Smart Automation Techniques for Podcast Guest Outreach with Khadirah Muhammad
➡️ How to streamline your podcast outreach with automation.
In this week's episode, we look at effective tactics for automating the guest outreach process, allowing podcasters to save time and reduce overwhelm. Khadirah, a marketing automation and systems engineer, shares her insights on using marketing CRMs and podcast directories to streamline the guest booking process.
Khadirah emphasises the importance of personalisation in outreach emails, ensuring that potential guests feel valued and recognised.
She shares her method of finding relevant podcasts using specific keywords and listening to a few episodes to ensure a good fit.
Takeaways:
Automation tools can significantly streamline the process of securing guests for your podcast.
Personalised outreach emails are more effective than generic ones for podcast guest invitations.
Utilising a marketing CRM helps automate follow-ups and keep track of potential guests.
Keyword optimisation in your podcast title and descriptions is crucial for discoverability.
Using AI tools can enhance your title creation process by generating ideas from transcripts.
Integrating podcast directories with your CRM through tools like Zapier simplifies guest management.
About Khadirah
Khadirah Muhammad is a Marketing Automation & Systems Engineer and CEO of The Alliance for Business Excellence. Her ultimate passion is to help service providers leverage systems and automation so they can gain back 500 hours of their time without feeling overwhelmed with tech using her 4C Method.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/allianceforbusiness
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/khadirahsmuhammad/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@khadirahsmuhammad
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KhadirahMuhammad
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khadirah/
Transcript
Rachael Botfield: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to this week's episode. Today, we're going to talk about the automation tactics you can use to get guests on your podcast. Let me introduce you to today's guest, Khadirah Muhammad . Khadirah is a marketing automation and systems engineer and CEO of the Alliance for Business Excellence. Her ultimate passion is to help service providers leverage systems and automation so they can gain back 500 of their time without feeling overwhelmed with tech.
Using her 4C method. Welcome Khadirah.
Khadirah Muhammad: Hey Rachael, I'm excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this.
Rachael Botfield: Yes, I'm very excited to dive into this topic today. So as I just said, we're talking about the tactics that you can use for automation with getting guests in your podcast.
So I would love to just get stuck in. So why don't you. Hit me up. I haven't, as I said, before we start recording, I haven't really come across a lot of this, so I'm just really super interested to [00:01:00] dive into this conversation. So I will let you share your expertise.
Khadirah Muhammad: Oh yeah,
absolutely. So just a little backstory on myself, just a little context.
I am the automation lead. So I do all things, tech, systems, kind of the things that most business owners and I imagine most podcasters probably don't want to deal with outside of the direct tech that's needed from your podcast. And so I've been doing that for like I don't know, since I was about 18 years old, I went to college, went to school to be a web developer.
I taught myself how to code prior to that. Tech is in my blood. I've been doing it for a very long time and I've been helping business owners be able to use technology without being overwhelmed because most people don't want to or it's like that necessary evil type of thing. I've been doing that for probably about 5 to 6 years now.
It's been a joy. I'm super excited to talk about this with you, Rachael, because it is like that podcast inception, because I used the same tactics I'm going to talk about to [00:02:00] get on Rachael's podcast. And it's a lot simpler than I hope it's not being made out to be this huge, web of things.
But it's a lot simpler. When it comes to automation technology, most people take it a bit too far in trying to do all the things with one app or buying a bunch of software. And you don't really end up using it. You have a bunch of duplicates and now you're just paying a hundred bucks a month for something that you're not really going to do anything with it.
And as a podcaster and more specifically as a guest who wants to be on podcasts, It can be a lot simpler to actually get on those podcasts. So what I did to begin with Rachael Is that we use any kind of one of these directory podcast tools that you may have. There's podcaster, I think there's pod insanity.
There's a lot of different ones out there. All of them do the same thing. So it's okay choosing what you want, but it's effectively taking that and having what's [00:03:00] called a marketing CRM. And if you're familiar with CRMs, there's a customer relationship management tool. And really it's, you may have heard of them.
There's Dubsado. There's HoneyBook there's ActiveCampaign, there's Keap, there's HubSpot, there's GoHighLevel, all of them do effectively the same thing. Some of them are better than others, but that's what you need. You need a podcast directory, you need a marketing CRM, any one of the ones that I mentioned before.
