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How to win friends and influence people: Summary, quotes and 5 takeaways
I was so inspired listening to Dale Carnegie’s audio book How to win friends and influence people that I hardly know here to begin to make a summary of it.
I listened to it at between 1.5x and 2x speed, so I can still hear the sound of the reader, who was trying to sound like he was from the 1930’s but with an added chipmunk kind of tone.
I am going to focus on 5 immediately actionable takeaways, along with juicy quotes and share links to more lengthy recaps from others.
- Take an honest interest in others
As a salesperson, I come prepared. Perhaps too prepared. I have been answering the objections of prospects for over 20 years. I have PowerPoint presentations, a litany of credentials and plenty of energy to share how I can help companies with digital marketing.
Ironically, the secret weapon that Dale Carnegie shares has very little to do with us and our qualifications. It has more to do with how much we honestly care about and listen to others.
If you want to be influential, spend a lot more time talking about people’s likes and interests than merely selling them. Sure, you have to get down to business and show them your stuff but if that is all you do, you will soon be forgotten.
It may only take one small comment such as appreciating a photo on their desk of their family or fishing trip or perhaps the unique artwork on their walls, to start a conversation that builds a friendship. This can open the door for sales and influence opportunities far greater than hammering them with details.
My father, who owned a large advertising agency and sold numerous 100 million dollar accounts, told me a dozen times that I must show interest in a prospect or clients “baby pictures” more than my own. He is like a broken record about how important the relationship is and so is Dale Carnegie. The best influencers live by this and not only get more clients but make many friends along the way.
Just this morning, I heard Donald Trump on the news say that the relationship is key when negotiating. He said that just by looking at Obama and Vladimir Putin together and seeing the lack of chemistry, he can tell that good deals are just not going to happen.
Taking a good hard look at myself, I know I can do better now that I know how important this technique is.
One actionable way you can show interest in others on your website is to use the words “You” far more than “We”. Speaking as if in a conversation to your readers will make them feel welcome, while only hitting them with “We do this or our brand does that” can be a turn off.
- People respond better to sweetness than bitterness
Abraham Lincoln said that “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.”
Dale Carnegie used extensive examples to illustrate how people successfully won the hearts of those they were trying to influence through kindness and not through arguments.
Dale Carnegie also says, “You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
Criticizing others rarely adds value and even if you know someone is wrong, avoid directly saying it. Don’t push people to lose face, rather empathize with them sweetly and they will much more likely be on your side when asking them to do things or delegating to them.
- Give honest and sincere (specific) appreciation
Emphasize people’s positives rather than negatives and they will do more for you.
Charles Schwab put it this way: “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticism from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my appreciation and lavish in my praise”
Just make sure your appreciation is heartfelt. Dale ads: “The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.”
And he also says that “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”
People also desire to have stature and a role. They often like the work itself more than the money and so giving them a clear title that helps them feel important, goes a long way in motivating them personally and for your company.
- Begin by emphasizing the things on which you agree (small yes’s help)
Carnegie says that you should “Begin by emphasizing and keep on emphasizing the things on which you agree”. This concept dates back to Socrates.
The Socratic Method relies on posing your point of view as questions, so that the person must ponder and answer. If you lead with very small questions which you know they will answer yes to, you can start them gently down the road to seeing things your way in a non-argumentative manner.
I recently went to the Michael Port Book Yourself Solid conference in Savanah Georgia. At the conference, we did a small group breakout session where we were asked to do the following exercise:
Tell each other what your upcoming goals are when you get back from the conference and the steps you are going to take to achieve them. Then, your peers, instead of giving you advice, will pose a series of questions aimed at helping you discover the answers on your own.
It dawned on me that this could be used in sales calls and meetings, when conversations are not going my way.
I have studied question-based selling a bit over the years but somehow this felt a little bit different and more like a psychology session.
I had a sales meeting shortly after the workshop, where my prospect was just not responding well to my answers regarding his objections. It was very clear what their problem was and I was 100% certain that my answers were not only accurate but I had over a decade of proof, solving exactly the same problem for other clients.
Regardless, this person just kept on questioning what I was saying and so instead of responding with statements or advice, I started posing a series of questions. Within minutes, the prospect had various revelations that prompted him to tell me he would be sending the signed contract shortly. An hour later I had a fax with a signature.
