My Guest-Podcasting Playbook: How I booked my CEO on 17 podcasts in 3 months

There are 4 things you need to do to create a system for getting yourself or your boss on a podcast.

• Research
• Create an Offer
• Outreach
• Follow-up

Research

At my company we have two products, Blaze, a marketing AI tool for entrepreneurs, and Almanac, a wiki and documentation tool for remote companies. and at the time I was focused on promoting Almanac.

And in terms of podcasts, there were three main categories that were relevant to us: Remote work podcasts, People OPs and HR podcasts and Startup-focused podcasts as we are a startup - these were our ideal customers and cared about our product category the most.

So I started researching podcasts in these three categories and adding them to a database I created in Airtable.

Pic of the database: https://i.imgur.com/um9WB7i.png

Now this database is so clutch for keeping track of not only what podcasts are out there, but also how and when you contact them.

I think every business should have a database like this for not only podcasts, but other influential websites and people that you might want to contact and partner with. You can see on mine I also track newsletters, conferences in this database and have other ones for influencers as well.

Once I found a podcast that fit our criteria, I'd start putting their info into the database, including the main focus of the podcast as a topic, if we had a warm intro through our network, the status, an email that I could find, the URL, and any notes that I thought would be helpful.

Most podcasts that have their own website had a contact email or at least a form to submit, and if they didn't I used an email lookup tool to find some way to reach out to them. I exclusively used email for my outreach, because these were all business type podcasts, but if you're trying to reach more consumer or lifestyle podcasts, I could see DMs on social media working too.

There's a couple ways to search for podcasts, the simplest just using the search function in apple podcasts for your category, but I found Spotify's search to be much more useful, so I would use that primarily. I found google podcasts to be useful as well, and lots of podcasts are on youtube now so i'd suggest that. I'm sure TikTok would be a good place to look too but I didn't use it then.

I'd recommend a two-pronged approach when searching: #1 is for topics and #2 is people.

Topics for us were things like "remote work" "asynchronous work" "return to office" "entrepreneurship" "meetings" "work culture", etc.

And for people, I would search for influencers, consultants who have been on multiple podcasts, and other CEOs in this space to see which podcasts they have been on. So I would literally type their name into spotify, filter it to podcasts, and see all the episodes that they have been on.

This would tell me that they accepts guests on their podcasts, because sometimes the more topic focused podcasts do not.

So with a decent amount of work, you can easily find 50 to 100 podcasts that will fit your business. You could outsource this and hire someone to do it for you if you're strapped for time, But i personally liked doing the research and looking into the podcasts and examining their previous episodes and website so that I had a better sense if it was actually worth the time to reach out to them.

Create an Offer

Now before you start reaching out to podcasts, you have to develop an offer, or what it is that you would talk about on their podcasts that would be so valuable to them and their listeners that they'd want to have you on. Unless you are doing something truly innovative or have an incredibly popular brand that everyone loves, you can't just talk about your company. You need something special or unique that will them choose you. Most interview-style podcasts have a huge number of people trying to get on them - so you need an exceptional offer to stand out.

One of the best things that we did at Almanac was to develop and publish our companies philosophy on how remote work should be done. We called it the Modern Work Method (https://get.almanac.io/modern-work-method), and it explicitly didn't mention our product, it was a set of practices and beliefs as well as templates for how we thought that modern remote teams should work and collaborate together.

Now this philosophy was baked into our product, so if you believed what we said, you were probably going to like our solution. But you could adopt the modern work method and never use Almanac, that was totally fine by us.

So we used the modern work method as the basis of our offer as to why people should have our CEO on the podcast. Our pitch wasn't: hey listen to our CEO about how great his company is, it was "we believe that the world needs a new way of working, and we've developed this philosophy that we think your listeners would be interested in hearing." That is a much better offer.

Another offer that generally works is accomplishments. If you have grown your business to 5 million dollars in revenue in 2 years, people want to hear that story and learn how you did it. Or if you overcame severe anxiety or defeated a eating disorder, people are really attracted to outcomes and want to know how to get those results for themselves.

Outreach

Now before you start reaching out to podcasts, I'm going to share a secret hack that will make you standout 10x better than all the other people pitching podcasts. And that is to include a document in your pitch email that sells you or your CEO.

Here is the one that I created for Adam (https://almanac.io/folders/marketing-jWPtTQ/adam-nathan-s-podcast-info-Vnr5d4qxs8YrtCFWMKt1vx7LzI50yV53), and it's purpose is create confidence in the podcast host that Adam would be a great guest. It talks about who he is, what he is great at speaking at, and why they should book him. It's great to load this with whatever social proof you have: Adam had been on a few podcasts before, so we used that. but maybe you have been quotes in the newspaper before, or been named to an influential list, or been a speaker at some conference. Use whatever you have to sell yourself as a great guest.

And then a best practice that all the podcasts hosts that I reached out to really appreciated was including the basic info that they always need when publishing a podcast: a headshot, bio, and links to social media.

My goal here was to just make it easy for the podcast host to say "yes" and envision how great Adam would be on their podcast.

Now you can write your email. I'm a fan if keeping things pretty simple and straightforward.

I'd ask if they accept guests, suggest my CEO, and them give my pitch for what Adam would talk about. I'd make sure to include a link to the Modern Work Method so that the pitch had some "meat" to it that the host could explore if they wanted.

Here is an example email: https://i.imgur.com/GDK9a9z.png

and I made sure to link to the document about as well. This works because you can keep the email relatively short, and do some of the selling in the document.

Now some people will recommend to do some sort of fake flattery like "we are such big fans of your podcast," and maybe reference a recent episode, but I did not do that. It didn't seem right and just seems kinda fake, I bet they get that all the time so I stayed away from it.

If I had actually listened to their podcast, or had seen some other content of theirs that I enjoyed, and if it was relevant to my pitch, then I would include that, but that was in maybe 10% of my pitches. A majority of them were cold emails or submitted to the forms on their podcast website.

After I sent a batch of emails, I would go back to my database and update the status field to "reached out" and also put the date in the "Week of" column. This helped me keep track of how many emails I was sending out per week so that I could report back to my CEO on my efforts.

Following Up

Out of the 17 podcasts that I booked for my CEO, I think only 1 did the host reply to the first email. Usually it took two or three emails to get into their inbox at the right time - sometimes they didn't see the first, or just forgot to respond.

I usually followed up once after 7 days, then 14, and then 30 days after my first email. And if the Modern Work Method or Almanac got any good press or was mentioned by an influential person on social media, I'd use that as an excuse as well to reach back to people I hadn't heard from.

I gave myself two weekly goals: adding 15-20 podcasts to my database per week and sending ~40 emails per week, a combination of first time outreach emails, and my second or third followup ones.

And if you have a good offer, and are reaching out to the right podcasts, the replies will start rolling in. And then it's just as much work as the outreach was, to coordinate schedules and get time booked to actually do the podcast.

And I know schedules are busy, and especially for CEOs, but the sooner you book and record a podcast, the sooner you will see the results of all this effort. We had a few podcasts where things had to keep being rescheduled and it just kept pushing back and ultimately the ROI we were going to see on this effort was several months after the first outreach.

So be prepared: this is a long-term playbook that can be very successful, but it's not all going to hit at once or within the quarter that you start it at. This effort resulted in our CEO being interviewed in 17 podcasts that came out within 6-8 months. Anybody who was interested in this space knew who he was and what our company was about because the podcasts and clips were all over social media and in newsletters, multiple times per month, a resounding success.

Have any questions? Let me know