How to Promote Your Book with Podcast Guesting

The traditional method of promoting your book (congratulations on publishing by the way) is a book tour. But like many traditional methods, book tours are slowly becoming obsolete because of the internet. 

If you have a small audience or you are a self published author, book tours no longer make financial sense. It’s too expensive to travel the country, especially when book tours aren’t guaranteed to increase your book sales.

Luckily, book tours are slowly being replaced with a cheaper, more effective, and easier strategy – podcast guesting. Guesting on other podcasts is essentially a virtual book tour, with better targeting to find your audience. You’re not going to Chicago and hoping people who happen to live in Chicago like your book, you’re guesting on podcasts about the exact topics of your book, guaranteeing the audience is likely to be interested in your work.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to do to promote your book with podcasts, from targeting shows, to writing a pitch, to what to do after the interview.

Table of Contents:

• Before We Start: Consider Creating an Audiobook
• 6 Benefits of Podcast Guesting for Authors
• How to Get Booked as a Podcast Guest
• Promoting Your Podcast Guest Appearance

Before We Start: Consider Creating an Audiobook

Podcast listeners love audio. It’s already a part of their weekly routines, where reading books may not be. So if you can turn your book into an audiobook, you’re more likely to convert podcast listeners into your customers.

6 Benefits of Podcast Guesting for Authors

1) An In-depth Way to Share a Message

Being a podcast guest is entirely different from buying a 30-second advertisement where you have to pack a punch in a few short breaths. The average podcast is around 43 minutes long, giving you time to introduce yourself and describe your book in compelling detail.

To find an author who loves guesting on other podcasts, look no further than John Green

2) Powerful Promotion With Minimal Work

Creating, hosting, and growing a podcast takes an unbelievable amount of work. When guesting on other podcasts, your name will be plastered on the episode title, and the whole episode will be about you and your book, without you actually having to make the podcast. Guesting is beautifully mutually beneficial. They get more content, you get free promotion.

Related Reading: Podcast Guesting Etiquette Guide

3) Generate More Traffic to Your Sites

Every podcast appearance provides another opportunity to share your personal website with a new audience. If you ask, the host will link to your sites on their website, social media, and show notes. Through multiple guest appearances, you can build up the number of links and backlinks that direct traffic to your website.

4) Boost Your SEO Ranking

Podcasting content is excellent for search engine optimization. With more content added around your keywords, there will be more doors for potential customers to walk through. With more backlinks sending traffic to your core site, Google and other search engines will boost your site’s authority.

5) Social Followers

Guesting on podcasts is a great way to increase your followers. If you tie something in from your social sites to what you are speaking about on the podcast, you can whet the listeners’ appetite and drive to your social accounts.

Not only that, but you can build up your Podchaser Creator profile and list all your podcast appearances. Your profile can live as your podcasting resume, making it that much easier to land future interviews. 

In addition, on your Creator profile, you can add links to all your social media accounts, like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, so someone who finds your Creator profile can easily access other ways to enjoy your content.

6) Networking and Thought Leaders

Podcasting also is a great way for you to network and meet other thought leaders in your space. Maybe the connection is that you both were guests on the same podcast. Or maybe the podcaster interviewing you is an influencer as well.

How to Get Booked as a Podcast Guest

In this section, we’ll overview the basics of guesting on other podcasts, how to find podcasts to guest on, what it takes to get booked, and podcast guesting etiquette to keep in mind before your first appearance.

1) Create a Plan

Ask Why

Before you get started learning about podcast guest appearances, first ask yourself, why you want to be a podcast guest.  If you’re looking for quick and easy self-promotion, this isn’t the medium for you. Podcasts are fantastic for selling your message or product, but the process is slower. It takes time to reach out, prepare, record, and promote. But, what you lose in speed, you gain tenfold in a strong brand allegiance unique to the podcasting medium. 

Target your Appearance

To harness this power, you need to create a plan. Understand what kind of podcasts will be the best fit for you in topic, tone, and popularity. The more you click with the host and their show, the better the guest appearance, and thus a more successful sales pitch for your book. 

2) How to Find Podcasts to Guest On

The next step to getting booked on a podcast is compiling a list of shows you’d like to be a part of. We recommend starting with Podchaser, the world’s most comprehensive podcast database. Our database is designed for maximum discovery through our comprehensive category system and advanced search functionality.

Podchaser Pro provides additional tools that can refine your research. You can search by Power Score to find the most influential podcasts, sort by audience demographics, and filter to only find shows that accept guests.

In addition, you can use Podchaser Alerts to find podcasts discussing your topic. Simply type a few phrases around your book’s topic and automatically receive email alerts when podcasts are mentioning those phrases. You could even create Alerts for your name and your book to find which podcasts are already discussing your work!

3) Source Contact Information

Now that you have found all the shows you’d like to guest on, the next step is to find the podcasts’ contact information. Podchaser Pro makes this a breeze. 

Once you find the podcast you’d like to contact, Podchaser Pro’s podcast contact database provides you with clearly organized contact information that is independently verified. On each contact information page, you can quickly target who you’d like to reach out to, whether that be “sponsorship inquiries,” “general inquiries,” the host, editor, producer, etc.

4) Craft a Pitch

You’ve done all the legwork of finding podcasts and their contact information, now it’s time for the moment of truth: Writing and sending a pitch that convinces a podcast host to have you as a guest on their show. This step is the most crucial and unfortunately the most difficult. Let’s dig in.

