How to Monetize Your Podcast Today, with 30 Under 30 Podcast CEO Amanda McLoughlin

All right, picture this. You and your best friend are at a bar, chatting over drinks after work on a weeknight. And for the past two hours, you've been analyzing the latest movie from your favorite movie franchise that just came out last week. The theories are so good. The conversation is so fun. And you say, other people should be hearing this. We should be sharing these ideas with the world. And your friend says without missing a beat, maybe we should start a podcast. We should start a podcast. So you two spend the rest of the night chatting about how fun that would be. And how cool it would be to actually have a show, have an audience, maybe even have sponsors. Maybe if the audience got big enough, we could quit our jobs. Now, maybe it's the fact that you're on your fourth picture of margaritas that has something to do with it, but right now this idea just makes sense. So you both agree, you're going to do it. You're going to start a podcast. Fast forward five years. You wake up one morning to a bunch of text messages. They're from people from all throughout your life, family, friends, but the longest texts are congratulations from the podcasters who have shows in the DIY podcast network that you created. Now, you're running a little late. You're supposed to be at the podcast recording studio that you built and that you operate in like 45 minutes for an interview. But you know what? This morning, it's totally okay that you're feeling rushed because all of those texts are about a news article that just dropped. That article honors you and all the work that you've done to successfully grow and monetize that podcast and other podcasts over the past five years. But it's not just any news article. This is an article in Forbes magazine. And it's not just any article in Forbes magazine. It's this year's 30 under 30 list. That's right. This morning, you were named to Forbes 30 under 30 for the success you have had growing and monetizing your own podcast and devoting your career to helping other podcasters do the same thing. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, this actually happened. Okay, most of this story was dramatized. I have no idea if she was running late or even if she likes margaritas. But this past December, Amanda McLaughlin, the founder and CEO of Multitude Collective, a podcast collective out of New York City, was named Forbes 30 under 30 for the impact and success she has had within the podcasting world. She launched her own show with her best friend while she worked at a big finance company. She eventually left that job to do podcasting full time and has helped several other shows to grow and monetize along the way. So, how does a Forbes 30 under 30 podcasting CEO grow and monetize a podcast? Do you want to know? Well, stick around because she's about to tell you. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that explores how we, how independent podcasters who don't already have a huge following or a huge budget can grow our audience and monetize our podcast into a thriving business. My name is Kevin Schmidland and today I'm joined by Amanda McLaughlin, the founder and CEO of Multitude podcast collective. In this episode, Amanda is going to share the different ways that she has had success monetizing podcasts. And while most podcasters have it in their heads that they have to grow their shows in order to monetize, Amanda is going to share how the opposite is true and how she monetized her podcast before it even launched. So, if you want your podcast to be monetized today instead of someday, then stick around and get ready to learn. Here on Grow the Show. My name is Amanda McLaughlin and I am the founder and CEO of Multitude, a podcast collective and production studio. Amanda graduated college in 2014 with a degree in English. And although she really wanted to work in media, she decided to get a job in recruiting for a finance company. Like many of us who have nine to fives, Amanda spent the day working hard and paying the bills, but not being super satisfied creatively. She had to scratch the creative itch nights and weekends. So, after work, my best friend from childhood from kindergarten, Julia, who also worked in New York City and I would go to happy hour right at six on the dot and over those drinks, you know, we would tell each other stories and hang out and do what we do and often that revolved around Julia sharing a mythology and folklore stories which she studied in school and she's always been really passionate about. After weeks and weeks of those happy hour chats, they thought it might be fun to turn those conversations into a podcast. So Spirits was born, which is every week Julia brings me a different story from around the world from mythology, folklore, and urban legends. And I am the sort of, you know, newbie. I am the audience stand in and I ask questions and it's just super fun. With this new creative outlet, Amanda was able to scratch that itch that she had to work in media even though it wasn't her full-time gig. But pretty soon, that itch came back. About, you know, a year-ish into Spirits being out there, we wanted to make this our jobs. But like most self-taught podcasters, they had no idea how to do that. Looking around at the shows I enjoyed, it seems like there was kind of one option or two options. One is, you know, you get wildly, virally popular, kind of my favorite murder style. The second one is joining a network, which I thought that is how people grow. You know, like in order to grow a podcast, you have to get in front of people who listen to podcasts. And especially, you know, in 2016-17, without the infrastructure we have even now of podcast journalism, which I think, you know, still has a long way to go and grow. But conferences like even the medium infrastructure we have now did not exist back