I may have been able to close the sale with my normal routines and sharing of knowledge, but I’ll never forget how quickly this one turned around when I started to get small yes’s from a series of simple questions. Thanks Dale, Michael Port and Socrates!
- Show respect for the other person’s opinions and see things from their perspective
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” – Henry Ford
It’s easy to get wrapped up in our own needs during the sales process. I recently had a salesperson tell me that it would be great if I could get started today because it would help them meet their quota. Needless to say, that didn’t inspire me to sign up.
What they could have said instead was something along the lines of: “You mentioned that it was important for you to have a better email marketing program for your client in place before the holidays began. If we can get started today, we would be happy to do the training immediately and help you both meet your goals.”
It is important for you to try and imagine yourself in the shoes of the other person. If you can even remotely envision the position they are in and the obstacles that are important for them to overcome, you’re one step closer to being aligned.
Conclusion
The likes of Warren Buffet have not only studied but credit Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people to changing their lives. If you are looking to be an influential thought leader and persuasive authority, it needs to be on your reading list.
There are so many additional great things to learn from it, such as smiling more and using people’s name frequently (because it is the sweetest sound in any language) that this post could easily turn into a book.
Below are a couple links to more detailed summaries and a few more How to win friends and influence people quotes:
- “It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
- “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
- “Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”
What are some of your favorite Dale Carnegie quotes?
4 White Hat Link Building Strategies for 2015 and Beyond
A friend’s band was playing at a local bar last week.To promote it, he went around different stores and asked if he could put up a poster and leave flyers on the counter. He also posted on several Facebook groups and on Twitter.
When I watched them play, I noticed that aside from regular bar patrons,and a couple of new faces, there wasn’t much of a spike in the audience.
Now imagine what would’ve happened if they focused on reaching out to people they knew or had a connection with? The bar would’ve been more crowded with our friends, their co-workers, and other friends of friends who got dragged in.
The same analogy applies when you’re building links.
If you’re just spamming the web with flyers (links), no one’s going to pay attention to you. You’ll be that annoying guy everyone hates.
Trust me, you don’t want to be that guy, especially once the big bouncers (ie. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) start booting you out.
Link Building that Doesn’t Rely Solely on Algorithms and Search Engines
From 2012 to early 2015, websites experienced the most devastating algorithm changes from the search giant, Google. Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and most recently, Pigeon, deprived many sites with traffic, ranking and revenue.
Two companies even told me that they closed up shop. One relied too much on a flawed content strategy — short content, posted five times a day. The other relied too much on submitting to article directories.What they both did were mainstream practices back then.
But they weren’t building a relationship with anyone. They weren’t producing anything genuinely helpful at all, and Google knew it.
Those algorithm updates are now baked into modern SEO. The most important thing you should do now is revise your link building strategy, using techniques built to last.
Long-Term Link Building Strategies
- Link to Relevant Resources from Your Own Website (Give to Get)
It seems crazy, doesn’t it? You want to get links, and I’m telling you to give them away!
Well, Neil Patel, Co-founder of CrazyEgg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics, says, “you should be shooting for 25 external links for every 1,000 words of content.” It’s not a hard and fast rule but it’s a good estimate if you’re just starting out.
Before you give out links, make sure that:
- The site alsolinks to others
- The link is relevant to your topic
- It is written by the site’s owner or a regular contributor
- You can find the author or site owner’s name and email address
- The author or influencer has a good engagement rate with followers, not just sheer numbers.
- com shows that it has some keywords driving traffic to it
When you publish a blog post with links, send a partially personalized email to everyone you linked to:
Try one of Patel’s email templates:
Or the one that I used to write this post, 50 Must-Read Personal Development Bloggers That’ll Change Your Life, with over 500 shares:
Don’t be afraid to ask big names for links and shares, like I was. As long as what you write would be interesting to their readers, you’re likely to get a positive response.
Don’t expect everyone you email to reply and link back to your site. Some people are naturally generous with links, while some will opt for a simple tweet. Those tweets are still useful though, because the people who see them might then link back to you.
