If you have a vegan business, you have found your tribe

Hello and welcome to episode fifty-seven of The Vegan Business Tribe Podcast with myself David Pannell, co-founder of Vegan Business Tribe. And if you have a vegan business, or are thinking of starting one, then Vegan Business Tribe is here to support and inspire you not just to build a vegan business, but to build a SUCCESSFUL vegan business.

And as always, if you want to go beyond this podcast to meet more vegan business owners just like you, and to engage with myself, Lisa and our amazing community of vegan business owners – then please do go check out the website at veganbusinesstribe.com. We know it’s coming up to January now when a lot of people decide they are going to really push with their business, so if you come join us at Vegan Business Tribe then you won’t have to do it on your own. And to join, it’s the equivalent of what you would pay a month if you just bought one cup of coffee a week from your local coffee shop – so head over to the site and click on the big join button to find out more about how we can help you.

Now I’m going to make the assumption that because we’re sharing this moment together that you enjoy podcasts. And if this is, indeed, the first podcast you’ve ever listened to then, well, congratulations – and no pressure on me to not put you off podcasts for life! But can I ask, instead of just listening to podcasts, have you ever thought of actually BEING on a podcast? One question we get asked a lot at Vegan Business Tribe is about visibility: so you’ve got a great product or service, you’ve got your website but no-one knows about you – how do you actually get yourself OUT there?

In the last couple of years, podcasting went from what was quite a niche, even hobbyist, media to now being one of the fastest-growing platforms out there. Back in 2018, Apple estimated that there were about half a million podcasts in existence, so 550 thousand different shows. This year, in April 2021, that estimate had gone up to over 2 million different podcasts that you can find for your listening pleasure. That’s a format quadrupling in size in just three years. Our familiarity with podcasts have increased also, with over half the population saying they have listened to podcasts but 75% saying they are familiar with what they are. And one of the reasons why podcasts have grown as a platform is they have become so much easier to listen to. If you’re an Apple fan, then podcasts have been on iTunes since 2005 – but many people had to turn to a whole myriad of different apps and websites to find their favourite podcast. I remember when I first started listening to podcasts myself many years ago – I was always a fan of audiobooks but when I started hearing about these podcasts the first question I had was, well how the heck do I go about actually listening to them?

Then last year in 2020, Spotify launched podcasts on their platform truly making them accessible to the mass-market. People who had never tried listening to podcasts before were getting them recommended on the homepage of their Spotify app. One of the world’s largest podcasts, The Joe Rogan Experience, gets in the region of 11 million listeners per episode and was bought by Spotify in a multi-year exclusivity deal rumoured to have been worth over 100 million dollars. Amazon’s Audible platform now produce many of their own exclusive podcast series with the likes of celebrities such as Stephen Fry. And no matter what your interest, you can probably find a podcast covering it. I mean, who’d have ever thought there would be a VEGAN business podcast? What a time to be alive!

And it’s this diversity of podcast shows that should make you sit up and take notice as a way to promote your vegan business. Because a huge amount of podcasts, especially in the business scene, are interview podcasts. This podcast, so you listening to me now, goes against the trend of most podcasts because we don’t really do guests. It’s usually just me, you and a microphone for half an hour each week. But for most podcasters, their whole format is set up around finding interesting people to interview: people that listeners in their specific niche will be really interested to hear from. When *we* bring you an interview, it’s usually with one of our Vegan Business Tribe members and it’s always because that person has some really specific knowledge or has done something really noteworthy that I want to share with you – because it’s going to probably help your business. But for most podcasts, they have to find a constant stream of interesting people to interview week in week out.