Listen to the Podcast

The first step of crafting a pitch is listening to the podcast you’re interested in. You’ll be able to tailor your pitch to the host better after you know the tone of their show, as well as their interview style. 

Find an Angle

Once you’ve learned more about the podcast, ask yourself, “What can I bring to the table?” You’ll need to convince the host that you can bring a unique perspective or discussion topic to their podcast.

Explain Your Credentials

The last element to include in your pitch is your credentials. If you’ve already guested on other podcasts, let the host know, and be sure to include a link to your Podchaser Creator page. With that one link, the podcaster can quickly see your whole podcasting resume and listen to your other appearances.

But don’t be discouraged if you haven’t been on podcasts yet. You can share your credentials either from a recording of you discussing your expertise, sending them a copy of your book, or summarizing your experience like you would in a job interview.

Promise to Promote Their Show

If you have an online following, promise to cross-promote your guest appearance to your fans. It’s a win-win situation, where the host’s audience is exposed to you, and your audience is exposed to the podcast.

Be Concise Our final tip for writing your pitch is to get to the point. Your goal is to receive a response to your email, which is an uphill battle. To do this you need to spark attention but not overwhelm. You have to resist the urge to include everything. Keep your pitch under 200 words.

5) Keep Track of Your Pitches

It’s likely that you’ll be reaching out to dozens of podcasts, hoping to maximize your chances of getting booked. It’s easy to become disorganized, not knowing when you’ve scheduled what with whom. It’s also likely that people will respond weeks after you’ve sent your email, and you can easily forget everything you learned in the research process.

Create a Spreadsheet

We recommend creating a spreadsheet with columns labeled “pitch sent?” “host responded?” and “recording date/time”. It is also helpful to paste in the contact information, show name, and any notes you have from when you were researching the podcast.

Ultimately, you can organize this spreadsheet however you prefer, but we’ve found that it really helps to keep all your pitching information in one easily digestible document.

6) Send a Follow-Up 

As we’ve previously mentioned, podcasters are likely to be busy people, receiving pitches constantly. This means that your expertly crafted pitch may be buried in the host’s inbox, and hasn’t seen the light of day it deserves.

In this situation, a polite follow-up email can make all the difference. Once again, make sure that this message is short and to the point. We recommend you wait 7-14 days after your initial pitch to reach back out.

7) Be Patient

This last step is harder than it may seem. After all the work you’ve done up to this point, it’s easy to be discouraged if nobody has responded. It’s normal to not hear back for weeks, so don’t assume that you’ve been rejected.

In the meantime, you can go back to step one and find more podcasts to reach out to. There are over 4.5 million podcasts, so there are bound to be hundreds where you’re the perfect fit. If your initial pitches aren’t getting any bites, then maybe you should experiment with retargeting your niche.

You never know who will be in the audience listening to a podcast, so there is a big possibility of reaching the ears of someone significant. With over 4.5 million published podcasts, there are at least a couple thousand influential shows in almost every space.

Promoting Your Podcast Guest Appearance

There are many benefits to being a guest on a podcast, but your work is not done after you have been on an episode. This section will share a few quick methods to get the most out of your podcast guest appearance.

1) Add Credits

The first method is to add your guest appearance to the credits of the episode’s Podchaser page. Then when people go to the podcast or episode page, your Creator profile will appear as a collaborator. This makes it incredibly easy for Podchaser users to click on your profile and discover the rest of your work.

As an added benefit, once you add all the credits to their Podchaser Creator profile, it becomes a podcasting resume that you can use to pitch future podcasts.

2) Share The Appearance on Social Media

Guesting on someone’s podcast is a “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situation. A lot of the benefit is mutual promotion. Sharing your appearance on social media exposes your audience to the podcast, and your appearance exposes you to the podcast’s audience.

It’s likely (especially if you ask) that the host will share your post with their audience in return. Remember to tag the host to increase the likelihood that they’ll share the post. 

3) Follow-Up with the Host

Not only is it polite to follow-up with the host to thank them for having you on their show, but it has its professional benefits as well. This seems basic, but the importance is easy to overlook – you want the host(s) of the shows you guest on to like you! As you guest on more and more podcasts, you are building a positive reputation. 

So email the host, or send a private message via social media that explains the wonderful and insightful time you had on the show. In the email, you should share the links to all the promotions you’ve done for their show.

4) Repurpose the Content

There’s a few ways to repurpose the content of your guest appearance to help promote it.

Audiograms 

An audiogram is a short audio clip designed to be shared on social media. With an audiogram, you can hook new listeners with a highlight or specific clip from the guest appearance and have them itching to listen to the full episode.

Infographics

Maybe your podcast appearance required a lot of research and preparation. If so, you can take some of the most valuable insights of their episode and turn it into an infographic. 

These pictures accompanied by text are both attention-grabbing and valuable. They can work exceptionally well if the content involves statistics, because the audience can then visualize the data and make it more powerful. 

Blog

Written content is amazing for SEO and is something that many listeners can find valuable. Some content is better to read than to be heard, and sometimes having both is best.

If your episode had a really interesting topic, you can turn that episode into an article and can attract new listeners to the episode by having them discover the article. 99% Invisible does this and writes a bunch of awesome articles for their website.