TL;DR:
Molly Roland, Founder of Heartcast Media, gave me a complete mental rest when it comes to podcast networking. Most podcast gurus give the advice to focus on your audience - make sure you’re giving your audience the best experience possible. What Molly advised me to do was to actually focus more on the guest and how you could provide value to the guest than the audience.
As an example, let say you’re in the business of creating content for businesses.
An audience focused approach to this podcast would be to invite thought leaders on to discuss best practices on how to creat good content. You may even do this as a solo podcast where you talk through how to create content effectively, efficiently, and consistently.
This approach is akin to inbound marketing. You’re putting out content that your target audience would find value in and over time hopefully some of the people that listen to the podcast may end up becoming customers.
On the other hand, a guest focused approach for this same business would start by picking a niche they want to do business with - lets say its accountants for this one. You create content for accountants so they can get more leads.
In this situation, what you’d do is not create a podcast about content creation, but create a podcast about accounting where you could interview accountants that run their own practices. This gives you an opportunity to build rapport with them, and crucially, make them look good. Once you’ve recorded the podcast and you’ve made them look like the greatest accountant on the planet, you let them know what you do and ask them to share with their network.
This approach is akin to outbound marketing. You’re going out and finding one person at a time to pitch your offer to.
The inbound/audience focused approach already gets all the attention, so here’s a breakdown of how to do the outbound approach.