How Do I Make Money With This?
Brad Smith
Lessons
Class Introduction
11:15 2History Lesson: Podcasting 101
05:38 3The Engine Powering Your Show
14:40 4Elements of a Strong Show
19:08 5Grow Your Audience
08:35 6Measuring Success & Setting Achievable Benchmarks
08:11 7How Do I Make Money With This?
04:20 8Who Owns Your Content?
07:08Lesson Info
How Do I Make Money With This?
How do I make money with this? Identify an early strategy which makes sense for you. And I say this because you cannot do everything. You do not want to do everything at all. Listener donations, exclusive content, niche sponsors, that's one thing. People think well I don't have 10,000 downloads a month, I can't get an advertiser yet. I can't get a sponsor. That's actually not true. I've seen some wonderful podcasts that have a small audience but because they are very focused on a specific group of people it's actually very easy to go out there. I don't know why I got stuck on peanut butter today but if I do have my podcast on peanut butter and I know that everybody listening to my show loves peanut butter, I could probably sell an ad to a peanut butter company. So again, don't worry about the Casper Mattresses and the Square Space. Think about who your audience is talking to and go from there. Injected ads, we talked about earlier. That is another way to generate revenue. To where you ...
just upload your show and these ads get plugged in much like TV commercials. I am not an advocate for that. But it is a way to basically make a few pennies every time somebody listens to your episode. Live events. Sounds like a big scary thing. Do something small in your town. If you get the opportunity, do a small event and just bring out people and be like I'm gonna record my podcast live. Even if there's five people there. I've been a part of some podcast live events and they are actually a whole lot of fun. And you have an audience to interact with. And also products. That counts too is how do you make money off your podcast. The products that you can sell, the stickers that you can sell, if you have a website, that is revenue. And a lot of people think how am I going to grow this show big enough to land a major sponsor when in reality you can do a few of these things. And actually generate some good revenue from your show. It does not have to be ad dollars. I know a lot of shows that don't want ads. And listener donations drives their show in addition to products. They sell T-shirts, they sell buttons, they sell pens, and they have a Patreon. So they're making money from their listeners. You need to find out kind of what makes sense for your show. And what's gonna make sense for you. If you do not want to have ads, do not feel like you have to have ads because there is a lot of ways to generate revenue. Don't wait for the money to come to you. And this is one thing if you do want to bring advertisers in, you need to treat your podcast like it's a company that you're pitching to investors. You need a media kit. The media kit needs to cover a few important things. Meaning when you say hey, would you want to advertise on my show? Don't send an advertiser a link to an episode and say listen to it. They can find that easily if they want to. Things you do want to show them is one, passion. Why does this show exist in the world? Why does it need to exist? Why does anybody want to listen to it? Cast some vision. You want to show no matter how basic the numbers, any early traction. If your show is three weeks old and you went from zero listens to 300 a week. That is a damned good metric. Put that in your media kit. Any basic geographic and demographic information. If you have a lot of advertisers in Seattle, Washington, that's great to note in your deck. Because when advertisers do want to get involved, that's fantastic for an advertiser that maybe has a lot of customers in Seattle. Social media growth. Don't just talk about downloads. Talk about the people interacting on social media. On Twitter, on Facebook, conversations around it. If you have a Twitter or a Facebook just for your podcast, that is an important metric in a media kit. So many times we all get caught up in just well this is my downloads. It's much more than that. It is a community and there is a lot happening around it. The other thing you can do in your media kit is if you want to name drop, if you've had a guest on that's recognizable even in a small community, mention that person. And the most exciting thing is it's amazing what can be said in three to four slides. You by no means need a 30 page media kit for your show. You can say a lot in three to four slides unless I'm making the slides. As you've seen today.
Ratings and Reviews
Jon
Good course, I liked the fact that it is VERY recent and therefore relevant. It's currently October 2018 and I believe this came out less than a month ago. Great information for any podcaster, new and old. Goes over some great updates in updated ios for apple podcasts as well. Thanks Brad! -Jonathan Frederick, HHH Podcast
Paola
This was extremely useful and inspiring, I recommend everyone to watch this class before all the other ones for inspiration!
Student Work
Related Classes
Podcasting