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7 Simple As Pie Email List Building Tips For Beginners

May 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Email list building is the most important activity you can do for your business. Your email list is truly your most valuable asset because people engage with emails far more often than social media posts.

In fact, if you have the same number of followers and email subscribers, you can count on anywhere from 3-10 times as many people seeing your email broadcasts than your social media posts.

The difference in click-through rates is even more dramatic. The average click-through rate for email is 3.57%, whereas Facebook and Twitter average click-through rates of 0.07% and 0.03%, respectively.

That’s right. Email gets 51-119 times more clicks depending on whether you use Twitter or Facebook. This isn’t to say social media is bad, in fact, you should be using social media to help you build your lists.

Remember, you own the traffic on your email lists. As for the traffic you don’t own, you’ll want as much of it as possible to join your email lists.

To help you, I’m providing seven simple-as-pie tips that you can implement to bring you email list building to the next level:

#1: Set Up An Email Server

Before you can even think of email list building, you’ll need to have an email server. And not one of those built-in WordPress servers that delivers your latest blog post to people’s inboxes.

Why? Because these services don’t allow you to communicate effectively with your audience.

Instead, consider servers like ConvertKit, iContact, and Aweber. Personally, I prefer ConvertKit because of its detailed auto responders, and its ability to seamlessly move people from one auto responder to another based on which actions they take (or don’t take). I wrote a more detailed post on ConvertKit here.

When you start using your server to send emails, focus on these two things:

Open rates
Click-through rates

Email marketers focus on other things too, but these two metrics matter most because, in the end, you want more people to open your emails, and more of the people who do open your emails to click on the links.

Besides, what’s the point of email list building if you don’t have an engaged list? By focusing on optimizing your open and click-through rates, you’ll end up with a more engaged email list.

#2: Create An Irresistible Free Offer

The irresistible free offer is the reason most people end up on your email list. Most people don’t subscribe to your email list to get more emails in their inbox. People get enough emails already!

The real reason they subscribe is to consume free content. My most successful free offer to date is an eBook containing 27 different tactics you can use to get more retweets.

You’ll want to be sure your free offer meets the needs of your niche and what you’re selling. When people subscribe and receive my free eBook, for example, they’re automatically sent an auto responder that provides additional value (as well as promotes my Twitter and social media-related products).

My irresistible offer leads qualified subscribers through a sales funnel that introduces my products based on a set of pre-qualifications — the products for which they’ve already expressed an interest — which keeps my messages relevant and on point.

Once you’ve decided on your irresistible free offer (video series, report, white paper, eBook, etc.), you need make sure it looks great. Design matters more than you think. We all judge a book by its cover (don’t deny it), and we also judge the value of a free offer by the way it’s presented.

For example, if all else is equal (including content), which book would you rather read?

A friend of mine was nice enough to create a new version of this eBook cover. And as a result, more people sign up simply because it looks better. You can even pay someone just $5 on Fiverr to come up with a good design. Just take a look at the logo for my upcoming summit:

I’ve made it my screensaver and I think it looks great! Just remember, the way your free offer looks is often more important than the free offer itself.

The title of your free offer is also important for building your email list. Choose a catchy yet simple title that communicates clearly what your free offer provides. If you have to choose between being catchy and being clear, always choose clarity.

As my friend Tom Corson-Knowles says, “Even a worthless book with a good title will sell more copies than a book full of useful information with a bad title.”

I write 10 possible titles for my free offer and then choose the one I like most.

#3: Create A Landing Page

Once you have the free offer in place, it’s time to create a landing page. A landing page is a page on your blog with a one or more CTAs (calls to action) and a form that asks users to enter an email address and possibly some other information (when you ask for less information, more people will actually fill out your form).

I personally use Optimize Press to create my landing pages. Optimize Press is a tool for WordPress.org users that lets you create landing pages, sales pages, membership sites, training courses, and just about anything else you can imagine.

If you don’t use this version of WordPress, you can still create a landing page. In fact, you don’t even need to have your own blog or website to create a landing page. You can simply create a self-hosted landing page on LeadPages or UpViral (they’ll host it for you so you don’t need to buy a domain name).

