Leveraging Podcasts in Your Book Marketing
Whether you publish your book yourself or land that elusive deal with a traditional publisher, you’re responsible for marketing your book. Like, 100%.
That means building your audience and writing a newsletter. It means blogging, writing snappy articles on LinkedIn or wherever your readers hang out, and commenting on other people’s posts to build visibility. It means planning giveaways on social media. It means reaching out to people—a LOT of people—to please read your book and write a review on Amazon. It means hosting a launch or signing party, and connecting with like-minded organizations to organize promo partnerships.
This is the grunt work of writing a book. (Well, after the grunt work of drafting it—which goes faster and better when you work with a book coach, but that’s not why we’re here today.)
Thankfully, there’s a super fun strategy for marketing your book in addition to all the grunty ones: being a guest on other people’s podcasts.
I recently sat in on an excellent deep-dive session called “How to Get on Podcasts and Use them to Sell Books.” Hosted by Book Launchers, this 120-minute session featured Jim James, serial entrepreneur, corporate media trainer and host of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast. Every word this guy said was high value, and I came away feeling like it was a great way to spend my Saturday morning.
I’m going to lay out my key takeaways below, but if you want to spend $35 USD for the benefit of the full session, here’s the link to buy the replay. I think it’s money well spent.
After the session wrapped, I sent these tips out to my writers. I hope you find them useful.
Podcasting is one of the best ways to become visible and share your message.
Podcast hosts are in the game of creating and protecting their community. People trust the hosts of the podcasts they listen to. More than 50% of Americans trust podcasters more than media personalities [my stat; source here]. As a guest, you benefit from this trust.
For a podcast, the host is far more interested in your story than in your book, per se. Balance your message accordingly.
Get your story down to a 30-60s sound bite. 35% of listeners dip within the first 5 minutes.
Far better to pitch yourself to a handful of well-researched, super aligned podcasts rather than cast your net wide to hundreds. (Same as shopping for an agent, really.)
I keep hearing great things about ListenNotes as a tool to gain more info about specific podcasts. When you’re researching podcasts, look for relevanceto your idea, the podcast’s ranking, and its reviews:
screenshot from Jim’s presentation
You should know and / or have researched a podcast very well prior to pitching them, so that when you reach out to the host you’re conversant with their content and you know what their audience is looking for.
You can research podcasts a) on podcast apps and b) by searching keywords on YouTube. (YouTube indexes keywords, whereas podcast apps only index titles).
A few sites that can help “match” you with ideal podcasts:
screenshot from Jim’s presentation
Going on a podcast is like going to dinner at someone’s house: don’t show up empty-handed. You should have something to give to the audience! A chapter of your book, a discount code for something you’re offering, or some other kind of lead-gen item.
Similarly, give the host something. A review is always appreciated, so write them a review, screenshot it, and send it along with your pitch.
For a fee, there are agencies that will handle the work of getting you onto the right podcasts. Here are a few:
screenshot from Jim’s presentation
After the podcast, be sure to use the content again (and again, and again). Get the MP4 sound file from the host, transcribe it with Otter or Sonix, and repurpose the SHIT out of it. Blog posts, LinkedIn posts, emails to your list, Twitter posts, Instagram, Facebook. Now that website and advertising cookies are being blocked left, right and centre, discoverability is much lower than it was in the past—so content marketing is your core strategy.
There you have it. If I were publishing a book myself, finding related podcasts would be my number one strategic move, followed by publishing a ton of content. (But see my last point for how easy a podcast makes it for you to materialize that content without having to write it all yourself.)
Go forth and converse.