And this is what makes podcasting such a great channel for getting visibility. Now, imagine you’re trying to get your business out there, and you decide you’re going to aim to get on ten podcasts. If you’re some big vegan business superstar founder like Seth Tibbott of Tofurky, then you’re going to get on those podcasts that have tens of thousands of listeners. In fact, you won’t need to go asking; people will be constantly asking to interview you. But (for the rest of us) if you manage to get interviewed on ten podcasts, and each of those podcasts had on average 500 listeners, that’s five-thousand people you’ve just got your company in front of. Imagine if you set yourself the goal to do 100 podcasts in a year. That’s 50 thousand people you’ve got yourself in front of. And, actually, starting off on the podcasts that only have a few hundred listeners is actually a good place to learn how to be interviewed. Because it’s much better to make all the mistakes on the podcast that has 150 downloads a week than the one that has several thousand!

In fact, in March this year Our Vegan Busines Tribe member Mitali Deypurkaystha from Let’s Tell Your Story Publishing set herself the challenge to get on 100 podcasts before the end of the year. When she worked it out that meant getting on 9 podcasts a month, or two or three a week. We’re now in December and I think at the last count she’s appeared on nearly 70 podcasts so far which is amazing. Because that’s tens of thousands of people who have heard her story, and how good do you think she is at getting interviewed now after all that practice? How well do you think she gets over what her business does now compared to the first couple of podcasts? How many entrepreneurs, who keep thinking they have a book inside them if only they could find someone to help them extract it, have now heard of Mitali and her services that hadn’t at the start of the year? In fact, I’m telling you about her now even though she’s not on this podcast as a guest, just because of the sheer amount of podcasts she’s managed to get on and publicity that’s gotten her. And in fact, if you’re listening Mitali, and I know she’s a regular listener, then we’ll probably do a session together about everything you’ve learned from getting onto 100 podcasts in a year that we can share with the rest of the tribe.

So getting on podcasts is an extremely good way to get visibility. It’s also a really good way to build credibility with your potential audience because you are being introduced by someone that the listener really trusts. You will find that when you become a regular listener to a podcast that you get into a relationship with the host. We get it all the time at VBT. Sometimes when we have a welcome one-to-one with a new Vegan Business Tribe member they say they feel like they already know *me* because they have been binge listening to the last year’s worth of podcasts. I might have been in their ears non-stop for the last month. So if I mention someone or recommend something, then as someone you listen to regularly there’s a deal of trust behind that recommendation. So if a host decides to present you to their listeners as someone that’s worth their time listening to, then that introduction has a lot of weight behind it.

So if that’s the case, how do you actually go about getting on podcasts? Well, this is the thing, because it goes right back to one of the core things I bang my drum about at Vegan Business Tribe: your company just being vegan is no longer remarkable. You having a vegan product or service is not a unique selling point. It might have been five years ago, but definitely not now. If I want to interview someone who makes vegan skincare products I could probably send an email to ten I know without even having to consult my address book. Because if you approach a podcast and you haven’t got either a really unique story, or a crucial bit of information that their listeners really really benefit from, then you’re actually just asking the host of that podcast to give you a free advert. You just being vegan is not enough. You just starting a vegan company is not enough. Trust me, there’s no shortage of vegans starting a business right now, and if you’re relying on that to get you interviewed on a podcast then I’ve got some really bad news to break to you.

Even Mitali with her goal of being on 100 podcasts, when she first started emailing podcasts to ask to be interviewed she got responses from almost no-one. She was completely ignored until she understood what podcasts hosts were looking for and how to approach them. So today, that’s what we’re going to go into – once you’ve decided that podcasts are something where you’re going to find a great audience for what you do: 1. how do you find them and 2, how do you actually get on them?!

So let’s start with that first one, how do you actually find a podcast that might be interested in interviewing you? Well, there are some AMAZING vegan podcasts out there, such as the Bloody Vegans Podcast hosted by Vegan Business Tribe member Jim Moore or Vegan Business Talk hosted by our good friend Katrina Fox. And if I go onto Spotify now, navigate into the podcast section and just enter the world ‘vegan’, it takes me a good couple of minutes to scroll all the way down to the bottom. At the top you’ve got the big-hitter vegan podcasts from Earthling Ed and the Simply Vegan Podcast by Vegan Food & Living Magazine. Scroll a bit further and you’ll see my face and some of the other names you’ll recognise. But keep going and you will find hundreds and hundreds of podcasts that talk about some aspect of veganism that you’ve probably never heard of. There’s vegan fitness podcasts, vegan cooking podcasts, vegan pregnancy podcasts, activism podcasts, even vegan religious podcasts.

