Feed drop time! We’re on a break from the show as we prepare for v5 of SquadCast and work on revamping the SquadCast podcast. So, we’re bringing you carefully curated feed drops from some of our favorite SquadCasters.

This week, meet Pat Flynn, an advisor to SquadCast.fm. In this episode, Pat interviews Ray Blakney.

From Pat’s website:

Seth Godin once said that podcasting is the new blogging. If that’s true, guest podcasting is the new guest blogging.

If you were blogging anytime around the year 2000 to 2012, you would know that guest blogging was the number one way to get more exposure for your brand. There’s a new audience, there are new eyes to find you for the first time.

Today, content creation is a little different, but guest podcasting, in my opinion, is the number one way to get exposure for your brand. No matter how big or small you are, there are possibilities for you to get on other people’s podcasts.

Today’s guest is Ray Blakney, CEO, and co-founder of Podcast Hawk, which helps people become guests on other people’s podcasts. Ray is a software developer at heart and he’s brought his software talent into the podcasting space for us at Podcast Hawk.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to be a guest on another person’s podcast. How do you get that person to say yes? How do you maximize your time on their show? How do you bring those listeners to your website, your brand, your product, your lead magnet, or whatever it might be?

All that and more, today, on the Smart Passive Income podcast with Ray Blakney, from Podcast Hawk.

Also in this episode:

Credits

  • Written and produced by Arielle Nissenblatt
  • Mixed and designed by Vince Moreno Jr.
  • Artwork and logos by Alex Whedbee
  • Hosted by Zach Moreno and Rock Felder

Episode Transcription

SPI 547: The Right Way to Guest Podcast and Grow Your Brand with Ray Blakney

[00:00:00] Ray:
When you start off on podcasting, or if you haven’t been interviewed very much, your message will be all over the place. The knowledge is in your head, but it’s not connected to your mouth. If you’ve been interviewed 50 times, you’ll find that there’s a lot of patterns. You get asked the same questions over and over again.

That really, really helps when you’re a podcast guest, a more experienced podcast guest. They have told that story a thousand times, in a thousand different places, but it comes across as natural. It comes across as funny, because they have really practiced at it.

[00:00:48] Pat:
You know, Seth Godin once said, podcasting is the new blogging. I say, if that’s true, guest podcasting is the new guest blogging. If you were blogging anytime around the year 2000 to 2012, you would know that guest blogging was the number one way to get more exposure to your own brand, and to your own blog, if you had one.

That’s because you are writing a guest post on another person’s website. There’s a new audience, there are new eyes to find you for the first time. Plus, you also get the SEO benefits, and Google might be more likely to rank you because of that back link that you get from the person’s site.

Today, however, the environment’s changed a little bit. Obviously, content creation is a little bit different, but guest podcasting, in my opinion, is the number one way to get exposure for your brand. No matter how big or small you are, there are possibilities for you to get on other people’s podcasts. Today’s guest is Ray Blakney, CEO, and co-founder of Podcast Hawk.

His business and his software, Podcast Hawk, helps people become guests on other people’s podcasts. The reason why I think podcasting is even better than guest blogging is because not only do you get the back link, because you’re often gonna find yourself on that person’s show notes, that host’s show notes, but you’re also going to get the endorsement from that host. You’re going to be able to have a conversation, and this audience that this person has built trust with over time is now speaking to you. They’re welcoming you into their circle. You’re going to build trust and a relationship with that audience much, much faster.

Not only are you getting access to that audience, but you’re building a relationship with them much faster, too, which is always great. Especially if you can maximize your time on that podcast, which we’re going to talk about with Ray here today, as well.

Ray is a software developer at heart, and in fact, he’s had a business in the language space at Live Lingua, a very successful software to help people learn languages.

He’s brought his software talent into the podcasting space for us at Podcast Hawk. We’ll talk a little bit more about what it does and how it does it, but today we’re mostly gonna talk about how to be a guest on another person’s podcast. How do you even get a person to say yes? How do you position yourself so that a podcast podcaster will be more likely to invite you into their circle?

How do you maximize your time on that show? How do you bring people from that time listening to your website, to your brand, to your product, to your lead magnet, whatever it might be? All that and more, today, in session 547 of the Smart Passive Income podcast with Ray Blakney, from Podcast Hawk. Enjoy.

Ray, what’s up. Welcome to the Smart Passive Income show. How are you?

[00:03:17] Ray:
Hey, not too bad. Thanks for having me on happy new year as well. I hope you had a great holiday with the family.

[00:03:25] Pat:
Even though we’re kind of talking out of asynchronously now, because we’re recording this. Actually in October of 2021, but we know this is getting published in 2022. This is one of the crazy things about, you know, podcasting is you can do things like this. and we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about a lot of things today with relation to hopefully people listening to this and getting on other people’s shows, because it’s definitely in my opinion, one of the number one ways to grow your brand and your, exposure, why this podcast ha.

Exist. Why spend all this time and energy to create a solution for us to go and find other shows to be on? this is your jam right now. So, so what, why was this even created?

[00:04:04] Ray:
Great question. And I think like a lot of entrepreneurs it’s because I need it. That’s the, the reason behind why I created podcast talk. So one of the things I like to say is there’s two kinds of entrepreneurs in the world, right? There are the visionaries who create stuff. We don’t even know we need, I’m not one of those, right.

