In Part 2 of this series, veteran podcast host, Theo Hicks, explains some best ever practices for all things podcasting. Catering to the audience’s needs is a no-brainer and finding out why people listen is something you should determine in advance. Listen to this episode to hear the rest of Theo’s best ever advice for how to interview on podcasts.
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“Ideally, the best ever practice would be to have a call-to-action where you’re giving the audience something for free.” – Theo Hicks
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: There needed to be a resource on apartment syndication that not only talked about each aspect of the syndication process, but how to actually do each of the things, and go into it in detail… And we thought “Hey, why not make it free, too?” That’s why we launched Syndication School.
Theo Hicks will go through a particular aspect of apartment syndication on today’s episode, and get into the details of how to do that particular thing. Enjoy this episode, and for more on apartment syndication and how to do things, go to apartmentsyndication.com, or to learn more about the Apartment Syndication School, go to syndicationschool.com, so you can listen to all the previous episodes.
Theo Hicks: Hi, Best Ever listeners. Welcome back to another episode of The Syndication School series – a free resource focused on the how-to’s of apartment syndication. As always, I’m your host, Theo Hicks.
Each week we air two podcast episodes that are generally part of a larger podcast series that focus on a specific aspect of the apartment syndication investment strategy. For a lot of these series and episodes, we offer a free document for you to download. These are free PDF how-to guides, PowerPoint presentation templates, Excel calculator templates, something for you to download for free that accompanies the content discussed in that series or episode. All those free documents as well as the previous Syndication School series episodes and series can be found at syndicationschool.com.
This episode is going to be part two of a two-part series entitled, “Eight Tips to Nail Your Podcast Interview.” So the last Syndication School episode, or yesterday, if you’re listening to this currently, we went over tips one through four. Today we’re going to finish up the eight with tips five through eight.
So really quickly, and I definitely recommend listening to part one, but just as a refresher, the four tips were – number one, we talked about the best ever practices for the equipment that you’re going to want to use when you’re being interviewed on other people’s podcasts. Obviously, the same equipment applies to your own podcast as well. Number two is to make sure you have a web presence prior to being interviewed on the other person’s podcasts, so that when people listen to it, they have somewhere to go to find more information about you, and ideally for you to capture their contact information once they’ve arrived at your web location. Number three is going to be best ever practices for how to prepare for the interview. Then number four is going to be the best ever practices for what to do after the interview is over. So I went in a lot more details on those four in the previous part, part one. So definitely check that out. Again, today, we’re going to go over four more tips to nail your podcast interview.
So overall, tip number five, is to make sure you determine before going on the podcast, why people actually listen to this podcast. So always ask the host why people listen to their podcast. What does their audience want? What is their audience trying to get out of listening to this person’s podcast? At the very latest, this needs to be done in the minutes before going live. But ideally, you’re doing this a few days beforehand, so that you have time to prepare. Because when you know why people are actually listening to the podcast, you know what you should and shouldn’t talk about, as well as how to [unintelligible [00:05:01].23] the conversation.
For example, people listen to Joe’s podcast, to this podcast, because they want to hear the best ever advice that the guests have about their successful real estate career. But they want it in a short, no fluff format. So typically, our shows are under 30 minutes, probably on average 20 to 25 minutes. So really short, concise, to the point, no fluff advice, and then specifically the best advice that they actually have for how they’ve been successful and how you can also be successful. So if I’m being interviewed on that type of podcast, then I’m going to make sure that I keep all my advice really concise, and to the point. I’m going to make sure that I’ve got an answer to the question, “What is your best real estate investing advice ever?” Be able to answer follow-up questions on that, and keep in mind the entire time that these are people who want to be as successful as me, supposing I’m a multi-million-dollar real estate investor, so what’s the best advice ever that applies to those types of people?
On the other hand, you’ve got a podcast like BiggerPockets, which was a little bit different. So the BiggerPockets podcasts, people that listen to that are going to hear a casual, much longer, and more conversational type chat about the failures, successes, motivations and the lessons learned. So if you go to the BiggerPockets podcast, that’s essentially a summation of their description – a casual, longer form, more conversational chat about the failures, successes, motivations, and lessons learned from the guests.
