How to find podcast guests: four lists, a pitch that gets answered, and the credit tag

The short version of how to find podcast guests: work four sources in order, starting with the people already closest to your show and ending with the paid marketplaces, and send a pitch that names the episode subject, the recording date and the running time. The industry has a job title for the work. The Podcast Taxonomy list that ships with the podcast namespace project, published by Podcastindex.org at https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/taxonomy.json, defines a Booking Coordinator as the person "responsible for bringing on new guests for interviews, including sourcing guests, scheduling interviews, onboarding materials, and post-publication processes." Four stages, only one of which is finding anybody. Most hosts who say booking is hard are actually stuck on the other three.

Any podcast can be listed on PodAnswer for nothing, which gives the show its own page that can surface when somebody searches the show's name, and you can claim a listing at https://podanswer.com/signup.

Four lists, ranked by how fast they answer

Treat guest sourcing as four pools, not one. They differ enormously in reply rate, and the order matters more than the volume.

People who already listen. Your audience contains working professionals in your subject. A single line at the end of an episode asking listeners who do a specific thing to get in touch produces better guests than a month of cold email, because they arrive pre-sold on the show and already know the format. This is the pool nobody works hard enough.

Past guests and their networks. The last question of every interview should be a request for two names. You are asking someone who just had a good hour to recommend a peer, which is the warmest introduction available to a small show. Booking three guests off one good episode is normal.

People publishing on your next topic. Pick the episode subject first, then find the person. Somebody has written the paper, filed the lawsuit, run the experiment or built the product you want to discuss, and they have a university page, a Substack, a LinkedIn post or a book with a publicist attached. This is slower per name and produces the most interesting episodes.

Guest marketplaces. Matching platforms exist and they work mechanically: you build a profile, you get matched, you message. Reply rates are high because everyone on the other side joined to be booked. Quality varies wildly, since the pool self-selects for people who want microphone time rather than people with something specific to say. Use them to fill a calendar gap, not to define the show.

Reading another show's guest list is a sourcing method

The fastest cold-outreach list comes from shows adjacent to yours. Pull the last fifty episode titles of four or five podcasts that cover your subject from a different angle, and the guest names are sitting right there in the titles and descriptions. Those people have already proved three things: they say yes to podcasts, they can hold a conversation for forty minutes, and they own decent audio gear.

Two things make this work better than it sounds. First, go after guests from shows with a smaller audience than you think, because somebody who has done two interviews is far more likely to reply than somebody doing two a week. Second, listen to ten minutes of their appearance before you write, and reference something specific they said. That single detail is the difference between a 5% reply rate and a reply rate worth tracking.

You can also run the search from the other direction, which is what PodAnswer pages are built on. Our library at https://podanswer.com/answers turns specific questions into pages carrying the moment a guest or host answered them, with a timestamp, so you can see exactly how a person handles a question before you pitch them. An answer page like https://podanswer.com/answers/how-do-you-make-customers-want-your-product is a sixty-second audition for the person speaking on it.

The pitch, with the four things it has to contain

Booking email is short and concrete. Long pitches read like marketing and get filed. A pitch that gets answered contains four things and almost nothing else.

1. What you listened to or read. One sentence, specific, no flattery. "Your piece on soil carbon accounting in March" beats "I love your work."
2. The episode, not the show. Name the question the episode answers. "I want to spend forty minutes on why carbon credits for farmland are failing audit" gives them something to picture. "I'd love to have you on my podcast" asks them to do the imagining.
3. The logistics up front. Running time, the platform you record on, remote or in person, and two or three date windows. Guests decline because of ambiguity more often than because of the topic.
4. One number about the show. Downloads per episode, subscriber count, the audience's industry, anything true. If the number is small, say the number and say who the audience is. Niche beats big for most guests, and a specific small audience is an easier yes than a vague large one.

Send it from a human address with the show name in the subject line, and follow up exactly once, seven to ten days later, with two sentences. A second follow-up converts almost nobody and costs you the relationship.

What you are doing here is selling a product to somebody who has no obligation to buy it, which is the same problem any business has. That framing is worth borrowing from the marketing side of our answer library, and it is why the pitch has to name a benefit instead of a request.

Onboarding is the part that loses bookings

The taxonomy's definition names onboarding materials as a separate stage, and that is accurate. Between yes and recorded, a booking dies of friction. Remove it with one link.

