Peter
Welcome to Public Speaking: Your Competitive Advantage, where you learn public speaking tips, techniques, and ideas that help you increase your impact, influence, and income. I’m your host, Peter George.

Peter
My guest for this episode is Case Lane, a global writer, podcaster, entrepreneur, traveler, and founder of Ready Entrepreneur. A former diplomat, consultant, and corporate executive, she now prepares aspiring entrepreneurs to understand how to take advantage of technology and global resources to achieve lifestyle freedom by starting their own online businesses. After a successful book promotion podcast tour, Case developed an approach to help professionals, writers, entrepreneurs, and other public speakers understand and navigate the growing podcast industry as guest speakers.

Peter
Hi, Case. Welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

Case
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Peter
We’re going to be talking about guest podcasting, which isn’t a term I heard, at least not in the way you use it, as a campaign. And before we get to that, can you tell us a little bit more about you, Ready Entrepreneur and the books you’ve written?

Case
Sure, I’ll do a quick version. Like so many people, I had a corporate career before going into online entrepreneurship. So, I won’t get into all the details of that, but my first work with online entrepreneurship was as a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and so I started self publishing. And I thought it was amazing that Amazon and Smashwords and all these platforms allowed writers to go directly to readers. And I realized the same thing was happening with all of online business. And I started to get into all of the different parts of online business and landing pages, websites, reader magnets, all these things I heard of before. And people started asking me what I was doing. And I realized that a lot of people thought it was cool to do something online, they could see that people were doing things, they weren’t sure exactly how it was all working, and there was no kind of overall picture. So, I started Ready Entrepreneur and Ready Entrepreneur starts right at the beginning of the process. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, or you’re somebody who has business ideas in your head, you just have no idea how to move forward with it, that’s where I come in right there at the beginning and help you understand the online business landscape and how you can benefit from it and take advantage of it. So, that’s that’s how I started then, I went from there into guest podcasting through the promotion process and understanding how to reach out to audiences and deliver value to more people. And podcasting has grown so much and become such a new and important place, platform for people that I serve took a deeper dive into it to get to help other people understand how they could use it as well.

Peter
I think when we get into these things for the benefit of time, and efficiency, and most of all effectiveness, we need people like you, the guide, the mentor and the like to bring us along. So that’s great. That’s great. And I’m glad you’re here to talk to us about guest podcasting and how you can help people as they want to be guests and the like and develop a campaign. If you would, explain what guest podcasting.

Case
Sure, sure. Yeah, it’s funny you say that about the term because I wasn’t sure what term people were using. So I reached out look at you know, I search it so and so get guest podcasting or podcast guesting or some people call it or podguesting as I’ve started to see, that is being a guest speaker, a speaker on a podcast. So podcasts now have grown incredibly. There are now over … last number I saw more than 1.7 million podcasts that are out there on the different platforms. Many of them do interviews. Many of them want to talk to people about their ideas, and their, you know, their products, their message and so on. So it’s a great opportunity for public speakers to go on podcast, and to speak to audiences. Now, you can’t see the audience, but it’s out there — more and more people — millions of people listening to podcasts, listening in so many different categories and genres. So guest podcasting is going out there and reaching out to podcasters to be a guest speaker on their show.

Peter
Alright, so once they do that, what’s the benefit? Why … why would I take the time to research and all the things you’re going to talk about in a little while? Why would I take the time to do those? What am I going to get out of that effort?

Case
Yeah, so the idea is that you want to get your message out there that depends you’d be … you’d be an entrepreneur or professional with many different reasons why you want to be speaking to an audience, and podcasters all have an audience. Some have audiences of dozens, and some have audiences in the tens of millions. So think about it as an opportunity to speak to that crowd. Could be the same as if you got an invitation to speak to a room of 1000 people, and they’re all going to be listening. These are people that actively go to a podcast — weekly, daily, whatever — and they download them and listen to them, and they … they make a point of listening. They put on a podcast at a point during their day when they can actually listen to when they’re in the car, or they’re doing cleaning, or they’re out doing yard or something like that. So, and some of them actually listen to as a form of training. There’s a lot of podcasts that are informational, educational, so people will put on a podcast as if it’s an online course or something like that they’re taking.

