The Art of Pitching Yourself as a Podcast Guest

Podcasts are now a distinct marketing channel in their own right. As consumers, podcasts are pretty easy to tune into from our mobile devices, but it's another task altogether to get picked as a podcast guest interviewee. You have to do your homework: researching each podcast and pitching yourself as a high-value, knowledgeable guest for that audience.

Through my agency, Drafted, we've spent years revising our podcast pitching process for clients. At this point, we've got it down to a well-oiled machine.

I've rounded up some best practices for nailing the podcast guest pitch that can make this process easier for you as you go:

Get the audience down

Practice answering an audience member's question "why are you helpful to me?" before going on the podcast to strengthen your pitch. This also helps with the next step...

Identify which podcasts speak to that audience or niche

Make your sales pitch clear that this is a mutually beneficial enterprise in the form of an email, with social proof and website assets to back up your claims.

Search for podcast influencers

This should be both people who are guests a lot, and those that have podcasts of their own. Do a Google search of individual influencers' names in your expertise + "podcast guest" to sort out who are the big or mid-level players in your space.

Use the power of keyword research in the podcast "search engine"

In one or some of the podcast apps, do a keyword search for terms you'd usually associate with your business to generate ideas of podcasts to tune into and influencers to use as models for your securing your own podcast guest spots.

The bottom line

The business benefits are oh-so-sweet if you put the research time in. You'll tap entirely new, unique (not to mention sizable!) channels to spread your expertise to new niches and increase the ROI on your marketing efforts. Being a podcast guest is a low-lift way to achieve both of these goals. However, it requires some elbow grease.