How to make money from a podcast! (And you don't need ads!)

One of the biggest challenges of doing a podcast

is figuring out how to make money from your podcast.

It's not easy, but it is very doable,

provided you take the right strategy. And right

now I'm going to take you through exactly what that strategy

is.

When most people think about monetizing a podcast, what they're

probably thinking about is advertising and sponsorship,

those pre roll ads that you hear on some of the big

podcasts in the world. But there's a reason why

those podcasts are monetizing in that way.

It's because they come with baked in audience. These

advertisers know that these big podcasts will have

huge audiences based on their brand equity. Well, what if

you're a bit lesser known? Maybe you're somebody

that's an influencer in a very niche space, or perhaps you're a

brand that isn't a household name. What can you do to

monetize a podcast then? Well, there are several ways that you can do

that. I advocate personally

for having the podcast being the marketing

platform rather than the product. You are

the product. You the person that brings all the genius and

insight to your people, to your tribe, as

the Gary Vaynerchuk crew would say. But

before we get more deeply into that, let's talk about all the

options that are available to you when it comes to monetizing a podcast.

We've already mentioned sponsorship and ads. Now, if you're getting

around about 5000 downloads

per episode within the first 30 days of release, then

you're eligible to start looking at that as a revenue generating

model. You're not going to make a fortune from it because the

CPM rates, as in cost per melee

rates, are very low. You're looking at around about

$25 per every 1000 listeners you

have. If you've only got 5000 downloads per

episode, that's not going to be a lot of money for you unless you've

got loads of ads in your podcast episodes. And if you're only

getting 5000 downloads per episode,

you might need to have that conversation with yourself about

striking the balance. Are you going to upset your

listeners? The few listeners that you've got?

Comparatively, given you've got 5000

downloaders, are you going to upset them? If

you load their content with ads? There's a real balance to be

struck here, and the ends are weighted between

continuing getting trajectory for your podcast reach in

terms of new listeners and getting money from those that you

have. I'd almost always suggest not having

a pre roll ad on a podcast unless it's absolutely huge. And I'm

talking millions of listeners. Even then, I

would get you to seriously consider whether or not a pre roll ad is a

great idea. A mid roll ad can be really

useful, but here's where I think the

nuances. If you use a mid roll ad to advertise a third

party, as in a sponsor or advertiser that wants

to use your podcast as a platform for their marketing

messaging, then you might be

possibly hurting yourself because the listeners aren't invested

in your advertisers, they're invested in you. So for

me, I would say if it's only about revenue generation

and you're looking to grow your revenue base with

income from the podcast, consider using

that mid role slot to advertise your own services. And

if you don't actually have a service offering or any kind of offering

for someone to pay for, then maybe think about getting that

started. Coaching can be a great product

for certain industries and certain service providers.

Otherwise you could do things like retreats. You could do

one to one sessions, you could even do group

webinars and charge tickets for those

there's affiliate marketing I'm not personally a massive

fan of affiliate marketing because for me I feel it lends

itself to people advertising for the sake of getting the

revenue rather than just sharing a good product

and endorsing that because they truly believe in it. Any article

you see on this website or on any of my podcast episodes, any

mention of any brands or products, it's because I

use them personally and can recommend them based on that

use. You'll never catch me running an affiliate campaign for

any product I haven't either used myself extensively

or still use. Another

option for revenue generation is merchandising. That could be

anything from t shirts, mugs,

pens, you name it, any sort of stationery. A lot of people

probably think about setting up an Etsy store or any other kind of e commerce

website and have listeners buying those products.

And that's the revenue generation model. But I'd like you to think about

this another way. Perhaps you could use the

merchandising as a gift in return

for the podcast listener helping you to grow your

show, as in recommendations, sharing of

episodes, reviews, proving that they followed your show in Apple

podcasts or Spotify, and maybe even getting their friends to do the

same. That way what you're actually doing is instead of

selling the merchandise, you're rewarding listeners

with the merchandise and you're ultimately going to get

more revenue benefit in the longer term anyway because you're going to be

able to get free advertising for your podcast. What better

way to build a business than have your listeners

as your biggest advocates in business? They call this the

ladder of loyalty, and if you can get someone at the top of that

ladder, you're on to a winner.

Crowdfunding and listener support. Yeah, we've all heard of those

websites that charge a membership in return for exclusive

content. Patreon is one of those. You've got superfans and all these

other websites as well. Buy me a coffee. That is another

useful tool for generating revenue from your podcast

content. The problem with this is a lot of people come into this thinking it's

going to be really easy money. But if you

think about it, it's actually a lot harder than offering your

own service as an offering and using the

podcast as a marketing platform. For that, we're back into the

domain of the podcast being the product.

There's no one side fits all to this. What one person might

see value in, in terms of your content, someone else might think, well, why am

I going to pay for that? So if you're looking at early releases of

episodes, one set of listeners might think that's a brilliant thing, that's well

worth investing money in, whereas other listeners would be like, well, I might

as well wait until it's for free on the free version of the feed.

So you've really got to think quite hard about how you're going to

make this offer worthwhile investing in.

You could do behind the scenes content that could be valuable to somebody,

maybe even exclusive content that only paid members

get. But of course, you've then got to bear in mind the conversion rates. So

you might be putting all that effort in to create content that

only five to ten people will ever hear. And if your main

audience is thousands, sometimes it could

be quite human for you to concentrate all that effort

on the thousands of people that aren't giving you money and

cutting corners with the few people that

yes, they're giving you money, but they're not giving you those dopamine

hits. Well worth thinking that one through before you follow

down that path. As a revenue generation model,

live events and workshops is another

feasible way of you getting some revenue from your podcast.

I'm talking about charging listeners to come to a live

event and see the podcast playing out in person, or maybe

workshops around the theme of your podcast. If you're a

business coach, this could be a really, really good way of

generating some new leads for one to one coaching by having a

group coaching session at a predetermined location that they

can show up at. It's a great way of offering listeners a

taste of what your products are.

So we're going to come back to my favorite type of

monetization model for podcast episodes, and that

is you as the product offering your

services and your products with the podcast being the marketing

platform. The great thing about this is it's really easy to

funnel. You can start off by offering a free download that sort of acts as

an introduction to what you do and who you are. Once they've downloaded that free

product, you can then start upselling them because they'll be on your email

list. You can start talking to them and nurturing them and

educating them as to what you do. Those bigger

problems they have that you can solve. You can help them

identify those things that you can solve for them in

real time, in regular communication through your email

that's updating them about new podcast episodes. See how this

works. So that's why that's my favorite method

of monetizing a podcast, because then you

don't have the ickiness of dealing with advertisers and making sure

that their ads are going out and that you're getting paid for them and all

that complicated paperwork that's going to be involved in that. You don't

have to worry about memberships and keeping your listeners entertained and

ensuring that they're getting the value for money from those special bits

of content that you're having to record for them. You're definitely not having to worry

about growing volume of audience in order to make enough

money to survive and keep the podcast paid for. There's

no ceiling on your earnings with this method. You

earn as much as you decide, and that's down to

how much you invest in the marketing of your podcast. And if you need

to know more about how to grow a podcast in 2024,

then you should definitely check out this other article that I've created

on Podnospodcasting Co. Uk

blog. The Podmaster is a Podnos

podcasting production. Find out more about us at Podnos

Co. UK. That's

podknows. Co. UK.