Case
So if you have a message that you want to deliver to an audience, maybe you’re promoting a product or a service. Maybe you’ve come up with a new idea that you want to get out to more people. Maybe you want to strengthen your authority and your influence, and you can speak on these virtual podcast stages. And you’re actually speaking to this very attentive audience. So that’s why it’s something that if you’re thinking about promoting and getting your ideas out there and delivering value to audiences, you should definitely be considering podcasting.

Peter
It’s funny … when you were describing that, I’m thinking, “I do that. I do that.”

Case
Excellent.

Peter
On Mondays and Tuesday mornings, there are podcasts that I listened to religiously. And they’re the first thing I do. I actually have speakers in the shower. So …

Case
Good for you. You put spakers in. I have a podcast play, but I don’t have speakers. I have to think about that.

Peter
I listened to these two particular podcasts on those mornings. But then, when I’m in the car, I either continue them or listen to others, and some are for the entertainment value, but most of them for educational value.

Case
Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned entertainment, because you could also be somebody who just wants to tell some good jokes. You know, or do a dramatization. And there are podcasts for that, too.

Peter
I think this podcast for just about anything.

Case
I think so, too. Yeah. That’s why it’s such a great opportunity. It is. It’s whatever you could possibly think.

Peter
Alright, so for those of our listeners who say, this is a great idea, and I’m really interested in it. What’s the approach you suggest? What approach did you develop?

Case
Yeah, so I decided I … let me go back a little bit. I was taking a course for a self-publishing course and new what I … why these people take lots of courses. This one was more focused on marketing and promotion, and they were talking about podcast, so they didn’t really explain how to do it. So, I just really started from scratch. Alright, let me take, let’s see what’s out there, you know, do the Google search, see what’s going on. And I started just, I delved into it.

Case
So I created this approach based on what I learned when I was reaching, researching podcasts for this book tour that I wanted to do. So the first thing to think about, I’m just going to talk about the actual mechanics of it. There’s other things to do when you’re preparing for guest podcasting that we could talk about, but the mechanics are you … you have to think about what is your message, because what you’re going to do is search for podcasts that fit the message or the product or the thing that you want to talk about. So, what that means is you have to have a very clear idea in your mind about what you want to talk about. It is talking after all. Podcasts is an audio medium. So, you want to be able to communicate and think about your message so that when you go into searching for podcasts, you’re actually searching by categories and keywords. This is one of the big things I tell people to think about — what are the categories and the keywords that describe what you want to talk about.

Case
Now, one of the challenges is that the podcast directory. So, podcasts are hosted on platforms you’ve heard of, you know, most people are heard of things like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher. If you haven’t heard of them, there’s about there’s dozens and dozens of different applications that you could have on your phone or on your … your desktop that will play podcasts for you. And, there are also directories that are just purely directories where you can go in and search for podcasts. So if you’re a potential guest, the thing you’re going to be doing is searching for podcasts that suit your subject matter. Now, when you do that, you have these very broad categories. So if you’re used to looking for really specific topics, you’re not going to see that on the podcast directories, you’ll know they’ll have “Business” will be one whole thing and everything related to the business from entrepreneurship to major corporations will all be under one thing. Health will all be under one thing. So, you really have to think clearly about what words you want to search for.

Case
And the search engines are not robots, like Google search. You’re going to put in a one word like public speaking, you’ll put in public speaking, and you’ll get every podcast that has the word public speaking in it. So, that’s how it works. So, the initial search is all around just … you have to think for yourself. What would be the categories of keywords people are looking for? Then, you’re going to go into these podcasts directories to find them. You … so you just pulled out … and I just say, you know, again, it’s more than a million something of them, so just pull out all the names that you see that look like they might fit what you’re talking about. And then you go from there and start researching them one-by-one. So, I’m talking about a very “do it yourself” process. I’m not talking about you’re just paying somebody to do it. But you could do … you can pay somebody to do this process for you. But this is not like going through a PR agency or something like that. This is actually … you’re going to have to do it yourself, going through and researching each podcast to find ones that look like they’re right for you.