They also do the lightning round, but they don’t have the money question like Joe has. Theirs are also much longer, like an hour, an hour and a half in length. So if I was being interviewed in that podcast, I would prepare entirely differently. I’d make sure that I had multiple stories to tell, multiple pieces of advice to tell, have stories about failures, have stories about successes, but detailed stories on those, because I have to talk for an hour. Talk about things that motivated me, a long story about why I got started, maybe five or six lessons that I’ve learned so far. So I need a lot more information for those podcasts, because listeners are there to hear a ton, as opposed to Joe’s are concise, to the point, here’s everything you need to know and nothing else.
Some people also listen to a podcast for a specific niche. So they might be looking for niche-specific advice. So for example, you’ve got Jake and Dinos’ Wheelbarrow Profits Apartment Investing podcast. Obviously, by the title of it, the listeners really only care about apartment investing. Similarly, you’ve got someone like Kevin Bupp who has a mobile home park investing podcast. So the listeners want to hear about mobile home park investing. So if I’m going on Jake and Dinos’ podcast, I’m not going to talk about mobile homes, or single family homes; I’m talking about apartments. If I’m going to go on a mobile home podcast, I’m not gonna talk about apartments or single family homes or office centers or shopping malls or whatever. I’m going to talk about mobile homes.
It seems pretty obvious, but you need to make sure that you know why the audience is listening. Then make sure that everything you say is directed specifically toward that audience’s needs, and then avoiding any topics that they’re probably not going to be interested in. So, again, how do you figure this out is you ask the host, “Why do people listen to your podcast?” You can also get a pretty good idea of why people listen to the podcast by looking at the topics of some of the previous podcasts, as well as reading the description they have on their iTunes podcast page, because when they create the podcast, they’ll have a description they use to attract people and say, “Hey, this is what we’re talking about.” So people that read the description, and then listen to some of the podcasts, realize that, “Hey, this is for me.” So obviously, the description and then what they talked about in previous podcasts are going to give you a great idea of all the reasons why people are actually listening. So that’s number five.
Number six is to make sure you have a call-to-action, which I briefly mentioned it yesterday, but I did say I would elaborate on it in a more detail in this episode. So at the conclusion of most podcasts that are interview format, the host is going to ask you, in this case, the interviewee, to tell the listeners to tell their listeners where they can learn more about you, and your business, or something along those lines, ask you for a concluding statement. They might just say, “Oh, to wrap things up, you got anything else to say to us?” or whatever. So you’re gonna be allowed of some concluding statement on the majority of podcasts you’re interviewed on.
At this point, whether it’s them asking you about where they can find more about you, or just to give a concluding statement, you want to make sure that you have a prepared reply. You don’t need to script it out, but just have an idea of what you’re going to say. This needs to include some call-to-action. Ideally, the best ever practice would be to have a call-to-action where you’re giving the viewers something for free. The action could be something as simple as just, “Hey, email me” or “Hey, go check out my website”, but going back to the last episode, one of the benefits is you want to increase your followers because the more followers you have, the more potential investors you have, the more potential team members you can find, the more potential partners you can find. So in order to maximize the conversion rate from the podcast, you’re going to want to offer something for free for them to download.
So you can ask them to send you an email to get this free thing, you can create a landing page where they sign up, and they sign up for your newsletter and they get this free thing… But whatever it is, you should send them something for free, and then capture their email address. Those are the two main important keys to your call-to-action. So, “Hey, I’m giving you something free and I want your email address for it.” Don’t say it like that, but that’s your goal. So whatever form your call-to-action is, however you’re capturing their email address, whether it’s them emailing you — a landing page is much better, because they might look at other parts of the website as well. The free item then can be an eBook that you’ve written, it could be a blog post that goes into more depth on whatever topic you discussed, it could just be a free subscription to your newsletter… That’s probably the most simple approach. But an eBook or some document that goes into more detail on the episode is great, because then you can have a document created, you can hit some of the highlights of the document and then say, “This is the taste. If you want more information on what I talked about– I gave you tips one through five. If you want tips six through ten, go to my website, sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll send you the free ten tips to nail your podcast interview.”
Another benefit besides just capturing their email addresses and again, increasing your followers, your newsletter list, is that you can actually determine the success or the failure of the interview, because you’re not gonna have analytics to the interview. So technically, I guess you would ask the interviewer, “Hey, it’s been a week, how many views did my podcast get?” But that really doesn’t really matter alone. You also need to know how many views the other podcasts and interviews they’ve done and have gotten, and thus actually see if it was a hit or not. And you’ve got to know what their average viewers is. You could technically ask the interviewer for that, but they’re probably busy and don’t want to give you all the information. So instead, you can use the email capturing process to determine how successful the interview was.
