 All right, thank you. I'm Mark Diehl, and this is going to be content explosion through podcast interviews. I had my little trigger warning up there, because I was advised maybe I would not throw in a atomic explosion right up front. Make sure which, all right. I've got my buttons. Excellent. Oh, and I can hear myself. That's even better. So first, I really don't like when speakers go on and on about their bona fides. Obviously, if they're up there talking, then the people that look at the speaker submissions have done their bit in vetting. So let's just say, I know podcast interviews. I've been podcasting about five years. I run Podcast Atlanta. It's a local organization of over 700 podcasters and the founder of Podcast Guest Academy. I've been talking with people for a while. You can find me on Twitter at Mark Diehl pod. But that's not why you're here. Let's dive right into it. All the information I'm going to give you today could be used for yourself or your client. So if you want to put yourself out there as an expert, through podcast interviews, obviously, listen up. If you're designing a website for somebody and what's stopping their growth is them putting their own content out there. I'm sure you've never hit a client that had writer's block because they can't blog. Well, this information can help them craft their own content. So first, why? Why do you want to do podcast interviews? Well, for one, social media is actually down. The latest report from Edison Research, their infinite dial that came out last month, for the first time in over a decade, social media usage is down. They're saying we've hit social media saturation. And this is driven a lot by Facebook and Twitter. They've taken a real nosedive, although some other platforms are coming up, Instagram and things like that. But overall, the social media is down. Podcast consumption is up. So there we are. In 2008, 26% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month. That's one out of four. And who's listening to podcast interviews? Well, you've got the pie chart right there, but a lot of educated people. And educated people typically means affluent and having some money to spend. So that's a good platform to be on. One out of four are listening. And of those people, they're educated people. So that's something to keep in mind with podcast interviews. Also, companies recognize this, although you saw that stat where listenership has basically gone from 12 to 20, about 2x. Podcasts advertising in that same five-year period has gone up three and a half times. They're projecting $256 million, almost a quarter of a billion in podcast advertising in the United States. And there's probably a few advertising things that aren't on that radar there. But that's a lot. So companies have recognized the value in podcasting and putting ads on these podcasts. But also, there are interviews where you or your client could go onto a podcast and position yourself as an expert. There's three reasons why you'd want to be a guest. The first of which, it's one of the reasons why you're here. It's content. A lot of people, by show of hands, is it easier to talk than it is to write? Anybody? Nobody? Three people? Come on. All right. Let's wake up. I realize, come on. So the last session of the day, let's wake up. All right. So, and I'll warn you, we've got a microphone we're going to be throwing at people later on. So we'll make sure you're awake. So if it's easier to talk than it is to write, a podcast interview is a great way to kickstart that content. Because, basically, it's a conversation with you and somebody else. And then later on, you can listen to that and write about it and blog it on your own website or your content or your clients on the website that you have built for them. Of course, there's marketing of it. You get to expose yourself to the reach of that podcast host and their audience. Yeah, it's kind of a no-brainer, but I'd want to throw it up there. There's a third reason that I have found that podcasting, especially as a guest on other people's shows, is very important, and that is authority. You develop yourself and showcase yourself as an authority, not just an expert, but really an authority by being interviewed from other people on those shows. And again, you can showcase these on your own website and your own email list and those sorts of things. So there's three reasons why you'd want to be a podcast guest. Now, of course, to be on a podcast, you have to reach out to a podcaster. So we're going to talk about these outreach strategies. Why do, well, how easy is it to get on a podcast? Well, I want to point out that interview format podcasts, they need you. They really do. They need experts to come on their show and share what they know to their audience. So podcast hosts do need you. Now, before you start reaching out, you should identify what shows you want to be on. You could hop on Apple Podcast or Google Play, whatever, start typing in key search terms relevant to your market and find shows that pop up and identify those shows. Like, maybe that's a good show to be on. Let's see if it's an interview format. And then you want to listen to that show. Does it sound like something you're interested in? Do you think your market would be interested in it? Would it be fun to be on that show? Also, is it an interview show? Because if it's a solo based show, they may not have you on for an interview. And I will admit, since I am a podcaster, I would like you to review the show on Apple Podcast. And that's not to say that a review equals you being on the guest. That's just your way of giving back to that free content. So identify, listen, and review. Once you've done that for a particular show, you've found the show, you've listened to it, you have reviewed that show, now you can begin to reach out to the host. You can seek a referral introduction, a lot of times through social media. Hey, does anybody