Case
And there’s a couple of things to look for. The first thing is what’s the last post date of the last episode. So when you go into podcasts, or after you find a good … see a podcast name that looks good. You click on it. You’re looking at the directory page. Look, first, what’s the date of the last posted show, because podcasts live forever. It’s not like traditional media where there are seasons or people announced where they’re ending or anything like that. Podcasters could do what they want. It’s still kind of wide open.

Case
So you might be looking at a show that looks really good, and then find out that there hasn’t been an episode posted for a year. So you might want to guess that that podcast is probably not doing it anymore.

Peter
Yeah, no sense spending time pursuing that one.

Case
Exactly. Exactly. So look for that date that looks good. Then look at the description. A lot of podcasters put in the description whether or not they do interviews, but not always. But it gives you a good idea. Then you look at the episodes, and you’ll see, depending which directory, but the ones you want to be looking at actually give you an episode description. So you’ll again be able to see if they actually have interviews or not. Now you might see a podcast reports that they do interviews in the description, but then there’s no interviews have actually been posted. And that could be just because they couldn’t find anywhere they wanted to interview. So that’s also a great opportunity, because you can put that in your pitch letter and say I see you you know you were planning to have interviews.

Case
So you go through that. And then if all that looks good, when you do the search in the podcast directory, you take your search to the next level, which is into just general web searching and social media searching on the podcast host and the podcast show, because you want to find contact information. And you want to see if there’s any connection that you make, so that you can actually … and listen to the show, because you want to write a pitch email, most of most people send emails, you want to write a pitch email to that podcast host that really shows that you can deliver a value to their show, because you did your homework, you looked into it, you did your research. And you can write a really good tailored email based on what you saw.

Case
So, it’s one by one, it’s not not an easy process. But it’s a valuable process, because you’re really going after shows that look like a good match for you. You’re delving into the background of the host and the show, which even if they say no, it gives you information about, you know, people that are active in your industry or your subject matter that you probably want to look at again. And, you can build a direct connection with the host, because you’re actually, you know, doing this work yourself. If you pay a PR agency to do it for you, you don’t know what you’re getting. But if you actually do it yourself, you’re actually you know exactly what you’re getting, which is all of this information which you can use later to network and collaborate and to continue to build your presence in your particular subject area.

Peter
Excellent. Now, three points here. One is where you say that they’re right for you, you’ve got to be right for them as well.

Peter
The second point is the people you can hire … we talked about this in a prior phone call that we had about a lot of podcasts get approached .– now I’ve been approached this way, ” My client would be an awesome interview for you.” “Great, what do they … what do they bring to public speaking or presentation skills? What knowledge?” “Well, they’re an engineer, and they really don’t speak but ….” Like, alright … so you have no clue what my podcast is about. Right?

Peter
And the third point is, you practice what you preach. And I just want to let the listeners know when I got an email from you or via LinkedIn, actually, you contacted me and you spelled it out. Here’s what I do. Here’s why I think it benefits your show and your listeners. And you were dead on. And I was prepped for, “Here’s what I do.” And my response being okay, “That’s not what I talked about.” You just absolutely nailed it, and I couldn’t wait to call you and get in touch with you and get to know you, and then have you on here, because you do practice what you preach. And I was absolutely impressed.

Case
Thank you. I appreciate that I really do. I, I, you know, I really enjoyed this process, I do want to provide value to listeners. And so I want to make sure I don’t want to waste your time, and and I don’t want to waste my time, you know, I want to make sure it’s a good experience for everybody and for the listeners. So, I’m glad that works. That’s what I’ve been trying to do to perfect as I go through this.

Peter
Let me ask you this. Once someone secures a spot, so they contact the podcast host, and the podcast hosts says, “Yup, we’re gonna have you on,” what do they need to do to prepare for that guest interview?

Case
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. Actually, I’m going to take a step back. This is a part you do need to do to prepare for the interview. But I would say even do it before you start researching. Just a few things to have in your back pocket before you start researching so that you’re ready for the kinds of things that podcast hosts asked for. So these are kind of technical things.

Case
Have a have a bio ready. So two, three lines, maybe but a longer one that you can edit, there’s a lot of hosts asked for that. And you’re thinking about, this is a promotional opportunity. So make sure that the information is what you want to be distributing to the world at this time. You should have a headshot it’s a good professional headshot, or just a really good picture, again, that you’re going to use. Think about this more broadly. It’s a much bigger process than just, “I’m going to go do an interview for an hour.” It’s, you know, this is going to be promoted, it’s going to be on social media, you don’t even know where else is going to be.

