Booking Your First Guest: What to Keep In Mind

Booking-Your-First-Guest

Baseballs and mitts, lanes and bowling pins, podcasts and guests – they all go hand-in-hand. Let’s say you understand the importance of booking guests and you’ve even booked a well-known guest for a future episode. You’re positioning your podcast for success and setting things up to not only delight current listeners, but bring in swathes of new ones.

But you’re nervous.

You’re nervous because you haven’t had guests on your podcast before and it seems like there’s a huge potential for things to go wrong. Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that[tweetthis]Every great podcaster had a First Guest that they learned from and built off of.[/tweetthis] The bad news is that the dire scenarios you painted in your head can happen. Fortunately, with the right preparation, you can make the best of your first interview and look back on it years later with pride.

Expert Lessons to Keep In Mind

expert-lesson-keep-in-mind

Pick the Right First Guest

Every podcast host has an idea in their mind of what an ideal guest looks like: an authoritative voice, an eye-catching résumé, a great conversationalist, and a massive online following. These are all great things to look for when vetting guests, but for your very first guest you’ll want to set the bar a bit lower. The really great guests – the ‘gets’ – are difficult to come by, and you don’t want to waste your opportunity interviewing someone on your bucket list when you’re still getting the kinks worked out of your system.

Instead, you should be looking for an approachable guest. Typically, the first guest should be someone that you have established rapport with and that you know how to easily converse with. They don’t need to be a close friend, but your first guest should be close enough to have patience with you as problems arise (as they always do). To find these types of guests, you should look to people you’ve worked with in the past. They usually know how to have a conversation with you and are relevant to your field in some way. It may not be the most eye-catching on-air visitor, but those kinds of guests come later.

Set Aside Plenty of Extra Time

There are plenty of things to worry about when interviewing your first guest: everything from what you’re going to talk about, to whether or not they’re able to answer the questions you have planned. In the face of so many legitimate concerns, you should do your best to kill as many potential anxiety-inducing moments ahead of time as possible. One of the best places to start is making sure that you have enough time to do the interview more than once.

Asking your guests to set aside a full hour of their day for the podcast when the episodes are only 15 minutes long is a big request. However, this extra time can make all the difference for you. If there are recording issues or problems with the content of the episode, you’re going to want plenty of extra time to maneuver around and figure out something that works. This rule shouldn’t be in place for every interview ever, but for your first guest (or your first three) you should assume that things are going to go wrong and have a plan in place to deal with it.

Make Sure They Know What They’re Doing

As the host of your podcast, most of the responsibility for a great episode falls to you. If things go wrong or the episode ends up being a bore, people will blame you. However, this doesn’t mean that the weight of the world needs to be on your shoulders. Instead, you should share some of the load with your guests by making sure that they know what’s expected of them and why you’ve invited them on the podcast in the first place.

It may seem obvious, but it’s shocking how many people are invited onto a podcast with no clear idea of why they’re even there. Yes, they received an email asking them to be on, and yes, they think it’s an interesting podcast that they’d love to help out. However, at no point did anyone outline why they’re being asked to go on the podcast and the host never explained what was expected of them. Explaining things like the topic of the podcast and what you’re hoping they’ll speak about can make a gigantic impact on the final quality of an episode.

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Prepare a Script Outline

One of the trickiest parts of hosting a podcast with guests is that you want the conversation to feel natural and flowing, but you also want to guide it in a certain direction. The obvious solution to this would be writing down every word you plan on saying and reading the script, much like a theatrical performance. Aside from the fact that your acting skills probably aren’t as hot as you think they are, this isn’t a feasible way to ensure that the conversation feels bona fide.

Instead, the solution is to outline what you want to speak about. By outlining the topics you plan to cover and what questions you’re going to ask, you can give your guest the opportunity to plan their answers. The more time you give guests to prepare their answers and points on specific topics, the more authoritative they’ll come across. Be sure to point out to the guest that they aren’t required to write down their answers word for word – that would be the same thing as a full script – but instead that the outline is meant to guide the conversation in the right direction.

To Sum It All Up

Even after reading all of this, you might still be nervous. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! Nervousness can help you focus on doing a great job – just don’t let it turn into full blown anxiety. Remember to pick the right guest, prep them properly ahead of time, and focus on the audience and not on how you feel. With the right amount of work and the right mindset, your first guest will end up being just the first of many, many more to come.

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