14 day free bCast podcast hosting trial: https://www.bcast.fm
Blog post with more detials: https://www.bcast.fm/blog/how-to-make-money-podcasting
Transcript:
Okay. And in this episode, we're talking about how to start a podcast and make money. So we're going to dig into the four different ways you can possibly make money with your podcast. Three, you probably know about. Number four is probably the most powerful. And you probably do. Don't know about it. So let's dig right into this now.
So starting a podcast, there are other episodes in this series that you can go and check out. If you Google, how to start a podcast, you'll probably find them off you head to our blog. We have a blog post called how to start a podcast that will take you through the full process. The here let's talk more about making money.
So the four ways you can make money from your podcast can be split into four categories. The first of which is through affiliate. So there is you building an audience and they're selling someone else's product. In response to that, that person will then come back to you and give you a commission. It could be 20%.
It could be 50%. For example, with beak after podcast hosting software, you can sign up to our affiliate program and we'll pay you 40% of any sales that you make for us. And so the great thing about affiliate revenue is that it's really easy to start with. You can have a small audience and actually make some revenue because you can focus all of your time on building the audience and not making a product, which is a whole other thing.
And so this is why this is first on the list is because it's very easy to get started with. So you can start a podcast or release some episodes, start building an audience, and then you could say, read out an ad for someone else's product on the show, using audio inserts feature. You can insert that. To your complete backlog, run that for a week, send people to your hour where they will be able to purchase that product.
And then you will be given a revenue split on that. So that's affiliate it's the first one. It's. But probably not the most sustainable form of revenue, but it's the easiest one. And the fastest one to get started with next. I want to call out the next strategy, which is sponsorship. So as you're growing the audience, maybe you're getting a bit of affiliate revenue.
You can reinvest that revenue into maybe some ads to grow the show, or maybe a better editor to make the content better. You can then start to reach out to sponsors. And so a sponsor is someone who will just pay you in order to get exposure to your audience. And so if you're early on the, the best way to do this is by writing up a Google doc of what you're offering.
You can say for X amount per month for three months, I'm going to give you this. And I'm only taking one or two sponsors on because we're very early. And I have, I'm speaking to a couple of other sponsors, would you be interested? And then you get them to pay upfront or pay the pay month by month, Lester fed $250 a month because you only have like 500 downloads a month included in that you also tagged them in your social pro posts.
And you also leave those ads in there forever, if you would like. And so once you had the pitch for that, you then go out to other people that have. That would like to sell to the audience that you're building and then just pitch them, say I'm only taking one or two. Uh, would you be interested in speaking to curfew of your fuel competitors?
That's how you do it. So that's sponsorship. So you can start doing that when your audience gets to 500,000 downloads a month, and then you can obviously make more, the more downloads you have, the multiple of food you can have, and therefore the more revenue you make, big podcasts like Joe Rogan or Tim Ferris, they read out like eight sponsorship ads to the start of the show because they can, because the audience is so big.
So that small ship next up is actually selling your own products or services. So this is slightly later down the route because you have to develop your own product or service. Of course now is probably the most profitable. And the most sustainable. And, and by the way, I'm saying, selling your own products or services to your audience, that's a different differentiation Asian.
So it's the most sustainable and most profitable over time. Uh, but you do need a decent audience, thousands of downloads a month, really to make this work, whether you're selling a B to C product or a B to B product. And the number four, which is actually the same thing as selling your own products or services, but it's to your guests.
And so that is a really big shift. It's by being strategic about who you bring on to your show. Yes. They have to be able to add value to the audience if they don't do that, you can't bring them on, but you also would like them to be a potential customer potential, uh, partner so that you can make revenue from your own products or services from your relationships with guests.
And be cost actually started because we ran a podcast like this for a B2B SAS company. It went really well. We made some sales to guests and we started growing the show and we wanted to build a podcast host that is more suited to marketers, more suited to businesses. And so this is the thing, so. If you're a B2C company, I would build a list of a hundred people that have an audience in your space and find the best ones to bring them onto your show, build a relationship and maybe form partnerships with the guests so they can help you sell your product.
If you're a B2B business, or if your product is more than say a thousand dollars, then you can sell, it can be effective to sell directly to guests. Now, the way you do this can vary. You can talk to them straight after the interview. And asked if they'd be willing to talk more about your product or services services, or you can reach out to them, say after the episode has gone live, say, actually, I would love to talk to you about the service we're running for other people similar to you.
Do you have 15 minutes to chat? And if you do that, like obviously not every guest is going to close, but over time you should get sales calls, you should make sales. So in summary, these are the four ways to monetize a podcast affiliate. Sponsors your own products or services to the audience and then your own products or services to the guests.
So I actually recommend starting off with affiliate, there may be finding some sponsors and then start selling products or services to guests. And then over time you can add ads for your own products or services into your own audience. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.