152 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #10: The Only Way to Monetize

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Smidland, I am your podcast growth coach, and today we are tackling a burning question that virtually every podcaster has, which is, how do I monetize my podcast? Now just to bring you up to speed, we are now entering into level four of the podcast success ladder. So level one was having a clear cat one premise, level two was keeping the listeners that you get. Level three was learning how to get more listeners via social media and podcast testing. And yes, now we are ready for level four, which is monetization. But before we talk about how to monetize, let's first clear up a common misconception. You see, in my opinion, asking, how do I monetize my podcast? Isn't actually a useful question to ask, and it's not useful because it's too vague at what moment is your podcast considered monetized? Is it when you start making money? If so, who is it that's paying you? Well, here is the reality. And I talked about this in lesson one of this 12-part course, but to recap, in my opinion, every form of podcast monetization boils down to getting your listeners to buy something. It could be either something from you or something from your sponsors slash partners slash brand deals. But ultimately, every single form of you making money from your podcast comes down to you influencing purchasing decisions. Now, novice podcasters tend to not see this distinction. And so they default to seeking, quote unquote, sponsors in order to monetize. They just think, oh, monetize equal sponsorships. But the thing is securing sponsorships is complex. It requires a significant audience size to be profitable, and it takes way more work than you think. It is a full-time job in and of itself. And unless you have a pretty freaking big audience, you're making peanuts. And it's true. Many of the podcasters that I work with are surprised at how much work goes into finding and pitching and selling and closing and fulfilling on brand deals. Plus, as podcasting becomes more mature, the competition increases, meaning it costs more for your podcast to stand out. There was a time ten years ago where you could just whip out a microphone, talk into the mic, publish it on Apple podcasts, and your audience would grow fairly easily. Those days are gone. It takes far more time, energy, and yes, money to make your show stand out. And I've got news. You're likely going to need to invest more to grow your podcast to the size where it will finally make sponsorship dollars worthwhile to you. It's not about just growing your show so that someday you can earn money from sponsors. It's about earning money now so you can fund your show's growth to the point where you earn meaningful dollars from sponsors. It's not I will grow so I can monetize. It's I need to monetize so I can grow. And that's why I usually advise podcasters to focus on selling something directly to their audience in order to monetize. And that is something that you can do right away. So that's probably the second most common monetization question that I get is, how big does my audience size need to be in order to monetize? And again, if you think that monetize equals sponsorships, then yes, you do need a certain audience size. It depends on your niche, it depends on a lot of things. Generally, what I recommend is don't even think about it until a thousand downloads per episode really don't take it seriously till about five to ten paper episode, which is massive, right? It's going to take some significant time, money and energy to get the show to that point. But again, if you're asking how soon can I monetize and you're assuming monetization means sponsorships, then yeah, you can't make any money until you have 10,000 downloads per episode, which is massive. But if you understand that monetization simply occurs when you get your listeners to buy something and the thing that they buy gets you a cut of that thing, then you can monetize your show literally anytime that you want. And regardless of whether your show is related to a business that you already have or not, nine times out of 10, what I found is that the best way to monetize a podcast at first is by selling something directly to your audience. In most cases, what I have found is that that is where the real money is. And so what can you sell to your listeners? Well, there's a lot of options. It certainly depends on your type of show, your niche, your category, but generally the options include, but aren't at all limited to number one, digital products, like courses, guides, ebooks. What's cool about those is that those are the type of things that you make once and you can continuously sell over and over again without having to do any extra work. So we love those. You can sell services, which is anything done for you. So you might have some sort of agency or you might do something for your listener base. You can sell coaching and consulting where you directly advise your listeners on some on whatever it is that they're looking to do. You can have a membership or a Patreon, which is usually where you have a grab bag of different things that people get in exchange for monthly fee. You can sell merch, but be careful with merch, ask anybody who is in the clothing industry and they will tell you that margins on clothing are very, very low. People are willing to pay more to support their favorite shows, but you're really going to have to put together a heck of a merchandise operation for that to be your full income. But it's possible. It's doable. I've seen it done. And above all else, merchandise can be a great supplement. I've seen tons of podcasts who make some decent dollars selling merch. It's not their end all be all of monetization, but it really helps. You can do live events either in person or online. These are something that are growing in popularity, actually. And I've been surprised at how many podcasts are going in on live tours in 2024. So that's something that's totally doable. And actually, that was the bulk of the monetization of my very first podcast, which was a show about my hometown of Philadelphia, percentage wise, most of the money that I made from that show was from holding live interviews, live, basically concerts where I did live episodes of the show. That worked really well because the show was about Philadelphia, so it was really easy to do. All of my listeners lived in the same city and you can make some good money doing that. You can also put together group programs or masterminds where your listeners pay to be a part of a small group. You could do exclusive content or behind the scenes access, a word of caution though, be cautious, offering tons of bonus content. It's really easy to just be like, oh, pay me and I'll do extra episodes. I'll do five extra episodes a week. You'll get episodes earlier than everybody else. Be careful making that promise. It's hard enough to stay consistent with the podcast for free as it is. So that's something that I see podcasters do all the time. They offer bonus content as a part of a Patreon membership or something like that. And then what they find is that they've just essentially added a second podcast to their slate. They already had enough trouble getting the first one out on time, but now they have a second one and they have to race to put together all this bonus content. And usually that bonus content is not as good as their free stuff. And so the people who pay for it are disappointed. So be very, very careful with bonus content. Behind the scenes access tends to work in my opinion easier because it's something that you can sell to your listener base that doesn't involve anything new, right? Hey, get behind the scenes access. That already exists. You don't have to make something new. So that's a really, really great one. Or you might be a business owner who offers some sort of high ticket