Using Your Personal Brand to Book More Podcasts

Isaac Mashman0:05

Hello and welcome. My name is Isaac Mashman, founder of Mashman Consulting Group, [out of] Little Rock, Arkansas. I want to take the next 10 to 15 minutes to talk to you about how you, as a podcast guest, can dial in your personal brand's marketing message and branding to get the most out of the interviews that you are already appearing on, as well as how you can land more interviews and guest placements moving forward. Now, the podcasting space is hyper-competitive. There are millions of podcasts out there in existence today, with millions, hundreds of millions, of listeners. There is a huge opportunity to leverage other people's audiences.

Now, before I talk to you about specific strategies, let me set the framework and the foundation regarding my philosophy on personal branding. You see, your personal brand is you. It is who you are. Every single part of you, your characteristics, your interests, your career, your profession, your successes and your failures, everything about you can establish rapport with another person. You see, the thing about being a guest on another show is that you are engaging in a form of edification. Now, when I was involved in the industry of network marketing, one of the big things that I was taught was the power of edification. Whenever there was a sales call, I would introduce my mentor, or my mentor would introduce me, and say, "Hey, this is somebody that I personally know, like, and trust, and here's why you should listen to them." What does that do?

It creates leverage. You see, in this age, everything is based on relationships. Despite artificial intelligence and social media, it is still a people-first society, and personality sells. Being a guest, you are effectively selling your personality first and then selling a different offer second. When you get on another person's show, that host, who has a relationship with their audience, who the audience is familiar with, is edifying you and saying, "I took the time out of my day to invite this person on for a conversation." That is really impactful. I don't know if you've ever thought of it that way. Alternatively, you as a guest are edifying the host, which is improving the relationship between the host and the audience, especially when you think about some shows that have celebrity speakers or larger-name business influencers come on.

That improves the value, the brand perception, of that podcast. So first things first, we need to do an audit of your personal brand. How do you show up online? Have you ever taken the time to do this? Step one, I would like you to Google your name. What shows up when you are Googled? Are you fighting with other people who share similar names? If you are, you might want to think about incorporating your middle name. So for example, if your name is John Doe, but your middle name is Zachariah, you might want to go by John Z. Doe, or John Zachariah Doe. From there, you need to secure the same handle across every single social media platform.

It should be @JohnZDoe all across the board. You are creating a seamless personal brand. Now, why is this important? Well, simply put, we want you to appear as an authority. You have to appear as a public figure, somebody who is credible, somebody who is [known], somebody who's trusted, who is vetted. This improves the perception of you [for] the person who is listening to the show, who is going to go and check out your profile. When they run a Google search of your name or go to your social media profile to follow you at the end, with your call to action, you want to make sure that there is no question about it.

You are the one John Doe that they should care about. So once you have the same handle and you start understanding how you're showing up on Google, then let's talk about actually optimizing your profile. Every social media profile, for the most part, has a profile picture and a header image. Your profile picture should be high quality and front-facing, and the person should see the whites of your eyes. The header image shouldn't have a bunch of text. It should be a lifestyle photo of you. Maybe you speaking on stage, maybe you reading your book, maybe you in a business meeting, whatever that lifestyle photo might be.

Then we need to craft your marketing message. So for example, my own marketing message starts out with a personal hook leading into a professional call to action. So I say, "Addicted to coffee and standards." That is my hook. "I help emerging and established public figures optimize and scale their personal brands." So let's say you're a lawyer, for example, looking to improve your law practice and land more opportunities, land more clients to represent. You can start out with "Loving father and avid outdoorsman. I help X, Y, and Z clients solve X, Y, and Z cases." Personal hook, professional phrase. That is a very successful marketing message that I would highly recommend you implement into your own strategy.

Now, once you have the same handle, you know how you are being represented online, and you have a marketing message, let's think about the kind of content that you're creating and how you can display some of your credibility and your authority. Well, creating social media content is a fantastic tool to do so. So what you do is record short-form vertical videos and post these on your social media feed to say, "Hey, this is an experience. This is a challenge. This is something I learned. This is something that you did not know." What this content is, is a public display of competence, a public display of competence.

