As a serious independent podcaster, diversity in monetisation is the single most

important part of your growth and your revenue strategy. Eggs in baskets can be very

dangerous, so making sure you have them spread to as many places as possible.

Diversity in monetization is one of the most useful aspects of a successful podcaster

mindset that you can undertake. But what does that mean and how do memberships

and tipping feature within this mindset? This is of course the podcast accelerator.

I'm your host, Mark Asquith, and today I'm going to talk about actually What is a

podcast membership? What is podcast tipping? And I'm gonna, honestly, I'm gonna

talk a little bit about what we've done here at Captivate to help with that. But before

I do that, I am just gonna give a bit of a shout out, honestly, to my brand new listener

support page. It's something that I've just built using Captivate's brand new tipping

and membership features. You can find it at mark.live forward slash. support. If

you like the show, you can show your support at that page, mark.live slash support.

And even if you don't intend on getting involved on supporting the show, it would be

useful for you to go and look at that page right now on your mobile or your desktop

or wherever you're listening to this, just so that you can get a bit of context around

what I'm going to talk about today. Monetisation for a podcaster is of course very,

very important, but what we tend to find is that scalable monetisation is difficult

for the podcaster that is not enjoying a huge audience. However, that's generally

because we're thinking about things like sponsorship via a CPM model, which is

where a sponsor will pay you per thousand downloads that you get per episode. And the

problem with that is that we know that that works. That's sort of mass. broadcast

advertising. In fact, that model is based on display advertising, radio, TV advertising

and so on and so forth. The problem comes when we see all of these amazingly powerful

podcasts and podcasters just like you, who have got these really useful and really

engaged and really passionate niche audiences. Audiences that might not be as large

as a big broadcast style advertiser might want to access. who are powerful nonetheless,

who will take action based on something that you ask them to do, if it's within the

niche or the niche that you're talking to. And it's something that they love and they

feel passionate about as well. And that is true for so many podcasts. You see so many

podcasts that have these types of audiences and it's very, very important for us to understand

that there are benefits to those audiences and that actually they make up the vast majority

of the podcast in space. So it's such a shame that... many of the things that we

look to for monetisation, like sponsorships and so on, they feel out of reach for the average

podcaster because most of the podcast world is made up of you and me, the small indie

creator. So what we've done at Captivate is we've introduced a range of membership and

tipping tools that you can use to offer things like exclusive content, like early access.

to content that will later go public, but also other benefits. You can direct sell

sponsorships where people put their card details in and buy a mid-roll or a pre-roll

from you or whatever you want to sell. And they do this on a recurring basis. So from

day one, with an audience that doesn't need to be huge, you can generate really decent

revenue through your podcast. And guess what? If people aren't ready to sign up with

their card or Apple Pay or GPay on a recurring basis, they can leave you a tip,

a one-off payment to say thank you for all of your work. We've just introduced these

features to Captivate. They're available to every Captivate podcaster, and it's the

most useful, highly integrated version of this that you're going to find anywhere

in the world. It is a fantastic platform. So what I want to talk to you about today is

really, like, how do you unlock the potential of memberships? What are they? How

does tipping fit into the mix? What are the things that we can really leverage

as serious podcast creators? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to step through

a number of different things. I'm going to step through, obviously the Captivate release

that I just talked about, I'm going to step through one of the big benefits that

you get with this kind of monetisation, which I think is absolutely huge. I'm going

to talk to you about what a membership really is, what actually is a membership and

how do you sort of benefit from that and how do your listeners benefit from that.

I'm going to talk to you about how to think a little bit bigger. with this kind of

thing. I'm gonna talk to you about some of the benefits you can offer. I'm gonna talk

to you about the differences in the types of content you can offer, how it works

with RSS feeds, how do people listen, what kind of pricing structures you can use.

I'm gonna talk about some of the pitfalls when it comes to a podcast membership and also

why that diversity in podcast monetization is key, all right? So let's get into this.

It's gonna be fun. I'm looking forward to that. So let's talk about memberships, all

right? A podcast membership is where someone Pairs you a recurring monthly fee for

access to something that you give them. All right. A listener pays a recurring monthly

fee and you give them access to something that they didn't previously have access to.

