Guest Post by Wendy Sullivan

Podcasting isn’t terribly different from blogging. One of the top touted ways of drawing traffic to your blog is to guest post on other people’s sites. I’ve found, in my experience, that inviting guests to be on your podcast really draws the traffic.

According to a study posted on Podcasting News (which you should be reading!), half the Internet radio audience is listening to podcasts, as opposed to streaming radio.

When I began my podcast back on May 18, 2008, it was small. My blog was a small-medium political site, with about 800 daily readers, many of whom were happy to tune into my little voice experiment. The first four weeks of Brass Balls Radio – now off the air – brought a couple thousand listeners, thanks to friends linking to us on their own blogs.

For my fourth show, I screwed up all my courage and invited author and columnist Mark Steyn to join me. At the time of recording, he had just walked out of a court in Vancouver after fighting a human rights complaint over an excerpt of his book, America Alone. Mark was very much in the news in both Canada and the United States during this time, and scoring him for my now-defunct show Brass Balls Radio was quite a coup.

In addition to merely appearing on the show, he also linked to his episode on his own website. That brought me not hundreds or even thousands of listeners – it brought almost 20,000! Not all of them subscribed, but thousands tuned in week after week to listen to the musings of me and my co-host Mike Williams.

It was time to leverage this information to draw in ever more listeners each week. We used different methods:

• Facebook fan pages
• Twitter
• Interviewing other bloggers in our niche and receiving links from them
• Sending out thank you mugs for special guest-hosts

All of these things resulted in more links back to Brass Balls Radio. Someone appeared on our show, they’d mention us on their website. If they received a personalized mug, they posted a picture of it and linked back to us. People not only wanted to listen to the show, the petitioned us to be on it, too. Traffic grew.

One of the most important things we did was to register our site feed with iTunes. Apple owns the podcasting world, and we just live in it. Ergo, making sure our listeners could get our show on their iPods without a lot of effort was really important. You can learn about sending your podcast feed to iTunes here.

So how do you get great guests to entertain and educate your podcast listeners? You ask them! It’s as simple as that, really. Your momma told you that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” Very wise advice. Whether you want a high ranking politician, a famous author or a tenured expert on ecology, you have to keep in mind that they are all human beings trying to promote their own product/idea. In the case of Mark Steyn, he was not only kind enough to appear often as a guest, but also agreed to guest-host for our 1st anniversary show. Rush Limbaugh pays him much more than a personalized coffee mug to do the same, I assure you! Obviously I had to approach him first, and this took confidence and more than a little chutzpah.

Don’t be afraid of people just because they are “experts” or are more successful than you. Most of them will be friendly and outgoing, happy to talk about their ideas on your show. I think that out of all the guests I invited, only one ever turned me down – Lord Conrad Black’s wife, and only because Lord Black was about to head back into court in Chicago.

If you build it – and have the confidence to ask – they will come.

Wendy Sullivan is a freelance writer and journalist based in Toronto, where she lives with her muse – an 8 lb chihuahua named Bug. Check Wendy out at Girl on the Write.