Exploring Guest Scheduling Programs

Child 0:00

Wakey wakey eggs and bakey.

Fuzz Martin 0:05

Good morning podcasters, it's a me, Fuzz Martin. Thank you for coming on to my semi weekly show about marketing, advertising, and public relations tips for content creators. Like you. I hope you'll subscribe to the show and join me as you walk the dog, drive to the gym, workout, make your coffee, take a shower, or you know, whatever fits into your schedule. Today, we're talking about lining up guests for your show. There's nothing more annoying than trying to get to calendars in order. So you can meet with somebody that has a schedule that's equally as busy as yours. Right? That's Friday to work. Yeah, does Monday at eight work, I can make 945 Hang one, let me get back to you. The good news is there are a number of calendar programs out there that make this a lot easier for you. With most calendar scheduling programs, you can connect them to your online calendar, whether that's Gmail, Outlook, office 365, Apple's iCloud mail, and it sets a window of time when you're available to record the length of time for your recording window, and then creates a link that you can share with your guests. So your guests clicks on the link, and then looks at the different times that your calendar is available. And voila, they can schedule a time that works best in their calendar, and you don't have to go back and forth with your guests trying to find a time that works for both of you. About this time last year, I purchased a year long subscription to Calendly. Calendly is a really easy to use calendar program. It connects to Gmail, office 365, Outlook, iCloud, et cetera. And Calendly allows for meeting polls that allow multiple people to vote on a time that works best for the group. So let's say you have two guests, or three guests coming on your show, they can all find a time that fits into all of their schedules. And then they offer easy reminders to get guests to decrease the chances that you're going to get ghosted by those guests. Calendly has a free version, but for some reason, I don't remember why. But I purchased the $8 a month version on the annual plan, which means it came out to about $100 per year after taxes. There are also programs like Doodle poll, which are similar to the Calendly poll option. But they're more geared toward those large groups. There is a free version of Doodle poll too, but your guests are going to see ads when they go to that. And if you're cool with that, it's not a bad choice. If you are working on a budget, it's something you can do. But if you're trying to brand your guest booking process, so that it feels premium, then perhaps I would stay away from Doodle poll, unless you pay for the premium version. There's also something I'm not sure how to put my finger on it about sending guests to a program with the word Doodle in it. But if it works for you, it works. So I have this Calendly subscription. But shortly after I purchased the annual subscription, Google Calendar released appointment booking features are those using Google workplace, which I do it is very similar to Calendly. Though not quite as feature rich, you can set up all sorts of different appointment slots, and then you can send out various links. And it allows for reminder, emails, automatic Google meat links, et cetera. It's not quite as easy to use as Calendly. And it's not quite as pretty as Calendly. But it works nonetheless. And if you're already on the right level of Google workspace, it is no extra charge. You have to be on a Google workspace Business Standard plan or higher. Otherwise, if you are using Google workspace Business Standard or higher, the Google calendar appointment scheduling feature is included with your plan. You simply go into Google Calendar, you click on the Create drop down on the left, where you would create a new Google Calendar event. Click appointment schedules, and then follow the prompts on the screen. It's pretty simple to set up. They also now offer Google calendar appointment scheduling with any Google account, but it's $9 a month to get their login to Gmail, go to your Google Calendar, click on the Create drop down and then click appointment schedule. You'll see a little premium tag next to it. And it will prompt you to subscribe to an individual Google workspace account. If you're going to go that way. I say spend the extra $3 a month and get your own domain to go with your email. But that's totally up to you and your budget. One kind of pro tip for you with any of these calendar scheduling programs. The platform is going to give you a huge URL that you can use to share with your guests. If it's with Calendly, it would be like calendly.com/fuzz. But I recommend that you use a link shortener that is, relative to your show if you have one. If you're using Captivate, you can then use their attributions link in order to create a shortcode. Some other platforms allow this as well. For instance, on my 15 minutes with fuzz show, I send my guests the link fuzz.cc slash book. And that gets them to my booking page. So which one do I prefer? I really like Calendly. The interface is great, it's intuitive, it looks good to my guests. There are also many more customization and scheduling tools than Google. If I was not using Google workspaces, I would be renewing Calendly. That said, I do have Google workspaces. And we're already paying at a level where I don't need to pay any extra for the appointments scheduling service. From the guest side, it actually looks great. It's a familiar Google look. And while it's not as fancy on the back end, as Calendly I'm gonna save the $100 a year that I would have spent and stick with Google, but again, Google's get my money for its other workspace tools, primarily Gmail. Thank you for listening to good morning. podcasters you can find every episode including more robust walkthroughs of these tools on Good Morning pod.com New episodes of Good morning podcasters at least twice weekly, more when I'm able. Also we host podcasting sucks every Saturday morning, Joe, Jeff Townsend and I as we walk through some of the things that make podcasting hard to do. Tomorrow morning, we're talking about Twitter's new Verification Program and the merits behind it, or the reasons not to get it. We'll talk to you next time right here. Good morning. podcasters