Case
So, you want to have that good picture in the back of your pocket. And then just have things like your, you know, have a logo, your social media handles. If you’re going to have an offer to the listeners and what you want to have that link ready, you just want to have all of that ready. And then your … your website as well. Like, if you’ve got a website, and you know, if you’re talking about something and you want to make sure that the information is there, because … don’t miss the opportunity. And you realize you’re reaching out to a new audience that maybe hasn’t heard of you before. And as you’re talking about everything that you do, you want, you know, anybody who follows up, you want them to really grasp that you are who you say you are, and all of that so they can get that information. So just if your website’s not up to date, just make sure you do an update and that kind of thing. And you could do this continuously, but it’s just a good way to be prepared.

Case
And then I know a lot of people are concerned about the technical equipment. This is probably right, right now, podcasts are growing very, very quickly. But they’re still outnumbered about 500 to one by blogs. So, I think a lot of people think it was just a lot easier to start writing with a blog. I would say the only, you know, that’s not the only but the top thing to concern us yourself about, of course, is how you sound. This is a recorded interview. You want to make sure you sound good. And for most hosts, they prefer that you have a separate microphone. You … you but those are, you know, they’re not expensive. If you’re really going to get into guest podcasting, it’s worth it to make that investment in a good external microphone that then you can have for all of your interviews going forward.

Case
And same with if you’re going to be on camera. I know that’s a surprise. It’s a podcast, why am I camera you might be asking, but a lot of podcasters are recording the interview in Zoom and putting it up on YouTube. A lot of podcasts people listen too on YouTube. So you want to have all of that ready ahead of time. And then you’re really good as you’re going in when when the host says, “Yes,” and they say, “Could you send me by your bio, your headshot, everything.” You’ve got it all. It’s all ready to go.

Case
So, work on just having that set of things ready before you even start. Then, as you get into it, and then of course you’re you know, making sure your pitch and everything is good. But then you could be … you could feel really comfortable about reaching out to any post when you’ve got that initial set of things organized. I haven’t seen too many other requests beyond those types of things like your bio and your headshot.

Peter
No, it’s all pretty straightforward. When you look at other podcasts that have been posted. You can see what they’ve requested — just by looking at them.

Case
Yes.

Peter
Like you said, the headshot and all. One of the things you just talked about that really struck home with me is the microphone.

Case
Yeah, yeah.

Peter
You know, you can’t you just can’t sound like you’re with a tin can and string.

Case
That’s good.

Peter
And the microphone and most computers, one out of 10, are probably a three at best. And we rely on those and they just sound horrible. And you’re right, you know, from $50 to $100 — you certainly can go up much more expensive with microphones — but you can get a USB microphone, plug it into your computer. You’re good to go.

Case
Yeah, yeah. That’s true. That’s the thing. Don’t … yeah, don’t worry about it. Don’t think it’s like you have to have some really high level of studio, you know, with all sorts of … especially … you want to be in a quiet place. Yeah, obviously, when you’re recording, you want to just … you want to sound good. And the thing is what you so many people are doing podcasts right now. And of course, everybody has to be isolated, you know, you’re doing it with social distancing. So even the big shows are doing everything over, recording it through whatever app or something like that. So you’re not competing, in a sense, with the big traditional studios, with all the fancy equipment all back, a lot of people are doing that right now. So just yeah, you just so just as long as you sound good, you sound clear. And, and you just want to make sure that the host has a good experience. And, of course, the listeners, because that’s one thing for listeners, people want to hear the information, it’s really important with podcasts are a different way of consuming information. You know, the … the talking is directly in your ears. And it’s like you’re sitting in on a conversation that you weren’t invited to, or you just walked in, and they didn’t kick you out type of thing. And so that’s a much different experience. So people want that information, they’re, they’re really into into it. But, at the same time that, you know, you want to make sure that obviously, they could hear it clearly, and if they can’t, they’ll switch to something else. So, you know, just make sure you do your part of that side.

Peter
That’s a good point. With all those things that they should do, is there anything they should avoid, other than speaking into their laptop microphone? Anything else they should avoid or just not do that’ll help both them in the podcast host?

