Lessons

Lesson Info

Guest Selection and Outreach

Now it is a big myth that you need huge names for your show. Shaq was a fun interview. I thought this is gonna be a really cool turning point. We're gonna see this massive spike in downloads and that massive spike was kinda like this little blip that kind of looked like a static on your microphone on a waveform. It's like, did you drop something? What happened? It just went up and then back down really quick and I thought, huh, is everything working? I looked at my hosting, I called my producer. I was like, I don't know, is it out? Is it out in every country? Are we the only ones seeing it? The lesson here is that nobody really cared. People thought it was a great show. They'd already downloaded it. Your subscribers are already getting this. There's rarely gonna be a show where someone goes, This person had that guy on or that gal you have to listen to this. I'm sending this via email to all of my friends and family It just doesn't happen. Unless you're getting a lot of press around so...

mething like when Marc Maron had Barack Obama on the show. Which was like this historic first in a lot of ways nobody really cares. So that's a relief right? Because now you don't have to go and spend two years and trying to book Shaq. You'll get a cool photo for your Instagram but really that will be the highlight of it. Not really what happens when you drop it into your podcast feed. I know that sounds a little anticlimactic but I like the idea that we don't have to hit bingo, home run, grand slam guests every single week or every single month or however often you're doing the show. It makes your life a lot easier because yeah you can have your friend on who has a really interesting travel story for your travel podcast. You don't have to have Rick Steves or whoever who's big in that world. It just doesn't matter. In fact sometimes when you have a guest like this they say, well I've seen him like a million times this week alone because he's in all this media. Or, he has his own show so I don't really care necessarily about your interview with him. Your audience will care but new fans really aren't going to think it's that big of a deal. What it will do is build a little bit of credibility but it's not the ginormous rocket that you're thinking it is. It's great you'll have somebody famous on there, it'll make the next entrepreneur or celebrity that much easier to book but it's not going to suddenly be like, well you had Shaq on so just make a wish list and Will Smith is knocking on the door right now. That's not how it works. I wish it did but that's not how it goes. It's more important for most of you to talk to people who you're very interested in, who you might maybe even have some level of expertise in their field because I find that the conversations where you don't know anything about the field or the guest are really not as interesting as somebody where you know a lot about their field. Maybe you know them well and you've got great rapport already. It doesn't mean that you should only book guests that you already know. It does mean that you shouldn't have somebody on and go, so what does that word mean in your field? What is neurology? You're a neurologist, what does that even mean? That's a great intro question if you're asking for the benefit of the audience. If you've actually never heard of it good thing you're watching this, right? Also, you wanna make sure that your guests can actually do the show. I've read a lot of books and sometimes I go, this is brilliant. Oh my God this is gonna be amazing and then the person comes on the show and I go how are you so boring? (laughter) How did this? When can I turn this off and then pretend that I lost the file? Watch YouTube go on Google Talks whatever you need to do and make sure that the person can speak. There are countless examples of the most brilliant academic written works and then you get in front of that person and you're just thinking, is there a human in there somewhere that I can talk to? And it's a little bit unfair but I think that just means they've found their calling. The written word, stick with it. Alright, now outreach I think is key for most of us. We're looking at outreach like the golden ticket to fame and fortune when it comes to booking the right kind of guest. You have to know who you're reaching out to. Are you reaching out to the guest themselves? Are you reaching out to a PR person? Are you reaching out to their assistant? It's actually really overrated to reach out to the guest themselves. I try to do it as often as I can on Twitter, Instagram and other social media I'll reach out directly and sometimes you'll get them to kick or nudge or whoever the person is that will actually book them. Usually it's the other way around. A friend of mine wanted to book a really big name celebrity for the show and they reached out to him directly and they found this address that the person could be reached at and they got responses every now and again and the person dragged them around and around and around for I wanna say two, two and a half years and finally I said, well why don't you reach out to their assistant, you know. And they said, why I'm already talking with them. Why should I reach out to their assistant. I said, just give it a shot maybe that's the person who can get it done. That's usually the case. You know, if you wanna reach me that's fine, I'm so reachable, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Instagram, Twitter, whatever. If