131: How to Get a Dozen New Sponsors

Today, I'm going to show you how to quickly identify a dozen or more companies to sponsor your podcast. And it's going to be easier to convince those companies to sponsor your podcast than any other company you've ever considered or talked to, I promise. This is Grow the Show. The podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schwydlin. I've been a full-time podcaster for over five years. I've helped more than 400 podcasters to generate more than 15 million downloads, and my own podcasts have generated over $2 million in revenue in the last five years. My mission is to show you how to get more listeners and monetize so that you finally get the audience and revenue that you want from your podcast. By the end of this episode, you're going to have a simple process to identify a dozen new sponsors for your podcast who will specifically want to reach your target audience and who will be some of the easiest sales you ever make. So how is that possible? How can you do that? We're going to dive into it, but side note real quick. I prefer to refer to podcast sponsors as advertisers. That's because sponsors implies that the business is paying you just so that the show can continue to exist. It implies that they are sponsoring the show, they're paying to support the show, and really that's not true. These companies, your sponsors, they don't really care if your show exists. They care if their company exists. They care about getting new customers. So in my mind, they are not sponsors, they are advertisers, and so for the rest of this piece, you're going to hear me refer to podcast sponsors as advertisers. So how can you get a dozen plus advertisers really quickly and easily? Well, to explain that, I'm going to tell a quick story. So I have a client who is an online coach. And a few months ago, she joined my podcast accelerator. So she's been in the program for like four months, and she just recently did what a lot of my clients do after working with me. She started another podcast, a new one, a second one, using the skills and tactics that she learned and applied to her original podcast in the program. The second podcast though that she launched is not business related. It is her and her sister doing a deep dive into their favorite fantasy book series. So they launched that podcast just two weeks ago. And as of yesterday, they have already gotten over 12,000 plays across audio and video of this podcast in two weeks. Now that's amazing. The show is blowing up fast. And so naturally, when I spoke to this client on a coaching call yesterday, the question was, okay, how do we monetize this thing? How can we make money, right? So the first thing that this client asked me was how I got the advertisers that I've had on the Grow the Show podcast. And I think it was maybe, you know, I could put her in contact and they could advertise on her show. And I said, I'm happy to answer that question, but I don't think that's where you should be looking for advertisers. However, you're on the right track. Now side note, before I talked about how this client could get advertisers, the full coaching that I gave to this client was, look, as much as you can tried the lay trying to pull the monetization lever right now, as long as you can and plow as much energy as possible into growing the podcast more, 12,000 downloads in two weeks is unbelievable. That is wild for a brand new show with no preexisting audience in that niche. And so I said, look, at this point in time, just focus on growing that number, capitalizing on the momentum, just do more of what you did to make that initial growth happen. Now, trust me, capitalize on the wave of explosive growth that you have today. And you're going to literally make 10 times more money later when you pull the monetization lever, even if it's just a few weeks later, then you will today. So I just wanted to say that first, like number one, I would say, don't worry about that quite yet. Focus on growth. However, having said that, people got bills to pay. I get it. And so I said, look, if you want to reach out to advertisers right now, totally fine. Just please make sure that having conversations with advertisers does not take your energy away from this crazy launch and this crazy momentum. Because if you do that, you're going to be basically stepping over dollars later to pick up pennies today. So that's the end of the sidebar. I said, focus on growth right now, however, when it is time for you to find your initial sponsors for the show and to you, the listener, what is time for you to find your first sponsors. Here are the exact steps that I recommend for how to identify a dozen perfect sponsors for your podcast in maybe 30 minutes. So here we go. Now, the goal with this exercise is to reverse engineer. Like with any audience, any podcast or any business, I have found for me that the fastest way to get what I want, whether that's growth, monetization, revenue, whatever it is, is to simply build upon the work of others, right? I would say find out. Don't figure out. Figure out takes forever, finding out takes a second, right? So most of my success has calm from reverse engineering. My podcasts grew by collaborating with creators who have already assembled my future audience for me. I model what other podcasters have achieved and even with my coaching business, which went from zero to seven plus figures in 18 months, I modeled off of other online coaches. So it's worked really well for me. I highly recommend it. Now the same thing is true for finding advertisers for your podcast. You want to reverse engineer. And the reason why this is important to understand is because here's the thing about podcast advertisers. You see, in order to get an advertiser to say yes and give you money in exchange for an ad spot on your show, they need to believe two things. So you need to convince them of two things. Number one, that advertising on a podcast in general is a worthwhile endeavor for them. That podcast advertising is a channel of new customers that will be good for them and that they should use. So you have to convince them of that first. And then you also have to convince them that your podcast is the best podcast for them to advertise on. So you have to sell them on two things. You have to sell them on podcast advertising. And then you also have to sell them on your podcast, right? So if you want to close advertiser deals fast, ideally, if you want to make that happen quicker, you'll want to find sponsors where you only need to convince them of one of those two things, right? They're hopefully already sold on either podcast advertising in general or they are already sold on you, right? And that you