hybrid, which includes many of the above. So a lot of high ticket programs have a course and coaching and a membership and a community. So those are the many, many, many different things that you can sell directly to your listener base. And so you might be a podcaster who already has a business. You might already have some sort of product or service to offer or you might be a podcaster who has never offered anything. You have never sold anything directly to anybody. And so I want to talk to each of you. So first, you've business owners with existing products and services out there. For the love of all things good, please talk about your offers on your podcast more. I am often floored at how many podcasting business owners have never mentioned their offers on their podcast. Or maybe they mentioned it once and then they come to me and they're like, I'm really struggling. How can I monetize my show? And I say, oh, well, I mean, how many sales do you get of your program while we never talk about the program on the podcast? What? Why not? If there's any people on this planet who are going to be your next sales, it's people who are listening to your podcast. Really what happens is the business owner is afraid of selling. They're afraid of turning off their listener base. We're going to talk about that in the upcoming episodes. We're going to talk about how I promise you the line that you're worried about crossing is miles away from you is so much farther ahead of you than you realize. And that really your listeners are going to be relieved because I have had podcasters that I've spoken with who have told me that they are so scared of talking about their products and services to their audience. And they're so afraid of being so salesy that they never talk about their products and service. And every once in a while, one of those podcasters will tell me that their listeners went on a stocking mission online to try to find something to buy from that person. And they successfully found it. And the business owner was like, I don't know how you found this. My offer is on a different website. It's a different name than my podcast. But that's how passionate your listeners are. And I was like, my goodness, if you just tomorrow say, hey, everybody, I don't know if you know, but I offer this thing. If you want more information, click on the link in the show notes. You will make so much money. So business owners, please, for the level of all things good, talk about your stuff more, talk about your offerings more. If you're worried about being too salesy, that is wonderful because you care about your audience. But we need to make sure that that worry doesn't hold you back. Now if you're not a business owner and you're somebody who has never sold anything and you don't have a product or service yet and you're wondering what you can sell, the key is to align what you offer to your listener mission. So whatever it is that your podcast is there to do for your listeners, your paid products and services, ideally, take that a step further. Now that is something that's going to be probably fairly obvious to my business based podcastes out there. So anybody who has a show about health or fitness or marketing or entrepreneurship or business growth or anything where it would be obvious how your listeners can pay you to help them with that thing more. I know that there are a lot of you are entertainment only podcasters who you have a listener mission that's based on entertainment, but it's not immediately obvious what you can sell to your audience. Well, one of my favorite examples of that is one of my most recent case studies, which is a previous client of Grow the Show, who launched a new podcast with her sister called Fantasy Fan Girls. And so shout out to Nicole Holliman and her sister, who recently launched Fantasy Fan Girls. They launched it about a hundred days ago and in a hundred days, they've gotten more than a million downloads because they have tapped into a fervent fan base on TikTok. But the time came for them to monetize and they were thinking about finding sponsors, but a wonderful mentor of theirs said, excuse me, we have this fervent listener base of people who love hearing you to break down the chapters of this fantasy book series. We need to put together a Patreon. And so what they did was they created an offer to their listeners where listeners can join the Patreon and what they get when they join that Patreon, furthers the mission of the show, which their show breaks down romance fantasy novels chapter by chapter. And so what they said was, okay, if you join our Patreon, you will get extra stuff. You will get our chapter by chapter outlines. You'll get to join an exclusive community where you can chat with us about it. You'll get to come to events with us where we can talk about the books. So all of those extra things that people can pay to access furthers the mission of that show, which is to dive deeper into the world of these romance fantasy novels. So that's an example of taking what is the listener mission of the show. Their shows listener mission was to dive deep into the world of these romance fantasy novels. What they decided to sell to their listener base dives even deeper than the free show. And it is extremely successful. They've got already a thousand paying members monthly. So that's just an example of how you can match the thing that you sell to your listener base to your listener mission. Now if you are still unsure about what you can sell, I have two pieces of advice, piece number one, ask your listener base. If you have an idea, ask them, would you want to buy this? And then regardless of, and then if you get a couple people who, and then if you get a couple people who say yes, just offer it. Just try it. Just try it out. See if it sticks. Nothing is set in stone and you're not going to be stuck selling something forever. In fact, even if you wanted to sell something forever, it just doesn't work that way. All right. So above all else, the most important thing for you to take away from this today, whether you're an entertainment podcaster or a business based podcaster is that you monetize your podcast by getting your listeners to buy stuff. You monetize an audience by getting your audience to buy stuff. That is how social media influencers make money. They get their followers to buy stuff, right? So today we talked about what to sell your listener base. And once you know what you want to sell to your listener base and what your listener base wants to pay for, the final piece of the podcast success ladder and the final two lessons of this series are knowing two things. Number one is the science of when within your episodes to talk about the thing that you're selling, aka to put your calls to action. There's certain areas where if you put your call to action there, it's going to have the opposite effect that you want, either nobody's going to hear it or it's actually going to turn them off, compare that to the optimized places to put your calls to action in your episodes where it's in the right place, it's at the right time and it maximizes not only the number of people who hear it, but it maximizes their willingness to hear the call to action. So that's the science of when and then our final lesson on day 12 will be the art of how to talk about these things. So it's how to sell without being too salesy and those two lessons are going to wrap us up. And you will have completed the podcast success ladder and you'll be will on your way to growing and monetizing your podcast over the next year. So I will see you tomorrow for part one of making amazing calls to action, which will be the science of when I will see you then. By the way, if you want to get access to the written lessons of this series, just go to 12daysofpodcastgrowth.com that's one two days of podcastgrowth.com and to your email and I will email them all to you. All right, I'll see you tomorrow.