you want me to actually do something you gotta talk to my wife, that's how this works. So, you might think, oh I'm talking with so and so directly. This is great I'm getting texts back once every 17 that I send, we're this close. You're probably further away than you think because what they're doing is following whatever the person next to them is telling them to do. You wanna talk to the person that influences them, not them directly 90% of the time. The other thing I would say is publicists and PR reps, sorry for those of you that do that for a living, but I sometimes feel like their job is to delete all of the emails that come into their inbox and then put a vacation responder up for three weeks after that. I don't know exactly what the deal is there. I think for a lot of folks if you've been doing this for 10 years you think, oh podcasts, nobody listens to that. But I wanna book him on a media tour of FM stations and AM radio in Idaho. That for some reason seems to be where a lot of publicists and PR reps are living these days so if you can get to an assistant instead of a publicist you're, in my experience, going to have a much easier time. I think those people have an overstated amount of influence and from what I've learned about the publicity industry a lot of folks will say they work with somebody because it sounds good. They're doing exactly what a lot of podcasters are doing. Yeah, I represent Shaquille O'Neal one time in 1998 while he was with the NBA but hey look, he's gone on my website. So you email them and they go, well rather than come clean about totally Bsing my client roster I'm just gonna ignore this or I'm just gonna say, yeah let's do that but first have this first time author who wrote a book about dog shampoo. You're gonna get tons of that and it's a waste of your time because remember, those reps are trying to book their current clients that can't get publicity anywhere else, they're trying to book them on your show. You are, we are, a lot of times the dumping ground for, where on earth am I gonna put a dog grooming author? Oh good, podcasts. Let's let 'er rip. You don't wanna be that because what you'll find also is that when people go on book tours you'll see a lot of shows have the same guests. That's great if you're a really interviewer, a really good host. You bring a unique angle. If you're just asking them what their new book is about you have officially commoditized yourself and I'll get into that a little bit more later on but it's very important that you're able to stand out. One of the ways that you do that is through your guest selection and if you can't get the biggest names if you just try to live in the middle it can be a little dangerous because that's who the publicist is sending out, Penguin or Harper is sending out their book list and 87 people have the exact same guest the exact same week because they wanna sell a book and what happens when I've heard Michael Pollan on your show, your show, your show, your show and your show? Well, maybe I don't wanna listen to him again on your show and yours came out 15 minutes later. Sorry, delete, right? Or unsubscribe, you only have have the same as everybody else I'll get the same roster there. Don't commoditize yourself. Warm introductions always better. And I'll show you a formula for this later but you want to make sure that you are getting warm introductions and what that is is I might ask Kenna, hey do you know how I can reach Chase Jarvis? I've bounced off him a bunch and she'll say, I work there and I can't even reach him so nevermind but maybe she knows his wife or something. So you wanna make sure that you can get an introduction from somebody that knows them. It's much more effective because for a lot of us we have a media box or a general inquiry inbox or we have our work email that we check when we have to. But maybe there's another way that everyone reaches us. Maybe they text us, maybe they do an email intro and then they say, hey Jordan you really should talk to Kenna. She's really cool, I met her at an event last month and that actually ends up being much more useful for me because now I have a good word put in and I can kind of skip to the head of the line and I'll show you how to use your network and everything for that later on in detail. Now, on your handouts, did everybody get this by the way? Great, so crack this sucker open to the first page. I don't know if you can use that for the first page. Oh, look at the first page (laughter) and you will see an email script that I use to reach out to pitch a show to a guest. So if you look at this first page you'll see the subject line. It's gotta be something attention grabbing. I can write a big number in there. A lot of you won't have that just yet. Use something you do have like, debuted as the top 100 podcast in tech. It doesn't really matter you're just tying to get their attention. What you don't wanna write in there is like, please come on my show, question mark, right? That doesn't really work. Or, wanna do a podcast? Like, no that's why I delete all these. So, make sure that you have something attention grabbing. It's really tricky. A lot of marketers do this and so you're gonna have trouble standing out there, I do all the time but a terrible subject line kind of gets ignored, a great one maybe doesn't. That's pretty much all we can expect from a subject line these days. Thanks internet marketers. But we throw that up at the top. Hopefully somebody's looking at that that wants their client on the show