within my network know such and such the host of this podcast? Social media connection, you can connect with them on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, whatever social media platform and connect their social media engagement. If they're active on social media, a particular channel, you find them on that channel and reach out to them and interact with them. Then at that point, that's when you want to reach out and do a social media direct message or private message and say, hey, I really like your show. We'll go in a bit on the way you'd reach out in some scripts. Of course, there is the website contact. If they have a contact form on the website. And then cold email in this order. Some of these, you'll hit multiple ones in the order, but I wouldn't go straight to just a website contact or a cold email. You want to warm up these hosts. If you've taken the time to identify, listen, and review the show, you might as well take the time to go through these steps, advice, a straight, cold email. Now, I'm going to go through an outreach script. It's going to be a lot of text. I'm not going to read it out to you, but I'm going to tell you what's behind the psychology behind the text that I'm going to show you. Now, if you want the script, all you'll have to do is text the word, interview to 33444 on your phone. And I'll show you how you can get the script just emailed to you, then you can copy and paste it. Vice feverishly writing down these notes. Because I'm going to go through it pretty quick. It feels like a love letter, honestly. These scripts, I've done a lot of research on what works and what doesn't work. And as I was composing an ideal formula and submitting it to my fellow podcast host, we were coming up with a love letter to ourselves. And really, that's how it starts. Oh, again, if you want these scripts, text interview to 33444. All right, outreach script. Now, this is an email. You could say something like, hey, howdy, greetings, host name, right? I like to stick to just first name, vice long, formal name. But you want to open up the email. Or should I say, inside joke, right? If you listen to the podcast and there's some inside jokes or some vernacular they use, go ahead and throw that in there. That's going to immediately identify that you know this host, you know their show, and you know their audience. Now, if you're continuing from social media, you could say something like, hey, email is so much easier than doing these DM, PMs, whatever on social media, right? I like to identify that because honestly, I like to communicate through email based on these various social networks on a one-to-one level. Now, just continuing, I like to say first, allow me to gush about your show, some fan mail. And that's when you want to say something you like and something else you like or something you also like. One to three things that you like about the show, right? You're saying, hey, I know your audience and I really like your show because of these few things. And also, you'll want to point out that's why you felt compelled to leave a review on, say, Apple Podcasts. Now, will caution, just because you left a review doesn't mean that they need to interview you as a guest and be cautious how you word this in your own ways to say, hey, I reviewed your show, so have me on. You could say something, add on to it, say, I consider leaving a great review as the price of the free content. So thank you, we're equitable right now. Depends on your own language. Continuing on, now that I have exercised my inner fanboy or girl, allow me to get straight to the point. I know you want to deliver whatever the host message is to whatever their ideal listener is. And again, sometimes they use their own vernacular for those shows. And I have experience in this and I also have an expertise in blank, right? So you're starting to transition from the show to yourself. Or you could say something along the lines, I'm launching a book, product service on blank and I think it aligns well with your message and their ideal listener. Then you say something like, and just to openly acknowledge that, sure, you probably get a lot of requests because people want access to your audience, but I respect your audience. I respect your listeners because I am one and I promise if I'm on your show, I'm gonna treat it as if the listener is sitting across the interview table from the two of us. Thank you again for your consideration. I'll happily send a one sheet. We'll cover what that is. And also you value their time by filling out any forms that they may have. Some podcasts hosts like myself have scheduling tools to where you can automatically get booked on their calendar. It'll automatically send you out, interview links and things like that. But sometimes we need a little bit more information. Would you be interested in interviewing me for podcast name? And again, you wanna drop the podcast name in there. You wanna talk about themselves and their podcast often. I know it sounds like a cheesy pickup book from the 70s on how to pick up people, whatever gender, I'm okay with that. But you do wanna use their name, their podcast name as much as possible. I look forward to hearing from you, signed your name. Now what is important in cold emails is no links, no attachments. So if this is your first conversation from social media into email, you don't wanna have, here's a PDF of my one sheet. And here's links to my website, don't do that. Not until they've gotten back to you because of spam filters and things like that. Here's an example of a one sheet. It's what it sounds like. It's just a one sheet. Typically you'll do these in PDF, but there's three main sections. There's a hello section, which has a picture of yourself, your name, your contact info, some expertise keywords, the big bullet stuff up there. And then you've got what I like to call the interesting portion of it. That's where you start talking