Why podcast guest cross-promotion as a growth strategy is a fairytale
Every podcaster who's ever had a guest on has felt it. You do the edit, write the show notes, create the clips, tag them everywhere — and hear absolutely nothing back. No share. No repost. Not even a like.
So is it you? Is it them? Is this just how guests are?
In this episode, I'm getting into why podcast guest cross-promotion is one of the most persistent myths in indie podcasting.
If you're booking guests to borrow their audience, this episode is going to save you a lot of disappointment.
Free 7-day podcast makeover: head to podmastery.co and sign up — one practical tip per day, straight to your inbox.
All right, let me save you some time with your next guest episode,
because your podcast guest is not gonna share your episode.
I'm gonna tell you that right now.
They're not gonna post any clips, they're not gonna tag you back on social media,
and they're absolutely not gonna write their own caption on your content.
You're gonna have to do all of that yourself for an episode that, if we're
being completely honest, probably benefits them more than it benefits you.
Don't worry, I'll say more.
Welcome along to Podmastery Podcasting Insights, the podcast for indie
creators that helps you get more from your podcasting efforts on your
journey towards attaining podmastery.
The idea that having guests on a podcast episode is a growth strategy is one of
the most enduring myths in podcasting.
I mean, the pitch sounds almost elegant.
You interview someone with an audience.
They then share the episode.
Their followers discover you.
Everyone wins.
Simple, logical, and almost entirely fictional.
Let's start with the sharing problem, because this is where
most people fall down first.
Got a case in point on this.
Last week, I got a voicemail on my other podcast, B2B Podcasting
Insights, from listener Dominic.
He runs a B2B podcast up in Norwich.
Dominic's doing everything right on paper.
Every time he has a guest on, he shares the episode absolutely everywhere.
He sends them the link.
He tags them on LinkedIn and Facebook and X and all the other places.
He even puts together a clip that highlights them and sends
it over to them ready to post.
He doesn't even feature in those clips himself.
And guess what?
He gets absolutely nothing for those efforts.
The guest literally ghosts him, ignores him, pretends he doesn't exist.
Now, Dominic wants to know if he's doing something wrong, and that's
what he asked on the episode last week . You can go and listen to it
for yourself, podknows.co.uk/b2bpi.
It's the latest episode on there.
But the TLDR of all this is that I said to Dominic, "Dominic, buddy, it's not
you, but it's also not really them." It's the problem with the very incentive
structure which is broken by design.
Think about it from the guest's perspective.
Now, they showed up to do the recording.
They did that with you, and it went fine,
and they've got their own content to post, their own newsletter to
write, their own algorithm to manage.
And so your episode that went fine is just one more item added onto their
content marketing to-do list, and it's the one item that they think benefits you
significantly more than it benefits them.
So the clip Dominic sent to his guest requires a little bit of effort to repost,
even though it highlights them, makes them look like some kind of social media god,
at least from Dominic's point of view.
As for the tag on social media, now they have to engage or they look rude.
The follow-up message that Dominic has been sending, now they feel a bit guilty.
He's essentially sent them homework, unpaid, with an implied deadline, and
people do not tend to rush to complete unpaid homework with implied deadlines.
Funny that.
And if you call them out on it, they tend to feel a bit of shame.
But here's the deeper problem, and this is the one that none of the podcast
gurus ever talk about or acknowledge because it's an inconvenient truth.
Even when a guest does share, who are you as the host actually reaching?
Their audience.
It's people who already follow them, who already have a podcast queue that looks a
bit like a Netflix watchlist that they're never gonna get through anyway, and
they're not in the market for a new show.
They clicked because their favorite person was in it.
They might have even listened, and then they went straight back to
what they were already listening to before your episode came into their
stratosphere, into their awareness.
you didn't necessarily gain a follower, you just gave your
guest another content asset.
And to be fair to them, that's probably why they said yes.
Now, this is the part the grow-your-show-with-guests crowd
consistently glosses over All of those pitch for guests websites and PR
agencies and people who have courses on growing podcasts using interviews,
none of them acknowledge this.
Cross-promotion only works when both parties have broadly equivalent
audiences, equivalent incentives, and audiences that genuinely overlap.
The odds of all three being true for most indie podcasters are not great.
What usually happens instead is you book a guest because the topic
fits, or they said yes, and you happen to have a gap in schedule.
So you record a decent conversation, you do your bit, and then you spend the
following week refreshing your stats, wondering why nothing has changed.
Now, I'm not saying don't have guests.
Guests can make for brilliant content.
They can bring fresh perspective, fresh energy, stories that you
couldn't possibly tell yourself.
But if the primary reason you're booking someone is that they've got a
large social media following and you want a piece of that, you're gonna
be disappointed every single time.
The listeners who are gonna follow and stick around and then tell someone else
about your podcast, they found you because of you, your voice, your take, your angle,
not because someone they already follow had a chat with you for forty minutes.
So what should Dominic have done, and what should you be doing?
Well, first of all, stop measuring your guest episodes by whether
the guest actually shares them.
Start asking whether the episode is strong enough to stand out on its own, whether
it gives your existing audience something genuinely worth forwarding to people that
they think might find it interesting.
Whether someone stumbling on it cold would find enough reason to follow your
show based purely on the content of that conversation, not on who the guest is,
but on what the episode actually does for them, the transformation it offers.
And if the answer to that last one is no, the problem isn't the
guest's sharing behavior or lack of, it's the episode content.
If this episode's got you thinking about where your podcast actually
sits in terms of your entire strategy, then I've got good news for you.
I've put together a free seven-day podcast makeover course.
It offers one practical tip per day straight to your inbox.
Head over to podmastery.co and sign up It's right there on the homepage.
Seven days free and every tip is something you can actually use.
If you found this episode useful, please do share it with somebody else you know
who is an indie podcaster, indie creator who wants to get closer to pod mastery.
Until the next episode, good luck with attaining pod mastery.