I’m not going to think of the next great big thing. The second catalog forerunner or those who are. CNA see nobody’s meeting that need and then create something to meet the need. So that’s the story behind podcast on my background is I actually run another company called Live Lingua.com. It’s one of the top five online language schools in the world.

And during COVID, we had a lot more people coming into our website and I wanted to get in front of new audiences. Right? So we use all of the usual suspects, SEO, Facebook ads, Google ads, and I’m like, we need to build a new chat. What can we try right now? Because everybody’s looking for online education to get in front of these new audiences and recruit to make podcasts.

I had end my own podcasts in the past. didn’t quite work out for me. It’s a lot of work and it, it didn’t really get any traction, but I’d been on other people’s podcasts, not too many, about 10 or 15, just people I met at conferences and that had actually worked out well for me. So I said, Hey, maybe I should go out there and find some other shows to get on.

How hard could that. So like everybody, the first thing you do is you go there and I went on Google and like podcasts to be a guest on nothing. I mean, you might find two or three and they’re, you know, really big shows that might not be for the right audience. You are half the shows that I found that way weren’t even active anymore.

So it was really, really intense. So my next thought was, did anybody there must be a tool to do this? And I spent a week, two weeks searching there. Wasn’t so I did it manually in the beginning and it took me weeks to find podcasts to get on there. You can hire companies to do it. And they were charging three to $5,000 to get me on five to 10 shows.

And they wouldn’t even guarantee that those shows have listeners. Right? I mean, this could literally be some kids sitting in his basement making a podcast, and I just paid an agency to get me on the show. So there had to be something else out there. So my background is I’m a software engineer. I went out there and on a weekend, I’m like, can I build something to do this theoretically speak?

So I played around with some code and by the end of the weekend, I’m like, I think I can actually do it. So I started working on it myself. It was kind of a side hustle for me for the first six months. Pretty much. I said, can I get every podcast in the world into a database? Can I get every email into a database?

Can we clean all that stuff up, make it useful to the users and make them.

I did it. I showed it some people know like, wow, I would pay for that. So that is how podcasts Hawk was born. And we get into a little bit more of what else it does right now. But that was kind of like the version 0.1 and why

I actually built in the first place, because look, I thought even if I don’t make any money off of it, I’ll at least use this to get on shows myself.

So will be a waste of time.

[00:06:51] Pat:
Wow. That’s an incredible story of developing a solution for something and taking, and I know it was this an MVP approach. Right? You built it over a weekend, right And then now, you shared it with others. And, you know, I think of a lot of people who have ideas for software, but then it’s just like, wow, there’s so much to do.

What’s it going to look like, how’s it going to feel?

I w I, I, part of me wants to go deep into software development right now, but I know that that’s not what we’re going to talk about. So we’ll maybe save that for a later time. Cause we’ve talked about that on the show before, but one question for anybody out there, who’s looking to build a software cause this is your world and you’re here.

So I want to take advantage of that. what’s the best tip you have for getting to that first sort of iteration to then explore, share, you know, green light red light at that point.

[00:07:36] Ray:
I do like the saying that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you know, you waited to launch do too long to launch it. Right. And that’s what I say for this first version. If you have a background in software engineering, like I have, don’t get too caught up in the details. I know as software engineers, we like, oh, everything has to work and we try to account for every possible contingency.

Don’t worry about that in the first version, right. Just to make sure it works, rate percent of the people get it out there, get people using it. And you’ll probably, if what you wrote solves a big problem for them, they’ll still say thank you for it. Even though they’re bugs and they might crash sometimes.

So definitely just get out there, throw it out there. If you don’t, if you don’t have a software background, use tools out there to build your MBA. Tell my story for live link was when we first launched it back about 15 years ago before there were all these cool tools out there that, you know, non-programmers could use. WordPress was a little note. Literally I made a five page website in HTML and we would use Google docs and Excel spreadsheets to track when we get language lessons to our students and pay our teachers with that. And yet that’s how we built the business into a seven figure business. And we’re using a similar methodology here for podcasts.

[00:08:37] Pat:
I love it kind of a lean approach to it, which, which I love. And I think it’s very, very smart. so let’s talk about getting. To get on to other people’s shows, using Podcast Hawk. We’ll talk about that briefly and just go over. Well, how does this actually work? so that people can try it out and use it and then we’ll get into, okay, well, when you land a guest spot, what do you do?

How do you make sure it’s the, the best it’s going to serve you and the growth that you’d like? So, tell us about Podcast Hawk. Like technically, like what’s the user experience like.

[00:09:08] Ray:
Yeah, absolutely. So podcasts on what we do for you is we take all the time out of not only finding the right podcast for you. And you said, we’re going to talk about it later about how you know, to get on the podcast and make use of it. But you need to do that before you use podcast talk in the sense that you need to know who you’re trying to get in front of and what message you’re trying to share with the world and what value you’re looking to add. Then when you come to podcasts off, what we’ve built is a sophisticated search engine that goes through all the podcasts in the world. Currently we have about 1.7 million of them in there. We just on a new source and we hopefully we get past 2 million podcasts. not all of them are active, but there are reasons you can reach out to inactive podcasts as well.

