Hire a Podcast Booking Company and Risk Getting Banned Forever

Following up on introducing NAME REDACTED as a potential guest. Her story aligns perfectly with "Fail Your Way to Success," where embracing setbacks leads to remarkable growth.

In "TITLE REDACTED,” NAME unravels the intricacies of digital creator life, mirroring your approach to understanding the success stories of business leaders. Her frank discussions on creator life and mental well-being could offer refreshing perspectives to your listeners.

NAME could undoubtedly provide substantial insights on redefining success in today's digital age. Excited about the prospect of her sharing on your platform.

Warm regards,

This is the kind of message that arrives in my box daily—sometimes three or four times a day. And this is one of the better ones! The bad ones say how inspired they were by the interview with FILL IN RANDOM GUEST WHOSE EPISODE THEY CLEARLY DIDN’T LISTEN TO, and how much it reminds them of THEIR RANDOM CLIENT.

EG: I recently listened to your conversation with Jon Small about how sharing failure can help your business. His ideas on embracing vulnerability and learning from struggles really stood out to me, and I’m excited to apply this mindset to my own work. Great episode! 

If there’s one thing I know about this person, it’s that they very much did not listen to this episode and if there’s another thing I know, it’s that they will not be applying this mindset to their own work.

They’re doing the “spray and pray”: spamming podcast hosts across God’s free world with slop. What amazes me is that they do not give up. If they’re going to email over and over and over, why not just take the time to email once but in an effective way? It’s usually by the third follow-up that I take action—not by accepting the guest but by blocking the sender.

Being pitched this way is worse than not being pitched at all. When I’m pitched someone and that publicist follows up three or four times, there’s a chance I may remember the name of the person being pitched. And if I ever met or encountered them, I’d definitely be turned off.

And yet people—lots and lots of people—are paying to have themselves pitched in this way. Why? Well, I just looked up some of the companies doing this pitching and they look super legit. Articles about them in big publications. Famous-ish clients, including New York Times bestselling authors. If I wanted to go on podcasts and saw their sites, I might think they’d be the ticket.

Of course, the sad truth, for the pitchers, is that most podcasts want to feature guests who don’t have to be pitched.

I have, on rare occasions, accepted guests who were pitched to me. A few times it’s worked out okay. One time, it worked out excellently. (More on that in a second.) Two times it resulted in such obnoxious male guests that one I cut off a few minutes in when I realized I couldn’t tolerate the experience any longer (something I posted about, still shaking from the experience) and the second time, I wish I had. (Instead I finished the interview and just never posted the episode.)

(The time it worked out excellently was when the person pitched himself, in the most thoughtful way that showed how closely he’d listened to the show. His name is Alex Strathdee and he’s become a friend and one of my favorite people to follow when it comes to book publishing; listen to the podcast he hosts here.)

I’ve learned a lot from Alex but one of the things is that you can get on a podcast if you approach it correctly. It was through the pitch he sent me that we developed the Legacy Launch Pad “can’t miss” podcast pitch template we use to get our clients booked on podcasts.

It’s not hard. It just takes actually knowing who you’re pitching, listening to the show and approaching the pitch from a point of view of how you can serve that host’s audience and not how that host can serve you.

As we amp up marketing and PR services at LLP, we’ve been exploring working with various companies. One of them is billed as the greatest software for getting booked on podcasts. My team and I did a Zoom with them and they showed the “most amazing” part of the software: that it will pick a random episode the show has released, build a pitch around it and then follow up three or four times. The guy showing us the software thought this was amazing while I realized that it was this feature that had caused me to block so many senders.

So what’s an aspiring podcast guest to do? Podmatch is my suggestion. I interviewed the founder Alex Sanfillippo and really like him but more importantly, we’ve used Podmatch for our clients and booked them on shows. Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss certainly aren’t seeking out guests there but if you want to dip your toe in the podcast world and haven’t been on any shows before, it’s the perfect way to enter the world. Either that or work with professionals who aren’t going to make you look bad.

So please avoid the podcast booking companies and software that allows you to follow up and follow up until you’ve driven the host or producer batty.