There are podcasts specifically for vegan women; podcasts specifically talking about vegan kids; podcasts aimed at new vegans; podcasts aimed at old vegans and even vegan podcasts aimed at people who aren’t even vegan yet. Whatever vegan audience you are looking for, there’s probably a podcast talking to them. And this is important because what that means is that someone else has already spent time bringing together your audience for you. And as I often say, there are only two ways to build an audience: you either pay for it with time or money, or you steal someone else’s. Finding the people who are already talking to your audience, getting to know those gatekeepers, should be a really important part of your marketing plan. But just because you have a vegan business, that doesn’t mean that you should only look at vegan podcasts. They are a great place to start because you already have that ethical connection with the host and they are more likely to respond to your email. But the most successful companies are those that occupy multiple niches. For example, you might be a vegan nutritionist working with women over 60 – and if so then you haven’t just got the vegan sector to look at. You also have all the podcasts that cover healthy eating, later-life health hacks, and there are probably as many podcasts that talk about menopause as there are vegan podcasts! So brainstorm all the different sectors and topics that you think your audience might be in and use iTunes or Spotify to find how many podcasts there are covering that topic. And don’t just look at the podcasts at the top of the results. Those are usually the ones that are well established and you will need to work your way up to if you are currently an unknown: just because it’s the first time you’ve found that podcast, they might be the queen of their podcast niche with tens of thousands of listeners and get people approaching them constantly to be featured.

It’s also important to remember that the biggest marketplace for vegan products right now are non-vegans. We know that as much as 90% of vegan food for example is eaten by people who don’t identify as vegans, and lots of people are happy to engage with products or services that are vegan in the same way they want to buy cosmetics that haven’t been tested on animals or want suppliers that are environmentally conscious. To many customers, your product or service being vegan may be a real positive even though they don’t identify as being vegan themselves.

Once you’ve found a rich seam of podcasts covering these topics, start to make a spreadsheet or a list of those that you think might be interested. And don’t make a list of 100 different podcasts, start with just ten. Check when they last put an episode out to make sure they are still active, go take a look at their social media to see how many followers they have and then try to find an email address from their show notes or website if they have one. And don’t discount the shows that only have a couple of hundred followers or even less on social media, especially at the start of your podcast journey. Because what we want to do first is test out approaching people who run a podcast. We want to work on practising our pitch and learn what is going to make these people respond, and working with smaller podcasts first is a great way to do that. Don’t think that just because they are a smaller podcast means that they are more likely to get back to though! Many podcasts are run as a weekend or evening passion project by people who are very busy earning a living doing something else and might only have a really limited time to handle emails. Take a look at The Bloody Vegans Podcast: Jim recorded his first 100 episodes while still working for a big tech company before he had built up enough momentum to give up his job and go full-time.

LinkedIn and social is also a great way to get hold of someone if you are not getting a response or can’t find an email address, and I’ve often found I can strike up a conversation on LinkedIn with someone that I’ve not been able to get hold of any other way simply because they don’t get as many messages on there. Another reason I would recommend just starting with ten podcasts is because you can spend a bit of time learning about each podcast before you reach out to them. Once you have found a formula that works for approaching podcasts, then you won’t have to do this every time – but for these first ones at least skim-listen to a couple of episodes, maybe listen to the intro and a few minutes here and there in a couple of episodes. Get a feel for who they are and what they talk about – podcasts are massively personality-led so get an idea of what their specific brand of personality is like. Also make sure that they are an interview podcast! So many people make the mistake of reaching out to someone, saying they are a big fan of the show and putting themselves forward as a guest when the podcast simply doesn’t do guests! We get it all the time, we’re mainly a solo-format podcast but every week we get people pitching either themselves or their client as a guest, and half the time they start the email saying what a big fan they are of the show. Fortunately, Lisa handles these before I see them else I wouldn’t be able to help myself starting a reply with the words, “Being such a big fan of the show you will know we’re not an interview podcast…”.