then. So it felt like joining a network was the only way we would be able to grow our audience to a kind of critical mass where the show could support itself. So I emailed everybody from maximum fun to Stitcher to, I'm trying to think who else was around back then, panoply a bunch of networks where I thought we might be a good fit and, you know, gave them my best efforts and said like, hey, we're really proud that we've reached, you know, this number of downloads our audience are great and didn't hear a word back. I don't fault any of those people. We were not bringing a huge audience to bear. And so financially for these networks, it probably wouldn't make sense to bring us on. I tried ad sales agencies too and pitching us to, you know, hey, can somebody just at least help me sell ads for this? But didn't hear back on any of them. Even though the bigger networks didn't even return her emails, the other people in Amanda's life did notice the success she was having and they actually started podcasts of their own. Other friends of mine from other areas of life, from school, from college, from YouTube, which I was kind of my hobby in my teenage and college years, making YouTube videos. When they started podcasts, they came to me for help. And so as I sort of, you know, became more and more knowledgeable and was giving people advice, it made sense to sort of form infrastructure where my friends and I, all of whom made like, thoughtful, funny, you know, critical, but still enthusiastic shows about things that we loved, whether that was Dungeons & Dragons mythology or Harry Potter, made sense for us to kind of come together under one roof. After never hearing back from the bigger podcast networks, Amanda realized she kind of already had her own network. And so that's when the idea for multitude was born. We were all just kind of outsiders to media, really, and certainly to radio and podcasting who were just doing shows for fun. And so in coming together, we were able to say, you know, not just that we can be a panel of our own and or performance of our own and, you know, do several things with several skill sets, but also bring several audiences to the same place. Now, a regular podcast network usually owns the show itself. It takes all the revenue, and it pays the creators either a small percentage or just a flat rate salary. Multitude didn't want to be like that. It was important to us that in the collective, you know, all of us own our shows individually, like every show is co-owned by its hosts. And all multitude does as an entity is sell ads for those shows and take a small commission, which I used to fund the overhead of the company. And now do things like consult again production. But at the time, it was just, hey, like I'm going to put a little bit of this money as I sell these ads into, you know, a kind of central pot. And then eventually, that can pay for things like us going to conferences, you know, us like, fronting money to rent a venue for a live show. And then several years later, renting a space. All this time, Amanda still had that full-time job. But multitude was growing fast. About eight months after launching the multitude website, enough kind of consulting work had come in. And my ad sales had picked up enough that I was able to quit my job and focus on growing multitude. And that focus has paid off. Today, multitude has seven growing shows. And recently, Amanda received one of the most coveted pieces of recognition by Forbes. I was named the 30 under 30 category for media. I am really honored that, you know, a panel of judges, including the head of stitcher, including podcast industry people, decided that running an independent business that can support other creators and let them help them make money without giving away their IP. The fact that they thought that was significant, I think is significant. And it is significant not only to build such a win-win organization that serves creators and lets them keep their equity, but to do it all in only five years. And multitude is just getting started. So how do they do it? How does Amanda, who is named 30 under 30 for her work, monetizing podcasts, how does she do it? Actually, let me rephrase that to reflect the question that I most often get from podcasters about monetization, which is, when do I monetize? We started our Patreon account for the show before we launched. And that is something that I think every podcaster should do. You know, we had to lay out a couple hundred dollars between buying a domain name, buying two microphones for us to use and just like licensing software and whatever else it was. And you know, we didn't come to that lightly. And so recouping our investment was definitely a priority. Many podcasters are taught to not even worry about monetization until your show is established. But what does that even mean? The reality is your podcast is monetize the moment you decide it is. And by not monetizing your show from the start, you may be leaving money on the table. I just needed really an infrastructure for if people found our show meaningful, if they wanted to show that meaning and appreciation with money, I just support art and creations that they think should exist. I don't want to stand in my own way. And the fact that people think they have to wait until they've earned an audience or earned a right to ask for money, I get where they're coming from, but you don't have to. Like it's not up to you what value your show brings to other people. And you shouldn't stand in your own way if they want to express that with financial contribution. So that happened right away. We were able to make back those couple hundred dollars within a few months of launching. This was one of the most surprising lessons that I learned myself when I was building out the Philly Who podcast. Before I learned how to actually grow and monetize the show, I was struggling to make money