Once you have a clear idea of the audience you’re trying to reach, the unique story of your business, and the pitches you’ll be using when you reach out to podcasts, the next step is to identify that reach that audience.
Identifying Podcasts
When we’re prospecting podcasts, we’re following a systematic process to identify podcasts that our audience listens to and then initially qualify them, weeding out podcasts that aren’t a good fit at first glance.
When you’re prospecting podcasts, there are five strategies that you can follow to help you find potential podcasts to reach out to:
- Searching in ListenNotes – Over the years, this has become my go-to method. It’s a great database! It costs a few bucks, but it’s 100% worth it.
- Expert ‘Shadowing’ — Once you start to research podcasts that reach your audience, you might discover there are a few experts that are commonly on the same podcasts you want to be on. By ‘shadowing’ these frequent guests, you can discover podcasts that both reach your audience and accept guests. (This is my other go-to method.)
- Searching in iTunes — Searching in the iTunes store for specific keywords related to your podcast often returns an initial list of podcasts that are a good match for reaching your audience.
- Looking at Marketplaces — Marketplaces like cast.market that index podcasts can be a great place to prospect podcasts. What I love about cast.market specifically is that when you search it does a full-text search of the description they have for the podcast. That means a search like “Marketing Guest” on cast.market returns a list of all then podcasts they have listed that have ‘guests’ listed in the description.
- Browsing iTunes Preview — iTunes has a podcast specific website (iTunes Preview) that lets you browse the different podcasts by category. Slightly easier to navigate than the iTunes interface, this is a great way to dive deep into a category and see both the most popular podcasts in that category and browse through the podcasts in that category alphabetically.
- Googling — You can often find leads on podcasts with custom Google search queries to help you narrow in on relevant podcasts. Starting with an initial search like “{Podcast Topic} Podcasts”, you’ll build an initial list of podcasts that reach your audience.
For ‘Expert Shadowing,’ I recommend using a custom Google search query like this:
“THEIR NAME” ((inurl:“podcast” OR inurl:“episode”) OR intitle:“podcast”) -site:podcasts.si -site:sticher.com
As you identify podcasts, make a copy of the Podcast Prospecting Sheet to track (and qualify) your results. (We’ll just focus on the first two columns — Podcast Name & Website URL — for this exercise).