Starting with a small number on your shortlist also means that you can pick out some podcasts that you have a real synergy with. Maybe you’re from the same geographical area as the podcast host, or maybe you have a background in a similar industry. With these first few podcasts, our goal is to actually get them to engage with us so that we can try out our pitch and find out what works – so finding the people who we feel most comfortable reaching out to will be a big help in this. Once you’ve got some confidence that you have a proposal that works, great, that’s when you can start sending it out to hundreds of podcasts. For now, let’s try getting a couple to engage with us first and make all our mistakes with a limited audience first.

Once you know WHO you want to reach out to, what do you do next? Well, the first point I will make is the very best way to get onto podcasts is to actually get people to reach out to you! Getting to this level does take time though, but if you look at any of the people WE’VE featured on the podcast – they are people I’ve reached out to because they have done something that I really want to learn more about. Take Molly Elwood who started Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat as a parody website of family-owned farms and picked up over 30 thousand followers on Facebook in just a couple of months of launching. I wanted to know how she did that, and I wanted to share how she did it with you. Which is why we interviewed Molly on the website for our members and then featured her and what we learned in episode 49 of this podcast. So if you have done something remarkable, and you continue to do something remarkable, people will want to talk to you. And this is the key to getting on podcasts. If you email a podcast and say you’ve just started up a vegan business making a vegan product and would love to be a guest, then you’re simply not going to get a reply. Being a vegan start-up is not remarkable – unless you make it so. So maybe you’re a former pig farmer who has gone vegan and has now opened a vegan butchers shop. Or maybe you were a dairy farmer who transitioned and now makes vegan ice cream. Straight away, that’s a story people are really going to be interested in, and if you’ve got that kind of story, then you will probably get onto any podcast or in any vegan magazine you want. But most of us don’t have such a dramatic founder’s story. So we have to craft one. If you can make your business remarkable in some way then you will never have to pay for social media ads, people will simply share what you do. If you have a remarkable story then you will never have to pay to put an advert in a magazine, the magazines will get in touch wanting to write about you. And it’s the same with podcasts. You need to have either a remarkable story or have been widely successful to get on a podcast. And people say to me all the time: “But I don’t have that kind of company. I just make a fairly everyday boring product.” Well, Nike just make shoes. Apple just make computers. Walmart have a shop, but they just happen to employ over 2 million people. How remarkable your company is isn’t tied to what you do or make.

Think of it from the viewpoint of the person making the podcast. They want to have a guest that is going to make a fascinating listen which means that you either have a story to tell or you have some information that is going to be really useful to their listeners. So what’s your story? What led to you starting your business? What about your personal story? Take another Vegan Business Tribe member Vetomeato, who have a vegan restaurant in central London run by Natalie and Jason. And when they first met, Jason was homeless living in a friend’s garage after a battle with alcohol addiction and Natalie was struggling an eating disorder. Plenty of people open up a vegan restaurant, but you want to know more about THAT story, which is why Lisa interviewed Natalie and Jason for our column in Vegan Food & Living Magazine. And again, you don’t have to work in the most exciting sector to have a really interesting story. Take Keith Lesser from Vegan Accountants – you might think accounts are not the most exciting people in the world, and I’ll let you keep those opinions to yourself, but Keith has a really fascinating story about how one of his customers converted him personally to veganism. They were a vegan cafe – and after getting to know them in order to do their accounts, that lead Keith to learn more about veganism, which then eventually led Keith to launch Vegan Accountants. Having some kind of story is absolutely key to getting on a podcast. And if you don’t have one, then make one.

Vegan Business Tribe member Sam Tucker is the founder of digital agency Creative Compass, and he’s just attempted the world record attempt for the longest rap marathon, managing to keep freestyle rapping for more than 22 hours. He didn’t quite make the world record but he still raised over four thousand New Zealand dollars for charity and now has an amazing story to tell on the back of it.