Check out the other templates for link building and email outreach here:The Ultimate List of Copywriting, Email and Blogging Templates and Swipes
- Give Testimonials and Participate in Case Studies
Businesses, big and small, love receiving testimonials from their customers. When you write that testimonial, give them more incentive to display it by praising them for a specific result, or a specific problem they solved.
Think about it from their point of view. Which of the following testimonials would you proudly display?
Thanks to XYZ software, I got a 25% increase in new customer purchases.
OR
“Bob and his team did a good job helping me increase sales for our new product”
The first one sounds better, right?
Of course, don’t forget to include your picture and a link to your website. Testimonials with these elements look more credible to consumers, as this gives them a chance to verify the testimonials themselves.
Participating in a case study is also another little-known link building strategy.
- Get Links Similar to Your Competitors
One of the ways search engines judge the quality of your website is by the number of high quality links you have that are similar to your competitors.
For instance, if your target keyword is “yoga studio in Brooklyn,” your competitors are other yoga studios appearing on Google’s page 1 for that keyword.
Your competitors wouldn’t have gotten to page one if they didn’t have links from other high quality sites. In fact if you examine their link profile, you’ll see they have inbound links coming from the same websites, aka ‘common links,’ which can be anything from review sites, health blogs, or yoga certification schools.
Your goal is to find those common links and try to get some of the best ones for your site. OnceGoogle sees a similar link profile on your site, it’ll associate you with other already high-ranking sites for your keyword. To take this to the next level, you will also need some links that the competitors don’t have.
Common link building is also a great way to differentiate low-citation links such as link farms, from high-quality search engine vetted websites. This process takes too much time when done manually, so we use the Common Backlinks Tool.
- Get .Edu Links and Social Shares through Scholarships
Many businesses give out scholarships in exchange for .edu links. It doesn’t have to be a big scholarship either. A budget of $500 to $1000 will do wonders for this link building strategy.
After the budget is set aside, decide the criteria for awarding it. You can have a contest where voting is done via social media, or accept essays or blog posts on a certain topic. Put the guidelines in a dedicated ‘scholarship page’ on your website.
Once the webpage is up, look up the email address of at least 25 high school and college career centers. Shoot them an email with a short introduction and a link to your scholarship page. You can repeat this step as necessary, when you want more links later on.
Link Building isn’t Dead
It’s just revived in a different, albeit more complicated form. For now, avoid websites and services that promise a high-quality link for a few bucks. The same goes for packaged services guaranteeing high PR links with little content production or relationship building on your part.
The best links are ones that come from establishing your site/blog as an authority but it can help to have some specificity and detailed tactics that help you spread the word.
Weekly favorite digital marketing tips: Repurposing Content, Twitter Chats, Public Speaking
During the last few weeks I went to the HubSpot Inbound marketing conference in Boston and then headed down to Savannah Georgia for the Michael Port Book Yourself Solid event. I also ran a Twitter chat for ProfNet. Here are a few cool things I learned or re-learned:
- Tips for Repurposing Content
Generating content consistently is one of the most common problems marketers face. Lee Odden of top rank blog gave a great talk at the Inbound conference about how you can make many pieces of content starting from one piece, such as an e-book. This post is essentially a summary of the talk about how to repurpose content and make your content marketing easier.
Lee also mentioned that his team does a quick Friday news post like the Friday fav’s John Jantsch does. Great way to keep active.
- Public speaking tips from Michael Port
Matthew Kimberley, who works with Michael, was preparing for giving a talk and so at the end of the day they let us watch the rehearsal. I was shocked how specific they were in organizing hand gestures, stage position, props, loudness and softness of voice, facial expressions and all kinds of fine details.
I wish I could share the coaching session but I don’t think they videotaped it, as it was spontaneous. The bottom line is, you don’t just want to think about your content and slides but you want to think about your entire presence and show, like an actor, comedian or a musician does.
More speaking tips from Michael Port on YouTube. And check out tips part 1 and part 2 from one of his clients.
- Combining sales and content marketing
Brian Halligan, one of the founders of HubSpot showed off their free CRM system and Sidekick sales tool, both of which I am now using. What really turned me on was when he said how important it is for salespeople to have a repository of blog posts and content that they can share with prospects. He emphasized the importance of showing off your thought leadership / authority.
