SDH 443: Book 100 Podcast Episodes in 90 Days with Christine McAlister

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Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the She Did It Her Way podcast. This week I am joined once again by the lovely Christine McAllister. Christine joined us originally in 2020 for episode 372.

I wanted to have Christine on the podcast again because I have spent a few episodes talking about how to start a podcast to leverage and grow your business, inviting guests on, solocasts, etc. Christine teaches people the strategies and tactics behind being an exceptional podcast guest and does podcast guesting so incredibly well. Christine is going to walk through some of the things that she teaches her students about how to get on podcast shows to grow your business and why it is important to create a game plan to get on other podcast episodes.

Christine is a business coach and her company is called Life With Passion. She helps impact driven entrepreneurs to go from best kept secret to making six figures and beyond doing what they love. She leveraged doing all of this in just 10 hours a week. She works with service providers like coaches, consultants, VA’s, and OBM’s. They know that they're good at what they do, but they don't have all the clients that they want. She comes alongside them and helps them have more impact and income and it is truly her life's work.

Christine’s Podcasting Journey

Christine first considered going on podcasts back in 2015 as a way of growing her reach. After a friend sent her a pitch as an example she realized she was super intimidated and quickly put it on the back burner. It was new. It was scary. About a year later someone reached out to her again while she was guest posting on other blogs (Today Show, Huffington Post, etc.) inviting her to come onto their podcast.

At the time she was eight months pregnant with her rainbow baby and she had been sent to labor and delivery triage for additional monitoring since everyone was a bit anxious. They sent her to the hospital and she realized that she was going to miss the podcast interview she was scheduled to be a guest on before she would be discharged. While laying in her hospital bed she realized that she was fine, and convinced the nurses to turn down the noise from the monitors so she could honor the commitment for her interview. And that’s exactly what she did. She had the conversation with the host from her hospital bed and loved it. She realized that if she could have a super fun conversation in that environment from her hospital bed, while dealing with anxiety, PTSD, and all these things, then after her baby was born this could be a whole lot more fun. She decided to start proactively pitching, because now she knew what was on the other side.

She started to pitch the people who were in her world that she was connected to, maybe someone whose podcast she enjoyed or maybe one her friends loved. To her, it became a really fun game. Along the way she developed her own method of pitching, making the host her friend, and what she found was that this came naturally to her.

What she learned was that she was not the norm. Podcast hosts loved how she approached them and handled herself and all she could think was “Really? It’s really easy to be a good human!” She first realized this could be something when podcaster Jeff Brown had her on his show when her book launched in 2018. While visiting her parents in Nashville, she asked if she could take him out to lunch. Reluctantly he agreed and while chatting over sushi he said: “I was just at one of the big podcast conferences and I was asked to give a presentation on what it is to be a great guest. I basically just took your process and I shared it from the stage.” He continued saying, “I have done hundreds of interviews and I can count on one hand, the number of times that people have done what you've done.” At this point Christine really began to lean in to this process. She knew it was something good.

Christine has made over $100,000 directly from being on podcasts from clients coming to her. But moreover, she has made amazing friends and met people all over the world because of this incredible medium.

How To Take Meaningful Action

In her experience, podcast guesting is the fastest strategy to go from cold to sold faster than any other strategy. The reason is, think about what you're doing when you're listening to podcasts. She asked me what I do when I listen to podcasts, myself. I replied:

Going for a walk
Cleaning up my space
Working out

When you consider that you are listening while taking a 30-minute walk, you are using your brain to hear or learn something new. You are in it listening only to that one (maybe two) people. You aren’t consuming information from anywhere else. There are no competing ads like when you are scrolling through Facebook. There are no popup messages. No content to create. No money to spend. No new tech to learn. No DM’s. You just enjoy the conversation. Christine realized how this is actually such a strategic way to build her business, build her network, connect with influencers, etc. You'll never run out of places to pitch.

5 Best Tips

Do your research; tap into who your audience is listening to
Craft your pitch and make it genuine; tailor it to the host
Promote the hosts products/ services/ events and tie it into what you have to offer
Connect with smaller and newer podcasts who don’t get as many pitches
Show up and be as you as you can be. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.

A few things that make a great guest before the interview:

Have a prep-chat with the host to find out what they are promoting right now. Do they have a launch coming up? Do they have a membership you can promote?
Confirm who their exact audience is. Ask about the pain points, the problems, the objections that their audience has, so you can determine how you can best help solve their problem.
Even if you don’t have an opt-in, website, etc., don’t let that stop you. Let the audience engage with you on Instagram or via email.

How to be a great guest after the interview:

Leave a review on iTunes
Send the host/ hostess a gift (NOT swag from your own company!)

Thank you again for your time and energy my friends. Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

“Christine teaches people the strategies and tactics behind being an exceptional podcast guest and does podcast guesting so incredibly well.“
“When you consider that you are listening while taking a 30-minute walk, you are using your brain to hear or learn something new.“
“You'll never run out of places to pitch.”