#23 | The Dirty Side To Podcast Pitching That No One Tells You About (Podcast Marketing & Growth Strategies)

0:00You know the five pillars of podcast pitching. But now, you need to know what no one else talks about. Welcome to How to Grow a Podcast that attracts high-ticket online coaching clients. The show helping coaches, consultants, and experts turn your slow-growth podcast into a profitable client attraction system. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, GetMoreListeners.com. It might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. In today's episode, you'll discover the dirty side of podcast pitching that no one tells you about, how to make sure your emails actually get opened, and finally, how to follow up without being annoying.

0:45Let's dive in. We're talking about the dirty side of podcast pitching. In our last episode, we left you hanging. We gave you the wow, but not the how. We gave you the steps that seemed implementable, but probably left you with questions. For example, what do I do if someone doesn't respond? How do I make sure my email gets opened? They only see the personalization if they open the email, right? Or, I'm a busy business owner. I don't have time to make each pitch personalized. Can I get an assistant? Can I use AI? Or is that unethical? So many questions. We're going to answer all of them right now.

1:21Really focused on how do we get you booked and guarantee you get booked on tons of high-profile coaching podcast as a guest in 2026. Let's dive straight in. Firstly, we're sending out this pitch. I'm writing my 100-word unique selling story. That's all great, but how do I make sure my emails even get opened? What do I need to do to make sure the email gets clicked on? Well, this is a great question. This is the first stumbling block. We need to make sure the email is getting opened. Otherwise, there's a lot of time wasted. So the best subject lines we found for the best open rates after rigorous testing, tens of thousands of emails, there's two winners.

2:01Number one is the very short and sweet real quick. This builds in a trick because, well, it is just real quick, right? Why wouldn't you have a look? But here's a little sneaky trick we do to make it sound very human. We decapitalize the first letter. And this really gets across that this is a human sending it. Like, I just typed this up right now. It's not automated. It's a very minor tweak, but we have found it helps our conversion rates. Undefeated. Real quick. No capitals, no punctuation. It gets great open rates, so I would start with that one. And we'll add three more in the show notes that you could use if you want to alternate and experiment.

2:39Great. So we've got into the inbox. We've got our winning subject line. How do I know whether someone's opened it or not? How do I track the open rates? So what you want to do, you want to use a platform known as Yet Another Mail Merge. This is a plugin you can get on Google Sheets. So instead of just sending out emails and not knowing whether someone's opened it, whether they've clicked on your link, we have the answers. Yet another mail merge is the answer. You type YAM on Google Sheets. Go to add-ons. It's a free plugin. You can just install it. It'll give you a breakdown. It's pretty straightforward.

3:14Essentially a plugin that once you send an email through Google Sheets, you can track the open, reply, and whether people clicked your link. This gives you an idea of who's engaging, so you're not left in the dark. So three things can happen. They respond. Great. Whether it's a yes, no. Ideally, just start a conversation. However they respond, that's a win. But if they don't respond, they either opened it and aired us, or they just didn't see the email. So if someone doesn't see the email, what do we do? We can simply resend it. People are busy. Inboxes are chaotic. If they haven't opened it, don't get upset.

3:50just send another email. Resend the exact same email. Same subject line, everything. Because they probably just missed it. You can do this three days later. Send Monday, then resend Thursday. But maybe more often, people may open the email and just not respond. That kind of stings, but what do we do? We don't want to just stop there. It could be a massively wasted opportunity. A lot of the time, people might have started reading the email and thought, wow, this is insane. And then they got a phone call. Or maybe they were finishing their workout. There's a million reasons why they might really enjoy your email and be open to connecting, but they just don't hit reply.

4:30So we don't want to let that go to waste. So what do we do? Up until this point, we've been pretty clean. Here's when it gets dirty. This is the part where most people will start feeling uncomfortable. But there's two words we say to every single client. Every single client who says, I want to get more listeners. We've done all this work. They're still ignoring us. The two words are this. Follow-up. Hell yeah. The two words are follow-up. That's what you need to do. You have to follow up. It shouldn't feel uncomfortable. Now, you might be thinking, oh, but they've ignored me. We're genuinely being serious.

