Blossums,

You might remember a little while ago I told you how we halved our time spent on emails as part of our mysteriously named Project 10%.

What’s Project 10% you ask? Well, it’s where we work on different areas of our business and improve them by 10% or more.

For our second Project 10%, we decided to improve and automate our interviews + podcasts process.

The plan was:

  • Automate the screening + booking procedures
  • Tune up our pitching process
  • Have a minimum of 20 interviews booked in by the end of the month

We’re going to document here what we do as we do it to give you ideas of how to do the same.

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Some of the notes my assistant Zita took from the pitching training

 

1. Commence training to tune up our pitching procedure

My assistant took Jaclyn Mellone’s Plug-N-Pitch System training and from that we got some super helpful tips and ideas, including a number of pitching templates.

This meant we were able to personalise not only to me and my brand, but also to whoever we’re pitching to.

The other HUGE take away from the training we had was to actually pitch topic ideas. For every podcast I pitched, I came up with 3 topic ideas that were incredibly relevant to the podcast being pitched. These topics varied from money, business, life, creativity, neurodiversity, gender and more!

Including topic ideas in your pitch really shows you understand the podcaster’s audience and what you can offer them!

2. Streamlining the Interview Screening + Booking Process

We knew straight away that we wanted to make the booking process as easy, quick and painless as possible for us and potential interviewers. The back and forth of emails, manually booking people in, having to send out reminders ourselves just takes up so much fucking time and I would really rather use that time for other projects, or you know, to just read a book or masturbate with a crystal dildo instead.

To streamline and automate our booking system, my assistant set up a Calendly account.

Calendly is perfecto for us, because we can also ask our screening questions before people can confirm their bookings.

Here’s a sneak peek at our screening questions:

  • Name:
  • Email:
  • Do you engage in anti-racist practices, avoid + call out when possible cultural appropriation and misogny, and support science (i.e. you are not an anti-vaxxer or a believer of QAnon), and support the LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC communities?
  • What is the name of your podcast/show?
  • Please provide links to your podcast/website/social media etc:
  • What’s your expected audience number/number of podcast downloads/number of unique views?
  • What topic/s would you like to discuss?
  • Please provide the Zoom link below:
  • You understand that if you do not show up to your interview without courtesy emailing support@leoniedawson.com at least 24 hours in advance, we will not be able to book any future interviews with you:

All these questions are required. That means that you can’t confirm your interview booking unless you’ve answered all the questions. And then we check the answers, to make sure they fits in with our values as a company.

I’m not interested in being interviewed by racists or people who spread misinformation that harms lives, cheers & thanks.

So much time has been saved!

  • Screening questions are asked before booking, no more having to manually email everyone!
  • Calendly is connected to my Google Calendar, so as soon as someone books in it automatically adds it in
  • You have the option to make the booking link private or public. Ours is private, so we can send it to people we already have a cheeky inkling will be a good fit without having to screen too much
  • I have complete control over my calendar availability; to help avoid double booking or booking too many interviews
  • People can book in their own time zones (which avoids confusion re: daylight savings + mixing times up)
  • People have to provide a Zoom link in order to book their timeslots (saves us having to chase up links the day before/morning of the interview)
  • Calendly sends out automated reminders 24 hours + 1 hour earlier

Literally babes, I could sing to the stars all night about how fucking amazing Calendly has been.

If you want to try out Calendly for yourself, clicky click this link and nab yourself a 14 day free trial!

3. Pitch to podcasts who don’t know us.

We did a sweep to look for podcasts who might be a good fit. I found them by:

  • looking up Apple Podcast’s top podcasts in certain categories
  • researching what podcasts other teachers in my niche had been on
  • googling “topic + podcast”

We also kept a comprehensive spreadsheet of who we’ve pitched on what date, and what their answer was. We also use my podcast directory as a way to keep track of who’s interviewed me before!

4. Finding podcasts in my own community

In the past, I’ve emailed my list asking people to reply if they want to email me, and while this always gets a great response it causes my assistant a significant amount of work. And given that we’d just streamlined the inbox I really did not fancy causing a mahoosive avalanche of emails for her. #SoooooooThoughtful

To avoid the inbox deluge, my assistant Zita had the idea of asking people to post their podcasts in my Kajabi student forum for all my students. This was faaaabulous because I had also been wanting to find more podcasts to listen to. So we made the post, and suddenly we had a directory of podcasts by my students.

For me, it was a treasure trove of new content to consume.

For Zita, it was a list of potential podcasts to pitch to.

Two birds. One Stone. MUCH SUCCESS!

My assistant began the task of going through and creating a list of podcasts that might be a good fit. I then went through the list and approved each podcast. The pitches were written and we emailed them off!

5. Affiliates!

We also emailed separate pitches to our top affiliates, inviting them to interview me. This was suuuper successful. Peeps get to promo their affiliate links while interviewing me, talk about a win/win. Ha!

6. Results!

21 interviews are fully booked in and confirmed between now and the end of the year!

We could have booked more, but I capped it at 2 interviews a week and none over the school holidays. It’s incredibly important that I don’t burn myself out and spend precious time with my family.

At the end of project (whether it’s successful or not), we answer the following questions:

What 3 things made the most significant difference?

  • Taking some training to work out how to pitch well
  • Being smarter and more intentional about who we pitched to
  • Automating using a Calendly booking link with extensive screening questions.

What lessons did we learn?

  • Even with all the automated processes in place, pitch document templates and a list of podcasts to pitch to, pitching still takes a BIG chunk of time. 
  • Providing topic ideas (in the format of blog post heading) REALLY gets people excited
  • It’s super useful for me & my assistant to do a training of some kind anytime we feel unsure about how to complete a task – it really helps with confidence levels and makes us feel more capable
  • Cold pitching (i.e. pitching to podcasts who aren’t within my circle) has a much lower response rate. As does pitching bigger podcasts.

What could we continue doing to see improvements in this area?

  • The podcast pitch course recommend following up no sooner than 10 days after sending the pitch, so we’ve made a weekly reminder in Asana to follow up pitches that haven’t been responded to
  • We also have a document where I’ve saved who’s been pitched to so we have a directory
  • We might also consider creating a booking page on the website for ongoing podcast interview requests
  • Ask interviewers if they could recommend me to any of their podcaster friends… #networking

What are the end results of this experiment

  • Podcast pitch document template is PERF and not only reduced any nerves about reaching out to people but also saved time writing up pitches
  • Easily booked 20 interviews: affiliates + customers were incredibly responsive
  • Calendly booking link + questions has saved so much time + energy

Our second Project 10% has been a flying success, just like the first! EXCITING!

Business really is just a massive experiment… trying new things & seeing what works.

And if you’re keen to book me for an interview, you can apply here!

With love and to your enormous success,

 

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