Using podcasts to grow your thought leadership

Quotes

• “I really started being a guest on pocast. I left my job as a TV anchor and reporter, worked at a PR agency for 6 months before starting my own. To grow my business, I was a guest on other people’s podcast. I did for awhile, probably two years. Then I started working closely with Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Incomepodcast.” -Christina“I started selling online course with the people who heard me on his podcast.We started to form a relationship and then I get to his Mastermind program then a couple of people ask me, why I don’t start my own podcast.” -Christina“It started as a lead generator to sell my online course to teach people to be their own publicist. Since them my online course has not been my focus and I don’t even openly promote it. So I asked myself if this isn’t my goal anymore, why am I still doing the podcast?” -Christina“The purpose of the podcast is in the guest that I bring on. I always brough on guests that I could learn from or my listeners could learn from. Because I am not going after those online course sales anymore, I am now focusing on my PR Agency MediaMavenand Podcast Clout, my software that was created for people in PR.” -Christina“Instead of bringing on general thought leaders, I am going to be niched in bringing on people in marketing and public relations to talk about their day-to-day because for me I find that’s where I learned a lot of value.” -Christina“So many people don’t understand the value of a podcast and the value is in the listener and I worked with all forms of media. A podcast listener is so much more invested than the other ones because when you take the time to find a podcast, to tap on it, to listen to it for 30 minutes, you are invested. You are choosing to focus on that thing only.” -Christina“People listen to podcast for two reasons, to be educated and to be entertained. They are the people that are so much more invested in bettering themselves personally and professionally. They are the action takers.” -Christina“The thing that I will say in my sales pitches to B2B SaaS companies who are interested in becoming sponsors of the podcast is, ‘hey I’m going to give you a pop quiz. If somebody is going to listen to you for 15 -25 minutes, can you name another medium of marketing where you are going to have a captive audience of multiple thousands of people listening to you for 15 to 25 minutes, all week and nobody can ever answer it and sometimes they’ll say, okay, event.” -Ben “But being a keynote speaker at an event with 10,000 people listening to it. That’s probably going to cost either tens of thousands of dollars or it’s going to be incredibly hard for you to secure that speaking opportunity. You really have to be a mega-influencer to have that type of reach. In podcast, you can do that multiple times a week if you wanted to.” -Ben “Pitching wise, I actually don’t have a background in public relations. Like I said, my background was in TV, I was a reporter and anchor for ten years so I was on the receiving end of pitches, so I know first hand how bad they are. Most of them are bad for many reasons but generally speaking, they do not put themselves in the same shoes as the person who was on the receiving end. They are very promotional, they’re very obvious, a a lot of times it is just spray and pray. It looks lazy. So I wanted to right those wrongs.” -Christina“Stop being promotional. I know it sounds like it defeats the purposebut I promise you, if you land a spot on the podcast or any form of media, the promotion is going to come by default. Nodody is going to give you a free commercial.” -Christina“By you willing to share your expertise on a podcast, as a side effect you are getting that promotion. But when you come out with so much overly promotion, like it is the podcaster’s job to promote you, you’ve already lost the game.” -Christina“When you are conducting your outreach, the first thing you need to do is do a great job targeting and figure out what you have to say and who is interested in that message.” -Ben “The thing that you should get across is what is the value that you can provide to the podcast. What I am thinking about when I’m fielding the pitches are, what’s the content going to be like? Are my audience going to be interested in this? Is it going to create compelling content.” -Ben“The second thing is, who is the person I am talking to and what’s the potential reach they have because for us, as podcasters, our guests have the ability to serve as a marketing channel. That’s one of the things we’ve done when we are fielding inbound pitches.” -Ben“It’s something that makes me mad but there have been so many when I’ve had people as a guest on my podcast and when the episodes go live, I email them the link, I email them the pretty pictures and videos that I’ve created for them on social media and crickets. I don’t see them share anything, they don’t even respond to the email.” -Christina“Most of the time when you earn profit from any kind of publicity, it’s from you sharing it. I wrote for Inc Magazine for two years. I did not get one client because I wrote for Inc Magazine, I did get client because people saw me sharing what I wrote on Inc Magazine onmy LinkedIn.” -Christina“The things that I think about are what’s the content, how much reach is the potential speaker going to have and I understand podcasts are a marketing channel and the person interviewed might be the CEO and they are not going tospend their time marketing even though they have a public profile. Sometimes they think, well my PR team is going to take care of the syndication and that is a gap.” -Ben “This was created oit og a huge gap in the public relations space. PR agencies they use softwares to find contact information and all kinds of things for different media outlets, all traditional. So if I want to pitch something on Oprah Magazine, I can putthat in there and they can tell me all the people who work there, what they write about and how to reach out to them. If I want to pitch people in Northern California, I can put that in and get all the contacts in there but nothing existed like this for podcast.” -Christina“Basically with Podcast Clout, it is all manually done. There is no AI. We go through what Apple and Stitcher are telling us are the top few hundred podcasts in each of the category and we give you all of the information in a spreadsheet that you can export. I kind of created it for me and decided I could share it with others.” -Christina