And you probably need somebody else. It could be you, but if you have a virtual assistant or somebody on your team who can manage the entire process, that would be very helpful as well. And what you need to do is you have your team member again, I'm just gonna say a VA or whatever assistant that you have an EA and they're going on your podcast directory and they're looking at, okay, these are the podcasts that, in this case, Rachael is really interested in being against them.
These are the podcasts that [00:04:00] she wants to be able to show up on. They match her desire. They match her demographic. They match just whatever audience that she's looking out for. You go on that directory, you're able to find all those podcasts. You want to get their contact information. Mainly just an email is perfectly fine.
In this case, we only use email. Some of them have phone numbers, but I don't do any direct SMS. That's, I guess it's a whole different thing. I'm not going to go into that right now, but the email side is super simple. You take that and you're using your marketing CRM in order to automatically follow up with all of those people.
And it's really as simple as that. The best thing that we've done though is my assistant, Cecilia. I love her. I think she's been my assistant for at this point, maybe almost four years now. And she's amazing at this. And what she'll do is she finds these podcasts and shows them to me and we both listen to them.
And she listens to them, an episode or two to get a feel of what [00:05:00] they're speaking about. If they match what we're looking for and audience that we want to be a when she does that. She writes a very personalized message related to that episode, complimenting it, bringing up some insight from it, something that says that she's actually listened to it because she did, right?
There are some tools out there where you can have AI handle that part for you. I like the personal touch a little bit more. So I like when she mentions what she liked about that episode or what I like about that episode. And so she takes that, and she's able to automatically put it into every single email that goes out and the emails and outreach and we're sending those emails via marketing CRM.
And people respond, some people respond sooner, some people respond later, but we're able to use that email marketing in order to reach out to all these podcasts to see who's interested in us being on there being against. It's really as simple [00:06:00] as that.
Rachael Botfield: So do the emails get sent out individually or do they, are they on an automation progress within the CRM?
Khadirah Muhammad: Yes, they're on automation. So all of them are on automation.
All of them just, each of them have their own specific personalized, unique message in each of them. A sentence or two gets changed out. But the bulk of the email is pretty much templatized. Okay. And it gives them even more to know who I am, what other podcasts I've been a part of, so on and so forth.
Rachael Botfield: Yeah. I'm, I think the personalized touches is the way to go because we have, I've talked about this in the West Midlands Podcast Club community. From the point of view of the podcast host, if you receive a very generic email that doesn't really show that the person has really listened, you're not really, you're going to just think they've just like cold emailed a load of podcasts. And in fact, actually I had an email. on Monday this [00:07:00] week at time of recording.
This is September and my new season four of the, this podcast has come out today. And someone emailed me Monday saying they listened to the episode. And I was like, I actually don't know how you've listened to the episode because it's literally not published. It wasn't published till today. So I don't know how you managed to hear the episode earlier.
Tell me how great you thought it was. It was a bit like, I'm not quite sure where you're coming from here, but. I think that you definitely need to be listening to some of the episodes and making it personalized. , do you or your assistant have a process of where you where you search for the podcasts, is there any kind of, is it just looking at the different, you go through the directory, find the podcasts that you think are the best match for you, and then you're transferring the information over to the CRM.
Khadirah Muhammad: Yeah. We search using, so each podcast directly will be a little bit different in terms of how you search on there.
We're always using some variation by keywords via the podcast title, potentially via a previous episode that they have. [00:08:00] Right so I like to focus on that are speaking to small business owners as well as corporations and those type. It goes deeper than that obviously, but those are the main keywords that we're using.
In order to find the podcast that we want. And then from there we just, we search, we may listen to an episode or two. And then if we like it, we try to see if we have their email information and then we put them in the system.
Rachael Botfield: Yeah. Would you try multiple different directories or would you just stick to like, do you stick to one?
I don't know if you've heard of GoodPods, I found that quite good to use for search.
Khadirah Muhammad: I haven't, but mostly we just use one. I'm actually in the middle of looking at a couple of different ones because the one that we've had before is just the quality hasn't been as good in terms of the platform itself, not necessarily the amount of pockets that they have on record, but we don't usually go with more than one, unless there's like an issue with the one that [00:09:00] we have right now most podcast directories that we realize have been large enough where they, they're getting all the pockets that are available to them.