Build a single page or document containing the recording platform and what it needs, a headphones request, the running time, three or four of the questions you intend to ask, where the episode will be published, and what you will need from them afterwards: a headshot, a one-line bio, the URL they want promoted. Send it with the calendar invite, not in a separate email two days before. Settle the recording method itself before the first booking rather than during it, since the approach that survives a bad connection and the specifications the finished file has to hit are both set out in https://podanswer.com/blog/record-podcast-remote-guest.

Ask for the bio and headshot at booking rather than after recording. Chasing assets from somebody who has already given you their hour is the single most common reason episodes sit unpublished, and your publishing cadence suffers for it, which matters for the reasons set out in https://podanswer.com/blog/how-often-publish-podcast-episodes.

The tag almost nobody fills in

Here is the post-publication stage, and it is where guest episodes earn search traffic rather than just filling a slot.

The podcast namespace defines a <podcast:person> element for exactly this. Its documentation at https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/tags/person.md specifies that it lives in <channel> for the show's regular people and in <item> for an individual episode, that the node value is the person's full name or alias and should not exceed 128 characters, and that it carries four optional attributes: role, group, img for an avatar and href for a link to the person's own page. The role and group values come from the same taxonomy file, where Guest sits in the Cast group, and they are case-insensitive. If you omit role the spec says "host" is assumed, and if you omit group it assumes "cast".

The trap is in the same document. Person information in <item> wholly replaces everything in <channel>, so an episode that lists only the guest will show the guest and not you. The spec spells it out with a fictional show: a podcast hosted by Big Daddy with Sid James as a guest has to re-state Big Daddy as host inside that episode's item, or the host vanishes from that episode in any app reading the tag. List both, every time.

Two unglamorous habits do more than the tag. Put the guest's name in the episode title, because a person's name is the query somebody actually types, and write the guest's name, affiliation and the subject into the first two lines of the episode description, which is the text search engines index. Both points are covered in detail in https://podanswer.com/blog/podcast-show-notes-where-they-earn-search-traffic-and-where-they-don-t, and a published transcript extends the same effect across the whole hour, as https://podanswer.com/blog/podcast-transcripts-and-seo sets out.

Booking guests and being one are different jobs

Hosts conflate these two and they run on opposite mechanics. Finding guests for your own show is outbound sales with your microphone as the product. Getting booked on other people's shows is inbound positioning, where you need a one-sheet, a track record of appearances and a pitch about an audience that is not yours. If what you actually want is the second one, the method is in https://podanswer.com/blog/how-to-get-booked-as-a-podcast-guest, and the two efforts feed each other: every host you interview is a host who now owes you a listen.

Interview shows that have done this for years are the best place to study the format. https://podanswer.com/podcasts/recording-studio-rockstars has run hundreds of guest episodes in a narrow subject, which is what a working booking pipeline looks like from the outside.

Common questions

How many guests should I line up before launching a season?

Enough to cover your publishing cadence through the first six weeks plus two spares, because cancellations cluster. For a weekly show that is eight recorded episodes before the first one airs. Recording two in a single sitting is how most small shows build that buffer.

Should I pay for a guest matching service?

Only once you have exhausted your listeners, your past guests and the adjacent-show lists, because those three are free and produce better episodes. Matching platforms sell convenience and speed, and the honest reason to buy either is that you have a date on the calendar and no name against it.

Do podcast guests expect to be paid?

No, for ordinary interview shows. The exchange is the guest's expertise for your audience and a link, which is why your pitch has to describe the audience accurately. Paid appearances exist, and they belong in advertising rather than editorial, with disclosure.

What do I do when a guest never sends their bio or headshot?

Publish without it. Use their own published bio from their site, credit it, and ship the episode on schedule. A missing headshot costs you nothing compared with a dead week in the feed.

How do I find podcasts looking for guests, rather than guests for my show?

That is the inbound problem, and the same marketplaces serve it from the other side, along with host-run calls for guests on LinkedIn and in subject-specific newsletters. Start with the method in https://podanswer.com/blog/how-to-get-booked-as-a-podcast-guest.

Where this leaves you

Guest booking is four jobs wearing one name, and the sourcing job is the easy one. Build the list from your own listeners first, read other shows' guest lists for the cold outreach, write a pitch that names an episode instead of a show, and finish the job in the feed where the names become searchable.

Every guest conversation you record contains answers people are typing into Google this week, which is the part most shows leave in the audio. PodAnswer transcribes your episodes and publishes those moments as pages that link back to the show. Any podcast can be listed for free, the plans are described at https://podanswer.com/for-podcasters, and the Growth and Network package prices are at https://podanswer.com/pricing.