about your expertise and your experience. I like to give about three full sentences of your expertise, like an expertise statement and do the same with experience statements. I'm an expert in this. And I have also done, had this experience in the past, based off of my, which has built up to my expertise and experience. And then at the end, I like to have what I call the yes statements. Your studio setup, like look, I'm not new to podcast interviews. I've got this microphone, I know how to do this. I've got high bandwidth internet, whatever. I list some of the shows that you've been on. Yeah, I've talked to people who've been on over 150 podcast interviews on different shows. Obviously you don't want to list out everything. Maybe just hit some of the highlights. As well as your show promotion, how are you going to promote the show? That's gonna benefit both the host and yourself. So equipment, the screen, I know it hurts the eyes. It's red, it's ugly, but it can also hurt the ears. So do not use a laptop microphone, because it's gonna sound as echo-y as I sound right now on the stage, and my voice coming out in these speakers and bouncing off the walls. Laptop microphones are meant to pick up everything in the room, and unfortunately they pick up everything in the room. Don't use a webcam microphone. It's a little bit more directional, but we can do better than that. An inline microphone, like with an iPhone or something like that, I personally don't like those because there's a lot of rubbing noise. So if I were to hold that, doesn't that hurt your ears? Yeah, imagine thousands of people listening to an interview where you're holding that inline microphone. It's gonna hurt their ears. Or a Bluetooth headset. Hey, I love technology, but I promise, like anything that's wireless is gonna break at the moment that I don't want it to, like a podcast interview. I love wireless, but I enjoy wires when there is a interview. All right, commit yourself to great audio quality. Does anyone know what scene this is from? An old movie, 2000? High fidelity, thank you, thank you. You know, I was thinking high fidelity, you know, audio, and this movie came to mind. All right, money. This is gonna cost some money. There's professional level, you can spend $500 or a lot more than $500, but I'm gonna show you the equipment where you can get almost as good audio quality for less than $100 and with a solid directional microphone and, you know, some headphones. So you don't need to spend $500 or 1,000 or more. You can honestly get by and have great audio for less than $100. So required equipment? There's really only two things you need. A microphone, right? Directional microphone, like one that you see here that you hold on to. Also got a box right here. This is the ATR 2100 and a pair of headphones. If you wanna use the earbud headphones, I'm okay with that. If you're comfortable with it, as long as you can hear the person interviewing you and they can't hear themselves through your microphone. That's why these are the two required pieces of equipment that you need to have for an interview. And again, if you want links to these resources, if you're texting interview to 33444, I'm gonna give you that email script plus links to these microphones and headphones plus some other basic level stuff that I like and a couple more things I'll talk about later. So now that you're on the interview, you need to be able to talk about yourself and your market and to be able to tell stories. People remember stories. Sure, I could say, hey, if you did X, Y, Z and that will result in three times, four times the amount of conversions or your website is gonna run faster if you do this. That's helpful information, but if I can tell you a story about a person that did that and the challenge that they have, you're gonna remember it a little bit better. So we'll talk about story elements, but a lot of times people have problems talking about themselves and their market. So let's cover a little bit of that. Got this explosion again and this Adam, these electrons rolling around. These are some things about yourself, your demographics, your traits, your expertise and your market is like that nucleus. There's what you do and why you do it and who you do it for. So there's things that are kind of inherent about you and things that you have developed about yourself and your business and you want these to be in balance and kind of touch and rotate into each other. I know it sounds a little weird with this Adam diagram, so let's play a game. So interview cards. This is something I kind of came up with as I was working on the project. I'll share, I shared it earlier actually, Podcast Gas Academy. I was like, how can someone talk about themselves and their market? How do these things tie together? So you have your cards. There are your demographics. A little bit about you. Are you on the older side like I am or not? Traits about yourself. I like science fiction. I actually like Star Trek more than Star Wars. I'm sure I might have a couple of friends in here, probably a lot of people in here that hate me for it, but that's a trait about myself. Your expertise, what is it that you or your client is an expert at, as well as the experiences that they've had in their life that build onto those expertise and then what you do or what your client does. So these are your cards and now you need to think about your market cards and that is your market's demographics. Are you serving men or are you serving women? Older people, younger people? What are their traits? What do they like to do? Are they active people or are they non-active people? What problems do they have? What are some of the results that they would like to get? And also why you do this, why you do the work that you do in your market. And as you see, these tie to each other, your demographics to their demographics. If I came on and said, hey, I'm a mom-preneur, that's a new