How blogging can make you a better podcast guest

You can be a better podcast guest by sharing your episode for weeks or months after it goes live.

In the online business world, we’re told to seek guest spots on podcasts to grow our audience. The logic is simple: if you appear on someone else’s podcast, you’ll be in front of their audience. That works, to a point.

You can be a better guest if you turn that appearance into tons of written content you and the host can share for months to come. Most podcast episodes have two or more blog posts and dozens of short social media posts hiding in them. To be a better podcast guest, ask the host for the transcript and create them. Start with a blog post for your site and one for your host’s.

How does this help the host?

Turning your appearance into blog posts makes you a better guest because it gives you and your host more ways to easily get your episode in front of more people. Not everyone will listen the day the show drops.

Not even everyone who plans to listen the day your episode goes live will listen to it. They’ll get distracted by other things and then they’ll forget all about it. If you don’t remind them it’s there, they’ll never come back to it.

One of the reasons podcast hosts have guests on their show is to grow their reach. Turning your episode into blog posts does this by putting links to the episode in front of the readers of the blogs your posts are published on.

Also, having the content of the episode in reader-friendly text makes it easier for both of you to break it up into text-based social media posts, thus increasing the number of ways you can both talk about your episode and the podcast more generally on social media and in newsletters. This is how you remind people the episode exists and get them to listen to it.

The post you create for your blog

The blog post you create for your blog will help you appeal to different kinds of people - not all of us love listening to audio or watching video. It will also give you more nuanced ways to promote your appearance than just repeatedly saying, “Come listen to my episode”. Instead, you’ll be giving people a reason to read more or listen.

Helps you appeal to different audiences

Creating a blog post for your site from the transcript from your guest appearance gives it another ‘home’ on your website. People who often appear as guests usually have a speaker page with links to their appearances, which is great, but those pages will only appeal to visitors who are looking specifically for video or audio content.

Some of your readers will prefer text (I know I do). For those readers, having an in depth blog post based on part of the transcript will provide enough incentive to get them to watch or listen to your episode.

Helps you promote your appearance in more nuanced ways

Once you’ve written your blog post, you can break it up into short social media posts (this goes both ways if you work better with short formats first, just create those and then put them together as a blog post). That way, you can easily share parts of the conversation you had with your host in text-based social media posts. 

Having lots of different ways to lead people to the blog post (and thus podcast episode) will broaden your reach. This means more ears will be on your episode and eyes on your links in the show notes. In other words, the podcast guest appearance will be doing what you wanted it to in the first place: growing your audience and helping you connect with new potential clients.

The post you create for the host’s blog

The post you create for your host’s site will help your site and your reputation as a podcast guest.

You can promote your website on your host’s blog

In the post you create for the host’s site, you, as the co-contributor, will need to include a short bio and call to action. When you do that, make sure there’s a link to your website. That way, you’ll have created a quality back link, which keeps search engines happy (aka, it’s good for your SEO).

This isn’t salesy. It’s not poaching their audience. 

It’s letting the readers know who you are and where your part of the conversation the blog post is based on comes from. Your readers will appreciate this because we like to know if we can trust the information in front of us. Also, we’re generally curious about other people. They’ll enjoy learning a bit more about you.

The search engines (SEO again) will like this because they want to lead searchers to trustworthy material that actually answers their questions (read what Google says about this here). Part of being trustworthy is being transparent about where information came from and who produced it.

It’s an easy way to give back

Your host invited you on their show and shared their audience with you. It’s only polite to thank them for that. Saying the words, thank you, is a great start. But taking the time to create evergreen content for them to use will have a greater impact.

Not only will it encourage them to promote your show more often than they might otherwise have done. They’ll also understand that you valued the time you spent with them enough to spend some time creating something for them. Your host will remember how that makes them feel and they’ll recommend you to other podcast hosts.

Create more opportunities

Once other hosts see you turning your guest podcast appearances into content you can share long after the show goes live, you’ll get more invitations to be on podcasts because they’ll

• Be more likely to have seen your episode and know you’ll be a great guest,
• Be confident you’ll help promote your episode and their podcast, and
• Look forward to getting a new blog post for their site shortly after your appearance.

In short, by promoting your appearances, you’re demonstrating to the hosts of podcasts you’ll be on in the future that you know how to be a great guest.

Example of how I’ve done this

I turned a guest appearance on Ashley Griffiths’ podcast, An Espresso Shot of Confidence, into this blog post.

I then broke it up into these social media posts  - click on the picture to see the original LinkedIn post; while you're there, send me a connection request so I can learn more about you and your business:

The blog post these LinkedIn posts came from is only a small part of the transcript from my episode. Also, there are more posts I could pull from that blog post, and I haven't even started turning parts of it into reels, or repurposing it in my newsletters. As you can see, you can get a lot of content from one guest podcast appearance.

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