While it’s better to connect your landing page to a blog where you provide free, high-value content, you can technically go the self-hosted route that LeadPages, UpViral and others offer. The one problem with self-hosted landing pages is that people may not trust it as much since the URL doesn’t tell them who’s providing the free information.

When people don’t know who is getting their email address, for example, they are more hesitant about providing it. It’s often a good idea to say that you won’t share it with anyone!

Now that you know the basics, you’re probably wondering how to get people to subscribe via your landing page. There are two basic ways to do this. And understanding these two basic ideas will help you know what to look for to ensure effective email list building.

Increase the amount of traffic to the landing page
Optimize your landing page’s conversion rate

If two landing pages each have a 10% conversion rate, the landing page with 100 daily visitors will get more conversions than the landing page with 50 daily visitors.

But if the landing page with 50 daily visitors bumps up to a 30% conversion rate, that landing page now converts 15 visitors per day, whereas the other landing page with 100 daily visitors and a 10% conversion rate will convert 10 visitors per day. So even though one landing page gets half as many visitors, it’s still getting more conversions.

Ideally, you will increase traffic as well as your conversion rates. However, if you want to double your results, my advice is to focus on your conversion rates. Psychologically, it feels more doable to go from a 10% conversion rate to a 20% conversion rate than going from 100 daily visitors to 200 daily visitors. Are you still with me?

By focussing on conversions, you’ll only need a 10% increase. With a traffic-based goal, on the other hand, you’ll need an increase of 100 visitors.

#4: Share Your Landing Page On Social Media

Ah yes, here’s where social media joins the email list building mix. You can’t just create a landing page and expect people to visit it. You get those visitors by promoting your landing page, and social media is a powerful tool that lets you do just that.

The easiest way to promote your landing page is to use your bio. While most people link to their blog or website in their bios, why not link to the one page you want your visitors to see more than any other piece of content? I always link to my landing page in my bio.

Once you make this simple change, your email list building efforts will pick up momentum. You can then build on that momentum by promoting your landing page several times a day. But keep in mind that frequency will vary according to the social network.

On Twitter, for example, I promote one of my landing pages every hour. But on Facebook and Pinterest, I promote my landing page only once per day. And on Instagram, I let my bio do most of the talking.

Most social networks also give you the option to pin a post to the top of your profile. I use this feature with Twitter to keep one of my tweets immortal. While most tweets have a lifespan of 20 minutes, this one tweet continues to work wonders.

But I also noticed that as I shared my landing pages on more social networks, I fell into a time crunch. Sure, I was working on my email list building, but I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted from the rest of my business.

Why? Because I didn’t have as much time to communicate with my email list or create new products for them.

Once I realized the problem, I knew I needed to find a way out. So I began outsourcing more and more of my tasks. I delegated social media growth activities, image creation, and editing of my blog posts and podcasts, just to name a few. This decision opened up countless hours of my time and allowed me to pursue new opportunities.

#5: Profit From Your Autoresponder

What’s the point of email list building if you’re not making revenue? Your email costs go up but you won’t be able to pay for them.

To avoid this problem, you need to rely on your auto responders. An auto responder is made up of a series of emails people get after subscribing to your blog. You can set up your auto responders to email your list every few days, weeks, or even months.

Within each of these auto responders, you should be promoting a product. And if people buy one product, you’ll need to direct them to another auto responder that promotes a more expensive product. I refer to these as connective auto responders, since one auto responder leads right to the next.

This transition from one to the next only takes place when subscribers perform a desired action (i.e. buy a product). The more connective auto responders you have, the more revenue you can make.

Within each of your auto responders, tell stories! In my very first auto responder I share a picture of myself and explain the context behind it, which makes me more relatable, and my customers more attainable.

Plus, virtually every email service lets you check your auto responder stats. You’ll want to check the engagement from your overall auto responders as well as individual messages. That way, you can see what is and isn’t working. Then, based on the analysis, you can make changes.

Not bad, but can it be better? No matter how great my engagement, I always try to improve it.

#6: Get In The Growth Cycle

The growth cycle is the never-ending period of time in which you continue growing without boundaries. The basic set-up is that you pay for your traffic and make more money per conversion than you spend on each conversion.

For instance, if you’re spending $1 per conversion, but earning $2 per conversion, you should continue on that path until the end of time (or until/if these rates fall out of your favor).

