👋🏼 Welcome to the Profit Ladder newsletter. The mission? To grow your consulting & coaching profits with offers that attract ideal clients & compound your revenue.
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Hey there,
In the past 2 weeks I've been booked to speak on 17 podcasts (growing daily).
Not only was it simpler than I thought it’d be, but I’m on pace to land 12,500 new warm leads and 125 new clients. And if that ain’t enough, some additional perks I didn’t see coming.
In today’s post, I’m showing you exactly how I did it so you can do the same — regardless of your industry, niche, or topic.
I’m also giving you access to 2 resources I’ve been using to get booked on podcasts, with a 65% success rate. Their yours to use.
👉🏼 First, I want to let you know about a free workshop I’m running this week. You’ll learn the system I use to grow my service-based business’ profits by 1,300%.
Hope you can join.
Alright then, podcasting. Let’s get into it…
Guest podcasting as a new growth channel
I started Profit Ladder in October 2023. That means my authority and audience are still works in progress. But I also can’t sit back and wait for those pieces to mature. As the owner of a service-based business, it’s grow or die.
I’m already spread thin writing this newsletter, engaging on LinkedIn, hosting workshops, and working with clients. If I’m going to invest in another growth channel, it needs to be high-ROE (return on effort). An unpaid channel that doesn’t require me to create more written content.
Guest podcasting fits the bill perfectly. I’ll join shows that already have a following from my ideal customer.
So long as the host believes that I’m able to provide unique and relevant value, they’ll bring their audience to me.
When it goes well, everyone wins. The podcast serves its community, without having to create more of their own content. The community is educated-entertained on a topic they care about. And as a featured guest, I earn the trust of the host and their community.
Success metrics
My goal is to speak on 50 targeted podcasts within the next 6 months. That's roughly 2 episodes per week. If each episode takes a total of 90 mins of my time, that’s 75 total hours invested.
If I conservatively estimate that an average of 250 people hear each show over the following 12 months, that's 12,500 new leads per year. If 1% of that audience converts, that's 125 new clients.
ROE (CAC) = 1.7 hours per client. 😍
But beyond exposure and new leads, I also get to hone my story, the problems I solve, and my offers to help clients solve them.
These conversations with hosts and their audience will bring forward new ideas that challenge my thinking and highlight new objections. As I get better at understanding and addressing them, it will improve all parts of my operations.
So that’s the plan.
All well and good — except, my initial attempts to start guest podcasting bombed.
Early failure
Earlier this year, I poured hours into Googling for shows that my ideal customer — consultants, coaches, fractionals, and freelancers — value. Then more time attempting to contact the host and pitch them.
My success metrics were abysmal.
In many cases, the host never responded. Most other times, the show turned out to be a poor fit for my topic and niche.
After several weeks and dozens of wasted hours, I set my podcasting plans aside.
But then a couple weeks ago, I inadvertently discovered a few websites that claim to solve all of my initial podcasting pitfalls.
They offered efficient ways to discover podcasts that match my audience and topics. From there, I can contact the host, pitch myself, and book an appearance.
My preliminary shortlist of such sites included:
Podcast Guests sends a weekly email with podcasts looking for guests (and vice versa). But the list is a bit generic — for every 10 shows, 1 is a good fit for me. And for each show I’m interested in, I need to fill in a Google Form. A bit too tedious and inefficient.
PodMatch offers a lot of premium audience data about each show — demographics, downloads, ratings, etc. It also delivers AI-powered matchmaking between guests and shows. I suspect it’s for more advanced podcasters. I’ll give it another look next year.
I settled on MatchMaker. It's free to get started and tops out at $15/mo for premium. Very reasonable. (FYI, I’m not affiliated with them)
Below, I’ll give you an overview on how MatchMaker works. Then I’ll also show you how I’ve optimized my outreach process to hit 65% acceptance rates. Not too shabby.
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