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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the episode of the show. On this episode, it's just me, you and the mic. And today we're talking a little bit about podcast guesting. Is it a good idea? Should you be doing it? Is this part of your marketing strategy? Is it part of your content strategy? Is it a personal brand thing? Where does it fit? How should you do it? What are the do's and don'ts that's we're going to break down on this episode of the show and I might actually be one of the more qualified people out there to talk about this just because I, in addition to doing like 1700 something episodes on my show, I've also been a guest on probably, I don't know, 500 plus podcasts at this point. And then in addition to that, I also had a podcast guest software company and a guest booking and show booking agency for several years. And we did several million dollars in revenue doing that business for a lot of other people. So this is sort of a culmination of a lot of the things that I took away from that time. And, and I'm going to try to be as objective as I possibly can because there's obviously when I was running the business, I fully believe this is something that every single business owner should be doing. I don't really believe that anymore at this point. Well, let me. I'll caveat that by saying I think that it's still really valuable, but probably not for the same reasons that it was valuable. So here's a few interesting points about this. First of all, the demand for podcast guests has only decreased while the supply has increased dramatically. So back when I started my software and agency, back In, I think 2020, yes, it was a Covid baby. We had to shut down our travel, our International travel retreats business for obvious reasons. And so I had this idea for software in the back of my mind, started this company when we started. At the time there were 400,000 ish active podcasts in existence. And to this day there's like 450,000. It's only increased by 10% even though the total volume of podcasts in general has more than doubled since then. It went from like 2 million to now. I think the number's closer to 5 million like total indexed podcasts ever. It's still less than 10% of the total volume that are actually actively releasing episodes. But in that same period of time, podcast guesting as a marketing strategy has blown up. And I, I like the majority of the emails in my inbox that I have to go through on a weekly basis are pitches of people representing other people who want to come on my show. It's almost, it's almost never an individual that's reaching out to me to pitch me, almost always an agency. So there's been no shortage of agencies that have popped up. A lot of freelancers are doing it. There's several software companies now that do it. And there's been more attention on it in general, which I think is good overall for the space. And I think the election made it more apparent that it's a really great method to get your message out. I think always that the election cycles will predict what small business marketing looks like over the next, over the following five to 10 years. You know, Barack Obama in 2008 was a lot of Facebook. Facebook and social obviously took over small business from 2010 to 2020 and obviously is still a main, a mainstay to this day. But this is the first election that was really swayed by the podcast circuit by being a guest on popular podc. However, I think that that is a skewed metric because there's only about, let's call it a thousand shows in existence that really have like crazy needle moving power for any business in particular, for any personal brand in particular. And those shows are almost impossible to get on. They're just really, really difficult. Not to say that they're actually impossible, but they're just really difficult. And I know that again from multiple perspectives because we would represent guests in our agency who are great guests by all measures of the word great. Like they had a successful business, they sold a company for $24 million or something, they had a great book, or they had a strong personal brand or good online presence. They for all intents and purposes should have been marketable. To a certain extent. But the bummer part is, is that you can never really measure whether or not a guest is going to be a great fit for a show. So there was constant surprises.
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This episode of the show is brought to you by Fanview. Fanview is a creator monetization platform that enables individuals to build, grow and monetize their own digital content businesses. You guys know we talk about this all the time here on the show and so I was excited to do this partnership with Fanview because it's a great platform. They have the ability to share exclusive content with your subscribers over there. You can build direct relationships with your audience through their platform, generate recurring income through fan support. So if you are somebody who has has a creator channel or you are thinking about starting a creator channel, you're not sure exactly how to monetize it. Well, Fanview is a great platform to do that through. It's super accessible for beginners. You can make it feel extremely personal to you and to your audience. The connection that you can gain no matter what niche you're in. You can use Fanview as your platform so you can monetize your content. You can earn as much as you can. It's super low barrier to entry to entry. So it's really easy to get started and there is no experience or audience needed in order to be able to get started making money on the platform. Not to mention it's crazy, crazy scalable. So you guys know we talk about side hustles on the show all the time. The couple of the parameters that I look for is is it really easy to start low barrier to entry to start, and if it starts going well, is it something that's potentially scalable beyond what your full time job is capable of earning? And Fanview definitely has those potential things there. So if you are already creator or you're thinking about becoming creator and you're not exactly sure how to monetize the platform that you're building, then go check out FanView. Visit www.FanView.com today and launch your creator career. That's Fanview. F A n v u e.com fanview.com