I got interviewed on the BiggerPockets podcast and I had ten email signups. I got interviewed on Joe’s podcast and I got a 100 email signups… So obviously, my content resonated a lot more with Joe’s audience than the BiggerPockets audience. Now you know what type of podcast to go on in the future, so that you’re maximizing that conversion rate. So that’s number six, call-to-action.
Number seven is going to be have prepared stories. So no matter what the format of the podcast is, you are going to resonate with the listeners the most if you’re telling stories, as opposed to just going through a list of things, giving them stats. You can do that, but you also want to back them up with an interesting story to tell.
So depending on the podcast – if I was going to be in Joe’s podcast then maybe I’d make sure I had three or four stories to tell. If I was going on the BiggerPockets podcast, I’d probably have a list of ten stories to tell. Then depending on which way the conversation goes, I can naturally bring up one of my prepared stories. You don’t wanna force the story in there. For example, maybe you’re in apartment syndication, you’re talking about how you found your first deal and I go, “Well, really funny story. One time after I bought a deal…”, or maybe a story about you meeting a property management company or something completely random; it’s an interesting story, for sure, but it has nothing to do with your first deal. So that’s why you wanna have multiple stories prepared so that you can naturally bring that story up, because it’s related to a question that was asked.
So for example, as I said, if you’re asked about your first deal, don’t talk about how you met your property management company or talk about your job that you had before getting the real estate or talk about the deals which you sold, which is obvious… But if you’ve only got one story prepared, and that’s the one, well, you’re going to bring it up eventually. But you’re also gonna want to make sure, as I said before, that you don’t say something like, “Oh, well I bought it for $100,000. I put $50,000 into it, and then the value was $200,000. It was a solid deal.” That’s interesting, a little bit, but you can definitely make it more interesting, more entertaining, because that’s boring. So instead, you can tell an interesting story about your first deal; something funny that happened, or unexpected that happened, or an interesting lesson that you learned.
So my go-to story, my bit is that when I bought my first deal, I was super excited about getting into real estate. I was 23 years old, I think; just out of my work training. Out of all my friends, I was the only person that bought real estate, so I thought I was so cool. I went to the house, I’d taken a bunch of selfies to post on Instagram about buying my first house. I just thought I was the coolest guy in the world.
My plan going into it was to start to do the renovations the day that I closed. I closed on a Thursday. My goal was to go over there, take the pictures, and then start pulling up carpets that night, and then working through the weekend. so that the next week, the contractors could come in there and start doing their work. But of course, since I’m this cool guy, I was like, “I not gonna do that now. I’m going to go out and celebrate how cool I am.” So the weekend goes by. This is in February in Ohio, so it’s freezing. Then I show up to the house on Monday, ready to go with all my carpet removing tools. I open the front door and I hear a very faint sound, like a wishing sound. It sounded like static. I was like, “Oh, that’s weird.” So I walk in the living room and I start ripping up carpet and I’m like, “What is that sound? That doesn’t sound right.” So I’m looking around for the source of it, I’m walking around, playing like “You’re getting hotter, you’re getting hotter, you’re getting colder, you’re getting colder.” So it started getting hotter as I approached the basement door, and I open the basement door up and now it’s a really loud whooshing sound, but I still can’t identify what it actually is. So I walk down the stairs and I turn, because you go down the stairs, and then behind the stairs is a bathroom. So [unintelligible [00:15:46].11] second I look and literally there this Niagara Falls just pouring down out of the ceiling into the basement. I’m freaking out at this point; I don’t even know how to turn the water off. So I googled “How to turn water off in your house,” I identified the master valves, I’ve turned that, and then all the water in the house turns off. One thing led to another, it all got figured out, but what happened was that my real estate agent – again, this is my first time buying a house – she told me to make sure I transferred the utilities into my name. So the word “transfer” to me meant that I need to transfer from their name to my name, so that I’m paying. Because if I don’t do that, then they’re gonna keep paying the utilities and that’s not fair, and they’ll have to come to me and ask for money, so I need to make sure I’m transferring beforehand… And I didn’t. That means, as I know now, that the utilities actually get turned off, because the owners will say, “Hey, we don’t own this property anymore. You need to stop utilities on this day.” So they stopped; the heat turned off. It was freezing cold outside, so the pipes froze, and then it warmed up a little bit. The pipes thawed, the pipes burst while it was frozen, and the water had been pouring in the basement for– I don’t know how long it was doing it, but my water bill was some insane number, because it was all just pouring straight into the sewers.
