How to Succeed at Podcasting

Check out this video to see how you can get great results from podcasting supported by an automated process.

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Video transcript:

The first process is our podcasting process. Who here listens to podcasts? Awesome, that is pretty good, actually. If you’re in any kind of room at any kind of event and you ask that question, about ten percent of the people put their hand up. So we’ve got a pretty good adoption of podcasting here. Who listens to non-fiction podcasts like This American Life?

The reason I called this presentation rinse and repeat is I’m a big fan of leverage. I get bored very quickly and I don’t like doing things I don’t have to do. Dave thinks I’m a fast implementer. My business partner would tell you I’m trigger happy and he is forever trying to contain me.

We’ve been podcasting for almost three years now. The first podcast that I started failed. When I say it failed, I mean I published six episodes and then stopped after I had people lined up to record episode 7,8,9,10,11,12. I pulled the pin because I realized every time I recorded an episode of my podcast, I then created about four hours work for myself editing that podcast. I was still consulting with clients and I was just having a meltdown.

I thought, I love this. I had Rand from Moz, I had Derek Sivers from CD Baby, I actually interviewed those guys. Derek Sivers from CD Baby I interviewed and published it fifteen months later. That’s how unorganised I was, how overwhelmed I was. I knew there was this great opportunity to podcast but I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work.

So I shut that podcast down and just pretended it did’n’t happen. About eight months later, I started another one which I’m proud to say has been a huge success. It has been a success not only for our business but for me personally. We are about to publish episode ninety-nine, which is the one with John Warrillow. I think we’ve missed two weeks in the last two years. One was Easter, just because it was a short week and we ran out of time, I said, let’s have a week off. Let’s make it like it was deliberate.

The other one was last week because we had an enrollment and had a huge launch in our business. We just didn’t want to dilute the message that was going out to the market by publishing a great podcast that probably would never get listened to or would just slip amongst the noise. So two weeks we’ve missed in the last two years. That’s because we’ve got processes, very detailed processes in place now for running our podcast.

John Warrillow is the person who wrote the book on The Automatic Customer and Built to Sell. His thing is recurring revenue and building that asset in your business. So writing the book is probably the ultimate piece of authority content you can produce. But it is a lot of work, writing a book. Not all of us can write a book. We don’t have the time or the structure or the motivation.

But having a great blog or a great podcast is the second tier of having good authority content. Podcasting I really like because it is a passive form of content. You can listen to a podcast while you’re walking your dog, in transit, at the gym, wherever. You don’t need to sit in front of the computer and watch it, you can listen to it wherever you are. Podcasting, I think is a great form of authority content.

It’s also a great lead generator. I was talking to a buddy of mine, Ed. He runs an SEO, pay per click agency in Perth. He publishes a podcast. He is well aware of the audience he has. He’s not trying to set the world on fire but he continuously picks up customers as a result of podcasting about what he knows. Instantly he’s seen as an expert on that topic because he’s publishing information.

The only difference between him and anyone else is he’s actually recording it and hitting the publish button. People have a lot of fear about publishing material on the internet that people might not take them seriously or who am I too publish information? No one is going to listen. But people who publish information regularly are the ones who get results. They just manage to get out of their own way long enough to publish something.

This is what our podcast process looks like. It all begins with an email request. It is quite a detailed process. Our email request goes out. If we’ve got time later I can even dissect the format for this email.

Essentially, this email is designed to do two things. The first is to get the person to open the email. If you think about open rates, if you can get half the person you send an email to to open the email, you’re doing pretty well. So why is it any different than if you’re just sending just one email to someone?

If I’m going to reach out to Neil Patel for instance, and try to get him on a podcast, how can I guarantee that he’s going to open my email? I try to maximise my chances there. My favourite subject line is: I want to promote you. If you send that to anyone who has a book or any piece of software, chances are they’re going to open it.

Then in that email, I prove that we have an alignment, that we’re talking to the same audience. I quote something specific that they’ve done that I really like. Then they know it’s not a cookie cutter boiler plate email.

Rule number two, once you’ve got them to open the email is to make it super stupidly simple for them to say yes. They’re going to start reading the email and say, ok, this is great. What do you want me to do? You want to get me on a podcast. So I make it really short and really simple.

I’d love to promote you, I’ve got a good database of about 25,000 WordPress consultants. I’d like to showcase you to them. I’d like to do that by getting you on a podcast and asking you some questions. It will take about twenty minutes. If you agree, I’ll shoot the questions through in advance. I promise I won’t overshoot because I know you’re busy. Are you in?

That’s exactly how I got Seth Godin on a podcast. It took me three times to get Seth. The first two times I was too eager, I was dragging it out and I was a total fanboy. He thought, yes, whatever. The third time, I really cut to the chase, I spoke to him as an equal and made it really easy for him to say yes and he said yes.

Once we request someone to be on a podcast, we tag them. We use Infusionsoft, by the way. But you can use ActiveCampaign, Entrepot, whatever system you’re using. We tag them and at that point, they are tagged as being requested.

Someone in our organisation will also move them to a new board on Trello. Michelle, who works for us in the Philippines, will have all of our contacts and people we want on the podcast on a Trello board. She will send the email, move them off the Trello and then tag them in Infusionsoft.

Then we do nothing. We just wait. Usually what happens, after thirty to forty-five days, if they haven’t responded, we’ll send them a follow up email. If they say yes, they are dropped into a campaign in Infusionsoft which sends them instructions on how to book the appointment.

In that email there is a link to my calendar. I use ScheduleOnce for my calendar. The guest can then just go and look at my calendar and book a thirty minute appointment in my calendar.

The first I know I’ve got Guy Kawasaki on the podcast is I get an email saying, hey Guy Kawasaki has made an appointment to be on your podcast. It is happening next Monday afternoon at 4 o’ clock. I say, sweet. I have no idea who has been emailed today or tomorrow or yesterday to request them to be on the podcast. That is all done by the team and by the process.

Then they get the instructions and at that point they are then put into a timer delay where we do nothing until the podcast episode is actually recorded. Once the podcast episode is recorded, they are tagged as having been recorded. Podcast episode recorded, boom, done. Again, I don’t do this, the team does this work.

At that point they are sent an email. So when they’re tagged, on their customer record card, we add the URL of their episode. Then they are sent an email swipe file when the episode goes live with the URL for them to promote. Hey, your podcast has just gone live on our blog. Here is the link. Here is a little email we’ve written that you can send out and here are some tweets that you can put out on social with the link to your episode on our blog. At that point, they’re tagged again.

On our podcast we give away a prize every week as a way to encourage comments and engagement. It’s funny, if you want people to comment on your blog, you generally have to tell them and dangle a carrot for them to do it. People are just lazy. So we offer a prize and it’s usually the book or the software or whatever it is that is relevant to the guest. Usually the guest will donate that prize.

We tag them here and we wait seventeen days. We tell our podcast audience, they leave a comment under the podcast and I’ll get John to swing by in a couple of weeks and award the prize. We wait seventeen days to give our audience enough time to leave some comments.

Then we send the podcast guest an email reminder saying, hey John, your podcast has been really popular, etc. Remember we agreed we were going to give away, (insert custom field, the prize they have agreed to give away.) I would love you to come back and go through the comments and pick a winner. We will organize the details of the prize.

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