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Chime.com disclosures running that agency on both sides of the coin where we would pitch somebody to some to some show and our first thought was like oh this is a perfect fit. We know the show host. We we have sent several guests some in the past this person's bio lines perfectly with what they're looking for. This is going to be a yes. And we pitch it and they're like no. And it was just like okay. No additional context or information. Which we didn't we tried. We like we'd ask but also with the value the benefit of being a podcast host myself, I know that not you can't. You can't all the time like articulate why it's gonna be a bad fit. You just know that it's gonna be a bad fit. So it just ended up being a no. And on the flip side of that there were several situations where it was the exact opposite of that where we would pitch somebody. And in my mind I was like this is almost a waste of time. I don't know if I wanna leverage this relationship for this because I just don't think that it's gonna be a good fit. And then we'd pitch it and they would say yes. So you can't always tell whether or not it's going to be a good fit and you just gott kind of throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. But again, the majority of these shows are not going to be like big needle movers. So in terms of deciding whether or not it's a good use of your time for personal branding specifically, I think it is still a good use of time for anybody that's trying to build a personal brand for a few reasons. Obviously, the most apparent reason is what we used to call opa. It's other people's audiences. You leverage other people's audiences so that you don't have to go build your own initially. And if you don't have an audience, it's a great way to start building up an audience over time. But that being the obvious one, we'll table that for now because you don't always have complete control. And it's probably going to be a small number of the shows that you're on that actually hit and do really well and bring in additional traffic that you didn't already have. And so there's other reasons why I think it's, it's still really important to do. The first one is brand recognition and search. And especially now when it comes to AI tools and if the podcast is posting on YouTube, even if it doesn't get a ton of traction on YouTube, like you're not getting a, you know, a hundred thousand views on their, on their videos. A lot of AI platforms and obviously specifically Google's AI platforms like Gemini and stuff, their LLMs are searching and scraping YouTube constantly for information. And so if somebody, if your ideal customer is searching on Google or searching on an AI tool, a lot of times they're going to be scraping YouTube videos for that additional information. So it's still a valuable practice to be able to own your search. You, you want to have a high volume of proof that you are who you say you are or that you can do what you say you can do. And there's this level of authority in your branding that comes from being interviewed on a podcast. Because even if it's not a massive show, it still gives the audience the perception that you are somebody who's worthy of being interviewed by somebody else on their show. So when you, when I first started doing this, you could search my name and you wouldn't even find my website on PA1. Now, if you search my name, there's probably, I don't know, 12, 13, 14, pages of Google results that come, and probably 80 plus percent of those are me being interviewed as a guest on somebody else's show. So if somebody hears about me, whether it's through a social media clip or it's a guest spot on a podcast, or it's speaking gig or something like that, when they go inevitably to search me out afterwards, they're going to find a huge volume information that backs up everything that I say that I can do, and it comes from other people saying it, not just me saying it. So the first reason to do this is for the branding piece. It's extremely effective for making sure that there's a high volume of evidence that you are who you say you are, you can do what you say that you can do. The next reason that I always found is for the connections. If you're, especially if you're new in a space, you want to get to know all the figureheads in that space, all the influencers, all the people who can make things happen in that world, who have all the connections, who go to all the events, who are the emceeing the events, or they're speaking at the events, or they're doing the podcast circuit in that world, it's just really valuable to connect to those people. And if you're doing, doing a constant cadence of four to six podcasts every single month, then you look at that over the course of two, three years and you've connected with, you know, 150 plus of some of the top influencers in the space that you're trying to do well in. And it just makes more people aware that you exist. The rapport that you build on a podcast conversation is better than the rapport that you build from a social media clip. Just because the volume of the time that you spend with the host, they tend the, the. What we used to say in our pitch, especially when we're selling services, was that podcasters are like connection nodes. They're, they're like super connectors within networks because they tend to know everybody in that space because they interview all of them for their shows. So there can be a lot of really good things that come from just connecting with people consistently over time. Like, I'll do that all the time, even for people on my show where we jump off a call and I'm like, hey, is it cool with you if I make this intro? I think like, I just had this person on very similar things. I just talked to somebody who's in the water filtration business. And then a few days before I just had on the founder of Charity Water, which has raised over a billion dollars for providing clean water to people all over the planet. And so I was like, hey, it might be a good connection for you guys. I don't know if anything will come from it, but it might be a good connection. So I made an intro for those two people to get connected and get to know each other a little bit more. And if something comes of it, great. If something doesn't come of it, then they now know each other. And, and if something comes in the future, they'll remember that I was the one that made the intro. There's a lot of good value there to, to being a guest on multiple shows for that reason as well. And then the, the next thing is for content for busy business people who don't want to think, who don't want to become creators, where, like, there's some, there's some business people who, meeting, and they love getting behind a camera and coming up with these three things and these five tools. And this is the best thing we've ever done. And they, they like that practice and that's good for them. But there's a lot of entrepreneurs who didn't get into entrepreneurship in order to create content. They did it to solve the problem. They're a plumber, they're an H vac tech, they're. They're an SEO expert, or they're like, they have their area of expertise and they don't really care to be a creator. So this can be a really great way to fill up your entire content calendar without having to take dedicated time to actually create a recording content for the specific purpose of putting it on your social channels. So if you have good clipper and you do five or six podcast appearances every month, well, they have. Now, you know, let's assume they're 30 minutes at a time. Well, that's three hours of content. Two and a half, three hours that they can pour through and pull clips from. And you didn't have to think about any of the, any of the time that you're getting interviewed. You just jump on, you answer