Ep 121: Everything You Need to Know About Hosting a Podcast Interview

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Podcasting for Indie Podcasters.

I realize it's been an absolute hot minute since January when I published, or actually, was it February that my last episode came out?

I can't remember.

I do remember, though, that at the beginning of the year, I did say that I was going to be way more consistent with the podcast.

But you know what?

I switched jobs at the beginning of the year with the kids as well.

Oh, my God.

It's just.

It's been a great quarter of the year, or great first quarter of the year, I should say day, but it has just been busy and I'm afraid it's just meant that I just haven't had a chance to sit down and record an episode, which is crazy that I had this beautiful plan set up and it was all ready to go and I was going to record, publish weekly and do bonus episodes and all this stuff.

And do you know what?

We're now halfway through April and just none of that has happened.

But I think that just demonstrates you don't have to be consistent with weekly episodes in order to have a successful podcast.

Because I still have been checking in on my stats, and I appreciate that.

I haven't really been posting on social media the last couple of months either to advertise the podcast, but what I'm seeing is still exponential growth in the podcast download numbers and the listener stats as well, and the length of listening time to the episodes.

Everything is just going up, up, up.

I put that down so heavily to my SEO strategy, and I know I've talked about that, and I'll make sure that I link down the episodes in the show notes as well, where I've talked about SEO strategy.

But I am a firm believer that that good podcast SEO really does get your show discovered and your episodes discovered, and people will find your show and they will listen.

So thank you so much to everybody who just continues to listen, even though I haven't been putting out new content in absolutely forever.

In today's episode, what I wanted to discuss was how to prepare to host a podcast interview to get the best out of your podcast guests.

And I think this is a really, really important episode because so often we hear episodes and we see YouTube videos and so much advice is given over to how to interview, but not to the preparation of hosting the interview, which is just as important as hosting the interview.

In some ways, I would actually argue that it is important to prepare than it is to actually host the interview.

So I wanted to go through how you can Best prepare for your podcast interview.

And the first thing that I'm going to discuss, which might sound a little bit weird, but actually asking yourself, do you need a podcast guest in the first place?

And the reason I say this is because so often in podcasting, people get obsessed with getting guests on their shows.

And then they kind of wonder, well, why are my services not selling?

Or why is my book not selling?

Or why am I not getting clients?

Or why am I not getting leads to whatever it is?

And the reason is, is because you're giving so much voice time and air time to your guest and not to you at the end of the day, unless you're trying to pitch yourself as an amazing interviewer or why would somebody seek out your content if you're interviewing so much?

Now, that isn't true for everybody.

I will appreciate that there are some amazing interviewers out there who do very, very well with selling courses and services and whatever it is.

But you think if I get people onto this podcast and I interview them and I ask their expertise, my expertise are not being demonstrated.

So then it doesn't make much sense for people to.

To then come to me if I were to try and sell them a service, for example.

So you really need to be considering to yourself is, do you need a guest in the first place?

Now, I've already said that some podcast shows, the whole premise of the show is to interview.

We've got examples like the Life Shift podcast and we need to Talk podcast.

I'll have them both linked down in the show notes.

If you haven't listened to either of them, both, in my opinion, very, very good podcast.

The whole point of them is interviewing other people to their stories.

So without guests, those are just never going to work.

But it is important to consider that if you're trying to sell something through your podcast or trying to gain someone as a client or whatever it is, then actually is having somebody else on the show hindering a potential sale or a potential client sign up.

And are you just sending your potential clients to somebody else?

I. E. The person that you're interviewing?

The next thing that we're going to talk about is finding the right guest to interview.

Because in my opinion, this is my opinion only too many shows interview just whoever is available to be interviewed.

And you see people all the time, they reach out on social media with really, really vague posts of who's available to come on my show, your show, about what exactly and who is it that you want to interview and what expertise do you want them to bring?

What conversation do you want them to bring?

You need to vet your podcast guests appropriately, because otherwise you just land the risk.

Interviewing somebody who just isn't the right fit for your show that's potentially just going to turn your audience away.

I'm not saying this in a really high and mighty way because I have been there myself.

I have interviewed people.

They weren't right for the show.

It was a complete disaster, to the point that I never actually ended up publishing the episode.

It was a waste of everybody's time and it was just, yeah, it was a hot mess.

And it could have been avoided if my enthusiasm as a new podcaster to please people hadn't gotten in the way of me betting people to come on my podcast.

It was my previous podcast that I had.

You know, it's your show.