If I were to take it another step, I would encourage you to get your own personal website. So let's say your name is John Z. Doe. You would purchase JohnZDoe.com and either create a separate webpage, a separate website, or set up a redirect to a Linktree or an alternative link that has all of your information in your bio. Now, why is this important? Well, when you are applying to be a guest on another person's show, they're going to ask for information about you. If you have all of your social media handles the same, you have your own website, and you have a very filled-out profile with all this information, that host is going to be able to go and check out what you are doing and say, "Wow, I like this guy.

I like what they have going on." It doesn't matter if you have the largest following or you're just starting out. It is a public display of competence. It shows that host, who is very limited in how many interviews they do on a yearly basis or a weekly basis, that this is somebody who is a contender, somebody that I should work with, somebody that I could consider locking arms with and bringing on for an interview. A display of competence. Now, by doing these things and positioning yourself as that public figure, in what I call Identity Positioning™, we position your identity in a successful way, to where you are positioned as a public figure, as an authority, and you are answering potential questions.

Why should somebody trust you? Well, they see what you have going on, and they automatically think, "Okay, I can trust this guy." There's a degree of connection that is being established even though you don't know that they exist. You have to start thinking in this mindset of the public figure. Now, once you have done all of these things for your personal brand, you need to create and craft what is called a media kit. Now, a media kit is a compilation of important information about you. It has your biography, it has a suggested intro and outro, it has your links, and it has a call to action.

What you can do is, when somebody asks you, "Hey, provide all this information," you can just email them your media kit. This again shows that you are a professional. You're not just being a guest, but you are somebody who is a public speaker, or somebody who is serious about doing this. It saves the host a lot of time, as it does you. Once you create the media kit once, the only thing you have to do is start adding to it, maybe adding some new photos that you get taken every now and again. Leveraging this media kit, you can send [it] for other opportunities, too, outside of the realm of podcasting.

This is the great thing. I'm directing this at podcast guests, but this will help you regardless. So I really suggest that you take every single step and implement and execute on these. So knowing that edification, the person who is introducing you, will naturally put a lot of credibility to your name, how do you get the most out of that post-interview, or at the very end when they ask you to do a call to action? Well, now that you have a successful personal brand and you have your own website, you could say (let's say the host's name is Jamie), "Well, Jamie, you can find me everywhere @JohnZDoe.

You can go to my website, JohnZDoe.com, and purchase my book on Amazon by searching up my name." You're making it easy and concise. That is beautiful. You don't want somebody to think, "Oh, this person's handle is JohnZDoe here, and it's John_Z there, and then their website is this." No, you need to have an omnipresent personal brand. This is how you dial in your messaging. Then, after that interview is over and they chop it up into a bunch of bite-sized pieces of content, you can take that and market it yourself through your own social media platforms, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, on YouTube, and all across the board.

You can have that host, who is also posting that content on their own page, tag you and invite you to collaborate, so it shows up to your followers. Then you have something to promote, and that is edification at work, and that is how you can get the most out of all of the time that you're already spending pitching people. You don't want people to ask a bunch of questions. You want to answer those questions before they even come up. Then, by the time that you're ready to go and say, "Hey, I want to come on your show," you have a track record. Then you can create what I call an "In the Media" sheet.

This has an entire list of places that you've already been interviewed, other podcast appearances. Imagine if you've been interviewed a hundred times and you send it out to a larger show, a show that is even more select. We're thinking about brand loyalty here, and brand marketing. Some brands are more exclusive than others. You think about Chevy or Toyota, and then you think about Rolls-Royce and Bentley. There's a different degree of, well, what they're offering. A Toyota's 40,000, and a Bentley's 300,000. So certain podcasts might be the Toyota, and then you have other podcasts that are larger. They might be the Bentley. They might have a million listeners per episode or 100,000 listeners per episode and be even more select with the criteria and the kind of people that they bring on.

But you'll have a track record and a validated presence online. Your personal brand is going to speak for you. So these are some of the various ways that you can dial in your personal brand, dial in your personal brand's messaging, to get the most out of, well, being a guest on wonderful podcasts. I'm Isaac Mashman. I hope you found [this valuable].