Finding suitable guests for your podcast when you’re starting out can be quite a challenge.

The issue is usually one of two things: Either you don’t know where to look, or your DM or email-based invitations are rejected or outright ignored, simply because the invitees are not familiar with you or your podcast since you’re just getting started.

On the bright side, there are a LOT of interesting people out there, most of whom you haven’t even heard of. So we need to play the numbers game here- if you invite tons of potential guests, a good few of them will gladly accept your invitation.

And so here’s the sauce: We’ve thought of and applied many strategies for finding guests. Some worked, many didn’t. The resource that proved to be the most effective was hidden in plain sight, right there in everybody’s favorite application: Instagram following lists.

Of course, you can scroll through the reels and explore feed, and you might find content creators who fit the bill. However, the algorithm only shows you the top-rated accounts, hence hiding away some very interesting creators and influencers who might not be ranking as much. The real gems lie hidden in the often-ignored following lists.
Let’s say we want to create a podcast about fashion photography, which would be suitable for us as a production house. Our guest preference would be influencers specialized in fashion content creation, fashion brand owners and personnel, and fashion photographers.

We think of a few key people in the industry, we search up their accounts, and we go through their following lists, as they’re likely to be following a lot of fashion content creators and brand owners. We could also look up other content creation studios and see who they’re following, since they’re likely to be following people in the fashion niche.
Another element we can play on is geography, as we scour the followings of content creators located in our country or region, furthering the likelihood of finding suitable guests. In our case as a production house in the UAE, we could google “Production studio in the UAE” or “Fashion photography in Dubai”, which would yield many results for Instagram profiles for us to dig through.

Apply this strategy through accounts in your own niche, and you can easily find 50-100 profiles a day of people who would make interesting guests for your podcast. Do this regularly, and you’ll never worry about finding guests again. Enjoy!