this and you’ve done it for like I have almost close to a year now, having your own show, it just becomes a natural progression. I wanted to hit the value summary again that we showed in the beginning, hopefully I’ve done a good job, and I want to get you excited about seeing that there’s actually real monetary value if you go out and make sure that you’re extracting as much value as you can on each and every one of these shows.
There’s absolutely no question that you’re going to get at least $150 if not $200 per show for each backlink that you get. Some shows aren’t going to have show notes, and in most cases, almost all of them do. Having one every once in a while that doesn’t do one is not that really big of a deal, especially if they’ve got good … I’ve been doing it for a long time. There are a few, but almost all of the established shows right now, they understand the value of having everybody come back to their website for the episode launches, so it’s 90 plus percent of the time you’re going to get a backlink back to the show, and you have to be very deliberate about it, especially if you want to get more than one.
Going after that review strategy, now, I put this at $50 getting a review up on Google. I think for me it’s at least worth, and I tell some of my clients when they go out and do their own small business review, reviews are everything, getting a small group or an army of people saying that you’re the best at what you do or you’re an expert at what you do is worth a lot more than $50 a review if you get up in the right place. But I wanted to put something that’s a minimum. I think it’s probably worth $500 to a 1,000 reviews, because I didn’t get people, they call us right now on the web design SEO that literally will say, “I’m only calling you because your reviews are so good.”And that’s just the way people buy everything now from Amazon to local services.
People want that social proof, and we have a killer way for you to stack the deck on this. So I put a minimum dollar of 50. I think this is way conservative, and you’re not going to get a review on every request but if you do it right and you bring your best effort to the show, I think probably two thirds of the time you’ll get a review off of it just because by nature of you’re doing a good job, and the fact that people want those iTunes reviews.Your own reputation, again, building up that personal branding and making sure that you have shows notes that have pages that are exclusive to you, that end up over time showing up when somebody does a search.
The Long Term Reputation Management Impact
I’m going to give you an example, and I’ve got a lot of places that say nice stuff about me, but if you go out here on a google search, I type in Phil Singleton, what you’re going to see is, I’ve got some of my own stuff up in here by nature of doing my own SEO, but as you can come down later, you’re starting to see the podcast shows that I’ve been on, Leading Results is a show that I’ve been on, the WP Chick is a show that I’ve been on. Many as we start going down to the second page, Jeffalytics is a show that I’ve been on. You start to see some of the shows, and Real Estate Rockstars is one that I’ve been on, Site Visibility is one that I’ve been on.
In my case, I’ve been a professional SEO marketer for many years, so I’ve got a lot of other pages that show up higher, but for a lot of small businesses are professional marketers, you’re going to see a lot of your podcast show pages show up at the top of Google. Now, if from the reputation standpoint, if you have somebody that’s got a reputation problem, like I talked to somebody today, a dentist in another city, another part of the country said, they were buying another dentist group where the previous dentist had some reputation management issues from some bad press that he got seven years ago, and some of that stuff, when you google his name is coming up on some of these press page.
Well, if you go out and do guesting campaign and you get booked on a lot of shows, those show notes page will start to outrank some of that older press. Now, in that case, each one that gets launched out, especially the ones that start to show up on the first page, are worth a tremendous amount for somebody that’s got reputation management issues. But, for all of us, you’re only one bad article away from something showing up on Google to the extent that you can pre-stack the deck against a reputation issue that you might unfairly run into you years down the road by nature of having a guest blogging program, you will insulate yourself from that.
There’s a tremendous amount of direct and indirect and longterm value in terms of the personal branding and the reputation protection and shield that you build for yourself that I think almost nobody talks about or doesn’t understand the value, but certainly, somebody that’s got a reputation issue right now, I would put them on a guest blogging program right now because that’s the fastest way that they’re going to start to be able to get up onto the first page and start using show notes pages to start pushing that, that bad old press that might be up on other websites.
The podcast ad in and of itself, when you’re on shows that have a certain amount of listeners already, almost all of them are going to have some show sponsor. The sponsorship money isn’t great, it ends up being, I think per thousand listeners. So a lot of times these guys are going to get a couple of hundred dollars per episode, so the episodes you’re going to be on are going to have a show sponsor. The smaller ones probably only get 100 or $50, maybe $200 a show, but they’re paying for 60 seconds to be on the show, you’re getting the whole 20 or 30 minutes for free. So there’s some added value that you get by nature of being on the show and having it be exclusive on you. The bigger shows, the sky is the limit.
