Welcome to Episode #8 of SPI TV! Make sure to subscribe (YouTube / iTunes) to stay on top of it every Friday when new episodes go live.
There are several reasons why you may want to consider contacting an A-lister in your market. Perhaps you’d like to reach out to them to invite them to be a guest on your podcast. Maybe you’d like to pitch a guest post for their blog. Or, maybe you’re likely to see them at an upcoming event and would just like to begin that conversation early.
Whatever the case may be, it’s never easy to reach the top people in your market who are in high demand. There are likely several other people who are asking for their time too, and it can be extremely challenging to get a reply.
In this episode of SPI TV, I give you 6 tips to increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to make contact with A-listers in your niche, plus a bonus tips that will make all of this a lot easier for you.
Thanks again for checking out SPI TV, and make sure to subscribe (YouTube / iTunes) and look out for another episode next Friday!
Transcript
What’s up everybody. Welcome to episode 8 of SPI TV. Thank you for joining me today. In this important episode, we’re going to talk about how to contact an A-lister in your niche market. Somebody who you might want to contact because you want them as a guest on your show. Or maybe you just want to establish a relationship with them or perhaps some sort of partnership. How do you go about doing it? Well, stay tuned and you’ll find out.
Now, you probably heard the advice before when growing your business to contact influencers. That’s why it’s really important to consider reaching out to A-listers in your particular niche market. This can be really helpful for the growth and expansion and overall virality of your brand. However, you have to also realize that the people who are there at the top already. They have a lot of things going on. There’s a very specific approach that you have to take when reaching out to them in order to get the best chance of having a response in some way, shape or form. I’m going to give you seven tips to reaching out to A-listers in your particular market.
Tip number one. Start with the low hanging fruit. A-listers who seem to already be easily contacted. Meaning, you might be able to go to iTunes and search through different Podcasts and see who were guests on those shows already. Those people are used to having people contact them. If you’re looking to have a guest on your show too, that’s the perfect place to start who else has already has done it. In addition to that, you can also look to see who’s coming out with a book or a course or something that they are going to want to market very soon.
The reason that’s important is because these people will often schedule as many points of contacts as possible. Because they know that the more people they can reach, the more other people out there who are going to help them, the better their book or their course is going to do. Check out to see who’s coming out with a book soon and you can do that through Google searches. You might be able to find a pre-seller list on Amazon as well. Reach out to those people in your particular market and you’ll find that those people will be more responsive. That’s where you want to start.
Tip number two. Connect with these A-listers before you reach out to them personally on social media. On twitter or on Facebook, you might be able to actually feature them on your particular website as well. Then use Twitter or Facebook to establish that connection there and offer some value to them first before you reach out on email and try to get some value back. One thing you could do is really easily re-tweet some of their stuff or you might be able to just give them a quick compliment on those platforms as well. So that when you do send that email out, it’s not going to be so cold anymore.
Tip number three. Keep that email that you send out really short and really to the point. I get emails all the time from people who are just awesome but they’re telling me their whole life story. I don’t have time to read all of those and neither do all the A-listers that you’re reaching out too as well. I can perhaps ask for that later but if you send me a quick email that who you are and what you’re trying to do to help me and that we also have a connection on social media as well. That’s a great place to start and that’s exactly what you want to do. Again, keep those emails very, very short into the point.
Tip number four. Even along with those emails. Look for some sort of connection. Some small connection that you might have with this person already. Maybe it’s a friend, maybe you guys went to the same college together. Maybe you both have kids. Maybe you both have Maltese puppies. I don’t know what it is. Maybe a favorite football team. Do some research beforehand about this person and you can find out what you can add in this email. Again, just a quick little mention of it to spark a little bit of, “Oh wow. This guy has the same interest as me. Maybe I should pay a little bit more attention in their mind.”
Again, look for those small connections. A great place for that is LinkedIn and also there’s an app called Refresh. That’s really cool. That will actually give you some insight on a lot of people in terms of different photos and posts on social media. Where they’ve been recently. Where they work. Also, some of their favorite teams and places to eat. Those can be really cool conversation starters. Or little things you can put in those emails to show that you’re just not some person just trying to span them and contact them for some beneficial reason for yourself. But you’re actually doing the research to make a true connection there based on that small little thing that you have in common.
Tip number five. If at all possible, even before you reach out to this person yourself. Have somebody else who already knows this person introduce them for you. That trust that they have with this person you’re trying to reach out to you is going to be much stronger than anything you could write in a particular email to this person. Any small connections you can make on social media. How does this work? For example, let’s say, I want to talk about Caleb Wojcik. If you don’t know who this person is, he’s my videographer. Just the fact that I’m talking about him here just increases the level of authority to so much already just by me talking about it. If you were to ever see him, you would know that he’s there to provide value and he’s my videographer and you might potentially go to his website. Diyvidoeguy.com to get your video needs done for you and your business. It’s that easy.
Tip number six. If you eventually have a conversation with this person and you are going to be doing something with him like a Podcast. You want to make sure that anything he has to do is already done for him. Anything that he needs to send an email about for if you’re doing a webinar for example. It’s all cut and paste, copy. Really easy for them to do. You want them to do as little work as possible and save all that energy for when they are on your show or that partnership happens and they’re promoting your stuff. Whatever the case may be, do what you can to help this person out. You’re providing value to them but you’re also making it really easy to do that so make that happen.
Tip number seven. Probably the most important tip here is you don’t have to always focus on the A-listers. Sometimes, you might get rejected by every single A-lister you contact. But you know what? They’re not the most important people. You also want to consider the what you might qualify as the B or C-listers. The people who are in and around the same level as you or maybe just below the A-listers. Because those people are going to be much easier to contact. They’re going to be really interested in working with you and do a lot more than what those A-listers might do to help promote your brand. That’s been one of the best things that I’ve done for my Podcast actually. A lot of people who are featured on my Podcast. Actually, the interviews that most people enjoy are the ones with people who may have never heard of their name before but they are more real. Sometimes, those people have a lot more time to help you out as well. Think about that. The B-listers, blisters.
Thank you again so much for checking out this episode of SPI TV. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe to the channels. These shows come out every single Friday. I’m so happy to be producing them with you with my videographer Caleb Wojcik. Not working this time. Anyway, I want to hear from you actually. Tell me a story of when you reached out to an A-lister. If you have a link to share related to that, maybe you got them on your show or maybe you were a guest on their blog as a guest blogger. Let me know how it happened.
Leave a comment if you’re watching this in Youtube right there on Youtube. If you’re on the blog, you can leave it there. Or if you’re watching this on iTunes as a video Podcast. That’s awesome. Head on over to watch SPI.TV and find episode 8. Again, you can leave a link to that because I want to read it. I want to know what you did and I think it will be really inspirational for the rest of the community and just to show. You got to ask. If you don’t ask, it’s not going to happen. Thank you so much and I’ll see you next week in episode 9 of SPI TV.