And it hasn't been like huge discrepancies unless they're newer, if they're newer than that's different. But if they've been around for a bit of time, they tend to, in their systems, always update and have the latest information on new podcasts as well as current podcasts that have just been running.
But we're always interested to see which one is the best. I'm not as I'm not married to one, if I can say we'll switch around and see which one is next. Especially if any newer directories, like right now I'm in the middle of looking for a directory that offers more integration.
So we can automate a little bit more as in like being able to pull the emails a little bit faster. And be able to put them in our system, because right now, even that process is a little bit more manual.
Rachael Botfield: So the information's, you can't, because I know you've [00:10:00] mentioned Zapier to me and that's a tool that you can use to connect different softwares. Can you connect that to any podcast directories? You, know, or is that not something that?
Khadirah Muhammad: Depends. Not every podcast some of them may have to be on a higher level pay plan.
Other ones don't offer it at all.
Yeah, it just depends on what's going on with that particular directory. Sometimes they'll let you, sometimes they won't.
Rachael Botfield: Okay, that would make it easier if you could just simply set that up.
Khadirah Muhammad: Yeah, it would be worth the money. And then also you've got to make sure that the data they're bringing in is also the data that you need.
Sometimes. Sometime, and for those who may not be as familiar with Zapier, Zapier is like the blue of the Internet. I can think of it and it lets you connect apps together that don't normally talk to each other. They don't normally hang out in the same spaces. And if you ever had an issue [00:11:00] where, you're getting an email and Gmail, but you want that to go into a Dropbox folder for whatever reason, Gmail and Dropbox don't work like that.
Natural and Zapier can help you do that. So I use Zapier in order to connect a podcast directory to my marketing CRM 'cause I know for a fact they don't talk to each other naturally and it makes everything so much easier. Without you having to physically do all the things yourself. So I'm a big Zapier fan of the Zapier expert.
It's amazing too.
Rachael Botfield: Yeah, it definitely, it's a great way to describe it as the glue of the internet. I love that. Yeah, I use Zapier. I think at the moment for the West Midlands Podcast Club, we have MailerLite and we have Airtable, which is the CRM and what we use. So we created a form so that when someone fills in the form, It gets zapped to MailerLite so we can contact them on the newsletter and let them know when the event's coming up and so on and so [00:12:00] forth.
Yeah, it's a really great tool. Can I just ask what CRM you use?
Khadirah Muhammad: Yeah, I use GoHighLevel.
Rachael Botfield: GoHighLevel. I've not heard of that one.
Khadirah Muhammad: Yeah, GoHighLevel is relatively newer. It's been around for maybe five ish years or so. It's a marketing CRM. But it's a really nice all in 1 tool. It promotes itself.
It's like a business in a box. And it really replaces a lot of other tools. It has email SMS. It has funnels if you're familiar with, click funnels and making landing pages. It has that as well it has if you're familiar with school. The kind of community platform where you can make different groups and memberships.
It has something like that as well. So it's a really neat, all in one tool I've used, I build out a lot of our clients on go high level as well. It's just it's also just tends to be more cost effective.
Rachael Botfield: Ah, that sounds interesting. Yeah, that, it is hard as a business [00:13:00] owner and a podcaster it's sometimes very difficult.
And like you were saying in the beginning you tend to have a lot of different. Softwares and you're paying for the same thing in which you don't realize because you use one thing for one, one thing for the other. But a lot of the time we need someone like you to be saying, okay, this is what you can change down or use instead so that you are streamlining your processes.
And because I know that even myself to try and keep costs down, like I'll have a free account of Headliner, which is a I don't know if you've heard of Headliner, you can make audiograms and videos and subtitle them. It's a really great tool. It's one that I recommend to everyone for using.
I have been on, they do have a good paid packages. If you're making that many, it's worth investing in it. But I also have Descript to do transcripts and it's Some of the tools do the same things, but they don't all do everything that I want them to do. So it's like trying to find the best workaround without going into five different programs to produce one [00:14:00] episode and promote it kind of thing.