regularly on each episode. I'd resisted creating a Patreon for a long time. Well, I don't even know why, really, probably because I just didn't know how to do it. It was scary. But eventually, I did launch a Patreon with three tiers. $5 per month, $10 per month, and $25 per month. And do you know what immediately happened? Five people signed up to support Philly Who at $25 per month. Instantly, I stumbled upon $250 a month in revenue that was just hiding in my audience. And the best part is that those folks didn't even really want much in return. They just wanted to support me, support Philly and support the show. It's also, I think, the best kind of investment or ROI, the best use for the squeeze for podcasters is setting up an infrastructure for your audience to contribute because they're going to want to. And you don't have to do a ton of active management like you do for sponsorships. Now, this was the huge mistake that I made. For Philly Who, I promised a bunch of bonus content and merch to anybody who signed up even for the $5 tier. And by doing that, I completely defeated the purpose of the Patreon because now I had all this extra work to do on top of the work that I was already doing. So how do you figure out the right balance and offer perks that make you money but also give bonuses to your paid patrons and keep them happy? Patreon is really a living document and you get to fine tune it as you figure out what you and your audience find impactful. But the reason I kind of beat the drum of pre-production so much is that you should plan to do things that you don't hate. You should plan for Patreon benefits that go with your workflow and don't add steps to it. So something like releasing bloopers on an improvised fiction show joined the party completely easy. Our editor throws them into a different file, exports them once every other week when we release it with an episode and it's something that people really love and value hearing. And for Spirits as well, like we release notes. So Julia takes those notes as she's preparing for each episode and then we can release some fun parts from that, you know, and excerpt as episode extras as well. So don't get me wrong, we put a lot of work into many things that we do for our Patreon but building in stuff that is not super intensive for us to make but is really high value for our audience. Like a discord for example, it costs us nothing in almost no time each week to run but it's where our audience gets to talk to each other every single day in all time zones and at all times of day and they love it. It's really high value for them and for us but it doesn't require active management. But what about podcasts that support a business? Like this one, Grow the Show. This show is mainly monetized through the very small percentage of listeners who decide to supercharge their show now and join the paid accelerator program. Should Grow the Show have a Patreon? I think every podcast of a Patreon unless you have a good reason not to and a good reason not to might be the goal for conversions here, the call to action should actually be to my business instead of to a Patreon. And it's more valuable for me to, you know, convince somebody to buy my book or sign up for my newsletter than it is to ask them for financial support in this way. And you can definitely make multiple calls to action over time. You know, you can ask your audience to buy merch and also support you on Patreon. But I think you should consider what this sort of primary goal is for an audience member willing to do something to help you. What should that be? So Grow the Show probably shouldn't have a Patreon and it won't. So I know if you do want to support me in the show, you can do so by telling other independent podcasters what you've learned and how it's helped you. But if your podcast is not a part of an overall business that can provide paid services to your listeners, then you probably should have a Patreon. Or at the very least, you need to make it so that your passionate listeners can support you financially if you want just so that you aren't leaving money on the table and probably losing money in the early days of your podcast. So once you have the infrastructure in place for your listeners to support you if they want to by either subscribing to a monthly membership that gets them extra perks or by becoming a customer of your business, the next step is to start thinking about brand partnerships. Now there is a prerequisite to making this work. And if you have listened to any previous episode of the Grow the Show podcast, you probably know what I'm about to say. If not, if this is your first episode, welcome. And I'm about to share with you the foundation of everything that I teach about how to grow and monetize a podcast. And that is this. None of this will work if you don't have a specific target listener. And I'm not talking about vague demographic information like age range or gender or location. That's not specific enough. I'm talking specific psychographic. What are their interests? Why do they love your show? What value do they get out of it? What products and services are they interested in learning about? If you're wondering whether your current target listener is specific enough, the answer is probably no. In fact, you should be able to describe your audience so specifically that when you do, you have this thought. Hmm, I think this audience might be too small. If you have that thought then congratulations, you have just started getting specific enough in your targeting. But why is that? Why do I harp so much on being specific about your listener base? Well, it's for three reasons. Reason number one is that it makes it way easier for you to know how to get more listeners because you have a better idea of who it is you're trying to go get. Reason number two is that when the listener does find you or you find them, they will