But this also means you need to continuously monitor your ads. If an ad performs well, for example, use it as a model for future ads. But if your ad struggles to convert, change the copy, picture, or something else… but only change one thing at a time (A/B test) so you can better determine which variable is working or not working.

If you change more than one thing at a time, the image and the copy, for instance, and your ad continues to get the same results, you won’t have the full picture. As far as you know, the new picture could have doubled your results while the new copy could have halved your results. Thus, the final result is that nothing has changed.

#7: Give Yourself A Public Challenge

A public challenge for a big goal is intimidating because you can’t back out. But you don’t win by staying comfortable. You win by burning your boats so success or public failure (ugh!) are your only options.

Give yourself a public challenge for your email list. By the end of the year, for example, I want to see 100,000 email subscribers. That’s what I told my audience anyway, and I’m telling you (and everyone else) again in order to keep myself accountable.

Share these public goals in a YouTube video or blog post. So EVERYONE will see it, not just a few friends.

In Conclusion

EVERY marketer’s biggest regret is not having built an email list sooner. That fact alone should encourage you to jumpstart your email list building efforts (if you haven’t done so already).

Do at least one thing today that will help you to get at least one additional subscriber tomorrow. If you start with a one-subscriber goal per day, and follow this method for 100 days (1 subscriber on Day 1, 2 subscribers on Day 2, etc.), you’ll end up with 5,050 subscribers in 100 days with small, incremental gains.

That’s an average of 50.5 subscribers per day!

Power question: What can you do today to get more subscribers tomorrow?

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What are your thoughts on finding a target audience? Which insight in this blog post did you find especially useful? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, please be sure you pass it on.

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If you’re new here, join the mailing list using the form below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

Until next time,

Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

3 Strategies To Get Out Of Your Inbox Faster

May 13, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

A lot of people suffer from inbox paralysis. This happens when they receive so many emails — and believe they must respond to each one — that overwhelm takes over and leaves them inert. Sound familiar?

Even when you do respond to your emails, you probably end up stuck in your inbox for long periods of time. Email is basically invading our lives. To think about the impact of the inbox, consider these statistics:

2.4 million emails are sent every day.
The average person receives nearly 121 emails each day.
50% of Americans check their inbox while in bed.

It’s easy to feel as if we’re chained to our inbox (much like our mobile phones). In reality, the inbox is a double-edged sword. Some people can focus on potential opportunities and good email content, while others complain, “Oh, this is such a time suck!”

To avoid inbox paralysis, you need to become conscious of how you use your inbox. At the same time, you’ll want to make sure you’re capitalizing on the opportunities presented therein. This means taking control of the situation and making sure you are getting the best possible results from the time you spend in your inbox.

One of the dangers lurking in your inbox is the notification. The red icon, or circle, that appears every time you get a new message. You must avoid being tempted by that! How? The following strategies will help you make sure that you are using your inbox more strategically.

The first strategy is called ‘Zero Inbox’ day

This is the strategy I use. Every Monday, I go through all of my emails and respond to every one. This means I’m responding to dozens of emails. And on some Mondays, I’ve responded to over a hundred emails!

Bur rather than scatter this out throughout the week, I prefer get it all done on one day so that I have another six days to address other areas of my business.

If you do a little here and a little there, you’ll end up losing focus and inbox paralysis kicks in. And it takes time to reposition that focus on the projects that you’re supposed to be working on.

So I choose one day to blow through all of the emails and get them done so I don’t have to worry about them for the next six days. Sure, there are lots of emails piling up during the week, but I only respond to the critical emails.

When I was planning my virtual summit, for example, I responded to every potential speaker or any speakers who had questions. I’m very particular about which emails I respond to during my six-day hiatus. But on Mondays, I respond to every single email that is addressed to me.

The second strategy is to shorten your responses

Basically, there are two things that control how long you stay in your inbox: the amount of emails addressed to you, and how long your responses are to each one of them.

If it takes you a minute to respond to 60 emails, averaging one minute per email, you’ll be in your inbox for an hour. But if it only takes you 30 seconds, on average, to respond to an email, and you’re responding to the same 60, you’re only in your inbox for 30 minutes. That is a big difference, and it all comes from writing shorter responses.

