Sunday, April 5, 2015

Mini Tips For Finding Participants For Podcasts



Hello Readers,

Finding participants to interview in a podcast episode is probably one of the biggest hurdle for a podcaster. If you are new startup in the podcast world then things become slightly more difficult. But one need not worry about this as there are various methods and techniques on how to go about finding a the correct research/interviewee participants to participate in your next podcast episode. Some of the most powerful techniques have been discussed below:

Drafting an email: First one needs to draft an email which would ask the potential interviewee's to participate in your Podcast episode. The draft email should mention 

A. How you found contact email address of the participant
B. Briefly introduce who you are. One to three lines should suffice.
C. Ask them directly if "We could interview you for our upcoming Podcast episode for the month of …"
D. Close the email by saying that we would love to work with you soon and are looking forward to receiving a reply from you. 

The email should be as brief as possible, should be broken into short paragraphs.

Lead Generation using Social Media: The most popular social media to find interviewee's that we highly recommend are Twitter, About.me, LinkedIn. One can even make use of local directories such as Yelp.- Especially if your podcast is related to a niche industry. One can make use of Yelp by searching for local businesses and then contacting the owners or CEO or the target participants. 

Twitter is by far the most easiest to work with. There is a high probably that you will find the person/business website address mentioned in their bio. One can visit their website and then get in touch with them through the "Contact us page". We don't recommend tweeting directly to the target participating asking them for their participant. This is because maximum number of characters is limited so the pitching would be limited to a few sentences. And it would probably sound informal as well.LinkedIn is another very good professional site that podcasters can make use of.  

University Students and Professors: University lecturers, assistant professors and students form a very good research group for all types of discussions on podcasts. One can easily reach out to star performing students and ask them for their opinions especially on social media, technology and health. For highly specific niche related topics, one can search for University directories and even make use of University alumni directories such as this one.




What's in it for me? Well, most potential participants would like to associate themselves with a podcast which has some significant listeners to it and would directly or indirectly market themselves. If your podcast is a relatively known then it should be easy to attract new interviewee's. Towards the end of the podcast episode one can thank the participant 

But what if you are a new startup with very few listeners? In that scenario it's best to reach out to the potential interviewee and tell them that you are new startup and looking forward to working with them. Though your service may or may not perform well in marketing in the initial stage but it always best to show some courtesy to the interviewee by sending out a thank you note after a few days of launching the podcast episode.

One can send a full transcribed podcast transcript to their emails as well. As we discussed a few backs there are several advantage to transcribing podcasts, out of which sending a transcript to the interviewee is one of them.



Workflow Steps For Finding A Podcast Participants:
1. Draft a common email. This can be fine tuned and modified later depending varying according to the each participant to whom you will be pitching to.
2. Find contacts using Twitter, LinkedIn and About.me search buttons.
3. Start contacting as many potential candidates as possible.

What if there is no reply back?
If there is no reply back from the person whom you contacted then it's best to refrain from any sort of further contact as this could lead to unsolicited emails. In the case when a participant becomes curious to know more about you and your podcast series, then one can continue the conversation of emails and even on Skype. At this stage you can supply as many supporting materials, marketing materials, links to previous podcast episodes, and even transcripts of previous podcast episodes. Transcripts are easy to obtain as they easy and affordable to transcribe.

If there any suggestions or feedback then we would love to hear from you. Contact us using the comment section below or via Twitter and we will get back to you as soon as possible.


Thanks,
AllTranscript.com Team

Links Worth Visiting:
What is book dictation and how are typing service companies helping out transcribing them?
Some Do's and Dont's for recording a focus group discussion. 

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