Case
You alluded to just making sure that your pitch is on point, which means you don’t want to disappoint the the the listeners and the host, when you’re actually on air, I’ll say, you know you, you write a good pitch and they have you on, don’t forget that the audience is there, even though you can’t see them. You’re still delivering value for that audience. That’s still what’s important.

Case
So, you want to make sure that you’re prepared for that. And I would even suggest practice. You can’t think about every possible question people can ask, but you can think of some of them. And you want to make sure that you’re ready for them. And that you feel very strongly about your message. You’ve got it down pat, you’ve got, you know, your thoughts organized in your mind. That type of thing. So, you could practice a bit and just in your mind, what would it be like to have a conversation going. Listen, of course, to their podcast, so you can hear how the conversation generally goes. And then you don’t get it to the point where you’re, you know, sort of freezing conversation starters.

Case
And it’s just very technical things in terms of remembering whatever the back and forth communication is, with you, you know, some people say, “Oh, I got to get the interview.” And then they forget that, you know, you still have to make sure it’s scheduled. Make sure you’ve got the right time zone, you know. Make sure you you’ve met all their requirements. If the podcaster comes back with, you know, fill out this form or send me this information, make sure that you try not to forget that there is time between the day they said yes, and the day of the recording, where you might get other requests related to doing the show. So it’s very important. And even if you’re doing you know, 10 or 20 episodes in the course of a month or something like that, make sure you create some kind of system so that you’re always keeping track of everything. So you don’t lose, you know, the people who have said yes, and then kind of ruin the relationship before it got started.

Peter
Well, that’s gonna be important of … yeah, if you have one or two coming up, maybe in your mind, you can keep track of those. But if you have, like you said, 10 coming up … yeah, then you have to know who you’ve sent the info to, who you’ve confirmed with, who you have to follow up with. And that’s going to be very important to the host, because they’re going to … not only does their show depend on it, and they don’t have to, if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. They don’t have to post anything. But … but they start to develop ideas and beliefs about you, if you follow through as excellent, as yours was absolutely tremendous. And, or if it’s not, you know, how do they then look at that … that interview?

Case
Exactly.

Peter
All right. I’m a … I’m a firm believer in YAC. I’ll explain YACin a second. So, for football fans will know what YAC is. YAC is Yards After Catch. And years ago, they always judged wide receivers by how far down the field they were when they caught a ball. Now, they often judge wide receivers by how much yardage they get after catching.

Case
Yes.

Peter
And which is YAC — Yards After Catch. So I believe much of marketing is yards after catch. What do you do once you’ve done something? What do you do with that if you go to and you have an exhibit a exhibit hall, you get names and you make contacts and the like, what do you do with the follow up? So, here’s my question to you. What’s the YAC? What can people do? Once they are interviewed, how can they use that to promote themselves?

Case
Yeah, that’s, you know, that it’s so important, this opportunity to interview on a podcast creates an asset for you. So you having the podcast host, of course owns the show, but your opportunity is in promoting it, and they want you to promote it, they expect you to promote it. So you have this link, usually, where you can put it on all of your social media, all of your newsletters. If you have an email newsletter on your website, you can use it to go out to other people and say, you know, I have appeared on other shows, here’s what I talked about. You would … you could have maybe if your clients, your customers want to know more about you understand more about what you do, you can send them the link and say here, I spoke about it on this particular podcast. And you know, if you don’t like social media, so people don’t like posting all the time, but so it’s actually a bunch of easier posts to say, listen to me on this show, hear me speak. And you don’t have to do it just once. You know, once is is great, obviously, and doing it on all your social media over the course of a week when whatever week the show that premieres is great. But you can come back to it, let’s say you, you do a related kind of talk or you release a book or you you have questions that come up, somebody says I would like to ask you about this thing. You can say, hey, I spoke about it on this particular podcast and provide them the link again. So you really want to think about it, this is an asset for you, the host, obviously you both of you are wanting to grow an audience and get your message out and provide value to more people. So, the more places that you can think of distributing promotions about you being on the show and what you said and why people would find it interesting to listen, then you’re really going to spread the wealth of the … of the … the intention of being on the show goes much, much further than just filling an hour of talk time shadow.

