One of the best ways to grow your audience, build more trust, and grow your business faster is to appear on podcasts.
I’ve used this strategy ever since I started growing lemlist, and it helped us grow the company to $20M+ in ARR.
In this article, you’ll get the exact emails I’ve sent to get invited to 50+ podcasts and reach millions of people worldwide.
But why does that strategy work so well?
If you see me having a chat with Beyonce - will you consider that I have more influence?
I bet you will.
Well, that works the same in business:
If you’re seen with influential people in your field, people in your target audience will think you have expertise.
Influence is a staircase
Before we see how to get invited on podcasts, there’s one mistake I see a lot of people making.
Most people see influence as an elevator.
You see, if I talk to you about podcasting, you’re gonna think of Joe Rogan, My First Million, Tim Ferris, etc.
But to get invited to these podcasts, you already need to be super well-known and have a large audience.
The elevator strategy is when you believe that by pressing one button, you’re gonna reach the highest sphere of influence.
In reality, you need to picture influence as a staircase.
Consider that each step corresponds to an influence stage.
The first step is basically people who don’t have a big audience yet and hence not have that much influence. They’re trying to grow fast, and they’re happy to interview less well-known people if you sell them well on a story. Which we will see in a minute.
As you go up the stairs, you’ll find people with more and more influence (basically, they have bigger audiences and businesses.)
And at the highest step of the stairs, you have the most successful people out there.
If you want to get an answer, you need to reach out to people who are more or less at the same stage as you.
And the more you grow, the bigger and bigger names you’ll be able to reach.
How can you reach out to people to appear on their podcast?
At the time, I used lemlist to send this email template to dozens of podcasts:
Here’s why it worked 👇
I used the value equation to write my email:
Let’s break down an example so you understand how you can use it as well.
The dream outcome was stated in the subject line.
Then, I built trust by following the trust triangle:
First, I built an emotional connection with my target by stating that I know and like their podcast and by mentioning a need they have (finding more interesting stories to talk about on the podcast.)
Second, I expressed my reliability by offering him a lot of different topics I could talk about that could interest their audience, all related to my journey building my company.
Third, I demonstrated my credibility by sharing my LinkedIn profile and a podcast episode I had already done with a well-known entrepreneur.
And finally, the effort to achieve the dream outcome was very low: welcoming me as a guest on one of his podcast episodes.
Then, I made sure to follow up four days later with a very simple and straight-to-the-point email.
Which got me an answer from the podcast owner.
I re-iterated the process for dozens of podcasts - making sure to always personalize my approach.
Those two very simple emails allowed me to get replies from podcast hosts and to appear on tons of podcasts when I first started my company.
Once you’ve successfully grown your audience by thousands of people, you can work on turning them into potential customers.
If you want to know how to turn your audience into customers, check out this video I created about it 👇
Here’s one thing you should remember:
If you want to ask something from people, you need to learn how to build trust.
Peace, love and profit 💰
G.