word now, right? My demographics may not match that market so much and if I were to say, hey, I like Star Trek but I like to work with Harry Potter people, maybe that doesn't always tie as well. So you wanna be able to tie your expertise to their problems and your experience with past results as well as what you do to why you do it. These are the interview cards. The ability to talk about yourself and your market, what you do and why you do it. So who has heard about the hero's journey before? I'm sure this is gonna be a recap for a lot of people, three, four. Okay, all right, good. This is new information for a lot of people. I came up with it. No, I didn't, I didn't. It's very, very old, very old. It's incredibly old but it works and it continues to work. In fact, the latest Marvel blockbuster, Black Panther follows the hero's journey much like the very first Star Wars movie does and when you see these elements, you can pick out these elements out of good stories. So a hero's journey starts with the hero, obviously, it's a person. I will say that the hero is not you. It is not, if your client has given the interview, it's not them. The hero is about the person that is listening, the people that you serve. And this person has a challenge, right? And you really need to be able to talk about this challenge a bit. And this person that has a challenge meets a guide. That's where you or if your client wants to get booked on podcast interviews, that is where they come in. They are the guide, not the hero. So to use the Star Wars analogy, you are the Yoda. You're not the Luke Skywalker. And they introduce to the hero a plan. Here is a plan. And this plan is going to help you avoid risk and failure and to reach your goal and resolution. And again, you went a little squiggly there to avoid risk and failure. That's it. So to walk through an example of the hero's journey using the Star Wars analogy that I'm sure some of you have heard before, Luke Skywalker had this challenge of the evil empire. They destroyed, blew up his family on some desert. Again, I'm a Star Trek guy, but I'm using the Star Wars analogy for most people here. And he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, which tells him about the force and gives him a plan so he can avoid risk and failure and that is the empire taking over everything. And the goal here was to destroy the empire. Website. All right. Now I'm talking about content explosion through podcast interviews and I can't get out of here without talking about website elements because that's what word can't people want, right? What do I put on my website or what do I need to put on a client's website so they can effectively leverage podcast interviews, especially to grow their content, have a broader reach through marketing and be able to develop that authority. So here's some website elements that I like to see and you see this often on podcast websites but they could also be on the website of the guest. So you could guest, or not guest blog, but you could write a blog on your own website about your own appearance. I like to see an album art image of the podcast you're on. You got that graphical element. And of course, a website player away for them to click the play button and it played that episode that you happen to be on. You can do this through various theme options if you're using a WordPress theme that has more enhanced media players, advice just pasting in an MP3 and you get that black bar. I'm sure some of you are familiar with if you paste it into your WordPress editor. You can use an embedded player. A lot of podcasts host will offer like an iFrame embedded player which can be embedded on both the podcast host website as well as your own website. And you can do this through plugins and I'll share a few plugins that will help you do this. We'll talk about that later on. And then of course, blog about your impressions from the interview and follow the typical SEO practices for content. But I will say to include a podcast name. I got a friend of mine. He just hit six million downloads for his podcast which is a pretty big number for a podcast. He's been doing it for a couple of years. If you Google his podcast name he's the second ranked result because somebody who was on his show blogged about their experience on his show and they show up top of Google. He's 16 million downloads. Great, sure. He's top of iTunes and Apple podcasts and Google Play but when you type it into a web browser and Google somebody else's website comes up. So use the interview, listen to it again and then just blog about your impressions of the show. Have that image there. Have the player. Follow typical SEO practices but make sure you include the name of the podcast show that you were on. So some WordPress plugins to be able to do this. If you can't do it through theme options or you can't do it through some custom coding or you're not using an embeddable player like an iframe player into the website. For podcast art gallery I personally like a plugin called as heard on. It's essentially trust badges for podcasts and it's got a lot of options in it. You can embed this onto a page. You can put it into a sidebar widget. The developer of this app actually works for automatic so he's very in tune with the WordPress community. And as far as media players there's a couple of options here. Both of these are paid premium options so expect to pay some money if you wanna use these but there is the smart podcast player and simple podcast press. Two different options that will allow you to create a more dynamic player an audio player for your website. Of course you might be able to Google and search and find some more. It's more about the trust badge. I'll go ahead and skip that cause I really wanna get to some Q and A. Oh, that's it. Thank you. I should say questions but I just wanna thank everybody for giving me the opportunity to talk. We've got time for some questions.