5:10Most people are just busy. Think about the number of legitimately important messages you yourself have forgotten about because you got busier. So many, right? So the people we're pitching to, they're busy as well. Follow up because they probably want you on their shows. Have that attitude. So how many times should you follow up? For us, it's really four times. Every three to four days, if you still haven't got a response, send a follow-up message. Now, with these follow-up messages, what should they be like? What are the principles to make sure we have good follow-ups that get responses without annoying people?

5:53There's two principles. Number one is humor. Number two is giving people an easy out. In terms of humor, just make sure it's lighthearted, friendly, and self-aware. The best humor comes from being very self-aware. In one of our emails, we like to say, If you've been eaten by alligators, let me know, and I'll send flowers. Just something like that. Very lighthearted, poking fun at the fact that they haven't yet replied. Also, give them an easy way out. Always sprinkle in, If you are not open to this, that's totally cool, just let me know. No hard feelings. Just give people an easy way out. Keep it lighthearted, make it as funny as possible, and the follow-ups will not annoy people.

6:41And oftentimes, clients get responses in their second and third follow-ups. It's not always the first. Sometimes it takes that second, third, and sometimes fourth one. So that's the dirty side. You have to be relentless and keep nudging someone. So we spoke about how to make sure your pitch gets opened. How? By having effective subject lines. And number two, we spoke about getting high response rates by following up. The dirty side of podcast pitching. And a final bonus. We know the 100-word story is extremely tricky for most clients. So we recommend using ChatGPT and saying, make this more concise, focusing on the key elements of my story.

7:29You can write the story freely, and then use ChatGPT to make it concise into 100 words. And is using AI unethical? I honestly think you can use AI to help you with a pitch, but don't just get the whole robot to do it and send it out. Use AI to save time, but don't have the whole thing be AI automated, because that takes away from pillar number one. Make it personalized, human to human. Last question. There's a lot of steps here, but people are busy. Is it realistic to do this all themselves? What should they delegate? If you've got the time, do it yourself and get used to practicing. A lot of our clients, even though they haven't got the time, this is an area they feel very personal about.

8:21They do want to have that extra touch. So if you do, just spend three to five minutes, listen to the podcast you want to pitch to before you send out the pitch to make sure the vibe is on and you can provide legitimate value to their audience. And then if you're strapped for time, because if you're trying to guest on 50 plus podcasts, you have to pitch to a lot. So maybe delegating this to a team member who understands your show and having them create a list for you. I think that's the best approach. Get a team member to create a specific list and do the personalized touch. But make sure even though you have a team member creating the personalization, that it's written in first person to make it personal.

9:07And if you are going to delegate it, I'd still encourage you to do it yourself for like a week minimum, just so you understand the nuts and bolts before you tell someone else to do it. So the call to action is this. Look at the subject lines, fine-tune your 100-word pitch, and get started right away. And ask yourself, what is your goal when it comes to guesting in 2026? And if it is not to guest on 50 podcasts, then why? Because getting in front of 50 other audiences means getting in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of your ideal high-ticket coaching clients who are already listening to podcasts in your niche.

9:53Start pitching, start following up, and watch your client pipeline fill. In this episode, we covered the dirty side of podcast pitching that no one tells you about, how to make sure your emails actually get opened, and finally, how to follow up without being annoying. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a secret with you, one that might mean you hate me. completely quit listening to this podcast, and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony.

10:41No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are Tig and Anthony, hence my name, Tony. The sick bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of GetMoreListeners.com. In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own show. They gave me access to everything they know, and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, I do understand how to grow a podcast that actually brings you new clients regularly. So here's my offer to you.

11:20If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. Enter your show name and we'll send you back a free mini podcast audit. It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.