So take some time to work out this story, work out what makes you remarkable, because it will genuinely make a difference to being able to get visibility for your business. And there are lots of ways you can prove your credibility as a prospective podcast guest. As Mitali from Let’s Tell Your Story always recommends, write a book or use someone like Mitali to extract a book from you. Or go right back to episode 14 of the podcast where we talk about overcoming imposter syndrome because we’ve got some great tips on building up your credibility quickly. That’s why in my former life I was an Ambassador for the Chartered Institute of Marketing – it just gave me instant credibility and set me up as an expert which was very handy for getting asked to speak at events or interviewed.

Once you have your story, next work out what that podcast host wants to get out of a guest for their podcast. And this is another reason why it’s a good idea to start with a small number of podcasts first so you can spend a bit of time on each one. So if the podcast is more of a lifestyle podcast, then the host might just want someone with a good story to tell within their particular area of interest. But it might be that the podcast has an agenda that you can help fill. Like Vegan Business Tribe, I want to give you as the person I’m talking to some really good business knowledge every week that you didn’t have before to make your vegan business more successful. Or I want to give you some motivation or inspiration to do bigger and better things so that you can move the vegan cause forwards with your business. I’m tired of seeing all these non-vegan businesses dominating the market with plant-based products. So when someone sends us an email saying they would be a great guest on our podcast because they could educate our listeners on the benefits of a wholefood vegan diet, then they have completely missed the mark. And apologies if you were the person who sent us that email a couple of weeks ago for singling you out, but the clue is kind of in the title of the podcast for what we’re looking for!

Email is a great way to open up the conversation, and go in with enough information to get someone interested, but not so much that it’s going to take more than a minute to read through. Again, remembering that we don’t usually have guests, I’ve had emails sent through that have been thousands of words long detailing all the different things someone could talk about and none of them really relevant to vegan businesses. Tell the host what you do in just a couple of sentences, make it clear that you’ve listened to the podcast so you’ve got a feel for what topics they talk about (even if you only skim-listened to a couple of episodes) then tell them why you think you’d be a good fit for their specific podcast. For example, if you have a vegan beauty product and you wanted to pitch at me for this podcast: telling me that you could teach our listeners all about vegan beauty is just not going to get a response. But telling me that you could talk about starting a vegan beauty business might get your email read. Telling me you grew a vegan beauty business from your kitchen table to supplying 100 retailers in your first year and you think that listeners to this podcast might be interested for you to share how you did it so quick – that’s got me actually thinking you’d be a useful person to interview. Telling me that you did all that, and at the same time 100% of your profits every January go to your local animal sanctuary, then you’re my perfect guest and I’ll be sending you our special Calendly link we use to book interviews! You’re someone who has really understood what this podcast is about and come at me with the right angle. And the best bit is, there will still be plenty of time while we’re interviewing you to promote your vegan beauty range to our listenership, you’ve just changed your approach to fit the podcast.

And that was just an example for us, but you can go through the same process for the podcasts you have singled out. Audience trust is everything to a podcast host, so they will be very selective about who they introduce their audience to. They know they are in a position of trust and will want a great guest every episode, so your introduction needs to make sure you present yourself as that great guest who is really relevant to the podcast’s audience and themes.

But don’t make the mistake of sending an intro email that doesn’t say enough either. Again, we’ve received emails that have said ‘I have a vegan beauty business and would love to be interviewed for your podcast’ and that’s pretty much been it. And key is to make sure you’ve got over in a couple of sentences why you’re interesting and relevant, what your story and expertise is, and then give people the opportunity to find out more without having to ask. Create a page on your website with the long version of your story that you can link people to in an intro email. And one tip I will also add is always try to include an image of yourself, either in the email if you can or at the very least on the page with more information about you. Because, as a guest on a podcast you are not promoting your business, you are promoting YOU. And I know that most podcasts are audio-only, but if you were selling a product then you would include a picture of the product wouldn’t you? So if you are promoting yourself, include a photo of you to show you are a real person. Email can be such a cold, impersonal way of communicating and including a photo of yourself in the footer can genuinely make a difference to how you are received. And a lot of hosts are also thinking about their episode cover art – so if you have an amazingly creative or just fun headshot, then include it letting them know they are free to use it in their cover art.