immediately feel connected to you and they'll hear their truth in your show. And they're gonna have the thought, oh wow, this is for me. If your show is vague or if it's for vague people, they're not gonna be inspired by it, they're not gonna hear their truth in it and they're not gonna listen to it. And reason number three and the reason that we're here today is because it makes it way easier, way easier to find sponsors and here's why. Every business, every good business has a very specific customer profile. They know exactly specifically who their customer is. So when you approach a sponsor and ask them to pay you for access to your audience, their first question is going to be, well, who is in your audience? And really when they ask that, what they're trying to figure out is whether their target customer is in your audience, will paying for access to their audience bring them customers? That's it. If your audience definition is super vague or really broad, the sponsor will have no idea whether their customer is actually a member of your audience. And so paying you to access that audience would be a really dumb investment. But if you have a really specific idea of who your listeners are, you can share that listener information with your potential sponsor. And if your listener persona matches their customer persona, well, then they're gonna be begging you to advertise on your show. So with that in mind, once you have a specific idea of who your podcast listener is, you're ready to start thinking about sponsors. Note that I didn't say anything about how many listeners you have. That doesn't matter. What matters more is how specific your targeting is, how specific your listener base is. Because with that, you can find sponsors right away. Our first sponsor was 20-sided store, an independent game store here in Brooklyn, New York, which was the first sponsor on Join the Party. And they remain an ongoing sponsor three years later. And the deal there was, we came to them with an audience that was small, but growing, just based on downloads of our trailer that we expected and excitement we had about it. And said, we're not sure how it's gonna work out. Can you pay us in product? Can you give us a hundred bucks worth of product? Or I think of the time, it was $50 worth of product once a month, and we'll just come in every so often and grab some games, grab some gifts, review some products to put into the ad. If it doesn't work out, we can stop. But we support you. You have an e-commerce store that you just launched and people will be able to buy things from you online. Can you take me into your thought process when you came up with that creative arrangement? For that first sponsor to think, oh, let's just, we love games. You have games. We have an audience. You look at a sell games online, give us some games and we'll review them. Like how to just being creative with your initial partnerships is so key. Not only one, because that's how you're gonna get your first partnerships, because you're not gonna close the CPM deal just like in your first go, you might, but it's very hard to do that. But it also just gives you reps in making your listeners and your sponsors happy at the same time in a way that adds value to everyone in the equation. So when you first had that thought, how did you come up with that idea? I think it's just a natural thing. If you think of other businesses as projects owned by people in a very kind of simplistic sense, it's a lot easier to work with an individual and say like, I have skills, you have skills or like I have products, you have money and like how can we help each other out? For example, a friend of mine, Allison Wakeman designed her logo in exchange for me editing her resume because that's a skill I had a new how to do and something that she needed. So going to 20-sided store, it was, you know, you guys want to get your name out there and drive some traffic to your website. We have a way for you to get your name out there and you know, you have a surplus of goods or goods that are cheaper for you to buy than market value and we have a need for you know, playing those, gifting them, using them on the show, whatever it might be. This is actually the fun part. The early days of monetization, when you're getting creative. Here in this example, a business was trying to launch their online store. So in exchange for some products, Amanda and her team would use their podcast to drive traffic to that online store and help the business achieve that specific goal. And you don't have to limit these early creative value exchanges to physical products. You can get super creative. There are other times where I will counsel people to think of yourself as a business, but in this case, I think thinking of yourself as a person, thinking about what you have to offer and if you have a podcast that's gonna be, you know, in part like a platform and a way to give advertising, but also other skills. And you know, thinking of other businesses as just like you, trying to take what they have and turn it into things that they need may help you to come up with those ideas. When we opened the multitude studio, I traded some ads on spirits for a bunch of plans that we used to decorate our office with local businesses. So it really is a great trade. I know people who have traded like screen printing in exchange for ads, you know, food, products, like all kinds of stuff. And certainly don't get me wrong. A paid ad is important because we need money most of the time. But if you have something to offer and not a lot of cash, that doesn't mean that you don't have options. Options like this are great when you're first starting out. But to make podcasting your full time job, you're going to need to start building relationships with sponsors and bringing in cash. The good news is that there is a way to do this without having a massive audience. And that way is