You can decline, decline people if you don't want them on your show or you don't find that they're the right fit.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, you saying no, it's just that they're not the right fit for your show.

So ways that you can vet a potential podcast guest is ask them specifically what they can talk about.

And I mean specifically.

I don't mean, oh, I can talk about the beauty industry.

That's way too wide.

Are we talking about the beauty industry for men, for women, for children?

We're talking about vitamins, Are we talking about hair care?

Are we talking about nails?

You get my point.

What sports specifically can they talk about?

Listen to other interviews they've done before as well, because that will really help you understand how they respond in a question and answer environment.

Ask for their credentials.

And I don't just mean I worked at X company.

Like, who cares what company you necessarily worked at?

It's your experience that's going to be relevant.

So, for example, if you're doing a show all about, I don't know, all about IT systems in a company, then is necessarily talking to somebody who didn't work in the IT department, the right person.

For example, once you have got your guest all lined up, what you're now going to do is think about the structure of your podcast interview.

So within your interview, you want to have three main chunks of it.

You want to introduce your guest at the beginning, then you want to have your conversational question and answer session in the middle.

And then finally, your third part is to wrap up your learning points from the episode, any contact details for your guest, and thanking them generally for being on the show.

So let's break that down a little Bit further.

Because when you introduce your podcast guest, you need it to be quick and snappy.

I don't mean a 10 minute introduction of everything that they've ever done from elementary school all the way to the present day, because people don't need to know that.

They need to know who they're listening to.

So their name and a really snappy couple of sentences at absolute most as to why they are there.

If you think about TV shows when they're introducing a guest, it's high.

This is so and so.

And they've just written a book about this and that's what they're going to talk about today.

Or they are on this show and they're going to talk about their experience of filming this particular storyline.

They're not giving every single credit that this person has ever got in their lives.

So you really need to condense it down.

And don't feel guilty if someone sends you over like a page long bio.

Don't feel like you need to read that out either, because your audience don't need to know that information.

Next, you're going to plan your conversation and questions.

So just think to yourself when you're planning, what is the end goal of this interview?

What information do I want my audience to walk away with?

And once you've clarified that, you can then work backwards and come up the questions that will help deliver this information to your listeners.

Now, some podcasters like to have a really strict set of questions that they don't deviate from.

And other people like me will have maybe three or five questions that we all use to get started.

But then you'll deviate depending on where the conversation goes and whichever approach you take.

I would always recommend giving your podcast guests the questions or rough idea of questions you'd like to ask them ahead of time.

Recording the podcast interview because some people are planners and some people, I mean, some people will turn around and go, I don't want to know the questions.

I'm just going to fly by the seat in my pants and just see what happens.

But other people will want to know a vague direction that the interview is going to take.

And then finally you're going to wrap up your conversation because you've got through your introduction, you got through the whole interview, but you need to effectively wrap it up.

You can't just kind of stop or your audience and the person you're interviewing are going to be a little bit lost.

So what's really good is asking your podcast guest if they have a freebie or an offer that they'd like to promote at the end of the interview.

And it's important to clarify before you actually hit record that you stress to your guests that you will give them the opportunity to pitch their freebie or whatever it is or offer at the end of the interview.

Because what you don't want is your listeners to just think that you've got this person on purely to sell to them.

I also ask the guests for links that we can include in the show notes and then I also direct listeners to those links whilst wrapping up the episode.

Finally, don't forget to publicly thank your guests because they have given up their time to be on your podcast.

Probably a good hour, hour and a half, sometimes even a couple of hours.

You know, I've had the fortune of interviewing people on my previous podcast whose time is worth, not even kidding you, like four figures if you were to hire this person or some of the people that I've had the fortune of interviewing, some people I'd be paying like 3, 4 figures to spend an hour with if I were to pay them for a proper consultation through their business.

But instead they've given up their time to appear on my podcast.

And that is just amazing.

So please thank people.

Don't just kind of cut them off because at the end of the day, they don't owe being on your podcast to you.

I hope going through this episode then has been useful for you.

Within the episode, we've considered to ourselves, do we need a podcast guest in the first place, how to find the right guest to interview, and also how to structure your podcast interview as well.

What I'm also going to do is link an episode down below all about podcast guest release forms.

We haven't covered that in this episode, but if you're having a podcast guest on your podcast, I'd highly recommend using a podcast guest release form.

So I'm going to post a link to that episode down in the show notes and I'd recommend listening to that next after you're done with this one.

In the next episode, we are going to continue this conversation and we are going to consider the eight ways to prepare your podcast guest.

I will see you next episode.