You’ve found podcasts you want to guest on, which means you’re ready to put a podcast pitch together so you can book that interview.
Your next step is deciding what you’ll bring to the show.
What will your guest interview be about?
Here’s the thing – the topic you suggest to the podcast will make or break your chances of appearing as a guest. This is your chance to not only show off your expertise or share your story, but also to show the podcast that you’re paying attention to their content.
Propose an interview topic that’s not relevant to the podcast, and your email is getting sent to the spam folder.
Lucky for you, we’ve developed a shortcut that almost guarantees you’ll impress the host.
Before you even think about topics, first you need to figure out what kind of guest content the host puts out:
Is the podcast you’re pitching a storytelling podcast or a teaching podcast?
Storytelling podcasts tend to feature stories about how people have ended up where they are today.
Teaching podcasts promote the ideas of their guests and like to promote how-to’s and specific guidance and process their audience can try out.
Here’s how you know whether the podcast is a storytelling or teaching podcast:
Step One: Pick one of the podcasts you want to pitch.
Step Two: Look at their recent episode titles and show notes. Do they emphasize a guest’s personal journey or do they focus on how-tos in the way they market episodes?
It’s that easy! If the podcast focuses mostly on storytelling in their episode descriptions, then you’ll want to approach them with a story of your own.
For your story, identify a moment where you experienced a significant personal transformation or turning point in your business:
- What happened?
- What changed?
- What was the result?
If the podcast’s marketing language is more focused on tactics or how-to’s, it’s a teaching podcast. To develop an insight-based topic, look to what’s not been covered in their past content:
- Where can you go deeper?
- What’s not being said?
- What’s your most controversial take?
What would be the title of your episode? That’s your interview topic!
Once you get a response from the podcast host or their team, it’s usually to ask further questions or set up a time for the interview. That’s where scheduling conflicts can come into play. We’re all busy and podcast hosts often batch their interviews, which means that your interview could be more than a month out once your pitch is accepted.
That wasn’t so bad, was it? You can use this process any time you want to pitch a new podcast, and you’ll find it gets faster after you’ve done it a few times.
Of course, you don’t have to come up with a new topic for every podcast you come across. Instead, you can create a list of topics for each type of podcast (storytelling vs teaching).
And since every interview is unique, you can absolutely repurpose a topic from one podcast to another!
As long as the topic is relevant to the second (or third) podcast you want to pitch, you can feel free to use it!
In this way, you can continue to confidently send pitches that resonate with multiple hosts without wasting a ton of time trying to brainstorm new ideas. Helpful, right?
Want help cutting down on the rest of your pitch creation time?
Our Podcast Pitch Blueprints give you prompts like these, as well as email scripts and pitch templates, so you’re the one that lines up the interview and not your biggest competitor.
Click here and select the blueprint that’s a match for your industry and target audience.