Lessons - How to Be a Better Podcast Guest | Ryan Sullivan, Founder of Podcast Principles

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of Success Story. Today my guest is Ryan Sullivan. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Podcast Principles. Ryan has been working with Podcasts, Podcasts hosts, Podcasts agencies, companies that are starting podcasts for virtually all of his career. With Podcast Principles, he saved his clients over 100,000 hours of time creating content through podcasting. He started podcasting and in the podcast universe in 2018 and spent over 2,000 hours learning how to edit audio, design graphics, cut video, release, and market a podcast. And that was just how he got started. Now he's perfected everything there is to know about podcasts, creation, production, guessing, everything in the podcast universe, Ryan has immersed himself in. Today he's going to teach you how to be the perfect podcast guest, how to get on podcasts, how to deliver true value, and how to use podcasts as a marketing channel that can reach your customers, expand your influence, close deals, and make more money. My name is Ryan Sullivan, founder of Podcast Principles, Podcasts launch and production made simply for coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs. And today I'm going to be teaching you exactly how to get booked on podcast to grow your business in four simple steps. So this is called the podcast, guesting guide, discover how to use podcast, guesting to grow your business for free. So to start off podcast, guesting is the best way to get involved in podcasts. If you want to try out the medium, you want to understand audio, how podcasts work. This is the best way to get in there, and you can actually take value from being a guest. You can give value, you can receive value, you can network with people. All these are different ways or rather different. All of these are different benefits to podcast, guesting, and all it takes is time to do this. You always start with discovering your value. As a guest on a podcast, you have to be able to offer value to the audience, especially when it comes to business, marketing, sales, anything where the audience expects to gain actionable tips, steps, advice from you. And obviously this is going to benefit the podcast, the listeners, and you because those people are eventually going to want to work with you, especially if you have the problem that they solve, but we'll get to that. The best way to find your value is to identify your thing, your it factor, say you're a coach, you know, instead of saying, I'm a relationship coach, I can help people in their relationships. Instead you might say, I'll give your listeners the proven three step process that they can use right now to fix a broken relationship with anybody. That's a lot different than saying, hey, I'm a relationship coach, I can talk about relationships, right? What's that thing that you do specifically and then framing it into a simple one to two sentences? This is exactly what I do. This is the value that I provide. On top of that, building on that is the second step, which is knowing your audience. As a speaker on a podcast, we can't provide value if we don't know if the listener actually has the problem we're claiming to solve. If you're a life coach going off that coaching angle, if you're a life coach getting interviewed on a marketing podcast, it probably doesn't make sense to talk about a yoga retreat or, you know, something that is that that you did that doesn't have anything to do with your value to discover what the audience needs. You have to go to your clients and people that you work with. What are you solving for them? What are you doing for them that you do best? And a way to do this is to actually go in and ask these people. So how would you frame it? I'm going to use the earlier example. I'm going to be interviewed on a marketing podcast. Is there anything you'd want to learn from a life coach to improve your work? The results here will probably surprise you such a simple question, but going into people who you've worked with or say the audience, people who would be in that audience say you're going off the same example, a life coach on a marketing podcast, you're going to try to frame it so you can help marketers, right? So going in and asking some marketers what this is what I, this is my value. This is what I do best. What are some things that you'd want to learn about this topic, okay? So that is the knowing your audience portion and I'll also get to how to determine, you know, what that who that audience actually is and to make sure they're right for you. And the third step is packaging it, providing the right amount of value. In my opinion, you can never provide too much value. I've never heard of somebody being interviewed or creating content saying, man, there's just too much value in this. It's just I've never heard of that before. So you've determined the effect or you know how to adapt to each audience by framing what you do. Now you have to package it. So now comes the meat in potatoes. How do you craft your offer? Don't overthink this step. It really is just creating that simple framework, those simple actionable things that people can do based on what you do best, right? So it hits the angle of it combines what you do great. It combines a problem that the audiences need solved that way. They know that you understand them. And once again, you can never provide too much value. So just learning the best way to package it is extremely important. How do you do that? Simply write it out and then speak it as if you were talking about it on a podcast, record it, listen back to yourself, take some notes. And so when you go to answer that question on the podcast, it's like clockwork. You don't even have to think about it. It's instinct, it's second nature. You just know exactly how to frame what you do for these people and then how to provide them those simple actionable tips when you're actually on the podcast. And step four, which is a little more intense is how to search podcasts, how to pitch podcasts and ultimately get booked. I could write an entire guide, I can do an entire podcast just on this step. But if I was to put it in simple terms, you can browse Google podcasts, Apple podcasts and Spotify to find podcasts in your niche and then go connect with those folks on LinkedIn. So there's other directories, there's probably hundreds of podcast directories, but you can use these major platforms and their categories are pretty solid. You can go in there, find the host, start to dive into their network and see what they're all about, then create a Google sheet or an Excel document to track this. So that's tracking the niche of their show, who their audience is, how many followers they have, their name, their email, et cetera, super simple things and you can outsource this if you have the resources for that. Next, join Facebook groups and engage in the community. You will find opportunities to be a guest on small shows, especially to start out, which is a great way to start doing this. So small shows, they're looking to grow themselves and they're willing to take a chance on somebody who hasn't been booked on that many podcasts before, especially if you know how to frame it. So you can also use LinkedIn for this to find those hosts and talk to them directly and maybe just hang out in their comments section for a couple of weeks, understand their audience, understand who's in there because that's going to give you an indication of your podcasts, of that podcast audience because remember podcasts don't have comments sections, but LinkedIn and Facebook does to wrap it up. The final thing in this search pitching get booked section is the podcast pitch checklist. So you can follow this checklist when you're writing out your pitch. Number one, let them know who I am and what I do. Who do I do it for? How do I do it? What can I do for you specifically or for your audience specifically? Super important. A call to action in that pitch to book a call to respond whatever it is and finally insist on getting a response even if it's a no. Typically what I say is I understand you're busy, but please do reply with a simple no if you are not interested instead of not answering at all. That typically allows people to just tell me no and I can move on. We don't have to guess or anything about it if you're going to be on it or not instead of saying, oh, I hope to hear back. That's just everybody says that it doesn't work. You might as well just say, hey, if you want to do this, reply with no, please, I'd really appreciate it. So before you start being a guest on podcasts, take the time to write out these steps so you don't find yourself just wondering what to say. Curve balls happen, but the more planning and preparation that you do, the better. Let me also say that just in a side here is that nutrition, physical and mental health are half of this equation in my opinion. A podcast is a mental game. You have to be on your game mentally if you want to perform the best. If you don't have your energy right on these things, nobody's going to want to listen, nobody's going to want to work with you. It's really important to make sure you're in the right mindset. I've been helping podcasters do this for years. I started myself with my own podcast in 2018. And since then, I've been helping other people launch podcasts, host podcasts, anything podcast related. That's right up my alley. So those are my tips, my simple framework for getting booked on podcasts so you can expand your business. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Ryan Sullivan, founder of podcast principles.