What does it entail to run a podcast/videocast show?
answering one of your most pressing question as a potential guest speaker who has been asked to share the production and administrative fee to support the podcast/videocast business
I received this question from one of my potential virtual guest speakers, and as this might be a question you are asking yourself as well, I decided to share it as an article.
The highest price of running a podcast is YOUR TIME (or your team’s time)
Time = money, especially when we start to hire a team of virtual assistants to help free up my time, so that I may focus on our 2 meetings (20 min intro + 1 h recording) and let them do the rest. The question may be… what is the rest?
Here is what running a podcast entails:
1. Have a clear vision of the message you want to share and your audience profile.
Without this step, your podcast project goes nowhere. In August 2020, I had a 2-hour heart-to-heart conversation with Anna Tøssel who is a survivor of domestic violence and addiction recovery advocate, as well as the founder of a Facebook page called Sealed Lips Destroy. At the end of this call, I thought to myself: “That was a Real Talk Real Women! … and I should have recorded and posted it because this conversation would have been helpful to so many people who are struggling with abusive and toxic relationships in their lives right now.” The idea was born but was not ripe yet.
During the partial solar eclipse of April 30th, 2022 followed by the total lunar eclipse on May 15-16th, 2022, the vision I had in 2013 came back to my mind: “I am at the head of a huge company, and we are spreading the message of love, light, peace, and hope by women who have prevailed over abusive and toxic relationships with others, with themselves, with illness, or with addiction.” God! It felt safe, right, and good to finally get started. I’m ready, and I’m doing it! - This kind of decision is the irrevocable decision that shapes the rest of your life, the one decision that I call “the shift”
Craft a clear call to action to find guest speakers.
To craft a good and clear call to find guest speakers, the point is to be extremely clear about their profile, because just publishing anybody and everybody is not going to do your message justice. This is why I have put together the following message:
I'm looking to feature an additional 48 virtual guest speakers on my podcast/videocast/broadcast Real Talk Real Women - Breaking The Silence Around Abuse
If you are:
✅ a strong, powerful, and visionary woman
✅ business owner, entrepreneur across all fields
✅ victorious over abusive and toxic relationships
✅ looking for a platform to have your story heard
✅ looking for a platform to promote your business, brand, project, offers
✅ looking to get featured to a large international audience
I would love to interview you and give you the space to share your story of overcoming abuse, how you shifted in your consciousness, and how you now thrive as a businesswoman.
Try different groups to find your guest speakers
Then, the next question arises: where are your ideal guest speakers hanging around? Where are they looking for speaking opportunities? Who are they?
I started by direct messaging people who had a common interest as life coaches looking for marketing advice and was able to secure quite a few spots with them, but it was one person at a time, and the proportion of yeses was low, especially when I’m asking my potential guests to share their story of abuse publicly. Not everybody is ready to do that.
One of my potential guest speakers invited me to a Facebook group with 35,000+ members, all about guest speaker opportunities. I shared my post and got an overwhelming 70 positive answers over a 2 weeks period of time. This was so much easier to simply manage the inbound flow of people who think they are a good match and connect with them personally.
Follow-up and respond to your potential guests
When you have people who comment on your post, you have to figure out where you are at with whom. It requires serious organizational and planning skills, as well as relationship-skill to probe the people you are considering. (To follow up and keep all your tasks at the same place with all the details and the aggregations that you can think of, pay ClickUp $144/yr subscription per person in your team)
Schedule an intro call with your potential guest speakers to make sure you both are a match for your show
Pay Calendly $144/yr or $15/mo and create at least 2 appointments, one for an intro call, and one for recording the podcast. (if you go with the free version, you can create only one type of appointment and the possibilities are limited).