If you also already have your own audience then you should mention that in your introduction email too. Again, audience is everything to podcast hosts and if you are offering to introduce them to a new one, then you’ve got a better chance of getting their attention. If you have a huge social media following, then mention it and say that you’ll promote the episode with your followers. Tell them about the several thousand people on your email list that you’ll share the interview with. We’ve seen some big spikes in podcast listeners when we’ve interviewed companies with huge online followings, because we were able to tag them into our promotions and get them to share the episode with their own followers.

And then finally in your email (and you won’t believe people always do forget to do this), if you are trying to get on a vegan podcast, don’t forget to say you are vegan! Again, we get so many messages at Vegan Business Tribe from people wanting to do things together and Lisa’s first email back is “Can I just check you are vegan yourself?”. And it feels like a stupid question to ask someone who’s just emailed an organisation called Vegan Business Tribe, until you find out that 50% respond that they are not. Yes, we get plenty of people approaching us as VEGAN Business Tribe wanting to work together, and when we check that they are vegan they come back and tell us how they are proudly flexitarian. You know, they don’t eat much meat. That’s great, but again the title kind of gives it away.

So once you’ve got all this in a fairly concise email that can be read in a minute or so – send it off to your ten first podcasts, let them know you are flexible on time and can be available either during the day or the evening, and then… be prepared for a little bit of a wait. Don’t be disheartened though. As I said, most podcast hosts are busy and many do it as a side project so it might be a week or two until you hear back. And if you don’t hear back in a week, then go find the original email in your sent folder, and forward it on again with a quick note just asking if this was of any interest, or if not if they have any feedback about how you could improve your pitch as a potential guest. Remember, you will always learn more from people (and customers) who say ‘no’ than those who say ‘yes’.

Some podcasts, however, you simply won’t be able to get onto until you either reach a certain level of significance with them, or until you do something even more remarkable. So don’t be afraid to circle back a few months later if something new and exciting happens. But hopefully, you will learn a lot from testing and engaging with these first podcasts in such a focused way that when you find the thing they all pick up on in your bio, or the part of your story or business they all get excited about – THAT’s what you can highlight when you start reaching out to more. THAT’s the thing you open your email with to get people’s attention. Mitali from Let’s Tell Your Story Publishing didn’t start getting responses from podcasts until she mentioned she was a best-selling author – and once she worked that out, that’s what she opened with in her intro email. If you get NO responses, then it might be that you just don’t have the story or the angle right. That’s why we’re testing first to see how people respond to your pitch.

So let’s assume though that you do hear back, that someone likes your story and that you’ve made it relevant to their show and their audience. Your goal now is to use that interview as a showcase to get others. It might be that if you get on a newly-launched podcast that you can get yourself invited back when their audience grows and new things have happened in your business. It might be that someone hears you on this podcast and thinks that you would make a great guest for their’s too. So first of all, make sure you have the basic kit covered. Get a separate microphone, you don’t have to spend hundreds but if you are aiming to do a number of podcasts then invest in something better than the microphone on your headphones or your laptop’s internal mic. If the podcast records video as well as audio, then buy a ring-light for your desk to make sure you are well-lit. If you are doing a lot of interviews think about setting up a dedicated space with an interesting background and lots of soft furnishings around to reduce reverb. And then, just BE A GOOD GUEST. Be the sort of person that lets the host enjoy themselves. I remember that Lisa and I were invited onto a podcast and we really turned it up to 11. I can, you may have noticed, perform somewhat when I need to do, and we put on a great show that day! We got really animated, we brought the energy, we were serious and fun in equal measures and the podcast host promoted the heck out of that episode. He even sent me a message afterwards saying that was the most fun he’d had on an episode since he started. So, turn it up a few notches. If when you speak you’re naturally a three, turn it up to 5 when you’re a podcast guest. If you’re normally an 8, turn it up to 11. Make the host remember you, and make anyone listening with their own podcast think they need to get you on their show too.