called CPA. CPA means cost per acquisition. That's the amount of money that a sponsor will pay to get one sale or one sign up to their business. Like I said before, every good business has a specific idea of who their customer is. But there's also another fact that every good business owner knows and that's their CPA, their cost per acquisition. Some businesses call it CAC or cost to acquire a customer. That means the same thing. Today, we're going to say CPA. And CPA basically means this. Businesses have to spend money to get people to find out that their business exists, to find out about their services and products. And they do this in many ways, sponsoring conferences, paying sales reps to cold call people, creating organic online content. Those are some ways, but the most common way that you and I both are very familiar with because we're constantly surrounded by them is advertisements. Businesses by ads on TV, on Facebook, and on podcasts. Now, all of these businesses have a budget for how much they're willing to spend on marketing for every new customer they get. That budget is their CPA or their cost per acquisition. And so when you go into a CPA deal, you can say to the business, just pay me your CPA for every customer that I bring you. This is often referred to as affiliate marketing and it is powerful. You do have an audience, like you've people who might listen to you, who might buy a product because you recommend it. And so the really valuable thing I think is to do more of an affiliate model. So just like companies have affiliate programs where you have a link or a promotional code and then you get a free month or two free weeks or five dollars or whatever it might be for like every app has this. You can put that to use on your podcast too. And either use your podcast as a platform to do those traditional affiliate deals if the terms and conditions allow it or to reach out to a sponsor and say, hey, I think I could do great for you guys, but in order to like have low risk on your side and some learning and experimenting on mine, do you wanna do a situation where you pay me per sale or per sign up? But for businesses, it doesn't matter if they advertise to one person and then one person bought it or they advertise to 100,000 people and one person bought it. They still have a cost per purchase that they're looking for. And so going to local businesses, to fellow creators, to even huge companies and asking for an affiliate deal means that you're not limited by the size of your audience. You can put that audience to use no matter what the size is to make money via ads if that's something you wanna do. Now, you may be wondering, how the heck do I even get a business to agree to do this type of deal with me? Well, it's all about the quality and the quantity of your pitches. Just put together a few nice slides about your show who you are, what you wanna do, what your prices are. It makes you look legitimate. So take some time, take an afternoon, take a weekend, make your deck once. And then my recommendation is build that list of businesses and then batch it, once a month, sit down, find email addresses for all those businesses and then shoot them that email, just saying, this is who I am, this is what I want and this is why you should care. And then give them the information that they need to either say, this is the price that I'm charging for this ad or I would love to set up a kind of affiliate relationship with you and this is why I think it would be helpful. Your hit rate is not gonna be 100%. I would say my hit rate of cold emailing companies is maybe 5%. And that is brutal. And I think knowing in advance that it's not you, it's just what it is, might be helpful in terms of that emotional burden as you work with sponsors, put that in the email. So like we've worked with companies like A, B and C and as with everything, hearing that somebody else did it, makes it easier for someone new to do it. It's gonna be challenging, but if you can particularly put some kind of personal touch or connection that always helps. Back in the day, meeting people at conferences would definitely be a positive, but I do think that it is kind of a volume game and you have to give out a certain amount and you have to plan a certain amount of seeds for one to sprout. Okay, so you've planted your seeds, you've watered your field and something sprouts. You're starting to see some green money, get it? A potential sponsor is interested in making a CPA deal, but they've asked for your pricing. So what do you charge? How do you determine how much a business should pay per customer that you bring them? And how do you even measure it? Well, according to Amanda, it's not really up to you. The beauty of the CPA is it's up to the business how much a quiet customer is worth. And that might sound weird to be like you, you set the price sponsor, but it's true for them. Like they know how much money they want to spend on client acquisition. And so for some sponsors, we just do a 50-50 profit split where there will be certain sales coming in, but it's really variable or maybe it's software or maybe it's a browser extension that's linked to the amount of traffic they get. We have other sponsors who are like, we know that our average profit on new orders $50 will give you 30, will take 20, and let's go on with our day. So I'll often say the sponsor, honestly, I know it's up to you. You know your budget's better than I do, so like you tell me what you think a good price would be. And that is maybe a little off-putting, but I think in a good way, it's disconcerting where it's like you're very honest, which is good. This is one of the reasons CPA arrangements can be great when you're first starting out. They help you learn the value of a customer to various sponsors and build relationships while working within the sponsor's parameters. But how do you track how much you'll be