How to answer requests for unpaid exposure without agonising over it
Panels, podcasts and guest slots all cost you the same day. Here is a rule that decides them in a minute, and the one thing to ask for when you say yes.
The message arrives at eleven at night. It is friendly, slightly flattering, and it wants ninety minutes of you next Thursday for a panel, a podcast, a webinar takeover or a guest lesson. There is no fee. There is a line about great exposure and a really engaged community. You read it four times, put the phone face down, and think about it on and off until Sunday.
Why these requests are so hard to answer
They are hard because the offer is real. Sometimes a guest slot does put you in front of exactly the right two hundred people. Sometimes it is a friend, and the ask is really about the friendship. Sometimes it is the third time they have asked and you have run out of gentle deflections. None of that is imaginary, which is why "just say no to unpaid work" collapses the moment a good invitation lands.
The second difficulty is that the cost is invisible on the day you agree. Thursday is far away in April. It is not far away on the Wednesday night when you are writing slides instead of shipping the product. Unpaid slots do not take ninety minutes, they take the preparation, the travel or the tech check, the recovery, and the fortnight in which you were half-thinking about it.
And there is the part nobody says out loud: some of us accept because being wanted feels like proof the business is real. That is a bad reason and a very human one. A rule helps because it moves the decision away from the moment when your self-esteem has a stake in the answer. If you want a place to point people when you do say yes, a free lead magnet is the asset that makes the yes worth something later.
Deciding case by case versus deciding by rule
The rule is not stricter than your instincts. It is faster, and it costs you nothing in the moments when the instinct would have said yes anyway.
| Deciding each request on its merits | Deciding by a written rule |
|---|---|
| The answer depends on how the message made you feel at 11pm | The answer depends on criteria you set on a calm Tuesday |
| Every request costs a weekend of deliberation | Most requests are answered in under a minute |
| You say yes and then quietly resent it in April | You say yes to fewer things and turn up properly for those |
| The ask is vague, so the outcome is vague | You ask for one named thing: a spoken link in the episode |
| Listeners hear your name and forget it by Friday | Listeners land on a page made for them and join your customer list |
| You have no idea afterwards whether it worked | You can see the sign-ups the appearance produced |
The rule, in five lines
Write this in a note on your phone and paste from it. Adjust the thresholds to your own life, then leave them alone for six months.
- 1Does it cost more than three hours in total, counting preparation, travel and recovery? If yes, it is a working day, price it like one.
- 2Would I go if nobody I know would ever hear about it? This strips out the vanity and leaves the actual audience question.
- 3Is their audience mine? Not adjacent, not interesting: mine, the people who would buy the thing I sell.
- 4Can I ask for the link? A spoken mention plus a URL in the show notes or the event page. If they cannot do that, it is publicity for them and a favour from you.
- 5Do I have a page ready for those people? If not, the answer is no for now, because a mention without a destination evaporates by the following morning.
What to ask for when the answer is yes
Ask for a link to a page built for that specific audience, and make that page a free product rather than a home page. On store.fan a lead magnet is simply a product priced at $0: the listener goes through the same checkout, gets the file instantly on a private order page they can return to, and lands on your customer list with a note of where they came from. That last part is the whole reason to bother.
Give the page a name that matches the conversation. If the episode is about pricing, the free thing should be the pricing worksheet you referred to twice, not a general newsletter sign-up. Say the URL slowly, once, in the middle of the conversation rather than at the very end, and ask the host to put it in the notes. That is the entire negotiation, and most hosts are pleased to have something concrete to point at.
A worked example
Suppose a podcast with a few hundred regular listeners invites you on. You spend an hour preparing, an hour recording and an hour recovering. You mention a free checklist made for exactly that audience. Suppose 40 people visit the page and 14 of them complete the $0 checkout. Those 14 are now on your customer list, exportable to CSV on any plan including the free one, and if two of them later buy something at £39, the appearance paid for itself in cash as well as reach.
That arithmetic is illustrative, not a forecast, and plenty of appearances return nothing at all. The point is that the version with a named free product can be measured, while the version without one leaves you guessing forever. Over a year, a handful of measurable appearances beats a dozen you cannot evaluate. If you want to see how the free product and the list fit together, the features overview lays out the ten product types on one page.
Build the free page you point people at, on a plan that costs nothing and takes no platform fee.
Start for freeThe mistake most people make
They negotiate for the wrong currency. Hours are spent trying to extract a small fee from an organiser who does not have one, when the thing worth having was always the link and the mention. The second version of the same mistake is saying yes and then sending everyone to a generic page with eleven equal links on it. Two hundred people hear your name, thirty visit, and every one of them faces a menu instead of the thing you just spent an hour describing.
Short, warm, no reasons. Thank them, say it is not something you can take on at the moment, and offer one useful alternative if you have one, such as a person who would be great for it. Reasons invite negotiation; brevity does not.
The same rule applies with one addition: free work should have an edge you would be happy to see repeated. A sample lesson or a short template is fine. Building something bespoke for nothing is a job, and it should be priced.
Treat it as advertising, not exposure, and judge it on the same basis: how many people arrived on your page, and how many joined your list. If you would not buy the ad, do not buy the slot.
It is what makes the difference between a download and a relationship. The buyer gets a private order page they can return to, and you get a named person on your customer list with their purchase history attached.
You will still say yes to things that make no commercial sense, because sometimes the person asking matters more than the calculation. That is fine. The rule is not there to make every decision for you. It is there so that the ninety per cent of requests that were never right for you stop costing a weekend of thinking each.
Give every mention somewhere to land: a free product, a private order page and a customer list that builds itself.
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