Adding guest expert to your CV is a great way to grow your authority and get more eyeballs on your brand. Essentially it’s about collaborating with other brands with similar ICAs to yours and providing content for their blogs, podcasts or even paid offers, in return for exposure to their warm and engaged audience. It’s a fantastic audience growth strategy that’s free and much quicker than growing your own engaged audience from scratch, but there is a definite right and wrong way of going about this, and if you’re not careful and really intentional about how you guest expert, at best you risk not properly leveraging an amazing opportunity, and at worst, completely wasting your time. In today’s episode I’m sharing my biggest learnings of how to make the most of guest expert opportunities – which ones to take, which ones to avoid, and how to be a really great guest. Join the free facebook community www.facebook.com/groups/thecontentdownload
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Transcript
Traffic (AKA how new people find your business) is a pretty important part of content marketing. And when I looked at where my most engaged followers many of whom have turned into clients and customers, have actually found me – some came from social media, some from word of mouth – but a whole chunk of them had found me in other communities, platforms and memberships, where I’d been invited in as a guest expert. And so today we’re talking about why becoming a guest expert is such a powerful way to grow your audience, plus I’ll be sharing my top tips on how to make the most out of every collaboration you make because there are definitely some and dos and don’ts i’ve learnt along the way that will save you lots of time and energy and make guest experting a much more profitable experience for you and your business. Welcome to Episode 29 of The Content Download; How to grow your audience as a guest expert.
In the early days of your business one of your biggest challenges is how to get more eyeballs on your brand. You don’t have a massive budget for ads to make a significant dent. You’ve only got so many hours in the day to be networking on the likes of facebook and instagram, so what other ways are there of reaching more people with your message.
And one of the ways that I fell into very early on in my business was as a guest expert and it’s something I didn’t really do very strategically early on. If people asked me to come into their communities or onto their podcast or write a blog for them, I’d do it, but it wasn’t something i actively sought out. Until I started really looking at where my customers and clients (ie the followers who had engaged my services or bought my products) had actually found me. And I realised that the most engaged, and often the ones who felt most aligned, were the ones who had found me when I had gone into other people’s communities as a guest expert. Which made me suddenly start looking at this aspect of my audience growth strategy in a whole new way.
Now there are several ways you can show up as a guest expert. You can be a guest on someone else’s free platform – you are interviewed on their podcast, or inside their free facebook group, you maybe write a blog post for them or be interviewed on their youtube channel. And these are great ways for you to reach more people, and grow your authority and credibility through association. The more places your featured and collaborate with the bigger you look. And it’s great practice telling your story, sharing your message and your expertise and attracting members of that audience to your world.
But you can also go into other people’s paid communities and platforms, share your knowledge and expertise with their audience in exchange for more eyeballs on your brand. These are places that members are paying to be part of. And some people think well, if this is a business enterprise and they are making money from it I should be paid for this expertise. But I think this can be really short sighted. Because these are people who have skin in the game – they are proven to invest money in themselves they are not freebie seekers. They have also been nurtured for me. My host has grown their know like and trust and I have it by association. And I believe this is why going into paid communities has been a really successful strategy for me. Because I know that I’m getting something far more powerful than payment from my host here. I’m getting access to an audience that’s been warmed up for me. Plus, very often it’s an audience that is going to be grown for me. I’ve done trainings in memberships and programs that have a constant churn of new members who find me over and over again just from that one training I did in some cases a couple of years ago.
So I’m a huge fan of being a guest expert and here is what I’ve learnt about how to make the most of these opportunities.
- Don’t wait to be invited. Pitch yourself to the places that you’d like to go in and be a guest expert. 9 times out of 10 they will be grateful that you’ve put yourself forward with a clear pitch on how you can support their audience. It’s saving them time.
- At the same time if someone approaches you don’t say yes to everything. If they don’t have the right audience for you and people in their audience are never going to want to buy anything you offer it’s not going to be a good ROI for you. Don’t go and talk about how you suffer with anxiety for a mental health podcast, if you can’t relate it or link it in some way to your business, and if there audience isn’t going to be interested what you have to offer. If you need practice, practice with an audience who actually are going to want to work with you. And this is actually the only time I would ask for payment. Is if i was asked to go in and do a training somewhere where I knew it wouldn’t lead to sales for whatever reason. It’s just going to be a transactional arrangement with no future benefits to you.
- Know that the size of an audience or a community doesn’t necessarily matter. How engaged they are and whether they are filled with your ideal client that matters more. So I have actually spoken at a summit that had hundreds and hundreds signed up to it, but I didn’t have a huge amount of uptake from it – there was a lot of other speakers at the summit and the audience was quite broad. Not everyone had what I offered. Whereas I’ve gone into very small programs to do trainings, masterminds and things like that, and I’ve had those people spend a few thousand pounds on a private package with me.
- Know exactly what you want your audience to know, understand, feel or do after they’ve heard your piece. It’s really important to get clear on this. Because particularly if you’re being interviewed, you want to be able to steer the conversation to make sure you say the things that are actually going to benefit your business and goals. Make them understand what you do and how you can make their lives better. Share your story so they remember you. Rather than coming away and wondering why something hasn’t given you the traction you wanted it to. So it’s definitely a good idea to agree what you want to talk about or cover with your host beforehand if you’re doing an interview. Or if you’re doing some other kind of collaboration getting really clear on what opportunity they will give you to pitch to your audience and get them to stay in touch.
- Don’t just share your website or a social handle, find a way to get them stay in touch with you via email. Capture their email. Easiest way to do this is have an irresistible freebie offer. For ideas on this check out the interview with Jackie Muscat in Episode 27. You want that freebie to be relevant to what you are talking about so they want it and linked to whatever offer you might be giving in them in the future.
So there you have it. I hope that has inspired you. Because being a guest expert is a great way to quickly reach a warm audience and attract new people to your world. But there definitely is a strategy to it and if you bear in mind those five points that i’ve just shared.
- Don’t wait to be invited – put yourself forward
- Don’t say yes to everything – be strategic – your time and energy is finite
- Know that size doesn’t matter and ROI can come from a very small but highly engaged audience
- Know what your goals are for that guest expert slot – lead with value yes, but know what you need them to know and understand about you and your brand
- Find a way to capture their email
So get out there and starting pitching yourself as a guest expert. It’s a great way to reach more people. It’s definitely a strategy that I am being intentional about these days. And if you follow those tips i’ve shared with you there, I know it could be a really profitable part of your audience growth too.
Come and join the conversation inside the free facebook community www.facebook.com/groups/thecontentdownload