Yeah, I really being able to connect up the podcast directory to your CRM that makes things. The process a lot easier because from my experience in looking for guests, I've done it for myself and I've done it for a client. It is quite laborious work. Obviously you have to put a lot of time into listening to the episodes and crafting that personalized response, but actually finding the episodes I know this is not about automation, but how has you, have you or your assistant found like actually physically finding episodes that are relevant or sorry, podcasts that are relevant?
Because for me I know discoverability is a big issue with people that want to be more discoverable with their podcast. I found it quite difficult to really hone in on the podcast that would be relevant for me or my client. We,
Khadirah Muhammad: it all comes off like the podcast titles and episode titles as well, because that's how the directories are able to.
Search you up and make you findable or searchable inside of their [00:15:00] platforms. If you are focusing on a specific niche. I would suggest, and I also have an SEO background too, so it's also coming up into play too. You really want to focus on your podcast title and the description and making sure you're adding in relevant keywords there.
If you do that's how people can find you not just in a directories, but just in regular places where people search for podcasts. Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube podcast, wherever else, podcast. Searchdom, it really comes down to how you keyword optimize your title and your description. And that goes into your episodes as well, each of them, each episode title, each episode description.
That's the only way I can find you. I can't, most directories are not like searching within the transcript of an episode. They're looking, so like you mentioned certain keywords in the episode, which is more likely. I can't find you in that, for the majority of the time, I [00:16:00] can't find you in that one.
I find you need to type in the description as you are. Yeah,
Rachael Botfield: That's a good reminder there to make sure that you're thinking about your titles and the descriptions. I know that when I first started this podcast, I had a lot of episodes that were if how do you record your podcast or how do you publish your episodes?
So they were quite, easy and clear to understand for episode titles. But when you have a guest on I do sometimes sometimes it just comes to me and I feel like it's really explains exactly what it is that you're getting across with the episode. But sometimes I find it hard and AI doesn't always help.
I feel like they sometimes produce very generic so and so's journey and titles that aren't, that might sound good, but really aren't very keyword specific, like you were saying. So for somebody then to either find your podcast to listen to, or to potentially be a guest on, [00:17:00] you're restricting yourself in that way.
Yeah. I agree. Do you actually have, if you've got an SEO background, do you have any tips? Is the best way for titles and descriptions is to really make sure you've done your keyword research for that particular topic and ensure that you've built that into the description of the title.
Khadirah Muhammad: Oh, I love this question so much.
So I'm going to, I'm going to answer all that because I actually would suggest using AI for this. But this is where you have to train the to be able to produce what you want it to do. I think if I was in your shoes, or I was in your audience's shoes and for producing podcasts, and they want to be able to optimize their title's and descriptions on their every episode that they do.
My 1st thing I would do is if I already know what the episode is about. That is going to tell me what keywords I should probably be focusing anyway. I would have that in mind ahead of time. Now, obviously, once you actually have the conversation [00:18:00] if you're having it with the guests. It could go in a different way, and it's perfectly fine.
But then I would do some, recapping. I don't know what you do afterwards, but if okay, we talked about this subject as well. I'm going to add this to my, 3 to 5 keywords that I already had in mind for this episode. So we want to tell the AI what to do.
We don't want to just let the AI do what it wants. Because, is like a 3 year old or something like, it's super powerful. A lot of potential, love it all those things. But at the day, if you let it run around, it's just going to do what it wants to do. And, but we had a great conversation about us being both being with children over the past few days.
So I really on the on the. On a children basis right now. But if you let it do what it wants, it is going to do what it wants. It's all the snacks and do all the things. So that's why we have to direct it and tell the AI what we're looking for. I, number 1, I would not leave it to AI to choose the keywords for [00:19:00] you.
You choose it for yourself. That's that'll help with everything. Number 2, I would take the transcript that you're able to get of your podcast. You can upload that tip to I'm just saying, you can upload it to chat GPT and give it a prompt of these are the keywords I have in mind for this episode based on the transcript.
Please give me 3 to 5 titles that integrate my keyword choices. that also are within, this character limit, because they probably can't be super long. And that is going to give a direction based on the transcript of the actual episode, what you all actually talked about, and keywords you have in mind.
And that's how you can use AI to ideate for you. Not saying you're going to use the titles that it directly gives you, but it can bring up your creativity. Okay, I like this, but I'm going to tweak this and tweak that, and so on and so forth. You want to have in mind ahead of time, and if you [00:20:00] are podcasting on a regular basis, you should also be both already thinking about these keywords.