and then I have a short introduction that's just two to three sentences because what I found from sending out really detailed pitches for the last 10 years is even myself when I see an email in my inbox and it's a wall I go, yeah I'll read that later, but then I won't ever read it. So, if I have three or four sentences in the beginning or even just two to three and it's like, my show has this, it will sell a lot of your books in these countries people go, oh good. And then when they wanna look at the additional details they will but I would love to know I would love to put a brain or eye scanner on the next thousand people I pitch and find out what percentage of people actually even read the rest of this. I bet it's like one out of and it's probably the people who read that and go, oh this is kind of what I read earlier and we're already doing this. Or somebody that already said yes and just wants additional detail for their client or for themselves. So, you want the call to action between the intro and between the additional details but once you get these additional details throw those in there and then I throw a handful of testimonials in there. Usually I use the bigger names that I've had but I would tailor this. If you're pitching someone who's a medical specialist post a health researcher in there. They might not care that you had General Stanley McChrystal on there. They might not care if you've had Tim Ferriss. If someone's a scientist maybe they don't even like Tim, maybe they think he's too life hacky and they don't respect it. Maybe you saw them say something, maybe they panned his book. You don't wanna be like, hey this person you didn't like did my show you should come on too. It's not really a good selling point. Maybe they love NBA and I'll be like, hey, Shaq did my show, just saying, you know. You could be sitting up there next to him. That's the way that you tailor this. Don't worry so much about what they've said and you can get these testimonials at the end of your show by saying, hey so what did you think? I'm pretty new at this and they'll go, oh this was great, you ask great questions 'cause they're being nice. And then you go, Jordan Harbinger said this was great, you ask great questions. You can throw that right in your show pitch and nobody will ever mind that you did that because very few people use testimonials in their pitch, in their pitch emails. So make sure that you grab that from the handout feel free to take as much of that as you want. I highly recommend tailoring it obviously for your specific show. If you use mine it's gonna look bad because people will find out. Like, where have I seen this before? Or, possibly they will, if this gets spread out enough which it will through Creative Live if everyone's using the same script it's gonna look a little bit like, oh great some schmo taught a podcasting class. Now everybody's using the same scripts and it's gonna get deleted. So even me now, I've realized as I'm saying this right now that I probably need to change my pitch script so that's fine, that's fine. I use tools every single day to make sure that I'm booking and rocking the right kind of workflow here. First and foremost I use Meistertask. Now what this is, well actually before I go to that screen Meistertask, Scheduleonce, Textexpander and Boomerang. And now what Meistertask is is a workflow that looks a little bit like, I mean you've seen this before, Trello, things like that. Guests to rebook that I've had before. I got a whole list. People that I've had that did a really good job. Potential guests, that is the biggest column. That's like, hey you should have this person on your show. I just clip that and I throw it in there and then hopefully once a year look at it and go, oh right, that's guy, or that gal. Reading and vetting. I'll read a book and think, maybe this person will be good but I'm not sure yet so I'll throw it in there. You don't have to copy these categories by the way. I'm really not sure these are the most useful set but this is how my weird brain works. To be contacted are people that I thought, this would be a decent guest for some reason at some point. Maybe I should email them and their contact information is in there. We whited it out because I don't know if James Comey wants his email address broadcast on the internet here. Contacted and waiting for a response. There's a whole column full of those people. Replied, whether we're scheduling this or not it doesn't really matter. Whether they answered is the important part so those go in there. Scheduling, everything on the right side is my assistant's problem officially at this point because they're either getting scheduled or they've been scheduled. And if they've been scheduled then the date of the show, recording not the air date, is in there as well. And then this far right column is the most important because this is the one that I order by the date I need to have their stuff done by. So if I'm gonna prep and interview Molly Bloom today I better have this book read over the weekend at the latest. I don't want to wake up and go, this week looks kinda busy, oh crap I've gotta read six books. That's not a good way to do this. What'll happen is you'll read zero books, you'll panic, you'll do six crappy shows and then you're right back to where you started so this keeps me from overwhelming myself because I can go, oh wow looks like I've got four shows this week. Do they each have a book? Good, only two of 'em do. I can read two books this week, no