And you can filter that with our search. So where you can go into podcasts right now. It’s really simple. We’re worried about functionality, not so much making it look pretty. It doesn’t look awful, but you know, we’ll, we’ll have pretty later. You go in there and you can search things. For example, I was recommended using podcast description as the base of your search, not the title because when people create titles for their podcast, they sometimes try to get really creative with it.

You know, let’s just say raise amazing show and you have no idea what the show is about. So if you search by title, you’d be missing out on a lot. But if you, so you go on there, you can search by the description and then we can, we have all these other search filters. So you can say, I want a podcast with the word marketing in it, a big category, but that also has the word pink flamingos in it, because let’s say that’s your niche.

You’re selling pink lawn flamingos. And. It’s great enough. So in the last 30 days, it has at least a 4.5 star rating average on iTunes. It has at least 50 episodes because you want something that’s been around a little bit. You’re not looking for a new show and it has a podcast score of 40 and all this point a little bit.

What a podcast score is in a minute, I challenge everybody to go and find these shows yourself manually on the web, and you will be there for weeks with us. You clicks. And in a few seconds, less than a second, if we’re lucky, it will bring back all the podcasts in the world that match your criteria. So what you can do after that is you go and you find all the shows.

You can read all the shows. So we’ll show you the full description, which use the social media. The title is the images you can decide out of all of those. Let’s say 5,000 shows came back. You can go in there and pick 50, a hundred, a thousand that matched exactly what you’re looking for, because even with a good search, you will not, all of those will be a perfect match for you, right? And you create a campaign and podcasts off. What does that do? We actually do the email pitching for you afterwards? So let’s say you created a campaign with a thousand shows. That’s a lot of shows and I’ll get about 10 to 20% response rate. So unless you want to be on a hundred shows in the next month, I’d say, start with a smaller number than that.

You create the campaign. And we do all the emails for you. So the first email, the three-day follow up the seven-day followup. If you don’t get responses, we do all of it. We have kind of one of those email systems where you can say, hi, first name. We know the name of the hosts based on our system. And we’ll send emails out for you.

So pretty much once you set this off, the vision guy in podcast talk is let’s say we have different plans and we’ll pitch 25, 50 or a hundred shows every month on autopilot for you, depending on your plan, you could set it up with 5,000 shows. It’s safe and never have to go back into our system again, because every month we will be pitching twenty-five 50 to a hundred podcasts.

So if you’ve got about a 10 to 20% response rate, let’s just say on the lowest plan, you get 25, 25 pitches a month. You get 10%, let’s round up to three. So you’re getting all three shows every single month without doing anything. Because what we do is when they reply to you and say, yes, I’d like it on my show before that your inbox, that’s it.

You just sit back and wait for your inbox to be filled with these messages. Once you’ve set up the campaigns in our. That’s all there is to it. There are other uses you can have for it, but that’s the primary use of podcasts. Get on podcasts on autopilot.

[00:12:41] Pat:
Well, questions that I’m assuming my audience has right now. And I have, which is these emails that are being sent out. You know, I know from a podcast host perspective that I get emails all the time. That just sounds so generic that it’s just like, oh, this is a waste of, I, I’m not never going to say yes to this person.

How does Podcast Hawk help us avoid that kind of email?

[00:13:04] Ray:
Great question. And that’s exactly right. We do not, we’re not a spam software, right? We, we, if users keep getting marked as spam, we probably will laugh a block them from our system because we don’t want to be known for that. So what we’ve done is we’ve created a wizard in podcast off. So when you go through the whole thing you put in your template, let’s say for the podcasts and you can create, you can actually customize.

The emails for each one of the people you send out. So let’s say you have a hundred people in there. I’m going to touch on podcast score a little bit right now, this, this is going to help you figure out which ones to really go in there and customize in which ones are, what we’ve created is our own algorithm to rate all the podcasts in the world from zero to 100.

So literally it uses things like how long they’ve been around their ratings and all this other metrics that we’re getting from around the internet to give you an idea of how quote unquote powerful this podcast is. I’ll give you an example, for example, your show. I looked it up right before we got on there.

You have a podcast score of 81. It’s longer than that. So the higher you get the higher, you know, getting from 81 to 82 is a lot harder. You know, it’s getting up to the top is really, really hard. you know, you’re still in the top, like 1% at that point, right? But it gives you an idea of whether anybody is actually listening to this show.

And it also gives you an idea of how hard it will actually be for you to get on that show. So let’s say Jerome, he’s one of the top ones and a show called Dr. Death. I don’t really know. It’s one of those serial murder shows. Those are like the two top scoring podcasts in our system.

If you’re starting off the entrepreneurship journey, if you’re starting your business, you probably don’t want to be pitching those guys anyway, because they might be out of your level.

You can, but you might be looking to pitch people at a score of 30 to 40 in our podcast. These are the kinds of podcasts that have some listeners, but maybe a little easier for you to get on there. Get your feet wet. Get used to being interviewed first, then work your up. I know our podcast. That’s why we built it.

We update it all. The way this relates back to customizing the pitches is if you go through your search and you have these a hundred podcasts and you find the. 20 of them have podcasts we’re above 60. So these are generally pretty established podcasts, over a hundred episodes, all that kind of stuff you might decide.

