Using AI to Prepare for Podcast Interviews | Mike Montague

As podcast guests, showing up unprepared, overly scripted, or simply repeating yourself in every podcast interview can quickly lead to burnout and a lack of results. But, there's a quick way to ensure you're always uniquely prepared for every podcast interview! In this episode, Mike Montague explains how to utilize AI to help with preparation and positioning for upcoming interviews. Get ready to tailor your message uniquely for every host and their audiences in a way that gets you remembered!

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Chapters

00:00 Harnessing AI for Podcast Preparation
02:53 Crafting Your Podcast Persona
05:45 Sharpening Your Talking Points
09:04 Connecting Through Storytelling

Takeaways

AI can help you show up sharper and more relevant.
Great guests package their ideas well for hosts.
Context builds trust, and AI can give you that context.
Be interesting and memorable, not just prepared.
AI can be the best brainstorming partner you've ever had.
Use AI to save time in your prep and promotion.
Know the show, know the host, and know the audience.
Don't let AI make you sound more robotic.
Treat AI like a coach, not a crutch.
Find fresh stories and personal insights with AI.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/361

📊 This month's Independent Podcasters Report is now available! To see podcasting industry insights that matter for indie podcast hosts and podcast guests, please visit https://PodMatch.com/Report!

Chapters

• 0:00 Harnessing AI for Podcast Preparation
• 3:12 Crafting Your Podcast Persona
• 6:04 Sharpening Your Talking Points
• 9:23 Connecting Through Storytelling

Transcript

Let's talk about how you can use AI to prepare for your next podcast interview. Look, AI can help you show up as a sharper, more relevant, more confident podcast guest by doing all of the heavy lifting before you hit record, but only if you treat it like a collaborator and not a crutch. If you're worried about the host asking you a question and your mind going blank, even though you know the answer cold or worse,

You're an old pro and you're worried about repeating the same old stories and talk tracks you've told in the last five interviews and your audience won't care about the podcast because they've heard absolutely everything before. Those are moments of misconnections and it's just awkward. It's costly. It erodes trust and it wastes the opportunity to leave a lasting impression. And it makes it hard for you to promote your own interview. So before you do anything else, I want to talk to you about how AI

can help you become more relevant and more prepared, not by scripting you, but by preparing you. I'm Mike Montague, founder of Avenue9, host of the Human First AI Marketing Podcast, where I started this year because I've been a podcaster for over a decade with hundreds of episodes and millions of downloads under my belt. But AI changed the podcasting game for me two years ago, and I had to jump in on this. I hope you will too after hearing this because

We're going to talk about how you can really use AI to make you a better human, not how to automate you, script you, or turn you into a podcasting robot. We have those now and we don't need it. We need you to be yourself. So look, rule number one, the big idea here is AI should never write your script. It should train your brain and give you additional context for the interview that helps you understand what to say, not how you're going to say it.

If used well, it becomes your research assistant, your pattern detector, your voice coach, your brainstorming partner, all rolled into one. Good guess. Don't show up and wing it. They show up prepared, but not with prepared remarks. They show up thoughtful, human, relevant, and AI can help get you there faster. So let's talk about four ways you can do that as a podcast. Yes. Number one is preparing your marketing assets. Before you ever hit record, your positioning

is already doing the talking for you with the podcast host. So most guests lose their audience before their interview even starts because their bios are boring. Their topics are generic. Their pitch emails to hosts fall flat. AI can help you make a better first impression by putting your best impression out there with your bio, a memorable headline, witty pitch email that's like short, punchy. It warms up the podcast host. It shows that you're relevant. gives them suggested.

questions and even a little personal touch to make sure that it resonates. You can draft all of this stuff, even social media posts to promote your interview before you do it. You can say, Hey, I'm getting ready to record another one. Right. Three LinkedIn posts for me to promote this podcast interview and avoid sounding overly self-promotional, but giving hype to the podcast that you're excited to be on and the host that is running that show.