are worth working with. And honestly, this is why many of the creators that I work with, they're very first advertisers come from their personal network or past guests that they've had on their show, you know, those people are already sold on you. And so you just have to sell them on a podcast advertising. So it's easier to get those initial deals. But the thing is your network gets tapped out. It's going to get tapped out pretty quickly. And so you'll have to move on to other companies. So that's the question, where can you find companies that are already sold on podcast advertising as a channel, but maybe not yet on your podcast, right? The answer is by looking at what companies are sponsoring other podcasts. And so here is the hack. One of my favorite tools for podcast growth and monetization is called Raphonic, R-E-P-H-O-N-I-C. And Raphonic actually has this really cool free tool at raphonic.com slash graph. So the link is in the show notes. Now the Raphonic graph is an amazing tool that will show you a 3D graph of podcasts that share the same audience as yours. How does that work? Well, basically on Apple podcasts, if you open up your feed and you scroll down, what you're going to see is an area that says listeners also subscribed to, right? The shows that pop up there are the shows that the bulk of your podcast audience also listens to on a regular basis, right? So what Raphonic does, Raphonic is a podcast database. It looks at your show. It takes those related shows that your listeners also listen to. And then for each one of those shows, it pulls up the shows that their listeners also listen to and it puts them all together into this cool floating 3D graph that helps you visualize the podcast listenership web, right? And you can see what shows different listeners are listening to. So that means that that graph shows you all of the podcasts that your listeners today also listen to. And most importantly, the reverse is true as well, where it shows you the podcasts that are most likely to have your future listeners listening to them today. Because talking about podcast growth for a minute instead of monetization, but the fact of the matter is your future podcast listeners, most of them, they're not people who don't listen to podcasts today and are going to start tomorrow and start listening to your show. They're people who already listen to podcasts on a regular basis today, right? So right now this week, they're listening to podcasts, but they're not listening to yours yet simply because they haven't discovered that yours exists. So that means that there are other shows that they are listening to and our job to grow is to find out what those shows are and collaborate with those creators so that your future podcast listeners can finally find out that your show, which is going to be their favorite show, exists. That is my favorite way to quickly grow a podcast audience, collaborate with the shows that show up in the refonic graph. Okay, but why am I talking about this? What does this have to do with getting advertisers? Well, you can probably guess. This is also my favorite way to quickly identify companies that are most likely to be your best podcast advertisers. Those companies are already advertising on other podcasts and they just don't know that yours exists yet. They just need to find out. So how do you make that happen? Well, you pull up the refonic graph and you take note of the shows that show up that clearly serve a similar audience to yours. And then for each one of those shows that look like a good fit, you do some friendly and legal stocking where you pull up their podcast feed. You pull up their website and you see who that shows current or recent advertisers are. Those advertisers are going to be companies that are not only already sold on podcast advertising as a channel, which is good because you don't have to do that. They already currently have podcast ad dollars deployed targeting your niche. They are already spending money to advertise on podcasts to reach your listeners. They just need to find out that yours exists. So what's great about those companies is that you are probably not going to have to educate them on podcast advertising itself because they already do that. And you're also not even going to have to get them to pull the trigger on podcast advertising for the first time because they've already done that. You simply ask them, Hey, you know how you're advertising on these podcasts already? You want to just toss my show into that portfolio? Way easier sale. Their team members are already familiar with how it works. So it's, I'm telling you, it's going to be one of the easiest podcast ad sales you're ever going to make. And while you're doing that research, also take a look to see if those podcasts are monetized in any other ways. Are they selling anything, courses, products, whatever? That's going to be again, reverse engineering, you're probably your best path forward. As you do this, I recommend you reach out to and befriend the creators of the similar podcasts. You can say, Hey, we have really similar audiences. Look at this graph. Can you introduce me to your sponsors? Do you want to do a podcast swap? Should we collaborate? Let's be friends, right? Again, people have already done the work that you are trying to figure out on your own to grow and monetize your podcast and reach your audience. Your future podcast listeners are already listening to podcasts today. And there are podcasts and advertisers who are already reaching those people. You just got to plug into the work that they've already done. Tony Robbins says that success leaves clues. The same thing is true in podcasting. Reverse engineering is your best friend because if you try to do everything completely from scratch and you try to figure out instead of just finding out, I promise you, you're going to give up before you get what you want, or it's just going to take way longer and be way more painful and along the way you're going to be questioning whether it's worth it and whether you're good at this until eventually you just give up, right? Anything you want to do with your podcast has already been done. All you got to do is find out, not figure out. So I hope this episode is helpful. I hope it makes you money. If you're on YouTube, please leave a comment with any questions that you have. And let me know if you discover any good advertiser opportunities. And if you're on Apple or Spotify and you thought this was good, please leave a five-star review and share why this episode was so valuable. So that's going to do it. This has been Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I'm your podcast growth coach, and I will see you in the next one.