My rule of thumb for writing an email response is to keep it no longer than five sentences. Most often, it’s one to three sentences. I’m very quick with it. I have an automatic signature so I don’t have to reenter the same details over and over and over again.

And instead of writing, “Hello Name,” and hitting the enter button twice, I’ll sometimes just include the person’s name on the same line as the message. This basically allows me to write shorter responses, which in turn allows me to address more emails within a shorter period of time.

The people who are really busy and seem like they are getting hundreds, or even thousands, of emails every day, have the shortest responses.

That is very intentional because they have a whole bunch of people to get back to, and they also have projects they want to pursue.

Don’t be afraid to make your email responses a little shorter. Don’t be afraid of coming off as curt or anything like that. It’s just part of the nature of communicating with as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, so that you can free up time for the rest of your business. You can be short and still be polite.

The third strategy is to hire an assistant

You should take this step when you’re getting hundreds of emails every day that require your attention. The assistant can go through the emails that follow a certain rubric. For example, answer all emails that say, “Please be a guest on my podcast.”

It’ll be a different person with a different audience and different podcast link. But the assistant can go through all of them and answer based on your preset recommendations for how to proceed. A good assistant will determine whether or not the gig is a good fit and/or which emails need your personal attention.

You can also ask the assistant to address common questions, send out thank you notes, or answer others who have written to thank you. Still, I would proceed with caution when hiring an assistant. Personally, I respond to thank-you messages myself. The idea of someone using my email address to respond on my behalf makes me a bit uncomfortable. But it’s done all the time.

If you do use an assistant, be sure they respond to your audience the right way. I suggest monitoring the person for the first week. My own rule is to micromanage for three to seven days only, just until I’m sure that my assistant or freelancer is competent.

Analyzing every little thing that your freelancer does, or micromanaging everyone on your team, makes hiring them to free up your time pointless.

Make yourself available for questions and clarifications the first week. Once you’re confident in their skills, step back and let them do their thing. They can always reach out to you with questions. But you needn’t bother analyzing every single email they send on your behalf.

To save even more time, you can take it a step further and hire a manager who oversees your freelancers.

These are three strategies for spending less time in your inbox.

I hope you enjoyed them. If you know someone who might benefit from these tips, please share this post.

Do you have your own tips to share? If so, please leave a comment. I read them all (and sometimes I end up turning them into a video or blog post).

If you are new to this blog, welcome! Sign up for more content like this using the form below 🙂

But what I’d really like from you is to dream big, achieve greatness, and unlock your potential today.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

Episode 39: Using Webinars To Generate A Massive Profit With Jon Schumacher

May 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Wondering how to make a big profit from webinars…regardless of the size of your email list? This podcast episode will shed the light to those questions.

For this episode, I got to interview Jon Schumacher. Jon is a Webinar specialist and webinar consultant. He is the founder of Webinar Mastery Academy, and was the co-host of the Webinar Mastery Summit.

After creating thousands of webinars and videos, he’s learned the nuances of hosting a webinar that brings in revenue.

“It’s not what’s happening at the webinar, it’s what happens after the webinar.” —Jon Schumacher

Learn

—The “3 P’s” of webinar traffic,

—How to attract potential customers to your webinars.

—How to provide an evergreen webinar that continues generating consistent revenue months later

Key Links from the Show

Webinar Jam — a valuable tool for hosting your own webinars

Ever Webinar – an advanced tool for hosting evergreen webinars

Jon’s site

Jon’s Webinar Academy

3 Recommended Books

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham

80/20 Sales And Marketing by Perry Marshall

Episode 38: How To Grow A 7-Figure Podcast With John Lee Dumas

May 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

If you get into a conversation about starting your own podcast, it won’t take long before JLD gets mentioned. John Lee Dumas, otherwise known by his cool nickname, is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet.

He regularly brings in six figures from his podcast…every month!

And he took some time to share his secrets. We talked about growing your podcast to a seven figure revenue generator. He talks about pitching to sponsors and sprinkling call-to-actions throughout his episodes.

We also talk about productivity, which is one of John’s strong suits. To publish 1 episode every day and grow your business at the same time requires a legendary amount of productivity, and JLD unloaded with tidbits that anyone can use.

