Interviewing guests and having panel discussions are some of the most popular podcast formats. They’re a quick way to create the audio content as you don’t need to script the whole episode.
However, there’s a significant problem… actually booking the guests onto your podcast. How can you do that?
If you’ve got the time then email is a great option. Of course, you will need to know the email address of the people that you want as guests on your podcast. But if you do, then this can be a very effective technique.
You can create templates for your emails in your own email client, which you can reuse to save you some time. There’s great a Chrome extension called Gorgias which enables you to create templates and save them to the cloud; this software can be used with Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, Facebook and some others. It’s a real time save.
A good tip would be… if you’re writing basically the same email for a third time, then you should take a few minutes to create a template for that. Save it and you’ll never have to start from scratch.
If you create an email for the following, then you’ve made a pretty good start:
- introducing yourself and you podcast
- setting up a podcast interview with your expectations
- giving possible podcast guests some statistics about your downloads, audience profile etc.
- pre-podcast recording messages (reminders to turn up for the podcast recording)
- post-podcast recording messages (asking them to share the podcast)
Make sure that your templates don’t appear to be too impersonal. Allow some space to show that you’ve done some background research on the guest and to show that you really do know who they are and why they’d be a great fit to appear on your podcast.
The downside to email is that you have to do all of the work. You have to find the guests and go looking for their email address. You might need to spend time building rapport before you even broach the subject of a podcast invite.
Email threads can be hard to navigate and easy to forget. Just remember that with email, you need to keep on top of it all.
Online Booking Platform
If you’re more into using software to assist with your podcast bookings, then there are a lot of options out there. You can automate many of the tasks that simple email won’t allow.
One thing to bear in mind here is that you need to make contact with people in some way still. It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to create an online podcast booking page which will be inundated with bookings! You’re still going to need to do outreach, but once that’s done you can simply point people to your booking page and forego all of the back-and-forth that email necessitates; the booking system should take care of this.
Bear in mind that you can post the link to your booking page in the footer of your email / website and even mention it in your podcast audio. This, over time could gain momentum, with other people sharing this link on your behalf.
Although it’s unlikely to be free, the benefits in saved time can be enormous, and the possibility of conflicts in the calendar are greatly reduced.
Most booking platforms will link up to your calendar system and only show times when you truly are available for a podcast interview. The guest can then match this up to their availability when they book. This saves lots of easy to muddle up emails! If you’re a podcaster who is booking on guests from other parts of the world, the platform will likely take care of the timezone conversion for you, which can be a easy thing to mess up.
Some of the online options will also allow you to book multiple guests into the same slot. This is perfect if you have a podcast show which always has a specific number of guests. The platform will turn off the booking when that number is reached, which is a really handy feature.
It’s also possible that the booking system will be able to automate the process of creating the actual meeting in Zoom / Google Meet etc. Whilst this might not be the solution that you’d want to deploy to get the best audio, it might be okay for you, and is yet another step that you don’t have to perform.
Podcast booking calendar platforms:
Online SaaS apps (Software as a Service) options:
WordPress plugin options:
Podcaster Plus
If this all sounds like something that you’re interested in then you really should be checking out the Podcaster Plus app. It’s an online software which will allow you to create your podcast bookings with ease and automate many of the other tasks that you don’t want to be bothered with, such as show note creation, helping with podcast guest outreach and keeping in touch with your podcast guests both before and after the show.
Check out Podcaster Plus here.