Great guests don't just have great ideas. They package them well for the host so that they can be prepared to ask you the right questions, talk about you in a credible way, and be more relevant to their audience. So that's tip number two right here is know the show, know the host, and know the audience that you're talking to. Generic answers lose attention. Context wins hearts here. Podcasting is personal. The best guests speak to the audience, not at them.

AI helps you research what matters to those audiences. So you can just put in a link to the podcast, tell it to analyze the transcripts and look for recurring themes, tones, give you 10 ideas for podcast topics that might be relevant to what you do. You can ask what topics have already been done. What are common questions from the hosts? How long are the shows and how long you should be prepared to talk? Do the hosts like to participate in the shows?

All of that adds value and helps you show up your best. Study the host style, study the formats and the podcast structure, and then study the values and the audience of what people are trying to get so you can align your talk tracks to what the audience and the show hosts care about. Context builds trust, and AI can give you that context faster than listening to hours and hours of their podcasts, especially if you're showing up on a bunch of, still recommend it.

Definitely listen to an episode, get the energy, get a feel for the host and know what you're talking about. But now you can analyze all of the podcasts in their feed, not just listening to a bit of one of them before you jump on. Number three, we need to make sure that we sharpen our talking points before we get on the show. Being interesting isn't enough. You have to be remembered. And I feel like podcasts guests fall into one or two categories either.

They're overly prepared, they're scripted, they're robotic, and they're delivering what they want to talk about and they're ignoring the host or they just show up completely unprepared. have no idea about the show, the host, even what they're talking about. They hope the host is going to ask them interesting questions and they're hope that they're going to make up an interesting answer on the spot. But if you really want to do your best in an interview, AI can be the best brainstorming partner you've ever had. You can role play.

and have it ask you tough questions, you can just say, ask me 10 hard podcast questions based on my bio that somebody might ask. Or you can refine your key points. Say, rewrite this story that I've been telling in five different ways. One that's punchy, one that's humorous, one that's emotional, one that's data-driven with stats, research some background information for me, or just help me tell this story better. When you improve your analogies and metaphors,

how you show up and how you resonate with audiences. So you could say to AI, suggest a metaphor that could explain this complicated concept in a fun, engaging or interesting way. You can rehearse with AI that helps you land the lines you wanna say without losing the thread of the story or losing the audience with a really boring explanation. Tip number four.

Find fresh stories, new angles, and personal insights. Great guests don't just inform, they connect with other people. So AI can help you surface stories from your background, your work history, know, experiences that you've had that you want to share with the audience, and then turn those into great personal moments. So you might be able to prompt AI and say, hey, based on everything you know about me, what are 10 personal moments where I

overcome a challenge related to this podcast topic that I could use to connect with the audience or ask for new angles. What's a contrarian take on this podcast topic where I could create a great hook for a podcast interview. Maybe ask for emotional insights, help me explain the emotional journey behind my business and my story and turn these intellectual talking points of the scientific discovery that I've made.

and turn it into a story that resonates with this podcast audience. When you take your stories and your storytelling and amplify it with AI, you find the ones worth telling. You find ways to tell them in better and more interesting ways. And you really hope that those concepts land and resonate with the host, the audience, and everybody that you're going to be promoting with. So it makes you look good. Closing thoughts here. The warning is don't let AI

make you sound more robotic. should make you sound more human in what you're talking about. You should sound like the best version, most prepared, most thoughtful, most engaging version of yourself. So treat it like a coach, not like a crutch that's going to do all the work for you. Clarify your message, discover your own personal voice, spend some time going back and forth with AI and arguing with it and seeing what you can come up with for better ideas.

Use these thoughts that connect more deeply with every single audience that you speak to. Use AI to save time in your prep and your promotion. Use it to show up ready and help you tell more interesting stories. Just don't use it during the interview. Once you show up and you're doing a podcast interview, you close AI down, you don't look anything up, you don't pull up scripts, you turn all of it off and you focus on being present, being yourself.

and connecting with the host. Good luck. Have fun with it. And if you need any help, just ask AI how it can help. Good luck.