Look, I don’t have time to customize 5,000 pitches, but anything above 60, I’m a customer in our system. What you can do is it shows you all the, all the pictures you were about to send out. Before you send out, you click on customize button. It brings up this page where on the left, you have all the episodes on the top.

You have the description where the social media page links and they’re in the middle. You can actually customize the email. The main email and all the follow-up emails, you can listen to the episodes from that page. You can click on it. It will open up a new page for their Facebook, their social media. So you can go in there and take a look at that all from one page, including their own website.

So you can do all the research and customize your pitch. Listen to the three most recent episodes. Yes, we, the titles and customize the pitch for them all in one place without you having to go on the web and on Facebook and on YouTube and find all this information, we have it all there. Customize it for them.

So a score of 60 and above get safe and we’ll take care of it from there.

[00:16:02] Pat:
That’s crazy. It, it, two things for me. Number one. It’s almost like a command center for your podcast outreach. Right with the fact that you said you see their social streams and you see all this, like, I can imagine maybe I find a podcast that, through podcasts I’m like, cool, this is awesome. I could see what their, what their latest tweets were, for example.

Right. And I could go, oh, they were at Disneyland. I’m a huge Disney nerd now in my messaging. Hey fellow Disney fan, I saw that you were in a, you know, and it’s, it’s not as creepy if it’s on a public forum, like, you know, Twitter and people, you know, can see that it’s actually quite cool when people send me messages and they’re like, Hey, I saw, you know, on your Instagram that you, you know, hit 85,000 subscribers on your Pokemon YouTube channel.

Like congrats. I’m just like, Hey, thanks. Like now I’m open to the conversation now. And, and I think that’s really cool. this, the second thing is the one thing that’s been missing in podcasting for. Has been access to data, right. as a podcaster. And it’s interesting, cause this is for the podcasts D if you will, but this is so exciting because now we’re getting the ability to. Look around and search and filter and find things that actually matter to us more, which is whole point of data. In my opinion, the benefit of data is the ability to be able to locate and find things that we need much faster. And here it is now in the podcasting space, in the, in the form of helping us get on shows.

And you know, it’s not just getting on. The relationship that could be now had as a result of getting on these shows. Like some of my best friends are now people who I once had on my show or vice versa. So imagine the implications of a tool like this, just, wow. It’s just really amazing rate, congrats to you and your team for putting this together and, you know, full disclosure.

And I think I mentioned this in the intro, I’m an advisor to Podcast Hawk. So there is. Quote unquote bias here. Right. But, doesn’t it sound awesome. And also, I wouldn’t pay to an advisor

If this wasn’t awesome. So, right. This is, this is great. I’m glad to, push this into, the world through the show to help them discover this, which can be very helpful, but like with any of these great tools, they can be used for good and they can be used for bad.

Right. And so I think hopefully people listening to this will use it, not for spam purposes and that never works out in the end, but, but for good. And that is now possible. Thanks to podcast socks. So appreciate that.

[00:18:22] Ray:
No. Thank you very much. Thanks for your advice up until now. It’s an advisor and you know, we’re, we’re looking to add to it. Our goal with podcast talk is to make podcast guesting accessible to everybody, not the only the people who can afford the $5,000 agencies or have to put 40 hours out there. You’ll see on our pricing.

We’re not. this is a bootstrap business. That’s what I know how to do. We don’t have a $50 million investment. I don’t have to pay back these big investors in the back. So we’re keeping the price really, really accessible.

Right now, January, the prices are from about $39 to $79 on the high end $39. It’s pretty bad.

We’re pretty much saying we’ll get you on a show at least once every two weeks, probably every week. If you have a really good story behind you with $39, if you’re a entrepreneur starting out, if you are an author, who’s trying to get your book in front of audiences. If you’re a small business owner trying to get in front of your niche market, I remember onboard.

In the beginning, there was a consultant for burlesque dancers that are onboarded and our first beta users, I was kind of concerned when we were doing the onboarding call. Like, are there any podcasts for that? Yes, absolutely. There are a few hundred podcasts out there for that. So it doesn’t matter what niche you’re in.

There are podcasts, those podcasts are talking to your audience, right? So you can get there, you can get in front of the right people at the right time and add value to them on the podcast. And then you get, you know, you can hopefully grow your business, your brand through that.

[00:19:40] Pat:
I mean, always have been an advocate for getting on other people’s shows. You get not only more time with your target audience, because people are listening to podcasts longer and not only do people get to hear your voice, so they get to hear the real you, and then, you know, your personality and your character and come back to your website or what have you.

But you’re also getting the endorsement from the host as well. And I would pay. imagine, you know, spending $39 a month, right. Versus $39 on a Facebook ad to try to do this or get new listeners. It’s no comparison. There, there is, no comparison. it just makes complete sense. So, get in now while it’s cheap, I guess.

[00:20:19] Ray:
Exactly. I’ll let me add a little bit to that Facebook ad and the marketing side, because you know, I also had a little marketing background and. There are additional benefits, right? So you also, you mentioned the Facebook ad was a great, because most podcasts will actually share the episode on their social media. So in a way, you are paying for a Facebook ad, right? So whoever the podcast host is, is going to put it on their Facebook, on their Twitter. So You are going to get that social media exposure by appearing on the podcast.

[00:20:42] Pat:
It’s more possible. It’s not always guaranteed, but it’s definitely more

[00:20:45] Ray:
It’s not always guaranteed.

