In this episode, Sean Boyce and Brian Mattocks debate the advantages of hosting your own podcast versus being a guest on someone else’s show. While guesting can provide access to a new audience, having your own podcast offers more control, opportunities for growth, and the ability to build authority and brand. Additionally, they discuss the importance of strategic guest booking and caution against the pitfalls of low-quality guest requests.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services.
To solve this, Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time. Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:
- Having your own podcast provides control over the narrative and content.
- Producing your own content allows for growth and exposure opportunities.
- Being a guest can be beneficial for promoting specific projects or books.
- Guesting on other shows offers access to a new audience and the chance to grow your own podcast.
- Hosting a show and being a subject-matter expert can sometimes clash.
- Strategic relationships and cross-pollination can expand audience reach.
- Guesting without the ability to drive engagement may have limited value.
Resources:
Connect with Sean Boyce:
Connect with our host Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 01:15 – “I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think having your own podcast was arguably more valuable. And the biggest reason, I think, is because if you’re guessing on someone else’s show, you really don’t control anything. You don’t control the narrative, the story, the positioning, maybe even the questions, what you’re talking about.”
- 01:32 – “You don’t get any of the extras like producing the content, having that content out there, the opportunity to do different things with it, grow it, and just have it grow your exposure, authority, and brand. All of these things that you get if you’re making an investment into a podcast or a show of your own to promote what it is that you do help you help educate people, grow your exposure, all those types of things, you lose all of that value if you are exclusively just basically like guesting on other shows.”
- 02:53 – “One of the things that comes to mind, though, as a strength is when you are guesting on other podcasts, you have two kind of major things going for you. The first thing you have going for you is you get access to a completely new audience, which has value. If somebody likes what you’re saying on somebody else’s show, and that audience is existing, you get access to that audience by virtue of being a guest on that show. You might grow your own podcast even further by having that exposure. And then the other side of it is, when you’re a host, typically, and I can speak to my experience with this and listening to the episodes that we’ve produced for our clients, it’s very challenging sometimes to also take the role of a subject-matter expert.”
- 03:52 – “So I think in some cases, yes, you should always have your own podcast, like that’s like bread and butter for our value prop. But broadly, I think supplementing that with guest booking or guests being guests on other people’s shows is a great way to both increase your exposure and position yourself also as a subject-matter expert thoughts.”
- 09:41 – Brian: “If you, if you’re in a market space where there are shows that are really, really good and well done for you to reach out and say, Hey listen, I host a show, it’s similar, it’s a little bit different in this way. Maybe you can share some of your insights here. Maybe I can come share some of my insights on your show. Those synergies are great.”.. Sean: “Your, I mean, do your homework and be genuine, right? And make sure that what it is you’re trying to connect with ultimately makes sense, not just for you, but for them. And again, just like we do in guest booking a podcast chef, like it’s more about them. It’s not about you, right? Talk to them about why they would be interested in having you as a guest on their show. Like what can you do for them? What can you, what kind of value can you bring to their audience?”