getting paid in these kind of partnerships? You could rely on the honor system, which is common and can be successful, or you could use technology. Weaves that up at least in the past, you've done like domain name redirects on our own domain names so we can measure the traffic, but I got a lot to do every day and that is not necessarily a good use of my time. But what I will say is increasingly sponsors are integrating with tracking software in order to know if somebody forgets to put in a promo code, but they did come from your link to track where the customer came from. Chartable makes a tool which I find to be really trustworthy and good that does, it's called smart promos that does advertisement tracking. It's not for every ad, it's maybe like one or two so far that we've done using a tool like that, but it is something that sponsors are increasingly interested in particularly with larger scale buys and larger scale shows. Now that you've set up a CPA deal with a sponsor, how can you make sure that your listeners will actually visit their website by their product and become a customer of your sponsor? Well, the answer to that isn't as complicated as you might think. You just ask them. Your audience wants you to succeed and that is what I think is worth keeping in mind and that's something we're transparent with as well to say that hey, the reason we give you discount code is because the sponsor can tell that you came from our podcast and if enough people come, they want to come back and buy more ads on our show. So just kind of being transparent and explaining what's happening and why goes a long way toward helping the audience feel like this is a shared project and a shared leveling up and not, you know, oh, a show that I love sold out. So you have affiliate deals and your audience loves them. At the same time, your listenership has been growing and you're looking for additional consistent ways to earn money. Now you're ready for CPM deals. CPM means cost per mill, which is 1,000 in Latin because we like to use Latin for no reason in advertising. And that is where advertisers pay a certain amount of money per 1,000 downloads of your podcast. So like a $25 CPM means that they're going to pay $25 per 1,000 downloads. So if your audience size is in the, you know, the hundreds or the low thousands, it's valuable for you to know that an average price for a podcast ad is $25 per 1,000 downloads. So if you have fewer than 1,000 downloads and you sell and add in the traditional way, you're gonna make less than 25 bucks. This right here is probably the most important point in this episode. The podcast industry is rife with limiting beliefs and there are tons of podcast experts who regurgitate those limiting beliefs all the time. And those limiting beliefs are killing shows and this is the big one. The vast majority of people think that this CPM sponsorships are the only way to monetize a podcast. And that belief is the reason why so many podcasts have tried, failed and died. Let me paint this picture for you real quick. If you're somebody who still believes you need 10,000 downloads per episode to make money on a podcast, this is gonna blow your mind, but there's some math involved so stick with me. Now grow the show Accelerator student, John Strohmeier hosts five star council, a show for lawyers who own their own legal practice. Now according to Google AdWords, the average CPA or cost per acquisition in the legal industry is $120, meaning a business that sells products to lawyers is willing to pay on average $120 to get one new customer. Now let's say four demonstration purposes only I'm making this up. Let's say that five star council has a modest audience of 500 listeners, 500 lawyers. Now if you Google right now, average podcast ad rates, as Amanda said, Google will tell you that if you sell ads on your podcast, you can charge about $25 for every 1000 downloads that an episode gets. And so if that's true, that means that if John were to have an advertiser on his show at 500 downloads per episode, he would make 13 bucks per episode. That's not enough. Yet most podcasters think that this is the only way. And that is why the internet tells you that you need 50,000 downloads per episode in order to meaningfully monetize because it's assuming that that is the amount of money that you're making per 1000 downloads. But what if John did the same deal and made it CPA instead of CPM? Well, knowing that the average CPA in the legal industry is $120, John could approach a business that serves law firms and say, hey, your CPA is 120 bucks. Why don't we run a CPA ad on my show and you give me $100 for every customer I bring you? What's the business gonna say? Well, they're gonna be thrilled because they get to save $20 on the acquisition of their customers because they're used to paying 120 and now they only have to pay 100. On top of that, there's no risk for them. They don't have to pay until they get new customers. So John runs this ad on his show. Of his 500 listeners, if 1% or five of them become customers of John's sponsor, John just made $500 off of 500 downloads. Now, if John had the same limiting belief that many other podcasters have and he believed that the only way to monetize were through CPM deals, then in order to make the same amount of money on one episode as he did with a modest CPA deal, John would need 20,000 downloads. Do you see how this limiting belief has held back the podcast industry and is killing shows? This could change the game for you. Now, this is not to say that CPM deals should never be done. Once you do get to a certain audience size, it can certainly be more advantageous because that $25 CPM rate is not set in stone. You may be able to kind of get a higher price if you're very good or if there's a lot of demand, spirits, average price is a little bit higher than that because our audience are mostly women in their late 20s