Exactly, but it’s, it’s more than likely that they’re going to share it on there. A lot. Most podcasters will at least share it on Facebook, check out my latest stuff. So is.

[00:20:54] Pat:
Yep.

[00:20:55] Ray:
SCO if this podcast or has a website and they would put show notes, which most good podcasters do you just got a back link to your website, your website just went up and Google’s ranking. You got on a hundred podcasts. You just got a hundred backwards from very relevant backlinks. Remember, you’re picking the right? podcast for your business anyway. So you’re getting pocket, you know, you’re getting links back to your website from podcasts that talk about what you talk and then your website is going up as well.

So don’t think of it as only being on this podcast, which is evergreen material. Anyway, somebody can listen to it now. No, listen to it five years from now. And you might can clients or customers or sales out of that, but your website will rank more highly and you will be shared on social media all, if we’re talking about hopefully what you’re passionate about anyway, right?

Getting on a show and just talking about this is fun. I mean, you know, this is not work. I mean, I wish I got paid to do this, but no, this is, this is fun, right?

[00:21:42] Pat:
The, I didn’t even think about those benefits. I mean, I talk about guest podcasting all the time. In fact, I have some students of mine in my courses who this is literally their only strategy. I didn’t even think about the SEO implications of this, which is huge because SEO can be a very expensive thing to.

You know, or to, to, to at least get con consultation for, and backlinks are worth their weight in gold and relevant backlinks even more. So, this is, this is awesome.

So, podcast, hok.com/spi. We’ll talk more about what’s there later, but let’s talk about now that we are going to have this opportunity to be on another person’s show, just like how you’re on this show today, or a person listening is on.

You know, an influencer show tomorrow, how do we make the best of that time? What do we need to prepare for? How do we make sure that it’s going to be worth the time and effort to reach out and make this happen?

[00:22:37] Ray:
Great question for me, at least there are two big parts to that answer, right. the first part is You need to know your goal for? being on that. It sounds a little callous sometimes, but if you’re going to be on there, you need to know why you’re going to be on there. If you’re an author, your goal on there is to get people, to read your book and to buy your book.

It’s business. If you’re using it for marketing that’s, what’s there the second half, however, is you need to add value to the show because of all you use is that first half of the offer. We just I’m here to sell my book. And the only thing you talk about is buy my book, buy my book, buy my book for the entire pocket.

Absolutely going to bomb and the podcast, they’re more than likely wanting to be published by the host, right? they’ll say thank you. And you’ll have wasted 30 minutes of your time and the host time as well. So what you need to do to be a really good host before even stepping in there into the microphone ready is to have those two things very clear in your head.

What am I getting on this podcast for? This helps me a lot because. My mindset’s a wander. So if I don’t have that very clearly, but before I get on the show, I’ll start talking about, you know, that vacation I just took when I went to Mexico, you know, whatever. I mean, it just, I go really off track and it’s a waste of time for everybody. And then the second one is that value component. Make sure you’re there trying to teach something, try to share something. It can be anything from. Your knowledge or maybe even just a story, right? Because if what you’re trying to do is share some party that you went through in the past and help other people out.

That’s valuable to be on the show as well.

[00:24:01] Pat:
Great. So that’s what happens when you are planning to get, or even as you’re preparing to reach out to podcasts. And when you do going to that, Archives specifically to see what they have talked about, what they didn’t talk about. Maybe even going as far as looking at their reviews or any commentary on social media about that particular podcast to see what people who are listeners like and what the listeners don’t like.

And then I always love to have prepared a story or two ahead of time, you know, when you watch a late night show like with Conan or Jimmy Fallon or whoever, and the guest is sitting next to them up there and they’re always tell them the story. Those stories didn’t come out of thin air. They were actually rehearsed ahead of time, like, okay, I want you to tell this story and I’ll, I’ll set you up for it.

And not to say that you have to set it up with your hosts, but you can, in your mind, if you already know the topics that you’re going to talk about, have a story ready or at the ready in case, that topic comes up. Wow. You’re, you’re eloquent. You are, bringing people and transporting them to some situation that’s relatable, memorable.

It’s a shareable thing. and it always leads to more entertaining, factors as well. So I, I love that approach. Let’s see, let’s talk about like, what, what does a person. Like technically have to make sure happens because especially for first timers, it can be very nerve wracking at times to get on another person’s podcast.

It is a huge deal and you want to be showing up in the best way possible. What does, what does that actually mean? What do we have to, to look out for?

[00:25:33] Ray:
Yeah, so I’ll give some technical advice, but you know, related to what you’ve just said, I’m going to also share a story of the first time I was ever on a podcast. More maybe as a warning story to people who are out there.

[00:25:46] Pat:
Okay.

[00:25:46] Ray:
And a little bit of advice, I guess this is something to prep for podcasts. Make sure you relax a little bit before you get on.

I remember the first show that I was on. it was, I knew the person who was there, it was a travel podcast, is my wife and I love to travel. So I was going to be on it, but I was really nervous. It was one of the, you know, decent amount of listeners on there. And I was so nervous then when I went back and listened to my episode, I, I normally speak quickly, but I was like a machine.

