The RIGHT Way to Pitch Podcasts

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve told you how you can be an effective podcast guest. And I told you about my own content repurposing Flywheel and how you can repurpose content.

Now, I’m gonna bring those two worlds together by showing you how to pitch well enough to get on other people’s podcasts. As well as how you can reuse that content as well. 

Let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Profitable Podcaster where I help coaches, course creators and authors launch and grow their podcasts to help them build authority, generate more leads, and sell more through actionable advice and expert tested systems. 

I’m your host, Joe Casabona, and I’ve been podcasting for over 10 years. I’ve generated millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of dollars from my shows. I’ll teach you everything I know here on The Profitable Podcaster. 

So, going on someone’s podcast is the best way for you to promote your own work, right? right? Wrong. Well, it is right, but it should not be your primary motivation. Much like how the intentions behind your actions get you into the Good Place (one of my favorite TV shows within the last 10 years or so). Your intentions for reaching out to a podcast host and coming on their show also need to be good. Otherwise, the host and the audience will see right through you. 

And I have so many thoughts on this. I have a list of eight bad pitch archetypes that I’m gonna be publishing soon. But this is so important to me because I get a lot of bad pitches. Some of which I will share with you later in this episode. 

So how do you get on someone’s podcast? 

First, you need to establish trust. Look. As someone who’s been podcasting for a long time and someone who knows the value of getting in front of a different audience, I understand.

I know that time is an important commodity. That said, in order to get people who want to know more about you or check you out, they need to trust you. And you will not establish that trust with the host or the listeners if you just come out the gate hyping how great you are.

So, how should you do that? 

Well, first of all, you can engage with people on social media. If you have hosts or shows that you want to follow, follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn or Macedon or whatever social media you choose. And actually engage with them. Provide value. Then, you need to be intentional about the shows you’re going on.

So first, don’t just email every podcast host whose information you can find. Look at the shows that cover the topics where you are a subject matter expert. 

I’ve shared ways to find shows in a previous episode like my podcast episode that I will link in the show notes for this episode over at [profitablepodcaster.fm/316]. But you can look at Apple Podcasts, Google Shows, look at PodChaser, and of course, my personal favorite, the Tink Media Podcast Swap database. The most important thing for you to remember here is you wanna find shows where you can provide value.

A couple weeks ago, I told you have one or two things that you can repeat. Action items, things of value that you can give to the audience. And this brings me to my second point. Listen to the podcasts you’re pitching to be on. Look. I don’t do this all the time, but I try to do it anytime I’m going on a show. And I, or I’m pitching a show. It’s number one in my book as far as people who pitch to beyond my show.

If I’m being honest with you, it’s pretty clear when someone hasn’t listened to at least part of an episode and they’re just sending a generic email pitching themselves or their client. I know it’s work, but again, you need to know that you can offer the host an audience value. And I’ve been in the situation where I’ve pitched a show where I thought the audience was, for example, authors. And it’s actually like the audience is actually children. It’s a children’s author podcast, but the audience is not authors. And  that’s my bad, right? I didn’t listen to the show or read anything past a couple, like maybe the title. So I didn’t get that pitch right.

Just sending a bio with all the things you’d like to talk about will pretty much always get a polite rejection from me. Unless the stars align.

Instead, listen to the most recent couple of episodes or read through the transcripts and check out the format and topic of the show. You can also see if they’re sharing clips on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, right? You can get an idea for the type of content they want to have on their show by doing just a little bit of research. Figure out what the host is trying to do for the listeners. Scan the archive for topics that might be adjacent to your topic. Then you’ll be able to speak honestly about the show and how you can provide value. And that’s the important part of this whole thing. Providing value for the host’s audience, for the show’s audience. And again, I want to continue on this path. I want, I will die on this hill. Talk about how you can help the host and their audience.

As a podcast host, my number one objective is providing value to my audience. If I’m going to ask for 40 to 60 minutes of their time, I wanna make sure it’s worth it for them. So when someone reaches out to me about coming on my show, I look to see if they actually know what the show is about. Why they specifically chose my show of the thousands that are out there and what value they can provide my audience. If I don’t get that vibe from a guest pitch, I politely decline. 

I have sponsorships if you just want to promote yourself to my audience. What I want is value. And again, anybody who does a little bit of research for my show knows that I don’t tell founder stories. So if I get a pitch that’s a founder story, that’s an immediate decline. And I try to make that really clear on the form where I say like, “Hey, apply to be a guest here.”

So when you pitch yourself as a guest, again, make sure to hit these points:

• You’ve listened to a couple of episodes, or at least a few clips. 
• You know what they talk about on their show. 
• There’s something about the format or the show or the host that you like. You feel that based on the target audience for the show, they would benefit from the topic that you are an expert in. 
• And then you talk about why you’re a good person to talk about that topic.

So, here are a few very close to real example. I’ve anonymized it a little bit. I’m not out to shame anybody, but here is a bad pitch. I’m gonna read it verbatim and then it will go through why it’s bad. “Hey, Joe. Jim Grandstand is the CEO of Fastball, Inc. He graduated top of his class from the University of Albany and holds three patents for his technology Innovations. Fastball Inc. Is the number one company improving pitching technology and taking it to the next level. Based in Santa Clarita, California, the team lives and breathes baseball. Would you like to have Jim on as a guest, talk about his innovative background and passion for baseball?” Even worse, I did respond to this one, right? And I said like, why? And  I said like, what can you do for my audience? And,  I got an equally generic answer about how great Jim is. So this is a bad pitch because it doesn’t mention my show or audience at all outside of like, “Hey, Joe.” which again, that’s like a male merge thing or whatever. That’s like a mass email thing that you can do, right? And it talks about how great the guest is. Further, the proposed topic is about him, and not just a topic that’s helpful to my audience. This adds no value to my show. And it’s pretty clear that it’s just to promote Jim and his company.