So for this episode, I wouldn't be surprised if your keywords were podcast automation, podcast marketing automation, podcast marketing systems or something like that, because that's what we're talking about in this episode right here. And those keywords are going to be relevant for you for the people that you want as your audience listening to this episode.
Because automation and podcasting, while it's not always in mind, it's probably thought about in the sense of, how can I save more time with my podcasting? How can I make it more efficient? What can I do to get guests on? How can I be a guest on other podcasts so that I can also be promoting my podcast on other podcasts and so on and so forth.
Rachael Botfield: Yeah, that's great advice. I do use AI to, I do put my transcript. I've been using claude. ai for the [00:21:00] last few months. And I found that to be quite good. A lady from our podcast community recommended it. So we were, I was giving it a bit of a try and I quite like using it. Put the transcript in and then to get some titles, I use it to help you know, craft little excerpts and things like that as well.
But you're right, it's a great jumping off point, I think. It's easier to start with some suggestions than starting from a blank slate, isn't it, sometimes? I think it is anyway, for myself. I just don't like it when it keeps putting elevate and journey too many of those kind of buzz, buzzwords.
AI words kind of thing, but yeah, it's great. I think using it in that way, just, yeah, it's like a, especially if you're a solo business owner if you haven't got anyone else to bounce off of that time, it's somebody, something that you can bounce off of with ideas and different ways to, to write things.
Yeah, it can be super helpful in that way.
Khadirah Muhammad: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I [00:22:00] would try to use it as much as possible in your, it's called a tech stack, to just make it easier for you. And there's even ways where, if you're using a popular we're using Riverside, you mentioned Descript, these are all apps that also integrate in Zapier.
And chat CPT also integrates with Zapier, so you might be able to even automate it even more, where after an episode is done, maybe via Zapier, that episode transcript automatically goes into open AI or a chat GPT, and it'll automatically spit out a few podcast titles or suggested and or suggested keywords.
And you can put that in your Airtable CRM and it can already be there so you can already start as soon as episode is done.
Rachael Botfield: Oh, you just blow my mind with that. So you can set. So you're saying I could set, potentially set a ZAP from Descript. [00:23:00] From Descript to ChatGPT with the transcript, and then from ChatGPT to my Airtable with the information that I want.
Oh my god. Yeah, write that down. That sounds amazing. Write that down. Everybody write that down. That sounds amazing. Yeah, I just, I guess I never really thought about, Automation in that way. That's obviously why you're the expert and I am not in automation. I'm very new to Airtable and Zapier and everything like that.
That's like in the last 12 months, it's fairly new. I guess I haven't really delved really into like specifics about what About what kind of things I could zap together, but I'm definitely very interested in that one you have just talked about. That's an amazing tip. Everybody, try that if you're podcasting already.
Oh, definitely. Yeah. Ah I know that we would love for you to come and talk with Sarah and I in the, [00:24:00] podcast club exactly about these types of automations, because I think everybody will be wanting to hear your expertise and recommendations. And maybe we're going to have to get you back on the pod to talk about those for the next season, because I think they would really help, especially as business owners as well.
Not, not just for your podcast. Everybody listening here, this is a podcast aimed at women in business. And as I've just prove that I haven't really thought about some of those automations that really could be doing, saving me so much time, those simple little things instead of going, into different programs.
And that's already just got me thinking about what little things in my podcast process that I could automate. that I do go into different steps. So that has definitely given me a lot to ponder on Khadirah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed chatting with you today, and I have definitely learned something new from you.
Thank you so much for sharing your expertise on this. I know this will be a really interesting episode for everybody to listen [00:25:00] to. Before we go, would you just like to share how people can find you and where you hang out on social media?
Khadirah Muhammad: Absolutely.
So you can find me. My website is just my first name, Khadirah.
com. And I'm on all social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook all other things, just Khadirah S. Muhammad, you can just search me up. It's not like Khadirah, so you'll find me there.
Rachael Botfield: Brilliant. I will pop all of those things in the show notes so you can get in contact with Khadirah , if you need, and it sounds like everybody needs this awesome automation experience that she has.
Thank you again, Khadirah, and we will see everybody next time