Share your link and follow up. Some high-performance coaches are all about scheduling on the spot when you have the person’s interest, and not letting them do the scheduling when they are back to their home or office or when they have the time but will have forgotten about it because life comes in the way. I’m much more in favor of letting people
Update your tracking sheet to make sure everyone has received an appropriate answer
That requires another couple of hours to go through each person personally, update your tracking sheet, and follow up with those who fell in between the cracks. The more people you have, the longer it takes to keep this tracking sheet up to date, but it’s so worth it: it reminds you where you are at with your people.
Be available for the intro call and take precise and useful notes.
That requires organizational skills on top of people skills. Follow-up when there is a no-show. (Buy a new notebook to write down your notes and your thoughts regarding the guests and the business, as you cannot trust your memory to remember everything about everyone, especially when they are many similarities between the people - I’m guilty of a couple of those -)
When it's a match, follow up with your message/email with the next steps
The all-in-one app that does websites, landing pages, email lists, products, online course platform, CRM, and much more costs $178.80/mo. You can explore it here, it’s called Simplero. [disclosure: When you get started with Simplero, I will receive 20% of everything you will pay them, as an affiliate. You can become an affiliate too, it’s free]
Follow up again with your tracking sheet to see if someone fell in between the cracks
Again, that’s another couple of hours, and it’s essential if you want to see your project succeed big time. These are unavoidable steps if you want to be successful at a high level.
Be available to record the episode and have a clear and concise way of running the episodes
When you have your thread, and you know how you run your show, then you can easily guide your guest along. My recommendation: let them know before you hit record what to expect, so that they are not surprised, and they can prepare their answer in their mind beforehand.
Follow-up when the guest is unavailable, to reschedule the recording of the episode
Usually, people who have an interview show up. Sometimes, when life comes in the way, you just have to follow up and figure out what happened, hoping it’s not too bad and that you can easily reschedule the recording.
Save the recording and upload it on Google Drive
Pay a $99/yr subscription for Google One 2TB storage then share it with your guest speaker, as this is one of the easiest ways to share heavy files and keep them there without them disappearing as it happens with just a heavy file transfer app.
Prepare the episode description page for this specific guest speaker
Insert their info, links, promotions, opt-it, social media links, bio, picture, books, and more when available. The best way to go about it is to send them a form for them to fill out with the info they want on their speaker page. I use Simplero Worksheet for that that is already paid $178.80 per month for other things.
Create graphics that are appropriate in size and weight with Canva, for the speaker page, for social media, and are ready to be shared by them.
Schedule the release date and share the secret draft link with your guest.
Another follow-up message to your guest is to make sure everything is all right before the publication. Adapt their speaker page with their requests and desires, as this is something that will stay on the Internet forever, and you want it to really be what the person wants.
Promote the episode everywhere organically
Promote on social media, email lists, and by linking the publications with one another.
Ask for reviews
Ask your guest speakers to write or record a review telling their experience working with you; ask your audience to subscribe to your podcast and rate it in the app they have been listening to, to help your podcast/videocast to go up in the rankings
Stay active and present in your guest speaker FB group
Engage, encourage networking between your guest speakers, and network expansion.
Open more libraries and platforms to publish the show
There are so many possible outlets, just keep on adding more libraries for listeners to pick up on your show.
Manually upload the video of your recording to the show’s YouTube
Find a way to tag or connect the guest to the YouTube channel as well, and cross-promote when there is this possibility.
Keep the FB page and IG page up to date with the latest release
Publish on IG and FB as often as you publish your episodes
Keep your main website up to date with the latest release
That creates backlinks to your main podcast website
Grow the audience of the show
Choose relevant hashtags
Share the show in the appropriate groups on FB, LI, and elsewhere.
Update your bio to mention your podcast.
Update your email signature to mention your podcast and where people can subscribe to it.
Cut or create videos on TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels/videos, Twitter, Facebook reels/videos, LinkedIn, and more
Conclusion
I'm just asking my guest speakers to understand that running a successful podcast/videocast is a full-time job and that doing it on the side in my leisure time will not do justice to my amazing guest speakers. Most projects that are run for free are stillborn and die out after a while when the rush of the reward has faded away.