Hi Reader,
I received a great question last week from someone who was working through my Pitch Kit.
They wondered: “Do I need to finalize my offer structure before pitching podcasts?”
My answer: If you have clear messaging and a place for listeners to stay in touch by the time you record, start pitching now.
Here’s why:
1. It’s never too early to build your media portfolio.
The irony is that to get on podcasts, you need to have...been on podcasts. Pitching helps you refine your message, practice connecting your expertise to another audience, and build a media portfolio.
2. It will take time for your guest appearances to go live.
When you wait to pitch, you’re delaying a process that may already take months.
The time between emailing a pitch, getting a response, scheduling a recording, and having it go live can range from 2 to 10 months – or longer. This isn’t due to hosts being unresponsive. It’s usually because their pre-production timeline is intentionally planned.
Here’s my TOP reason to pitch now:
3. Your message guides your pitching strategy, not your offers.
When it comes to your business offer ecosystem, I see many business owners spend way too much time creating course curriculum, finding the right platform, and setting up their booking calendar before they’ve solidified their messaging and tested offer viability.
This is because they may assume this podcast episode has to fit with this singular offer.
But I encourage a pitching strategy that thinks much longer term.
Once it's live, each podcast episode has the potential to become a long-term business asset because it creates:
- Trust-building conversations. By the time clients reach out to work with you, they've already spent 30-60 minutes with you, just by listening to your interview. This shortens the trust-building process in a way few other forms of content can.
- Evergreen discoverability. Podcast episodes remain searchable for years, even if the podcast itself stops producing new episodes.
- Search credibility. Guest appearances can create high-quality backlinks to your website and reinforce your expertise with both people and search engines.
- A content ecosystem. Instead of constantly creating from scratch, you can turn one interview into several newsletters, social posts, blogs, and workshops.
- Audience expansion. Every interview introduces you to a new audience and may lead to referrals, collaborations, speaking invitations, and opportunities you couldn't have planned for.
Now imagine what happens when you have 5, 10, or 20 interviews doing this! You're building a library of trust and credibility that compounds over time.
The Big Takeaway: When you tie your pitch to your offers – not your message – you set your interview up for eventual obsolescence. 🫠
The moment the way you’re serving clients changes, shifts, or evolves (which it will), your episode stops being an asset and becomes an audio archive.
However…this whole argument falls apart if your messaging is unclear, generic, or doesn’t resonate with your ideal clients.
A podcast can expand your reach, but your message determines whether that visibility turns into clients.
If you suspect your messaging is holding back your visibility efforts, let’s see how I can help.
xo Ari 🩵
P.S. If you haven’t heard of Pitch Kit, it’s the collection of templates and resources from Pitch Party, a live workshop I hosted last fall.
It’s designed for therapists, service providers, and creatives who are brand new (or new-ish) to pitching and want a visibility strategy that expands their reach without relying on a big following or ad budget. Check it out here.