problem. I have a bunch of flights. This will help you keep yourself in order. As soon as you start overbooking yourself you're gonna start to run into this thing where you start cutting corners and remember your show is your product. So if you don't give yourself enough time to do it well you're just gonna end up with the bare minimum and going thank God I got that out in time. And your audience, which is the only person, group of people anyway that you should really care about for this. If you're not advocating for them and earning every minute of their attention they're just gonna go, 500,000 shows huh? Maybe there's one where they person doesn't go, hey I didn't have time to read your book but thanks for coming on. Why don't I find the person that gave enough of a darn to get it together in the first place. Better not to do a show that you're not prepared for than to try to fake your way through it. Trust me, tried both ways. Oh, and I went through a whole phase where I was like, I don't even need to read the book. I can fake it, nobody even knows and then one day I read the book for Robert Greene, my seven year anniversary episode years and years ago and he went, this is really good. You know, you've got so much experience we should do this again and I went, what if I read the book for every guest? What if I did homework for everyone? And that was what I started to do and that was a huge game changer. I saw the audience increase, I saw feedback for wow you really over prepare, or out prepare everyone else. That was like, oh this is my competitive advantage now. I can just outwork everyone. I don't have to be funnier than everyone. I don't have to be quicker than everyone. I can really just have better info because I sat down and did the work. I highly recommend that you do that. I feel like now the bare minimum is making sure that you're well prepared for the guest. Everything else is icing on the cake. This is ScheduleOnce by the way. This piece of software has the release where essentially it's a legal document where the guest by replying and scheduling agrees that you're allowed to use it. I've never had to rely on that. I think if somebody doesn't wanna be in my show feed I'll take 'em out. But what you don't want is for them to go on and do something and then somewhere later down the line someone who's not them says, well we own this material and you say, well take it up with them. I've got a release, they scheduled the show don't look at me. Aim that lawsuit somewhere else. You don't really need it but it's always good to sort of CYA. I am a former lawyer so let that sink in for a minute. Maybe that's why I'm paranoid about this stuff but I do use that. It also has a lot of booking details and I'll talk more about those later on. I've got them in the handouts as well. There's also instructions for the show that will end up on the calendar. It will auto populate their calendar and our calendar with, hey make sure you're here and you're on Skype and here's my Skype name, and here's my assistant's phone number in case Skype explodes that day which it does more than you would think and also it shows exactly what you're gonna need. Audio and video or just audio and unfortunately a lot of people won't even look at this in their calendar on the day of but at least some folks will look at it a week ahead of time and then they don't panic when you go, yeah it's video. They go, oh I totally wasn't camera ready. It'll still happen here and there but at least at that point someone's like, oh I'm not wearing any pants. Like, you don't have to worry about that. You can be the one who doesn't wear pants because you know that the camera is only above your chest. And a lot of people will do their hair and stuff like that or they won't go on camera if they don't. High maintenance but whatever. You know, you wanna make them comfortable. Also, one note is here, meeting subject is set by the owner. You wanna make sure that you put not just their name in there. A lot of people, and I cancel these sometimes by mistake 'cause I don't know what it is. If it just says, Jordan Harbinger and it's an hour long block in the middle of a Tuesday I'm just like, oh I don't know what that is, delete. And it's someone's show and they put what they wanted to see on their calendar not realizing that it's also on mine. So I'll put guest on the Jordan Harbinger Show and then I might even put their name next to it so I know who they are, I know what's in there, they know what's in there because if their email's like, four@security.com, I don't know who that is. And if it just has my name in there often I'll say, I've got a really busy day. Jen, just cancel this weird thing. I don't remember what that is and then the poor guy who's spent a week preparing gets last priority because I don't know who the heck that is. Make sure that their calendar invite has all the info they would need and that you would want if you were having somebody, if you were having somebody book you on their show. Does that make sense? I know it's a little confusing, but when you see it you'll go, oh yeah that, 'cause it's super annoying when it's not done properly. This is what it looks like when it's correct. Srinivas Rao who's gonna be speaking I think later today from, show name, guest on my show, time slot. That's what that should look like. Not just my name, or his name on there. 'Cause if I just put his name on there it's his calendar and then it's just got his name on it and nobody knows what the heck's going on.