For instance, on the day I interviewed him, I was podcast #16 of 20 who would interview him that day. This is based on his batching concept where he chooses 1 day to cluster up all 20 podcast interviews he does each month. He also uses this approach to record 30 episodes (1 month’s worth of content) by choosing two days to conduct all of the interviews. Basically, John has a bias towards action.

“You need to have a bias towards action…..do things that scare you.” —John Lee Dumas

Learn:

—How to grow your podcast to a seven figure empire

—How to be more productive than you’ve ever been before

—How to pitch your podcast to sponsors

—How to incorporate CTAs in your episodes

Key Links from the Show:

EOFire.com – John’s Podcast

Recommended Books:

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters

April 2017 Monthly Performance Report

May 1, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

April has been an exciting month of knowledge acquisition and summit progress. There are many moving parts with my summit which I’ll discuss in this performance report.

50+ Speakers Confirmed For CMSS

Back in February, I set the goal to get 50+ speakers. People I knew suggested I only set the target for 30+ speakers as this is the first summit I am organizing.

I am happy to say that I have 50+ confirmed speakers for CMSS.

With the speakers confirmed (of course, I will not close the doors, but I am not as actively searching), I can now advance to affiliate recruitment and sponsorship proposals.

The goal is to get 50+ affiliates for my summit and many sponsors as well. The best tactic working for me is having speakers and affiliates refer other affiliates for a commission.

My Next Summit

I know that CMSS will be a very successful summit. While I am still focusing about 80% of my time towards this summit, I am in the beginning stages of planning out my next summit. I am anticipating a September summit focusing on mindset and productivity hacks.

Just like CMSS, I will get 50+ speakers for this summit. Unlike CMSS, I will have more knowledge, the summer, and the freelancers who help me make CMSS a success to make the prep work easier.

I see myself getting hundreds of thousands of email subscribers by organizing successful virtual summits. Virtual summits are a lot of fun as you get to interact with top influencers, build your audience, and make revenue at the same time.

The Unveiling

As CMSS has been the main focus for the past three months, I’m giving it special attention in this month’s performance report. There’s a little more than 30 days before we get started with the sessions, so I thought now would be a good time to drop the curtain.

If you want a head-start to registering for the summit, you can head over to the CMSS site.

Screen Shot 2017-04-30 at 8.43.36 PM

It took a while to optimize the landing page, create the sales pages, email sequences, and everything else associated with the summit. I will share a video with all CMSS attendees detailing how I put the entire summit together. I honestly can’t remember most of what I did to reach this point because there’s still so much left, but I’ll recollect everything for that video.

Books I Read

No Excuses by Brian Tracy

The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley

High Hanging Fruit by Mark Rampolla

Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini

Be Obsessed Or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Habit Stacking (2017 Edition) by Steve Scott

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

I Don’t Make Excuses, But…

March and April have been two trying months for me. They’ve been that way for different reasons. I didn’t tell anyone (except family and friends who knew) unless the issue at hand involved a scheduling conflict.

My theory is that I’ll ramble on about the excuse and somehow legitimize my inefficiency. The moment you try to rationalize a lack of work or a poor result through any means, you are setting yourself up for failure. Stop rationalizing why you didn’t act and start acting. I always underplay any painful moments I experience in my life so these events don’t consume my every day thinking.

I will make a rare exception to show you what is possible if you don’t make any excuses.

On April 28th, I was a speaker at the first annual Small Business Symposium held in Connecticut. The attendees loved it and asked me many questions at the end. I co-presented with my brother (he did the first half), and we both enjoyed ourselves. We both presented on SEO and I chose to tackle the blogging side of things.

speaking at symposium

Here’s the part of the story you don’t know about. The day before, I got very sick and threw up a few times early in the morning. I would get a headache if I stared at my computer screen too long, so I didn’t have the day before to look over my presentation (a crisis for the typical college student. While I am an entrepreneur, I still go to college and am well versed with completing homework the night before). This was the final of a series of illnesses that I had battled for the past two weeks.

Why do I bring up this struggle?

I still crushed my presentation. Up until the presentation, I had virtually no energy (my networking game leading up to the presentation was nonexistent). It didn’t matter how much energy I had for the rest of the event. I knew that I only needed to tap into my remaining energy for the time that I was presenting.