Peter
You used the word twice in that answer that I’ve never heard it put that way before and I love it. It’s an asset. It’s an asset that you can use.

Case
That’s my business background.

Peter
I never looked at it that way — that it’s an asset. And if you think about it, if you get on enough of these consistently, whether that’s weekly, once a month, or whatever, it’s almost like promoting your own show, but you don’t have to go through all the logistics of having a show.

Case
Yeah, I mean, that’s another thing. Now, you … you don’t have to actually do the editing the preparation and all of that. You have to … you have to be prepared yourself and show up and so on. But all the work on creating the assets, so to speak, is actually done by the podcast host.

Case
So what you’re doing is promoting, but you’re promoting yourself and your message or your product like whatever, you know, reason that you chose that you want it to be on the show in the first place. That’s what you’re actually doing. So this is so valuable for you and you. And you know, don’t let it go. I think one of the things that happens to guests, and I want to make this point because you know, hosts cannot always tell you exactly when the show is going to be live. So you go off and you’re doing your own other thing and you’re busy. And then you get an email one day that says, oh, the show’s live right now. And you’re thinking I gotta drop everything and do all this promotion. So what I like to do is have a plan around how I want to promote the show. And I have that all set up. So when I get that email says shows live, I don’t have to drop everything I just put into my mind that this week, I have to put on you know my to do list that to put in … put this plan, execute on this plan of promoting the show across all my social media. And then I’ll put it in my next newsletter and so on.

Case
So, I want … you want to make sure you have something like that. Because I think that some people, you know, so it might be two months later that it’s live after you’ve done the interview. And so that’s something to keep in mind. If you’re doing promotions, if you’re doing a book tour or something like that, you want to start reaching out to podcasters months in advance so that you can get on the calendar for when you want to be there too. You don’t know for sure when the show will be live, in most cases. So, just have your plan ready and just know every time you do an interview, you’re going to promote that way. And then again, remember what he shows about remember what each podcast post description was like, you know, you might want to keep track of that as well. Because that way if you ever asked a question under any of those particular subject headings, you can point to that particular podcast interview and refer people to it.

Peter
I love that idea.

Case
Great.

Peter
All right, so what final suggestions do you have for people who are doing this? And, well actually even before then, can you … can you give me your thoughts on this where you said you don’t know when this is going out? Oh my go next week, might go out two months from now when you when you’re a guest on a show. Would you agree that not every interview actually goes out?

Case
Oh yes, that’s true as well. I’m glad you raised that. You know, it’s totally the podcasters decision. And they might have any particular reason not to release a show. There’s nothing that you could do. It just it’s the way things go, you might have thought it was the greatest interview ever, for whatever reason, they decide they don’t want that one, you know, to be released in that would be the end of it.

Case
You could say, as I mentioned before you … you could ask them now, it’s hard to say how long you let go by before, you know, you think it’s never going to be released, because again, they could have a three month long list of shows they’ve already posted. But you can ask them and say, yo, are you did you decide not to use this episode? If Could you give me the file? And you could, if they’re still willing to let you have it? And maybe, you know, maybe you wouldn’t be able to promote it as a episode of their show, that maybe they’ll let you keep a copy of the interview that you could use for other reasons. I don’t know how that would work. But it’s just a possibility. But I think, yeah, you do you. It’s not common, though. Because again, you’ve spent time they’ve spent time. So there’s really no reason to hold the show back unless there’s something else that happened. So they decide not to use it. But I’ve definitely heard hosts say that they have not there’s episodes, they have not interviews they have not posted.

Peter
I’ve had some of those. Well, I should say some I’ve had one, I’ve had one where the person just didn’t come prepared. And yeah, to your point about all the prepping, it’s necessary.

Case
Yeah, and I don’t think, you know, you don’t have to worry about like, this is some, big extra thing you’re doing, because it should be already part of what you’re doing. Whatever it is that you want to talk about should be something you’re you know, you’re doing, I assume, or you know about it, or something like that. So it should just be part of your own process around how you create your message, how you promote yourself about it. And that way, doing interviews just enhances and improves what you’re doing already. So think of it that way as well, that this is just part of that process around your whatever your bigger picture is.

Peter
All right. So that brings us to any other ideas for them as we wrap this up.