He shared how the Sidekick for Business tool lets you keep folders of this type of content, which may have been created by the marketing team and that the salespeople can send to engage potential customers.
So don’t just create blog posts with the goal of getting them ranked in Google or sharing on social media, but use them very directly in your sales process.
- How to do a Twitter chat
Shannon Ramlochan from ProfNet asked me to host a live twitter chat with her. I hadn’t done one before, and the Buffer guide to Twitter chats was extremely helpful in getting up to speed.
During the chat, I used a few hashtags like #inbound2015 and it drew in a few people who follow HubSpot. I loved the interaction with people following the #ConnectChat hashtag. I am now a strong believer in hosting Twitter chats.
I was pleasantly surprised that ProfNet also featured me in Times Square!
- How to submit a journalist query using ProfNet
Shannon shared with me a link where you can post your queries in order to have experts share tips for your articles. Not only can you use a tool like ProfNet to get featured in media, but you can use it in reverse and become a journalist yourself.
- News tip: My next public speaking event:
I am honored to have been invited to speak by Michael Gass, with many top agency new business experts, at The NEW Drivers of NEW Business, October 8-9, Nashville, TN.
Check out my Fuel Lines speaker page for more details.
Conclusion
I love going to conferences. Being around so many marketers with such high energy and learning from the greats is so nice to do in person. You can certainly get plenty of information online but getting to know high-level experts by interacting with them live is priceless.
11 Email List Building Strategies from Popular Websites with Tons of Subscribers
You just started a blog for your business.
You’re writing quality content as fast as you can, and you’re getting decent traffic. But for some reason, majority of your first time visitors don’t come back. At least that’s what Google Analytics’ data suggests.
Didn’t they like what you wrote? Weren’t you helpful enough?
They share your posts, so how come they don’t come back?
The Missing Link in Many New Websites
Then you read somewhere that as an authority, you should start collecting email addresses as early as possible. Like, right NOW. You read article after article touting the benefits of building an email list.
It will boost your engagement they say. It will help you sell more products and get to know your audience, they say.
So now you’re curious to give it a try.
But you have no clue where to start.
Your Yellow Brick Road to Building an Email List
Start here.
I’ve compiled 11 proven email list building tips from around the web then categorized them into beginner, intermediate, and advanced level advice.
Start with the easy tips that only take a few minutes to set up. Then progress into the intermediate strategies once you’re getting the hang of things. When you’re ready to invest more in building your email list, take a crack at the advanced strategies.
Beginner, Intermediate Advanced and Email List Building Strategies
Beginner
- Use a Feature Box
Remember those big rectangular boxes positioned at the top of a website? You know, the one usually offering a free e-book? It’s called a feature box. It contains a short copy convincing readers to give their email address in exchange for a free e-book or newsletter updates.
Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, says he increased the email opt-in rate for his site by 51.7% using this strategy.
Notice how the feature box sits below the navigation bar, and at the top of every blog post to ensure people will read it before scrolling down.
Here’s another example of a feature box, this time without a free e-book or report.
You can create a simple feature box of your own using SumoMe or Magic Action Box.
- Don’t Waste Your Sidebar
For some reason, many new website owners waste the top of their sidebar to tags and categories. While helpful for readers, these features do nothing to help you, the business owner.
Who’s to say they’ll come back of their own accord after they find what they’re looking for? There are hundreds of websites on any given topic, so it’s up to you to lure them back.
The human eye naturally reads left to right then top to bottom. So it’s only logical to prioritize what you want them to see first. Put the email opt-in box at the top of the sidebar. Then if you want to include categories, popular posts and other stuff, just put them below it.
Here’s an example of a sidebar opt-in box optimally placed on top of other widgets, such as the “about me” box.
And here’s another example from Legal Marketing Review.
- Use a Welcome Mat or Welcome Gate
Your website is your business’s home in the virtual world. What better way to make it more inviting than a welcome mat, right?
Like a ‘welcome home’ rug, an online welcome mat greets first time visitors to your site with an irresistible free offer. It’s like a feature box, except it dominates the whole screen and only pops up for new visitors.