questions and then you jump off. And again, that puts the control back in your hands instead of allowing it to only be for the purpose of leveraging that person's audience if their audience isn't very big or it's not super adjacent to the things you talk about. Well, that's neither here nor there. As long as they're a professional host and they ask decent questions and they can pull some good content out of you like, you tend to overvalue or, excuse me, you tend to undervalue the thing that you're really good at because you've just been doing it for so long. You have this unconscious competence about the thing. Whereas a lot of other people that are green in that world might have questions that you view as basic and just common knowledge, but for most people, it actually isn't. And so you can create really good content for people that are wondering about these things or asking these same questions in their mind. And so the podcast host almost becomes the proxy for the audience to get good content out of you so that your team can take it, cut it, clip it, post it, and use your own organic content strategy. And of course, now with AI tools like you upload these three hours of content and basically start using it as a bank to answer questions for your team or for your customer base. And then you can also, you know, have that AI platform cut all the clips for you, like an opus. Or you can use a platform to come up with 4 blog posts or, or 30x posts or 4 LinkedIn articles or whatever it is, so, or even a newsletter, something like that. And, and all of this is done and created without you having to take the time to like, sit down, research topics, prep a document that to. To record a video about, or hiring your own production team, or worrying about how to set up your own video camera and things like that. So it can be really effective for those things as well. And then, and then lastly is audience growth. It's a great place to go leverage other people's audiences. Start creating your own audience, not necessarily for leads and sales for your business, but to start just making more people.
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now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus. We're somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand. Getting us out of here should be your focus. I'm your boss. You work for me. Not in the office anymore. It's bold, relentless, and endlessly rewatchable. Discover why critics give it 93 on Rotten Tomatoes. You're so fired. Oh, am I no help is coming, coming. Send help. Rated R now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus where that you exist. And the thing that I always liken it to is like people, people will vilify going on a podcast that only has 150 downloads an episode, but then they'll fly across the country to go speak at an event with 150 people in the audience. So it's way more about audience crossover than it is about audience size. I told this example all the time. We had a guy one time who was selling franchises for his company. He's a franchisor and wanted to get additional franchisees. That was his main goal. We got him booked on this show. It was a really big business show, 50,000 downloads an episode, which is massive in the business space specifically. And he sold a franchise on that show, which is great because he, you know, franchise fees, whatever, 35 grand or something. So he made good money from that. But then we got him booked on another show that was literally specifically for the franchise industry. Maybe 3, 400 downloads an episode. And he sold almost 10 franchise units on that one show. Because the people who were listening, the 2, 300 people that were listening, there's several people who listen to that show actively to find new concepts to go develop and, and build. So one, I think he had two customers from it and between the two of them he sold like eight or nine franchises. So one of them bought a package of three, one of them bought a package of like six or something like that on the super niche quote unquote, small audience type of a show. So the cool thing about it is it's like it's going and speaking at five different 50 person to 500 person events and you can do all five of them in a two hour time frame from your home office or from your office and not have to travel across the country to go get in front of those people. So it's still a really great way to do that. And then yet on top, top of that, that you will also probably get leads and sales like what we talked about before. I think all of those reasons go into the idea that this is probably still a really great use of your time. And again, if you're not super focused, you don't really care about building a personal brand, then maybe some of these, maybe some of the things that I've mentioned would not be things that are meaningful or to you or things that you would view as being as mattering. But, but the only thing I would say about that is like the Needle moving shows typically will find out about you through doing another show that wasn't as needle moving. So you, let's say you go on a show, you take the time and you do this in person interview. This person has 3,000 subscribers on YouTube. The video itself gets 183 views. But one of the people that they know, because that person runs a multi eight figure business in the background of their podcast, they know somebody who's a really big creator and that creator saw a clip from that video that was put on Instagram that got 140,000 views and they see that clip and they go, oh, that's somebody who would be interesting for me to talk to. Then they reach out to you. So it provides more inbound opportunities, it provides more room for engineering, more serendipity in your life. So I still think there's an argument to be made even if you're not focused on the personal brand side. But I would say like, if you're, if you're, if you just don't care at all about the personal brand, you're focused purely on the business, then it might not be as great of a strategy to do because it's going to take, you know, five, six interviews a month, it takes three to five hours a month or something like that. So if you could, if you, if you have to say no to a better activity in order to install this into your routine, then it might not make sense for you from a brand building perspective. But from the other ones, I think it's still a really great way to get out in and do all the things that I just talked about. So there you have it. Podcast guesting. Is it worth it for you? Still think the answer is probably yes. But use some of these filters and decide for yourself whether or not you think it's going to be something that works effectively for you. And by the way, we still do take on a few clients from time to time. So if it's something that you're interested in having us do for you, travisavishapple.com, you shoot me an email and we'll see if we might be a good fit to help you get booked on shows done for you. Well, that's it for this episode of the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
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