A couple of other example pitches I’ve gotten, and the reason I’m recording this episode today is because I got like, just an awful, awful pitch today. But a couple of other examples of bad pitches I’ve gotten.  People who mistake me for the NPR podcast and want to be a guest. I’m including this because they contacted me from my website and I make it like really, really clear without explicitly saying that I’m not the NPR podcast. That I’m not the NPR podcast. 

I’ve also got pitches where people dictate that the episode needs to go out. So, it coincides with their launch. And again, that is…That’s a paid advertising thing. 

The pitch I got today looks like, sounds like it was written by AI. I’ll read you a few portions from it. “Hi, Joe. This is Aiden’s assistant. I have checked out that you are in the social media industry, and one of the renowned influencers of today’s media. I am positive that we can work together (Some information about who he’s pitching me on). We are leaning towards the possibility that you can invite Aiden as a guest on your podcast, where both of you can discuss and enlighten business minded people. You can definitely help us in order to broaden Aiden’s audience. Your positive words can definitely boost our line of business. It’s very transparent. You can book a call with him through this link.”  So, this is just part of it, but okay. So lots of generic stuff.

First of all, I’m not in the social media industry.  I’m not really renowned influencer in any shape of the word. And then they’re, you know, making it seem like, “Oh, well. We’re thinking that you can invite us on your podcast. We want you to help us broaden Aiden’s audience.” So that is just a flat out, bad pitch. 

Here’s a good pitch I got. And again, this has been anonymized, but “Hey, Joe. I recently discovered your podcast and have become a big fan. Your interviews provide a ton of value and insight into your guests and their processes. I especially liked the one that you did with Stephanie Wells. Her transition from nurse to developer was a great story. The important bit about this, as a sidebar is that Stephanie Wells interview was not one of the most, like it wasn’t the first or second most recent interview (which is usually what people say. They just like pick the one at the top of the feed)  I think a guest that could add similar value is Abby Wright. Her journey is incredibly interesting and her insight will really help your audience.  information about Abby and what she can talk about including some easy to start methods for finding their own messaging, right? Again, she’s launched a business, et cetera. So a specific thing that my audience can get.”

This pitch hits everything. The sender demonstrates that they listen to the show and therefore know the topics I’m most likely to cover. They know my audience and what will help them. And they tell me about a guest without bragging too much about them, right? 

The bio info is important, but it should be the last thing, right? Think about what’s in it for me. This is what people are always thinking about. And in my case, it’s what’s in it for my audience? So, at the end of the day, most podcast hosts are trying to do right by their audience.

So, as an effective guest, again, you wanna bring those one or two things, but you also wanna make sure you’re pitching and including those one or two things in your pitch. “Hey, I noticed that you know, you cover these topics. Here’s something that I’ve been talking about a lot lately. Generative AI in podcasting, I think I could teach your audience some unique ways to leverage generative AI and podcasting to summarize transcripts and blah, blah, blah, whatever, right? And, at least I’m now giving you takeaways worth for your audience.” So I think this is really important. 

Now, as far as the repurposing bit, what exactly can you repurpose from someone else’s podcast? 

First of all, if video is recorded and they’re clipping it, ask if you can have the raw video for your own social media sharing. 

Create Social media posts based on the clips that they create. If they’re not creating clips, then you can use an app, like a Headliner or Overcast to grab the clip yourself, transcribe it, and and outline it. Say, “Hey, I recently went on this show. Their audience is X. I talked about Y. Here are the top takeaways from my episode.  You can, you can listen to it here, right?”

It’s allowing you to take the thing that you’ve talked about already and repurpose it, and reframe it for that audience, right? Maybe your audience is slightly different from their audience. Maybe you talk to business coaches and they talk to authors, or maybe you talk to window washers and they talk to carpet cleaners, whatever. You can reframe it for that audience or put a different lens on the things that you said on the show and share it to your social media.

So, there you go.  How pitch well and how to repurpose your podcast guest content.

By the way, as a podcast host myself, I would love if people repurposed my content more, right? If they were guests and they were sharing my show with their audience, that’s beneficial to me, right? Because what is good is I’m getting more people into my audience. That’s like the social contract that you have with a guest, right? “Hey, you’re borrowing my audience. I’m borrowing your audience a little bit. Let’s provide value for everybody.”

So there you go. There you have it. 

Episode idea of the Weak: listicle – take out blog post a listical, right? Four apps that I can’t live without.  Or five tried and true methods for, you know, cleaning your teeth, whitening your teeth, whatever.Tthese are, this is really easy content to create. It’s very consumable. It gives people action items. And,  you can usually throw a few affiliate links Into the show description, if that’s your jam. Of course, make sure to disclose that there are affiliate links. 

Now, if you want to learn more about repurposing or guest pitching, I cover both of these topics in my Podcast Mastery program over at [podcastmastery.co]. You’ll get access to over a hundred videos as well as some one-on-one time with me. Again, that’s over at [podcastmastery.co]. Definitely check it out. 

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. 

For all the show notes and links that I talked about here, you can go to [profitablepodcaster.fm/316]. It’ll also be in the description of wherever you’re listening to this. 

But thanks so much for tuning in. And until next time. I can’t wait to see what you make.