and that is a desirable audience for direct to consumer products. But in most cases, until and unless you grow your audience to that size, traditional ads, by which I mean a sponsor pays you cash, you run an ad and then the deal is done, might not be totally worthwhile for you. Now, in reality, it is often the case that you have all three of these types of monetization tactics in use at once. As much as I like to put things in step one, step two and step three because it's easier to teach that way, most shows that have fully monetized, Philly Who included have a combination of direct listener support, CPA deals and CPM deals all at once. It's not like you do CPA until you start doing CPM. The shows with millions and millions of downloads do exclusively CPM, but for us, it's going to be a mix of all of those things. So with that, you now have the tools in your toolbox to do what you have to do to monetize your show. However, there is one other limiting belief that I do often here and that is that listeners hate ads. So is it true? Will listeners find advertisements annoying? You can make them not annoying. Ads are part of your show. Content is content. If you're in your RSS feed, it's content. And putting ads into your show that you don't hate reading and that your audience doesn't hate hearing is absolutely the goal. So that means reading the copy, the advertiser sends you beforehand. Maybe for the first few ads you do, I did this for like six months. I wrote out a script for myself so that I wouldn't have to kind of extemporaneously be like, and there's lots of recipes to choose from. And it sucks. And people can hear when you hate what you're doing, they can hear when you're self-conscious or when you haven't prepared. So prepare, treat it like a show, treat like part of your show. We put jokes, we put interesting anecdotes. You know, we talk about our personal lives because some of our audiences are really excited about and we try to make it something that you don't want to miss. But regardless of how funny or interesting your ads are, not every sponsorship is going to work out and that is totally fine. At the end of the day, successful monetization isn't about always making the right calls. It's really trusting your gut and making sure that the calls you do make are well thought out. Looking back, we made some good choices. We made some bad choices, but we definitely made choices with intention, which I do think is really important, especially in podcasting where there are no rules, but there are norms, it can be really easy to just kind of do what your favorite shows do because they do them. This sort of theme is that you don't have to do things the way that people tell you you should and you can do them your own way. Above all else, with monetization, what's most important is that you start. Remember, you do not need 10,000 listeners to monetize your podcast, but you do need to monetize your podcast if you want to reach 10,000 listeners because the show needs to pay for itself to grow. It will not become a thriving business off of your passion alone. You need to start now and with good strategy. So there you have it. There is your strategy for monetizing your podcast. Step one, today, build a simple infrastructure for your listeners to contribute to the show monetarily, either through a basic Patreon with perks that don't take you too much work to fulfill, but are still valuable to your listeners or by becoming a paid customer of you or your business. Because odds are there are already people in your audience ready to support you right now, like there were for me. Next is paid ads. In the beginning, advertising is all about bartering and focusing on the value you bring, not just as a business, but as a person. Find smaller businesses and products you love or already have a relationship with, find out what they or their owners need or want and figure out how you can give that to them. As you continue to build trust with your audience, consider adding in CPA deals or affiliate ads. You can do this with any sized audience and sometimes you don't even need to contact the sponsor. Many of my affiliate deals, including those with squadcast and fuse box and even with Amazon, were set up on their website with a couple of clicks. I didn't even have to talk to anybody. And finally, CPM ads can be a great way to make money once you've built a sizable listenership. But for now, I wouldn't even worry about that. Stick to direct listener support and bartering and CPA deals. Now, my challenge to you is this. Think about how you can bake in an infrastructure now for direct listener support. Whether it's a Patreon or offering coaching or consulting or some other business product or service, your first podcast dollars are already waiting for you. And by the way, Amanda has shared multitudes, sponsorship, pitch deck, and a bunch of other resources for podcasters online totally for free. If you want that, you can head to www.multitud.productions slash templates, the link is in the show notes. If you would like support in monetizing now, I invite you to join the free Grow the Show Facebook group where I and my inner circle of podcasters are always providing feedback and advice. Also, if you are on clubhouse, definitely follow me at Kevin Schmittland because I am on their hosting rooms to discuss lessons like these multiple times per week. I would love to chat with you there. Finally, if you want me to join your podcasting team and help you grow your audience and monetize in 90 days, definitely apply for the Grow the Show podcast accelerator program. For more details, head to growtheshow.com slash apply. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was hosted and produced by me with editing and associate production by Catherine Nails and post-production by Max Graham. Forward Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmittland. See you next time.