I mean, I was just trying to spew everything out at exactly the same time. So one bit of advice, you know, before the technical stuff, If you’d like meditation, if you, you know, drink a cup of tea, have a cup of coffee, do that before you got on shows, especially if you’re just starting off. As you do be to relax, you’re never going to be able to perform.

If you’re going into something nervous, this applies to sports. This applies to business, and this also applies to being a guest on podcasts. It will get better with the more practice you have. I’ve been on going on about 150 podcasts right now.

And then, you know, I still get nervous a little bit. I have those butterflies in my stomach.

I know you’ve had, when you’re talking about speaking on stage, right. You’ve done it a lot, but you still have that, you know, before you, that first time you spoke on stage, you already have a little bit of that, right. You’ll have that as a guest on podcasts as well, but you can get over it a lot more quickly.

So that would be the non-technical advice as well, drink a cup of coffee, tea, whatever it is that makes you relax, do that for you. Get off the show

[00:27:07] Pat:
Lots of water too. Cause you’re going to get, if you’re nervous, you’re going to get dry mouth. Right. That’s the one thing I remember. I, there, you got water right there. I remember when I was a guest on other people’s podcasts at first, it’s like, You start to get a little bit of a dry mouth and that’s not good when it’s audio only because when you have a dry mouth, because you’re nervous, it’s just the natural reaction.

Many of us have to being nervous. We then have that sound in our mouth that makes it sound more wet. It’s. Like that nasty sound. You hear that when actually people have dry mouth because it’s the mouth trying to moisturize itself and a little bit of a tip that I have because that’s something that I’ve gone through as well.

There’s actually something I want to give credit to. Nicole Walters, a good friend of ours here on the show. Nicole walters.com. She introduced me to the spray. It’s called entertainer’s secret. It’s like $8 a bottle, all natural on Amazon. It’s like tastes pretty good. I used that when I go to conferences, I use that when I’m podcasting, anytime you’re worried about having a little bit of a horse mouth, which can sometimes happen when you’re talking for so long or, and nervous, that stuff is magic, absolute magic.

So entertainer’s secret is the name of that. elixir, if you will, okay.

[00:28:23] Ray:
Okay. Yeah. So those are some of the prep things that you can do the obvious ones, right? Make sure that you’re in a quiet room. I mentioned, I’ve had a few podcasts in the past. didn’t go anywhere. But I remember one of my guests, he was on his iPhone, in a coffee shop with a blender is going off in the back.

I did not send any prep email for that because I assume nobody would do that. But apparently people would, will do that. So I’m going to share that here. Don’t do that. Right. And make sure you’re in a quiet place in your house. There’s some technical sides as far as close all your browsers down, make sure nobody else in the house is using internet.

It has happened to me in the past and I’ve actually done it in the past, played a computer game. When my wife was on a podcast, once not a good idea for all you young kids out there, you might want to connect your computer to the modem with something that we old folk called, wires, that you can actually connect from the modem directly to your computer.

We’re used to using wireless right now, but that literally takes your internet speed up by about 10 X. If you use like a land connection,

[00:29:22] Pat:
You’re you’re sharing your age with us with, with that comment, Ray.

[00:29:26] Ray:
I know it was about the say I’m like, yeah, back in my day.

[00:29:28] Pat:
Mention the fact that you said modem,

[00:29:30] Ray:
Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh yeah. Do kids not call them that anymore? I don’t even know what they’re called.

For podcasts do it.

[00:29:39] Pat:
I dunno.

[00:29:40] Ray:
Who knows? Right. So do it for podcasts. You can buy one on Amazon for like $5. They’re not expensive. Just plug them in. If you have a desktop, if you’re lucky again, dating myself, I actually still have a tower on there, but most laptops, I have it unless you have the super thin ones and even then you can buy like an adapter.

So for that to work, that’ll give you much better quality, good respect for the podcast hosts as well, because you can provide them with better audio quality.

Another tip and trick is make sure your background looks professional because especially these days, most podcasts there’s actually also do a video with their podcasts.

They probably either taking Pat’s course or some other course where it’s about repurposing. So if you’ve been already record somebody anyway, using something like we’re on SWAT cast right now, there will be a video that goes with it. Even some, a lot of podcasts is used to so make sure that your background looks presentable.

I have fallen into that before where, you know, I didn’t know there was gonna be audio and I forgot the question, my hair. So now there’s a video of me. You can find. Online or my hair is just like all over the place because I didn’t know anybody would actually see what I looked like. during that podcast is I thought it was audio.

So those are some of the technical things you can do again, close it down on your computer, close down all your chat messaging, but make sure you closed them down correctly. I’m talking about Skype. I’m talking about slack. sometimes these messages appear right in the middle of your pop of your energy and.

Depending on how you have your computer configured, it might be hurt, right? So it was, you know, a Skype ring might be bring to him might have happened in the middle of your call or your little slack, boop noise, right. Will happen right in the middle of your interview. And you want to do that. It’s not professional, it’s not respectful to the podcast coach.

So those are my general tips for people who are trying to be on podcasts and otherwise. ‘cause, you know, again, we go back to the first thing we talked about when you’re stressed out, when you’re not having fun, it will show your voice will be stressed. Your message will come across. So enjoy it. You know, generally, most, almost every podcast where I’ve met has been a great person and kind of pulled you along.

So just enjoy the ride.