And I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t go slower than usual and ask for sympathy because I threw up on the day before. I didn’t look for shortcuts.

Even if your excuse seems insurmountable, it’s only as insurmountable as you make it. While some would say bravo, I wish I did a little more. I wish that I listened to an audiobook while throwing up. That way I could have attached a sense of productivity to my pain.

That speech went well because I didn’t mentally go easy on myself even though I threw up the day before. When it comes to me serving my audience, a mess up is a mess up, regardless of the context.

Review Of April 2017 Goals

#1: Contact 150 Potential Speakers—this was not necessary as I just wanted 50+ speakers. Since I had a good number of speakers going into April, most of my remaining speakers came through referrals.

#2: Contact 50 Potential Summit Sponsors—I didn’t contact a single sponsor.

#3: Master The Intricacies Of CMSS—OH YES, but there’s still more to do.

#4: Have blog content scheduled past May—I barely have content scheduled in May right now. I am going to post 1-2 blog posts per week because I need the time for the summit and promotion.

#5: Make CMSS easier—it’s easier, but there’s still much to be done.

May 2017 Goals

#1: Contact 50 potential sponsors—the initial revenue from sponsors will help me pay for expenses which will get significantly higher as the summit comes close (June 7th is the start date). You can contact me marc@marcguberti.com if you are interested in being a sponsor for CMSS.

#2: Contact 50 potential affiliates—the more affiliates I have behind my summit, the more reach my summit will achieve. My speakers and affiliates have done a great job at referring other affiliates, and I am in the midst of directly contacting successful affiliates. I currently look at affiliate competitions and my current audience (people like you) to recruit affiliates for my summit.

#3: Completely plan out the summit marketing—I am so excited about so many things about the summit. The way I market this summit will be one of my favorite parts. I have some colossal marketing strategies for my summit that I haven’t seen ANY summit owner do (and I had to do a lot of research on summits to learn how to run a summit). My only hint is that it doesn’t start on June 7th. The best way to figure out my colossal marketing strategy is to join my summit and see how I market it.

#4: Have blog posts and podcast episodes complete past June—With the new publishing schedule of 1 new blog post and 1 new podcast episode per week, this goal is very possible. I’ll take a page from John Lee Dumas’ frame of thought and do all of the blog post related videos in one day and send them to Rev. I still need to figure out when I’ll do podcast interviews without conflicting with CMSS interviews.

#5: Confirm 10 speakers for my next summit—This would be a true cherry on top. The next summit will likely focus on productivity and goal achievement. Interviews will be closer to the 30 minute side as this makes it possible for me to interview more people quicker (while getting some great insights). I need to get these interviews done over the summer because I currently don’t know my college schedule for the fall semester. If I go this route, I’d do it VERY slowly and gradually so I don’t forget important elements for CMSS.

#6: Read 15 books—I am more likely to realize this goal in June since school and CMSS interviews will conclude in May. However, I’ll have significantly more time to read books after the first week of May. I have already bought five books on eBay (Amazon doesn’t take PayPal which is my preferred method) in preparation for reading 15 books this month.

#7: Identify a good coach—In No Excuses, Brian Tracy talked about the importance of spending a percentage of your earnings on expanding your education. I am anticipating a significant increase in revenue from my summit, and with that, I will have to spend more of it to expand my education. I will hire a coach to keep me accountable in a specific area and help me grow faster. The area I focus on is to be determined. Depending on how well my summit performs, I may hire two coaches.

#8: Plan out a second podcast—The Breakthrough Success Podcast is here to stay, but it’s getting a new friend. I am following an approach of a weekly interview on my current podcast combined with a new podcast filled with daily soundbites where I share some of my insights. I have no set release date.

In Conclusion

The trend for several performance reports remains potent in this one: the summit has taken up a priority of my time. Now I finally get to see the reward from my hard work (yay!)

My first summit will give me the firepower I need to propel my brand even further. I can pay for the top coaches and expand my business even more. For a long time, I thought I could do everything myself. I am increasingly learning that this is not the case.

It’s why I hire people to edit my videos, find great pictures for my content, manage my social media accounts, and more. I will be hiring more people very soon, but I am at the stage where I need to hire coaches to help me grow beyond what I can do alone.