So that is a more interesting story to tell than just saying, “Well, I bought my first deal when I was 22. I bought it for $170,000. I put 20k into it and I rented it out for three years and I sold it.” I can say that, but adding in that interesting story, I think it’s interesting, now. It was kind of depressing at the time, but now I think it’s funny. So, think of stories like that. Little funny things that are entertaining things you can add into your prepared story. So that’s number seven – have prepared stories, as opposed to just running through facts about your deals.
Lastly, number eight is going to be lists. So give your advice in list form. In addition to having your stories, you’re going to want to also format your advice in the form of a list. People listen to podcasts and read blogs. We’ve got BuzzFeed, for example, 17 different ways to make a cupcake. People love lists. So whenever a host asks you a question, or whenever you’re giving advice on a specific topic, make sure it’s in list form. So eight tips to nail your podcast interview, or as I said before, 17 different ways to make a cupcake… As opposed to just randomly talking about things and transitioning from one to the other without actually mentioning you’re transitioning; it’s better to say number one is this, number two is this, number three is this, number four is this. Number one, here is a funny story; number two, here’s a funny story; number three, here’s a funny story; number four, here’s a funny story.
So for example, let’s say they ask you about mistakes that you’ve made. You can say, “Well, it’s a good question. Here’s five mistakes that I made on that deal. So mistake number one was I forgot to put the utilities into my name. Here’s a funny story about that. Number two is I didn’t get a 203k loan. Instead I invested all the money myself for renovations. Here’s a funny story about that.” So not only is it really more entertaining and more engaging, but it also is going to help the listeners more easily understand what you’re saying, as opposed to your advice being all over the place.
So those are the eight tips to nail your podcast interview. Being the Best Ever podcast, I’m going to give you a bonus tip. Actually, it’s because I missed this in the outline in part one, and that is your bio. So whenever you are being introduced on a podcast, they’re going to read off some biographical information about you so the people that are listening know who they’re listening to. The host is going to likely ask for you to send them something before the interview, that includes what you want them to read during this section.
So some best ever practices for your bio that you send to them is to keep it to two paragraphs at most. You don’t want it to be this super long in-depth bio, because number one, it’s going to be wasting time that you could be using to discuss advice on the podcast. Plus, you can just discuss things that you’d left out later on in the podcast. Anyways. The bio should include facts about your business, and it should focus on how your specific background and your expertise and your business is going to be relevant and add value to the listeners. You know what they want to hear, so what in your background can you leverage to display that you are someone that they should listen to, and you’re someone that they should want to listen to.
Then you’re going to want to provide the host the link to your website, ideally that landing page, so that they can learn more about you and your company. They probably will ask you for a headshot as well, because they’re going to want to make a nice little fancy design of them and you, and then the caption would be the title of the podcast. So make sure you’ve got a nice professional picture to send them and it’s not a selfie of you at the bar or something… Which might work on certain podcasts, but most likely not.
Lastly, you’re going to want to provide them with your email address, your phone number, and then your username, so they knew who to send the Zoom invite to or they knew who to call on the Skype call… And then anything else that they asked for.
So a pretty short bonus tip, but just again, all these things are very similar, just making sure that you’re curating everything that you do to the specific audience. So for the bio, you want to make sure that your bio that’s going to be read at the beginning of the podcast is going to be included in the show notes of the podcast is information that’s relevant to the listeners. You know what they want to hear, so you know what you can put in your bio.
So those are the eight plus the bonus tip for how to nail your podcast interview. As I mentioned, on the last episode, we’ve got a full series about building a brand. A portion of that focuses on starting your own podcast, and some best practices on that but also a blog, a website, all the things that you need in order to successfully maximize your success on someone else’s podcast. So make sure you check that out as well and then download those free documents. Then of course, check out the other syndication school episodes as well. All of those are available at syndicationschool.com. Thank you for listening. Have a best ever day and we’ll talk to you soon.