[00:31:41] Pat:
You say a, a podcast host is looking for in a guest most,

[00:31:48] Ray:
This again, I’m pulling it all back to that first point that we had here. It’s about adding value or sharing an interesting story again, depending on your niche with the audience of this podcast hosts, right. you need to make sure that you are a good fit for their show before you get on there. And then practice your story.

It’s again, like speaking in front of a public you have to have a story. You have to say it over and over and over again. One of the things that I actually recommend is I did this when I was starting out. I mentioned the podcast score with podcasts. All right. So. Maybe you pick a few podcasts that are low on the podcast score just to get your feet wet.

There’ve been two interesting things on my podcast journey. So I’m trying to get, I’m going to find me on 1000 podcasts. It’s gonna take a few years, but my goal is to be a guest on 1000 podcasts, then I should have a pretty decent idea of what it takes to be a guest on podcasts in the beginning. When you start off on podcast, or if you haven’t been interviewed very much. Your message will be all over the place, right? Because you don’t really know what they’re going to ask. You don’t know what your answer’s going to be. You kind of, the knowledge is in your head, but it’s not connected to your mouth. And it doesn’t kind of come out. As you say, in an eloquent way. If you’ve been interviewed 10 times, 20 times, 50 times, you’ll find that there’s a lot of patterns.

You get asked the same questions over and over again. That really, really helps when you’re a podcast guest. And I think it shows more experienced podcasts guests. Most more experienced guests, like you were saying on the lay shows, they have told that story that they told a thousand times in a thousand different places.

They probably are half asleep in their mind when they’re telling it, because they’ve done it so many times. Right. But it comes across as natural to come across as funny because they’ve really practiced that. So that would be recommendation to a lot of guests as well. I’ll add a little bit of. Extra to that.

One of the things that I found on my podcast guest journey after having done that is I’ve actually learned more about myself when somebody asks you something a very common question, like, great. Tell me a little bit about you. The first time I answered. I’m like, well, you know, I was, I’m like, I don’t really know how to answer that because that’s just as a general question.

But at this. You’re like, yeah, I know who I am. I answered this question many, many times. Like, you know, when they ask you about your opinions and everything, it really helps you kind of clarify your thoughts, things that, you know, but nobody ever asks you in real life that you, you know, you get to share with the world.

And by the end of it, you might actually have a clear identity of who you are. Kind of an added bonus to being a guest on podcasts. That was a surprise to me. It wasn’t my goal. It wasn’t my intention, but I kind of found that happening after about 50 shows.

[00:34:24] Pat:
Honestly, now that you’re talking about that, I’ve definitely found the same thing to be true. partly as a podcaster, just having the opportunity to get behind the microphone and tell stories. And now thanks to Ramit Sethi who gave me the idea of one’s calling, he called it a story bank, right? So in Evernote folder system, or it could be in Google or wherever where you actually keep track of stories, little things that happen during the day could become a lesson or something that you could put into a presentation or a story.

On your podcast and a blog post, or if you’re a guest or something and I, and I’ve used those and those become really, really useful. And they end up often either in a presentation or even in a book, but you’re right. Like, you don’t know. What’s interesting until you find out what other people are interested in, and then you can also gauge how people react in real time.

You can have bursts and go, oh my gosh, it’s so interesting. Like tell me more. Really, that’s not really that interesting to me. That’s not a value, right? It’s about the podcast hosts and their audience. So that’s really fantastic. Great. Let’s finish up here by talking about, wrapping up with a person that you’re on their podcast for.

How do we best utilize that? Especially for ourselves trying to grow a business and maybe want to bring those listeners somewhere else. How would you recommend a person best utilize that time, especially near the end of the pod.

[00:35:44] Ray:
Perfect. Yeah. So when you go on the show, I’ll mention at the end of the podcast, and even after the podcast has done, there are a few things that you can do to make the most of the podcasts that you’ve just been, not at the end of the show. Again, it’s about offering value to the customer. So. Or to the listeners.

It’s So. make sure you have something to offer the listeners of this specific podcast. So it can be as little as a coupon code for your software, maybe some free downloads of the first chapter of your book, whatever it is you’re offering.

Give it to the listeners of this podcast. Give them easy ways for them to contact you, whether it’s business or not.

One thing I’ve done personally is I created just a small, simple, personal page. I’m like, look, you don’t want to sign up for podcast sock. You don’t want to sign up for a live link with my other business, but you have a question for me. I encourage people and I’ll encourage your audience here as well.

If you want a chat, I love talking about this stuff. Hit me up on Facebook. Look for, you know, I say something like I’ll say here, look for Ray. Most of the picture of the guy who is sword fighting. Cause that’s what I do in my free time. so you won’t confuse me with another raid lightning or go to Ray Blakney.com.

Contact me there. Those kinds of things at it might not be a sale, but you’re not building relationships outside of just the podcast hosts. You’re building relationships are there. so that’s what I would say at the end of the show, kind of wrap everything up.

If you are selling a story, a podcast is also like a story.

So you kind of start by talking about what you’re saying. If you building a story brand, if people haven’t read that book, I highly encourage it, but they kind of walk you through this whole thing. my, my main business is in education and they actually. The whole StoryBrand things, what we’ve been doing in language education for years, not by we, I mean the whole language education area, you kind of start with the summary.