What are your thoughts on this performance report? Have any questions? What are you working on? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Ways To Land More Guests On Your Podcast

April 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m teenager entrepreneur Marc Guberti. In this post I’m going to share with you five different methods you can use to get more guests on your podcast.

But before I get into that, I want to talk to those of you who haven’t yet started a podcast, but are thinking about it, and tell you why podcasts are so valuable.

One of my favorite things about podcasting is that I get free mentors.

Rather than pay for an expensive consultation session, you can interview someone, ask questions that are also your audience’s questions, and get the answers as well as more insight about your niche. So I find that really valuable.

You also get to build relationships with, as you scale your podcast, some of the most influential and successful people on the planet.

That is no understatement at all. Basically with a podcast, and you being able to interview all of these people, you are going to reach more people with your podcast. If you really scale this up, you could even have a chat with one of your role models.

Some people are able to land that interview on their very first episode. I would not recommend doing that because you’re going to feel a lot of pressure interviewing your role model. While that’s also just the nature of the game, I recommend conducting some interviews before you ask your role model if he or she is available for a podcast interview.

Finally, exponential authority.

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen other people with podcasts do this, but they’ll say stuff like, “I’ve had guests like so-and-so and this person and that person.” That gives you more authority by association. So if you associate yourself with authority figures in your podcast, you’ll increase your own authority as well.

So now that you know why podcasts are awesome, I’m going to talk to you about methods, beginning with the ‘contact me’ page.

This page works both ways: your ‘contact me’ page and your guest’s ‘contact me’ page. In the beginning, your contact me page is going to do little to nothing unless you already have a big audience.

So what you want to do on your guest’s ‘contact me’ page is tell them about your podcast and your past guests, if you have any; if you don’t, focus more on what your podcast is about. You should be doing this either way, but you should have a stronger focus on what your podcast is about if you still haven’t had any guests.

You want to make this a really short email, less than five sentences, because some of these people are very busy and they only have a few seconds to decide if this is the right opportunity for them. The ‘contact me’ page seems to be a universal page on most blogs. You can usually find it easily at the top of the blog. If you cannot find it, go into the search engine on that person’s blog and search for the words ‘contact me’ or ‘contact us’. You can also go to the very bottom of a blog to look for the contact me option.

As you continue to get more guests and you continue to build your authority, some people are going to contact you directly and ask if they can be on your show. Some of your fans may also suggest people who could be on your show. So in the beginning, you’re doing a lot of work by contacting people, but eventually people are going to be contacting you asking to be on your show, or giving you ideas of who could appear on your next episode.

The second way to get more guests from your podcast is to use Twitter.

I absolutely love using Twitter for the purpose of getting more guests on my podcast episodes. I find people in my niche who I want to engage with and then ask them via Twitter if they would like to appear on my podcast. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s just 140 characters; sometimes I’ll find myself sending two tweets to the same person to get my point across, but that’s still less than 280 characters, and people usually engage with their followers on Twitter.

Responsive users are looking to see who has mentioned them, so they will see your tweet request. And a lot of them will engage with that tweet. I mean, some people might say, “Unfortunately I can’t do it.” But other people will say, “Great. Where do we start?” Another thing I do is include my email address within these tweets.

Why? Because you can’t easily continue a conversation like this on Twitter. Once you have the person’s attention, you’ll now want it to go beyond 140 characters. You’ll want to send them your scheduling link, which you definitely want to keep private or else you’re going to get a lot of people that you don’t want to interview filling up your calendar.

Even if you don’t have a scheduling calendar, you don’t want to be talking about, “Oh, let’s do it at this time, this date,” on Twitter. That’s why I provide my email address within the tweets that I send to these people. As a bonus, if you are a verified user, you can filter and see all of the verified users who are following you. If you have a lot of verified users following you, you can go through them and see which ones you really want to have on your podcast, and then contact them.

The reason I like this method is because in order to be verified you’ve likely done something really cool. Maybe you have an incredible story, or expertise. These are the types of people you want as guests on your podcast. So that’s how you use Twitter in order to get more people on your podcast. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of thousands of followers or just a few hundred followers, you can use this method to get more people on your podcast.