Case
Yeah, I just want to say I don’t sell people buy, but thinking as as going through the the approach around, you know, researching and all of that, it’s like, uh-oh, that sounds like a lot of work. And again, I just want to stress that this is absolutely a DIY process. So you’re not, you know, hiring a PR firm to do this for you. But it also means you don’t need some fancy-schmancy you know, network or in, you know, high level influencers to get you, you know, interviews, that kind of thing. This is a process where you can absolutely go out, learn what you need to learn about different podcasts and talk to podcasters directly, reach out to them, tell them how you have value that’s related to what they’re talking about. I assume, you know, that the relation between your subject and their podcast means then that they become part of your network. And maybe there’s an opportunity in the future, to collaborate on something else. You’re actually building a bigger world around your subject matter.

Case
And so taking the time to do it, putting a couple hours a week — the amount of time you spend on it is totally dependent on how many interviews you want to do. I mean, there’s so many thousands and thousands of podcasts, if you want to do hundreds of interviews, you could spend a few hours a day and probably get positive responses every day. So that you just decide how much time you want to put into it based on you know what you what your goals are. But keep in mind that it’s a bigger process than just doing that interview for, you know, half hour, what have you. It’s more of also about, you know, building your network, building your audience, making collaboration with people that are talking like yours, doing what you’re doing, like minded people. And I think if you look at it that way, it does not seem as tedious, and so on and effectively as searching on Google and tried to find the names of podcasts. And we’re chasing people down on social media, I say something about that quickly. And I don’t use social media a lot to actually find people. But I know that’s another way. So my process, emphasize looking at the podcast directories and a Google search. But some people also just like to go to social media and see what they can find. And I did not, you know, use social media that way.

Case
So anyway, so you can get into this … this business of doing this. Think about the opportunity to speak and to use to you do be part of a virtual stage podcast, to build your authority and enhance your message. And then just you take the time to do it, make it make it a bigger part of your goals around what you’re doing. And then you get the most out of it that way. So I think, you know, don’t worry, don’t focus too much on what a drain searching on search edges can be like. Just focus on the bigger goals of what you to accomplish,

Peter
Right, they don’t have to go and try to get 100 in one sitting. If you just do this … make it a habit, put it into your weekly, bi weekly, whatever it might be — into your schedule, then it’ll continue to ramp up and then get where you want it to go, right?

Case
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, you know, I just test keywords. And so I will go into a directory, and I’ll put a keyword in and see what’s returned. And I’ll just start making a list of the podcast names. And that will give me an idea of how deep the search could go. Because some percentage of the shows are no longer active, as I mentioned. Some percentage don’t have interviews. And sometimes you can’t tell you have to look at the episodes and you realize, oh, they’re all five minutes, how to episodes. So there’s no way that this person does interviews. So I just make a long list. And then so you might spend a day just kind of weeding out the ones that don’t look good. And then the next day, start looking for contact information for the ones that made sense. So just test that with the different keywords.

Peter
All right. And you know, while you were talking before, and you said, you don’t really do a lot with the social media to look for this. And I said, I think you contacted me through LinkedIn. That’s not accurate. You contact me through the … my contact page on my website.

Case
Yes, on … that’s right … that’s right.

Peter
All right Case, well, this is a lot of information. I hope it inspires people to go out and do it. And if they need help, how can they contact you, and how might you be able to help them?

Case
Yeah, I’d like to offer the listeners, a checklist that I have, it’s a free checklist of the approach that I’ve been explaining. It’s at CaseLane.net/checklist. I can give you that link as well. And you can have that and you can reach out that way. And also, you can just send me an email contactcase@readyentrepreneur.com.

Peter
I’ll put both of those in the web notes. I hope people do contact you because I can see this being very beneficial for them. And I’m thankful you reached out and contacted me so we could bring this information to them. Case, so I wish you the best.

Case
Thank you so much. It was great!

Peter
This wraps up another episode of Public Speaking: Your Competitive Advantage. Be sure to join me for my next show, when you’ll discover more public speaking tips, techniques, and ideas that give you a competitive advantage and help you increase your impact, influence, and income. Until then, please rate, review, and subscribe to Public Speaking: Your Competitive Advantage wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Be happy and healthy, my friend!