How to Create Hits as a Podcast Guest (And Unlock Unlimited Leads For Your Business) – Part 1

Do you want to attract unlimited leads as a podcast guest?

Small business owners and solopreneurs oftentimes run their businesses with limited resources. Be it traffic, lead generation, marketing funnels, or sales, you do it all yourself. But if podcast guesting is one of the strategies you've used to build your brand and grow your audience, you have probably encountered a challenge.

You don't get enough engagement or leads as a podcast guest.

Have you ever felt like podcast guesting is not working for you? Have you felt like your appearances as a podcast guest have not generated enough engagement or leads? Have you always wanted listeners to see you as the expert on your topic?

You need to focus on One thing.

Oftentimes, the host of a podcast does a great job of shining the spotlight on you. Yet, the episode falls through the cracks. In this episode, you'll see how you can create very good podcast episodes as guest on other podcasts. You'll see how by focusing on just four critical elements, you can position yourself as the expert that listeners should listen to (and want to follow). In this episode, you'll learn:

Show Transcript

It’s me Karthik. Today, we’re talking about how you can get other podcasts to drive more leads to your business as a podcast guest. Podcast guesting as it’s popularly called, is an approach whereby you get to be on other podcasts as a guest. With the rise in the number of podcasts, there’s been a rise in listeners and businesses have embraced podcasts too. Just so you know, the ad spend on podcasting is expected to be about 2.4 billion dollars by 2024. It was 800 million dollars in 2020.

In this series of episodes on this podcast, we will help you make the most of podcasting for your business as a podcast guest. Today, we’ll focus on the why you should focus on the one thing, and how you can do it as a podcast guest. We’ll do this in three parts:

First, let’s start with a question.

Let’s say you ran a business selling courses on music.

If you had to advertise your business to get more clients, where would you go?

To the biggest mall in your city that got the highest footfall every single weekend.

Or, to the most popular music store in the city that attracted all the musicians in the city?

Here’s the thing about traffic.

When you have the budget and the money, you can afford to put up an ad on a giant billboard in the busiest parts of your neighborhood. It’s like a hunter having a gun and an unlimited supply of bullets to kill his prey.

You can spray and pray. Hoping that one of the bullets somehow found their way into the prey’s body. That’s what you do when you have unlimited resources. That’s what big businesses do when it comes to their marketing. They spend tends of thousands of dollars on running campaigns.

But what if you are not a big business?

What if you don’t have unlimited resources? What if you are a hunter with just four arrows in your quiver? How would you approach your hunt? How will you attract the right clients?

You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars running campaigns on Facebook or YouTube. At least, that’s not going to be your first step. Spraying and praying won’t work for you.

Back to my question about where would you go to advertise your business if you sell courses on music. You’d be better-off advertising your business at the popular music store, as opposed to the biggest mall in your city.

Why? Simply because the music store will attract the highest possible visitors of your exact target audience.

Whereas at the mall, you’ll find everyone coming in. Yes, you’ll have several hundreds of thousands more people at the mall. But the music store is sure to attract just the kind of people you want as clients or students.

Podcast guesting is not a spray and pray strategy.

It’s more like advertising your music courses business at a popular music store. And that’s because of the way podcasts are created in the first place. Most good podcasts have a singular focus on a specific audience.

For example, on this podcast, we focus on small businesses and solopreneurs. That’s our target audience. Sure, there can be a few outside this target grouping. But that’s what we focus on.

When we have a guest on this podcast, they are guaranteed to be inside the ears of small business owners and solopreneurs. We don’t talk about beekeeping and soccer. We talk about business, marketing, creating offers, messaging.

If you are a business that’s catering to small business owners and solopreneurs, you are better-off spending 30 minutes to be on this podcast, as opposed to running ads of Facebook.

Not a One-Time Affair.

And, unlike Facebook Ads, podcast guesting is not a one-time affair. You will continue to be inside the ears of listeners of that podcast today and forever. It’s like planting a tree. It shall continue to bear fruits and flowers for many years to come.

Let’s see what it takes to create a successful podcast as a podcast guest.

One of the biggest reasons why people in general fail as a podcast guest, is because they aren’t prepared to be a podcast guest. And even when they are comfortable with being on mic and recorded, some guests run into a bigger problem: the lack of singular focus.

In case you are starting to consider podcast guesting, here are four things I want you to consider focusing on:

1. Focus on one audience

Since you are listening to me anyway, let’s take my business as an example. We focus on two specific target market segments: small businesses and startups. While a lot of topics and problems are very similar for both these segments, there are a lot of differences too.

So if I have to go as a guest on another podcast, I have to pick one of these segments. It will be a bad idea to go with a dual focus. I cannot say that I’ll focus on both small businesses and startups. Their problems are different.

When you have a specific problem, you look for a specific solution. Get frequent headaches when you are hungry? That’s a specific problem. So I need to pick one of the segments for any podcast that I am a guest on.

Next, comes the topic.

2. One Topic

I was on a podcast sometime ago and the host wanted me to talk about landing pages and conversion. She asked me if we could talk about sales conversions. So I had to pick one topic. Landing pages or sales pages. Because while they are similar at a higher level, there are nuances that make them different.

If you are a fitness coach on a podcast about fitness, chance are that you will find resonance if you spoke about weight loss or abdominal strength as opposed to just everyday fitness.

Which leads us to the problem.

3. Focus on one problem.

If I took my earlier example, I would be better off connecting with more listeners of a business podcast if I focused on a specific problem they face with sales pages, than just sales pages in general. The problem could be “not getting enough sales,” or “how long should sales pages be,” or “how to write sales pages fast.”

Notice that I’m not talking about topics, but problems in this case. “how to write headlines better” is far less effective as opposed to “how to write a sales page fast.”

If you looked at the fitness coach example, and you topic is “weight loss,” then a specific problem would be “losing belly fat” or “losing thigh fat.”

And that leads us to the fourth element which is about focusing on one result.

4. One Result

Results are different from problems. While problem is the situation someone is stuck with, the result is where they want to go when you get them unstuck.

Going by the previous examples, if you looked at the problem of “losing belly fat,” a result you could focus on would be “to run a half marathon” or “to fit into your old trousers.”

If we looked at “how to write a sales page fast,” then the result you could focus on could be “sell your courses faster” or “get more copywriting clients.”

When you focus on one audience, one listener, one problem and one result, you are automatically doing two things. First, you are filtering your audience, and next, you are moving them from passive listening to action.

We’ll look at how to get listeners to take action in the next episode.

Now, let’s look at what you can do to implement what you learned in today’s episode.

Well, first you should download the Launch Plan Workbook so you have everything you need to take action. Next, make sure you use what you learned in the last two episodes to get on your favorite podcasts as a guest.

Quick Action

It’s actually quite simple. You just need to be conscious about this before you show up for the interview.

And that brings us to the end of today’s episode.

Download the Launch Plan Workbook:

kartvee.com/launchplan