How To Book Podcast Guests Even If You Don't Have A Large Audience

Here is the exact process for how to book podcast guests, whether they are big names or everyday people.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a way for people to connect with you about being on the podcast – besides your email address posted somewhere.

To do this, I embed a scheduling page from Acuity directly to my site so that people can organically find it and schedule a recording. This is the easiest way to book podcast guests, hands down. (We will input qualifier questions in the booking form to prevent guests that are a bad fit.) You want to do this first because it is a way to land guests that involves zero effort on your part. This is actually becoming more and more useful as many guests are hiring booking agents to get them on podcasts. Often now I will be setting there and get an email that someone just scheduled a recording. Since I have the qualifying questions in the booking page, I always get great guests.

Now, let’s move on to the move active outreach strategies.

The next thing we will do to book podcast guests is send out cold emails to people and ask for them to be on our podcast. I’ll show you how I approach them so that you get a yes 95% of the time.

Click here to read how I find all the guests!

Here is an example of the email I send to the potential guest. Feel free to use this as a template.

Hi Carey,

My name is Ryan Helms, and I host a podcast called Hustle To Freedom.

I came across your story on another podcast and it sounded super interesting so I was wondering if you’d be open to a discussion on my podcast? I haven’t had any guest with a publishing background yet, so I would love to dive into that with you. I’d love to hear more about the evolution of your side hustle and how you got the idea to write your book.

I focus on one-on-one interviews with people who are actively building a side hustle, or who have left their day job in the past three years to work on their side hustle.

Let me know your thoughts, I’d love to have you on.

Hope your week is off to a great start!

In this initial email, I do not ask them to join the podcast, I just use it to introduce myself and the podcast. BE SURE to add information specific to them so it does not come off as a spam email blast. This is super important! Do some research on the person before sending this email. If you don’t, I would be very surprised if you received a reply.

Pro Tip: One small trick that I use to help my emails stand out is I do not capitalize the first word in the subject line. You’ll see above the subject line was “would you want to be on the podcast?”. This just helps it stand out when 99% of the email in a person’s inbox starts with a capital letter.

Also, once you start to get some traction with your podcast you will want to include some numbers in your opening email. Such as, “currently, the podcast is getting around 15,000 downloads per month and steadily growing so it may be a good platform for your business”.

When you receive a reply email from the person and they have expressed interest, this is where you ask them to be a guest on your podcast. In your response to them, let them know you are excited to have them on your podcast and give them a link to book a time slot on your Acuity calendar. You can either direct them to the booking page on your website or directly to Acuity. Here is an example of my response to a potential guest.