Of course, if you have both a welcome mat and a feature box, you can use the same freebie for both. Just vary the copy written in each one so it doesn’t look like a spammy pop-up. If you can give different freebies for each, that’s even better!
Here’s Make a Living Writing’s welcome gate.
For Mixergy, only the CTA button prompting you to “Get 9 Interviews Free” are visible. I suspect it was deliberately done to minimize indecision on the part of new visitors.
- Add a Sign-up Button to the Navigation Menu
A subtler, although less effective, way of getting more subscribers is adding a sign-up prompt on the website’s navigation menu.
It’s a good add-on strategy, but not something you should use on its own. You can use a direct CTA, such as “Subscribe,” or go with “Free Updates.”
- Ask Readers to Sign up at the Bottom of Every Blog Post
They say online readers prefer to scan. So it means someone who reads ‘til the bottom of your post must like your writing. If that’s really the case, don’t waste the opportunity!
Convert new readers into subscribers by putting an email sign-up box at the bottom of every blog post. You can use anything from a simple sign-up button, or a more noticeable sign-up box like the one from Social Triggers.
Intermediate
- Create an Irresistible, Gosh-Why-Is-He-Giving-It-Free Offer
Freebies are such a commodity now. Most of your visitors think twice before giving up their email address just to get ‘another free e-book.’
Sign-up bribes are still effective, don’t get me wrong. But for this strategy to work, your offer has to stand out from the mass of average Joe freebies out there.
First of all, stop thinking you have to write an e-book! While e-books are truly effective, they are not the only format for a giveaway. And don’t think of this as something you create just for the sake of having one.
Creating a genuinely helpful freebie takes time. It should be something your visitors will gladly pay for, if you weren’t such a nice guy to give it for free.
Need inspiration? Here are some amazing freebies:
- Free 28 Day Email Course on How to Become a Morning Person from Little Green Dot
- Copyblogger’s collection of 16 e-books and 20-part marketing course (okay, still an e-book but with 16x more value and content)
- Bidsketch’s sample proposal template
- Firepole Marketing’s Beacon Community (includes a forum and e-book series)
- Ask Existing Email Subscribers to Forward and Share Your Emails
While relatively easy to do, this strategy won’t make a noticeable impact in your numbers unless you already have a solid foundation of at least 1,000 opt-in subscribers to begin with. Emails harvested through LinkedIn or some other database won’t help.
Once you have that, it’s easy to add a “Forward to a friend” link in the text of your emails. This simple trick gives you access to more leads, who are more likely to sign up because of the referral.
- Turn Non-Confirmers into Subscribers
Someone signs up to get your free organizing check-list. Then your trusty mail service sends an opt-in confirmation email. But a week passes and it’s still not confirmed.
Did he change his mind? Did he not want your free checklist, after all? Did he enter the wrong email? If you’re just starting out, such non-confirmers might drive you nuts.
Don’t over think it. Things happen. Your confirmation email might’ve landed in the junk folder, or the he forgot about it for whatever reason. Whatever the case, you owe it to him and yourself to re-send the confirmation email. This person already gave you his email address, so you have a better chance of converting him into a new subscriber.
Go to your email service program and search for unconfirmed email sign-ups in the past two days. Then just re-send the confirmation email to everyone on the filtered list. This process will only take less than fifteen minutes, but it can yield you anywhere from 5% to 20% more subscribers.
Advanced
- Include Social Proof in Opt-in Copy
This tip is easy to implement but like tip #8, you can’t do it until you have enough subscribers. And this time, 1,000 isn’t gonna cut it. You’ll need a number huge enough to shock people of how awesome your content is.
Would you be more likely to sign-up for a newsletter if you knew more than 205,000 people already did? Peer pressure is a strong motivator and its effects do not diminish online.
When other people in your tribe, group of friends, or professional affiliation, think a certain newsletter is valuable enough to be allowed in their inbox, your brain instinctively agrees. That’s exactly the tactic that convinced me to sign up for Linda Formichelli’s mailing list for freelance writers.
- Ask Commenters to Subscribe
Several plugins allow you to invite first-time blog commenters to a pre-determined page, such as a squeeze page set-up to collect emails.
