How to dig deeper into the guest’s background to get more ideas about them?
Have you ever lost your train of thought right in the middle of interviewing a guest on your podcast? You want to ask insightful, impactful questions but suddenly you seem lost.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone if you’ve ever felt this way. Interviewing guests is, in fact, a skill. That’s good news because no matter where your starting point is you can always learn new skills. People are not born great interviewers, they become them, and so can you!
When you master the skill of interviewing, you’ll be able to squeeze the most value out of every guest that appears on your podcast and your listeners will eagerly look forward to each new episode you put out. Your guests will love talking to you and your listeners will love listening to you. Let’s get started!
Have a plan:
Before you jump on a call with your podcast guest, sit down at the table, or somewhere comfortable to formulate a plan.
• What are you going to talk about?
• Why did you invite this person to come on your podcast?
• What area of expertise do they have that you can share with your audience?
Your plan doesn’t need to be proper, but you do need one. Spend some time doing research on your guests (Google and Social Media are good places to start), especially if they are someone you aren’t super familiar with.
Identify the 4–10 questions you know you want to ask them and have each question written down on a piece of paper or on your computer. This way you won’t get stuck wondering what to talk about next. In addition to planning out a list of questions, you’ll need a strategy for how the interview will begin in addition to the list of questions. The best podcasters know how to “warm-up” their guests.
It’s difficult to jump right into the good stuff without getting into a rhythm and asking some easy questions to get the conversation moving.
Practice how you want to introduce your guest and identify your first 2 questions. As you start to wrap up you also want a plan for how you’re going to finish the interview. Do you have a standard question you want to ask each guest? Do you want to ask for book recommendations? Is there a neat way to wrap up each interview of your podcast?
Tap into their passions:
Part of doing research ahead of time is identifying what things your guest is passionate about talking about. Hopefully, if you’ve chosen your guests well, their passions line up with the substance of your podcast. Here’s why this is important:
If your guest is excited to talk about something they’ll bring that energy into the interview. More energy = better interview.
When your guest is genuinely excited about what they’re talking about you can take even the most mundane subjects and make them captivating. As you map out what questions you want to ask, make sure that they will engage your guest’s passions and interests.
Start researching your guests:
If you’re going to start a podcast, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been stumped with the issue of research. It’s quite one thing if you’re conducting a podcast interview based on the interviewee’s book or course, but what if the research involves something about their life?
My so-called brilliant idea was to watch two or three videos where the interviewee had appeared. Then, just for good measure, I was going to listen to several podcasts where they’d been a guest.
Yet, all that preparation was of little help. For one, there was no way to know whether the interview would give me any information that was interesting or remotely juicy. Since interviews on both podcasts and videos are linear, there was no way to know how to get information about the interviewee’s life.
Here’s what I’m saying about researching the podcast quest. Your interview may not be about the person themselves. It may involve delving into their lives and the things that made them who they are. Even so, it’s a great idea to warm up the client with a little conversation about the things that are important to them.
Within the podcast interview, I’d also recommend you veer away from the main topic into a personal discussion. It brings out the personality and the drive of the person you’re interviewing.
However, the biggest reason for the research is to avoid asking your guest “dumb” questions. You wouldn’t ask your best friend: So, what are you doing in the future? What projects are coming up? Your question would be more pertinent, more precise. You’d say something like: “What’s happening on the “XYZ” project? And your friend would then go down the track of “what’s happening in the future” on that particular project.
If the interviewee is no longer keen on that project, they’ll swing towards a more pressing or interesting project all by themselves. And they’ll do it, because like a friend, they’ll know that you are interested in what’s happening in their world.
Use Twitter advanced search to research your podcast guest:
I hope you all heard about Dave Gerhardt. He’s behind the hit podcasts Tech in Boston, Seeking Wisdom, Ecommerce Marketing School, and B2B Marketing Leaders. Here’s a sneak peek into how he uses Twitter to surface interesting content from his guests that he can ask about on his podcast.
Twitter’s advanced search page makes it easy and extremely quick to filter by the number of likes (as shown below) as well as the number of retweets and any keyword or phrase!
Research your guest’s LinkedIn profiles:
If the professional background of your guest is of any particular interest, their LinkedIn profile will come in handy.
Here, you can see a precise timeline of their jobs and involvements in different companies.
From their profile, you can also dig into their “Activity” to find what they’ve been posting about.
Listen to your guest’s other podcast appearances:
Podchaser also allows you to search for someone and pull up a curated list of their guest appearances in a special tab. You can also set appearance alerts, which is a handy hack if you’ve got a list of potential podcast guests and want to keep your eyes on them.
Listen Notes describes itself as a search engine for podcasts, which makes it easy to dig up past guest appearances your guest has made on other podcasts.
It doesn’t take more than listening to 1–2 other podcast appearances they’ve done to get familiar and pick out other topics and questions that’d be compelling to explore on your podcast.
Smart people know you’ve done your research:
They know you’ve been stalking them on Facebook and Twitter. They know you’ve been to their website. Yet, they appreciate you doing that little bit of extra work. They recognise that you’re a professional, and it’s likely they’ll mention it during the interview as well.
People who are being interviewed frequently often do hundreds of interviews in a year. They get the same unpreparedness from almost every interviewee.
It does take about an hour or two of your time to dig into the book (if your interview is about a book). It will take about 30–45 minutes to learn more about the interviewee.
Do your homework. It’s not that hard. You’re on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter anyway. Might as well make your time productive.
One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our podcast is because we run into resistance.
There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing the research. We know we can find more information about our podcast guests on social media. But we go to social media, say Facebook and waste time reading about everything else. This slows us down considerably. Is there a way to work with resistance? Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time.
When it comes to podcast guests, good impressions last!
If you want to stand out and make a great impression with your podcast guests:
• Do extensive research
• Send a prep email
• Personalize the scheduling link
• Create a guest page
• Streamline production follow up
Do these things, and there’s no way your guests won’t share your podcast, refer you to other great guests, and do a favour in the future.
What are your views on this? Let me know in the comments below!
If you have any doubts in the field of podcasting, feel free to message me jeffreyboopathyj on LinkedIn or Jeff’s podcast academy on Instagram.
Links available below
https://www.instagram.com/podcastforpodcasters/
Check out my podcast here
Happy Podcasting.