I’ve been on some shows that have 50 to 100,000 subscribers per shows. People are paying thousands of dollars for ad spots on that. Meanwhile, I got on the show for free. There’s just add value for that, it’s really that access, immediate audience access value that you get while you’re trying to put some a monetary value on it. And at least even on a smaller show, getting $50 worth of audience access value on show, I think it’s a lot higher than trying to be conservative here. The long form post, 20 minutes show ends up being five to 6,000 words transcribed, you pay 20 minutes on Rev.com. If you do a 20 minute show at a dollar a minute, ends up being a great blog post. If you go and try and hire somebody to write a 5,000 word blog post, you’re just going to cost you probably hundreds of dollars, but having a transcription up at the top or you maybe write a little summary, that long form posts in addition to the money that you pay to have it transcribed, has some value on top of it.
I’m going to say it’s at least worth $150, especially if you can get it to rank like I have, it’s invaluable. On a lot of the posts that I have, but you may to be able to assign some value so that you can see on here. Social media, these guys, and I probably would type on email in here too. Virtually every guest that you have is going to create a show notes page and they custom graphic, they’re going to take that link and they’re going to share that link across all their social media, and a lot of times they will also include it in their email marketing campaign. So you’re getting free access to somebody’s audience that they’re going to blast in multiple channels.
How much is that worth? How much is it worth to have somebody feature you in their email list and in their social media channel and say, “I had this guest expert,” whoever your name is, and as part of their email and drama all back to that onto a specific page which features you as a guest expert? Worth more than $50. Of course it is. Even on the smaller shows that have audience, probably worth several times that. But at a minimum, I think that would be worth $50 to come up on this. And the new client value, I’ve had over six digits in new business come off of several new clients that we’ve got as I realized that I was actually getting real clients off of this.
Yes: You Will Actually Get Clients If You Do this Long Term
The sky’s the limits on that. In my case, a new client might be worth a $10,000 website and $2,500 a month in a digital marketing campaign. If we annualize that, you’re up over $30,000 a year for one new client that we get off of a show. Some people have smaller programs, smaller ones have things … It all depends on what a new client is worth to you, but if you do this right and you do it consistently over the course of … and you’re good and you’re comfortable, everybody gets on shows might not work the same for everybody. But in general, if you’ve got a good good plan and a good pitch and some good advice and some good proof and a good track record and good call to action, and if you do this over the course of dozens of shows and not trying to look for a home run off of one or two shows, more than likely, you’re going to get some new clients over time.
The value per show for me, I think this is really conservative, the cash value of getting guested on one established even a smaller show is worth at least $600. It feels closer to like a $1,000, but I have no problem telling somebody that it’s worth a minimum of $600 per guesting on an established show. And for some of the ones that I’ve been on, I’ve just [inaudible]thousands and thousands of dollars. I’ve been on some that I’m sure, and if I went to one of these bigger websites, Entrepreneur on Fire and said, “Hey, John Lee Dumas, do a personal branding campaign where you’re going to give me a backlink and give me your review and do a reputation of personal branding and make a whole website page about me and give me an advertisement spot, and give me a long form blog post and promote me in your social media.”
If you went and aside from a guessing program and positioned a package like this, these guys with big audiences would be charging you five, $10,000 plus for a ‘personal branding authority campaign.’ Well, that’s what a guesting program is if you do it right. It is actually that, but it’s a way to get into a super low cost way that can give you huge amounts of benefits where you’re essentially getting this an personal-branding / influencer marketing campaign. It’s just under the guise of a guesting campaign and it really, really works. It’s worked for me, and I think if you stick with it, it will work with you as a longterm content marketing strategy.
If you’re a part of our program and you’ve got your one sheet and you’ve paid the setup or paid the fees, or you’ve otherwise been informed, and we haven’t given this, you didn’t win this as part of a freebie, you are now certified because I think you’ve actually become a much better guest now at the end of this presentation than you were at the beginning of it. I think hopefully, you’ll appreciate the opportunity that you get to get in front of other people’s audiences, but more importantly, I hope you really think about these opportunities and the massive amount of extra value that you get from guesting, and that you take the onus on yourself to make sure that you get every drop of value, because there’s a ton of it in here.
On the other hand, if you just go about this and think of it in a single dimensional way, it’s still going to be okay, but you’re going to not get anywhere near the value or the return on investment as if you take advantage of all these opportunities the way we’ve outlined them here in the presentation. So best of luck to you. I hope that this really helps, and I look forward to working with you and helping you grow your business.
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