Here’s an example of a page readers are redirected to after commenting on Yoast.com
- Special Content Upgrade
Building your email list within the blog post is effective, because people are most engaged at the middle of the website (i.e. the blog post), not the headers and footers. Noah Kagan of SumoMe and OkDork credits this technique in a “daily email growth of (about) 30%.”
How can you take advantage of the increased engagement?
Offer readers a specialized freebie download. In this post at Backlinko, Brian Dean lures readers into signing up for his email list by offering a checklist for using content upgrades, the exact topic covered in the post.
After reading Dean’s helpful tutorial, readers will be primed to download his checklist so they can try it out for themselves, and so they don’t forget what they read. The freebie is a win-win for everyone.
But don’t confine the content upgrade at the bottom of the post. You can insert it at the middle, too, like what Dean did.
Not the Only Email List Building Tips Around
Whew, I hope you’re still with me at this point. There are a hundred other ways you can grow your email list but I only included the strategies that really work so you’re not overwhelmed with options.
Quick Question:
Which of these methods are you using for your own site? Is there another strategy you’re using not listed here? Let me know in the comments.
11 Killer Podcast Promotion Tips
Done. You feel accomplished. You just finished uploading your podcast’s very first episode.
A week later, how many downloads did you get?
Exactly… ZERO.
Hosting your own podcast is easier than ever. Now, all you need is a mic, laptop and, good audio editing software to start a show. Unfortunately, if you’re used to promoting blogs, a podcast may seem daunting, especially if you’re just starting out.
What’s a podcast without listeners anyway? Sure, your friends, (techy) mom, and pet husky might listen to a few episodes. But how do you grow your audience from there?
Podcast Promotion Tips that Work, even if You’re a Newbie with Zero Budget
- Post Behind the Scene Pictures
This might sound cheesy to you, but posting behind the scene photos have three benefits:
- Pictures can be used to promote the podcast in visual-heavy social networks, like Instagram and Pinterest. Besides, Twitter and Facebook posts with pictures are known to drive more engagement.
- Snapping a few selfies help podcast guests relax, so they’re not fumbling and awkward when the interview starts.
- Pictures give listeners a sneak peak to the show, which makes them feel more connected to you.
Bonus: funny and attention grabbing photos are good conversation starters on social media.
Jenni Hogan posts pictures of her podcast episodes on Facebook, like this one of her interview with Nadia Shouraboura.
- Tap into Your Existing Blog Readers and Email Subscribers
If you have a blog or email list, don’t let it go to waste. Some of your readers will be psyched to know you have a podcast, and vice versa.
Besides, people don’t always prefer reading. Sometimes they want something to listen to on the way to work — it might as well be your podcast.
- Interview Celebrities and Authors about Upcoming Books and Shows
Celebrities, authors, and their PR agents are always looking for new channels to promote their stuff. And yes, you don’t have to be a major network or publication to do this.
Contact them directly, or send their PR agent a short pitch for an interview. Granted, they will likely use your podcast to promote their new ventures but it’s a good trade anyway. Aside from bragging rights, you can use the celeb’s name in episode title, and when you’re promoting the episode online.
- Ask Listeners to Leave a Review on iTunes
Online reviews are this generation’s version of social proof. When a friend leaves a good review for a restaurant, book, or a movie, you’re more likely to give it a try. The same goes for podcasts.
The more reviews you get on iTunes, the higher up you’ll go in the show rankings. So don’t be ashamed to ask for reviews during the last few minutes of every episode.
- Submit Your Podcast to Only the Top Podcast Sites
Submit your podcast feed to legit, high-quality sites that actually get traffic.
Here’s a list of some podcast mega sites:
Authority Media Group, LLC’s podcast, “Authority Alchemy” is unfortunately no longer operating but was the 4th most popular marketing podcast on iTunes within 24 hours of launching. Now that is a nice bragging point and traffic driver. Think about at least attempting to get real traffic through your promotion efforts versus just getting listed.
What not to do when promoting podcasts through submissions
Do not blast your site onto every podcast directory you can find or you will likely do more harm than good. Google Penguin can track these kind of bad links and lessen your ranking because of them.