Once you’ve recorded the episode though, don’t expect it to be on air next week. Most podcasts produce their shows weeks, sometimes even months in advance. So if you have a specific date when the podcast needs to go out to be relevant, make sure you let the host know.

And one final tip I’ll throw in at the end is that many people actually launch their OWN podcast as a way to get on other people’s. We’ve interviewed people with their own podcasts and then have been interviewed in return; or we’ve put out joint material that we’ve created together to both our audiences such as the panels we’ve done with Vegfest or with Katrina Fox. In fact, sometimes podcast hosts make the best interview subjects. You know they’ve had plenty of practice as a speaker and will probably deliver an interesting episode. You might think it’s a bit of an extreme way to find customers, but if you have a high-ticket vegan service then setting up a podcast that aims to interview your dream customers as a way of getting in front of them is a very tried and tested route to market. I’ve seen plenty of companies in many different industries do just that.

OK – so we covered quite a lot in this one, so let’s just have a bullet-point recap of how to get onto podcasts:

1. Podcasts as a platform has quadrupled in size over the last three years. Whatever your specific business niche, there’s now likely a podcast covering it.
2. If you want to get interviewed, you need to have a story. And a good one at that. In fact, if you are remarkable enough then podcasts will reach out to you.
3. If you haven’t got a story then you need to make one. Launch a new mission or campaign, go for a world record attempt or delve into your personal story.
4. Start by approaching a small number of smaller podcasts first, especially if you’ve never been on a podcast before. Don’t just look at vegan podcasts though, think about all the different niches you cover.
5. Work out what that podcast host is looking for. Change your pitch to match what you think they want to present to their audience – they are looking to entertain and inform, not just give your company a free advert.
6. Include a good photo of yourself, or even have a fun and creative photoshoot set up to create a good image that will be attractive as episode cover art. Build a page on your website with more information about your story and just include the highlights in your intro email.
7. Aim to be a great guest and turn the dial up a few notches on your performance. Invest in a bit of kit so that you look and sound good on the interview.
8. Maybe think about launching your own podcast as a way to get onto other people’s, or even as a way of getting in front of your dream clients to interview THEM.

And on that last point, if you are thinking about launching your own podcast, head over to the website where we’ve got a recording of a panel I hosted with three vegan podcasting superstars to find out their tips for running a successful vegan podcast.

And that is it! So, one last thing before I leave you – we’ve really grown as Vegan Business Tribe over this last year, and it’s been down to people like you sharing what we do. If you’ve found this podcast really useful then I want you to do two things. First, if you’re not yet a member of Vegan Business Tribe then reach out to us, send us an email at hello@veganbusinesstribe.com saying you’re a podcast listener and introducing yourself. I really want to know why you listen and to get your feedback on what we do, and if you have a vegan business to find out more about it! But second, I would love if you can help share this podcast too. So just subscribing or giving a thumbs-up really helps us. If your platform supports it, then leaving a five-star review is a great way to tell other people this podcast is worth listening to. Or if you know someone else with a vegan business that you think this information will help, then send them a link to it to help share the message and the mission.

Because why should vegan businesses have to have a label? Why should we have to point out that our businesses don’t harm or cause cruelty to animals? Surely it’s the businesses that do that should have to carry a warning. But to make that a reality, then we need VEGAN businesses to have a bigger impact on the world, we need to make vegan business the new normal, and with your help I truly believe we can achieve that. So if you want to be part of this journey, come over and join us on the website and hopefully we can get you involved in this mission.

So thank you so much for giving me your time today. Lisa and I, we really appreciate you taking out the time to listen, and I will see you on the next one!