The third way to get more guests on your podcast is through referral.

After you interview someone, ask that person if he or she can recommend anyone who would be a great guest for your podcast. This allows you to leverage your guests to build relationships that you couldn’t have built on your own. Some people are inaccessible to you but not the person you interviewed; that person can make the introduction.

This is an underrated method. It may not be the method that will get you the majority of your guests, but you can get a few really cool guests by asking every one of your guests, “Who would you like to see on my podcast? Who can you introduce me to?” The main rule I follow is to build as many relationships as possible. I like to follow the approach in which you build one meaningful relationship every single day.

So I build a lot of relationships without expecting anything in return. But sure enough, I get many things in return. I mean, I don’t go into the relationship with expectations. But I often engage with a new contact only to find that same person lending a hand a few months down the line, perhaps by saying, “I know this person who would be great for your podcast,” or, “I know someone who is looking for people to interview for his podcast.” So you never know what opportunities will open up when you start to build relationships; try to build one meaningful relationship a day and expect nothing in return.

The fourth way to get more guests for your podcast is to read books about your niche.

When you read books about your niche, it helps you build knowledge about your niche. That’s one of the most common reasons people say, “Read books.” But there are more benefits to reading books, especially when it comes to having your own podcast. What I’ve noticed is a lot of authors like to mention other authors and other people’s works within their own books. It’s a pattern I see a lot.

So with this pattern in mind, you can come across more people who would make for great guests on your episodes. Even if you can’t get the main author, you can go through that author’s book, see which books and authors he or she recommends, and then contact those individuals to see if they would like to be on your podcast. Plus, reading a book written by a guest on your podcast will greatly strengthen the interview.

What I like to do when I’m interviewing someone (and have read their book in advance) is underline key points found within their book. By doing that, I am able to bring up key points when I first contact them about being a guest, as well as formulate better questions once they agree to be a guest on my podcast. I don’t have to reread the book, I just focus on the important points I’ve already underlined.

If you get really good at reading books you could get through 10 books a month, and read as many books as possible from authors who have books on pre-order. You can say, “I have this podcast, I’d love to interview you about your upcoming book.” Some of them will send you a copy or a few chapters to help you formulate questions to make the interview better.

Authors with books on pre-order are the easiest people to get on your podcast because they are looking for more exposure at this specific moment of time. What these authors try to do is get a bunch of podcast interviews, or a bunch of guest posting opportunities all within less than four weeks from the time the book actually launches.

Getting high authority authors when they are in this pre-order stage will allow you to get more people later on because, as mentioned before, authority by association means you will be associated with some of these really successful authors (who you had contacted back when their books were on pre-order).

The final way to get more guests on your podcast, is to contact more people.

I mean, it sounds really simple. Contact more people, get more of them to say yes. But you need to contact more people in order to multiply your results. If you want to get more people on your podcast as guests, then instead of contacting five people, contact 10 people. By contacting twice as many people, in theory, you get twice as many guests for your podcast.

I like to make this a daily habit. I’ll contact at least three people a day for either a podcast appearance or a summit experience. This daily habit keeps me in check and makes it easier for me to contact different people and get interviews with them. So, with this habit, I contact over 1000 people in any given year. And if I get 33% of those people to say yes, I’ll have enough podcast material for an entire year. And if I do a weekly, rather than daily, podcast, I’ll have nearly 300 extra interviews that can be organized into summits.

I personally recommend not having too long of a queue. Let’s say you get 20 interviews for your podcast and you do an episode every week; that is unfair to guest number 20. So at that point you would increase the frequency in which you publish new episodes. It will challenge you to reach out to more people. It will challenge you to learn more about your niche. And it is such a fun experience!

In my experience, though, scheduling can get really annoying – things like suggesting different times and dates. I stopped doing that and started using Acuity. Acuity lets you set up a calendar and people can simply choose which times and dates work for them, which also work for you.

This makes it easier for you to contact more people because you don’t have to go back and forth with scheduling technicalities. Instead of going through all that hassle, you can just send them a link to your Acuity calendar, and that makes it easier for you and easier for the guest to schedule an interview.

Do you have any tips for landing podcast interviews? Will you try any of the tips mentioned in this post? Reach out in the comment section below.

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Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay