If you book podcast appearances, you need shows where your speaker can contribute something listeners will find useful. Podcast hosts look for guests who can contribute to an episode. Topic relevance alone is not enough. Assess the show's format and propose a conversation suited to its audience.
What the search returns
Search by opportunity type for shows with guest pages, booking forms or stated guest criteria. The News Index also indexes podcasts, so coverage of your subject can identify shows discussing it.
A show with a guest application form is a different prospect from one where guests are clearly booked through the host's network. Only the first is approachable cold.
Qualify on format, not topic
Topic relevance is necessary but not sufficient. Four checks separate shows worth pitching.
- Do they take guests at all? Many shows are solo or co-hosted by design. Check several recent episodes rather than the description.
- Is it still running? Podcast archives outlive podcasts. An episode gap of six months usually means it ended without saying so.
- What type of guest? Practitioners, founders, researchers, customers. Listen to ten minutes of two episodes; it is the fastest qualification available and almost nobody does it.
- Who is the audience? A show for your peers is not the same as a show for your buyers, and both can be worth doing for different reasons.
Lead time is longer than people expect
Booking is typically weeks to months ahead, and episodes are often recorded well before release.
That has two consequences. A podcast placement is not a tactic for this quarter's numbers. And a seasonal or timely angle has to be pitched a season early, not when the season arrives.
The pitch is an angle, not a biography
Hosts need an episode. A pitch listing your credentials asks them to design one for you.
Propose the specific conversation: the question, the position you hold on it, and the two or three things you can say that their audience has not heard. If you have data or an account of work done, that is the episode.
Reference an episode you listened to and say why your angle follows from it. Hosts can tell within a sentence whether you have heard the show.
Following the stated route
Use the guest form where one exists. Shows that book regularly have a process, and going around it to a personal address is slower and reads badly.
Site Info returns the contact routes and page paths a show publishes. Confirm on the live page, since podcast sites go stale quickly.
What you get from it
Usually a link from the episode page and the audience for one episode. Both are modest. The compounding return is that a good episode leads to other invitations, and podcast hosts talk to each other.
Episode pages are also durable and get cited, so a substantive conversation can be part of the material answers are built from long after it aired.
Before approaching a host, listen to the show and propose a conversation that fits its format. That gives the host a concrete episode idea to consider.
See searching by opportunity type, qualification, or speaking submissions.