I am not saying all podcast directories are bad but put any site where you are considering getting listed, into semrush.com first. I tried just three as a test and all of them sadly had keyword visibility that was on a downward trend. These sites may be trying to serve a good purpose but look weak enough that I would steer away from linking to them or being listed in them for a backlink, even if just to play it safe.
Examples of podcast directories that could potentially cause ranking problems
- All Podcasts (allpodcasts.com)
- Replay Media Guide (applian.com/guide)
- Digital Podcast (digitalpodcast.com)
The keyword traffic to iTunes, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO and Soundcloud by comparison are all climbing steadily in a positive direction and in most cases are worth millions of dollars a month.
- Co-Host Episodes with other Podcasters
Tap into the audience of popular podcasters in your niche.
Reaching out to podcasters in different niches with a similar audience works well, too.
Pat Flynn, an expert on building passive income online, co-hosts the 1-Day Business Breakthrough podcast with Chris Ducker, an expert on outsourcing. These guys are an excellent example of podcasters with an overlap in their audience’s interests.
- Invite Listeners to Interact with You
Just as people love hearing their names on radio, podcast listeners will be thrilled when you talk about them on your show.
You can set-up a voicemail account to receive questions by phone, or ask people to submit online via Facebook, Twitter, or a dedicated email address. Use a unique hashtag so it’s easier to filter the questions from other posts.
Don’t expect a flood of questions immediately though. Give the news a chance to spread first. Announce it online and give clear instructions for sending questions on every episode.
- Don’t Neglect the Show Notes
Writing up the show notes can be such a drag, especially if you’re a one-man team.
But don’t neglect it! Your show notes are one of the reasons listeners come back to your site. And for many first time listeners, this is another chance to hook them in for another episode.
Show notes should provide real value and useful resources, not just a transcript. I doubt listeners will enjoy reading through the episode’s transcript just to find one website mentioned on the show.
Lewis Howes of The School of Greatness podcast has amazing show notes, which include:
- An introduction to give non-listeners some context about the episode
- Bullets of questions tackled
- List of topics and lessons to expect
- Links to websites, books, and other resources mentioned
- A list of related episodes
- Invite Guests for Interviews
Interviewing experts boost your podcast’s credibility. You also gain access to the guest’s audience, even if they don’t have a podcast of their own.
The big question is: How can I convince experts to agree to an interview?
Most experts are happy to share their knowledge to others, especially if the sharing part doesn’t require a lot of effort for them.
Anthony J. Yeung provided a simple script to invite podcast guests at Kissmetrics. Just modify his template to fit your needs:
If you don’t know who to interview, try one of the following queries on Google:
- “your keyword” intitle:interview
- “your keyword” intitle:”interview with” OR “Q&A with”
- “your keyword” intitle:”tips from”
- Do a Contest with Freebies and Giveaways
Holding a contest is a tried and tested tactic to growing a subscriber base. It’s effective for blogs, so there’s no reason it won’t work for podcasts.
You can announce the contest on all your online channels, and podcast to get as many entries as possible. Or you can announce it everywhere, but only release the contest information on the show. I think the latter attracts more listeners than the first strategy.
Another way to do it is to give contest entries in exchange for reviews and shares, like what Tim Ferriss did:
- Have Guests Include a Link to the Podcast on their Next Email Blast
Yes, your guests will be more than happy to promote your interview with them on their social accounts. Some guests are also kind enough to link up the episode in their blog or media page. But you won’t get the full power of their network that way.
You have to get into their email list.
But it’s a BIG ask. People protect their email list like hawks because they don’t want their hard-earned readers to unsubscribe.
Get over this objection by framing the request in an easy, risk-free manner.
How?
Suggest they mention the episode in the P.S section of an email already scheduled to go out. This way, they don’t have to do much work, and you’re not asking for 1 whole dedicated email so the chances of unsubscribes are minimal.
Better yet, write it up so they can just copy/paste it. Here’s an example:
P.S. John Mcdougall at Legal Marketing Review interviewed me on his podcast last week, and we chatted about LinkedIn Marketing for attorneys. Check it out here: (podcast episode URL).
Get Promoting!
What are you waiting for? If you have a show of your own, try one of the podcast promotion tips listed here.
Have a podcast promotion tip to share? Let us know at @Mcdougalljohnd.
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