You end with a summary of what you did, because people might forget some of the details along the way after you’re done with the podcast after you’ve kind of turned off the recording. There are a few things that I also recommend that I find a lot of people don’t do one send at least the thank you messages.

I wouldn’t, you know, I interviewed a few hundred people and I’d say five of them said, thank you the next day, or, you know, the hour afterwards. So just be polite. Say thank you to the host. You can actually take that to the next level. If you find that you had a rapport with the host. Yes. Do you have any friends who you think I’d be a good what podcast that I could be on their show?

That I’d be a good fit for their show. You’ll be surprised. I’d say one out of three times, most podcasts. There’s no other podcasts, unless they are very high level podcasts that would get a hundred, you know, hundreds of pitches every month. Most people are starting off podcasting or looking for great guests.

So if you just asked that the next day, you will probably get on a few more shows out of that as well. And then the final thing to make the most of your podcast for everybody is when your show is about. And they send you social media links was a lot podcast and we’ll put it in time to make here’s the Facebook post.

These are like share-its, at least you can do is share it on your personal pages. You don’t have to share it out to your email list or your business or anything like that, but just share it. it shows appreciation to the podcast posts that you’re doing.

[00:38:32] Pat:
For sure. Another thing that we could think about is to really utilize that audience and provide them even more value even after the conversation is over, is to

Provide a landing page with even more things on it. Right. Or relevant things that came as a result of that conversation. And I know for example, if like you don’t just walk the walk, you talk the talk, you have a page that, people can go to right now to learn more.

And again, that is a, is a great strategy. where can people go and what will they get when they get.

[00:39:03] Ray:
Absolutely.

So you can go to Podcast Hawk.com. So podcasts AJW k.com backslash SPI. So what we have there for you is not only will you get a coupon for one month, three podcasts off, do you guys want to try it out? You essentially, you know, for any of our plans, so.

Well, if I have 5,100 podcasts, get yourself on a bunch of shows, make sure that this works for you before committing to a more longer term thing.

If you don’t even have the budget to pay the $39 a month. Right now, I have a spreadsheet that I used when I was starting out. That I’m sharing with you guys where you can actually track the podcast. You manually find online. You can track the emails you sent out to the, all the rest of that stuff. I’m also sharing a media kit.

One of my tricks podcasts pitching is. Well, I guess there’s a busy that can back this up. So if you send them a pitch, that’s 20 pages long, they are not going to read it. You know, even if you send your whole bio and all that were your resume, they are exactly, exactly. So they won’t read it. So what I recommend doing is kind of keeping that first one on the main points, but you can include a link.

Don’t be making this an attachment because then you’re going to be putting this. box much more frequently, but you can include a link in there. It’s like, well, pat, this is why I am. This is what I think I talked about. You want to find out more, here’s a link to my media kit. You can host it on your Google drive.

You can post on your personal website, but they click on that. And then you can have a longer media kit, which not only will talk about your experience.

If you’ve been on shows before, make sure you have a few episodes that you’ve appeared on, that they can listen to in your media kit. So I’ve shared that on this page where you guys can just. Without the images put in your own, put it up on your websites and that you can use, you can have your own media kit and about.

30 minutes by using that, that will be there for free for you.

[00:40:41] Pat:
See, this is what we’re talking about. Providing even more value than expected, in re we talked about Podcast Hawk, and just how genius that is. I hope everybody checks it out. you can go to that link podcast, hok.com/spi. And, see, see what this is all about. So, Ray, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for allowing myself and Matt to come on as advisors and help out with the growth of the company. Cause we, we truly believe in what you’re doing in the purpose of it. And, couldn’t be more thankful to work with you.

[00:41:08] Ray:
Thanks, Pat. It’s been a blast.

[00:41:09] Pat:
Thank you.

Alright, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Ray. Ray is just a plethora of knowledge. Thank you so much. And again, that link, if you want to check out the goodies there and Podcast Hawk, go to PodcastHawk.com/spi. Again, that’s PodcastHawk.com/spi.

As always we’ll have links and resources at our show notes page, which you can find at smartpassiveincome.com/session547.

As you’ve heard during this episode, I get asked all the time from people to be a guest on this show. So, hopefully this gives you some idea, from my perspective, what it’s like, and some of the no-nos, some of the yeses and things that you can do to increase your chances to get on a show like mine, or even bigger.

Again, it doesn’t matter if it’s a huge show, you can provide a lot of value to a very tight knit community through a podcast that exists, and still see massive benefits. In fact, sometimes even more benefits by going more niche. By going into smaller podcasts that have much more loyal and a tighter audiences.

So, best of luck to you. And again, podcasting: amazing. Guest podcasting: even better. You don’t even need a podcast.

Now, I will say, that as a podcaster myself, when I had a podcast it was a lot easier to get on other people’s podcasts. Podcasters know that existing podcasters are often better on the microphone.

They sound better. So, you can definitely position yourself even better if you did have a podcast. Of course, if you’re interested in starting your own, you can check out PowerUpPodcasting.com. We also have tutorials on YouTube, and all that great stuff. But today, definitely check out Podcast Hawk, cause you can get on another person’s podcast very, very soon. PodcastHawk.com/spi.

Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. We got a lot more coming, and I’ll see you then. Peace out. Cheers, and as always, team Flynn for the win!