Now that could be exclusive member only content where they're literally the only ones

that get the content that you publish to those members. Or it could be early access.

to content that will become public later. As an example, this episode today, this one

that you're listening to right now, publicly for free, I could say, well look,

actually I'm gonna put this out to my listeners on the 18th of May, but I'm gonna

give it to my Early Access members four days early, or two days early, or a day early,

or a week early, whatever I choose. That is called Early Access, or you'll sometimes

hear that called, windowing. And it's used by some of the most powerful podcasts

in the world. It's used by Wondery, it's used by Global, it's used by so many other

high tier podcast publishers that you should be using this potentially as well. But

you can also do other things with your membership. You can offer other things. So

you can offer like laptop stickers. We do that with Sparker Rebellion. You can

offer access to meetups or shout outs on your show. Whatever you can maintain, whatever

you can do, whatever people want. you can give them access to using memberships,

and you can power this all using Captivate. It's all built in, okay? What is a membership

and how does it differ from a tip? Well, a membership is something that people pay for

on a recurring basis, where a tip is a one off thank you. It's like a, you know,

validation for all the work that you do. Thank you for doing this show. We really

appreciate it. Here's 10 bucks. Go and buy yourself a beer. All right. It's that kind

of setup and it works. Works really well. It's really useful for people that like

you and know you, but they can't financially commit to a longer term month of recurring

commitment. No, are they ready for that? They might just simply not be ready. They might

have got to know you. They may have come to find your content and got to like you

and really understand what you do, but they're not, you know, they're not yet fully

super fans. They're not fully ready to commit to a month of recurring payments.

So they give you a one-off tip and it works really well. Again, it's something that

you can do through Captivate and you can do that just today. You can just sign in

and do that, all right? So that's the difference between a membership and a tip.

The biggest thing, the biggest thing about memberships and tips and monetising in

this particular manner and using something like your hosting platform Captivate to do

this is that you control every facet of that monetisation. You're not beholden to

a brand or a sponsorship partner, you're not beholden to someone saying our budgets

have been cut so we're going to cut your entire level of funding. We are not beholden

to someone saying you have to hit a certain number of downloads in order to open

up our sponsorship money. You can do this from day one of your podcast, whether

you're a brand new podcaster or a veteran that's ready to get started with monetization.

You can do this today. And the real beauty with this, the real power comes basically

from the fact that you do have that end to end control. All right. You can use

Captivate to... provide early access to provide exclusive content and you do that

from all one place. You do it from your current platform. You do it with a range of

check boxes. It's dead easy to do. But the real power is that it's a relationship

between you and your fans. It's a relationship between you and those who already love you

and those that will come to love you in the future. This is why it's so important

because you get the full level of control, end-to-end control over this entire monetization

option and you get the ability to more effortlessly scale this. Now, I'm not saying

this is easy, but it's easier to scale this because all you have to do is focus on

what you were already focusing on, which is find more listeners, marketing, audience

growth. And as long as you design this well, and as long as you tell people within

your episodes, go to, for example, with me, mark.live slash support, where you can

leave a tip, then people will hear that. Yeah, people will hear that and it becomes

just part of your natural episode flow. So the control aspect of memberships and tipping

is a huge benefit over other types of monetization. However, the real goal for serious

independent podcasters like you is that you get diversity in monetization. All right.

I talked about this at the beginning of the episode. If all your eggs are in one

basket for monetisation, and I've seen this with podcasters where they go after sponsors,

they write an amazing sponsor pitch and it's full of all these extra benefits and

they get the deal and it's brilliant. However, budgets get cut. Episodes don't perform

quite as well because we're trying new formats or whatever. There's Covid hits or

something affects the way that people listen or... Times just change, renewals come

around and they've not seen as a sponsor the sales that they want to see because sales

is a really tough thing to measure against a podcast. So what they do is they pull the

sponsorship for the next year. So it's all well and good when you sign the sponsor

but what happens is you've got to keep pitching that sponsor, you've got to keep adding

benefits and adding value and then you've got to find another sponsor. You need that

second pre-roll or that second mid-roll and you've got to do it all again. and then

the year after all again. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way of

sponsorships. That's the way of sort of, I suppose, thinking of podcasts as more

of a B2B mechanism, business to business mechanism. Whereas listener support, this diversity

that I'm talking about, if you use listener support, memberships and tips and so on and

so forth, yes, do the sponsor work, that's cool, all well and good. Do the pitching,

whatever you wanna do. If that fits for you, brilliant. However, if you've also

got some eggs in baskets that's listener support, the rest of it sort of becomes a little

less urgent because you're not having to worry so much about renewing the next sponsor

deal or having to provide more value for the same price the next year. And so what

you find yourself doing is you find yourself with freedom in monetization. You

find yourself with opportunity to say no, if you want to, because memberships and

tipping. is underpinned by your fans, it's underpinned by the people that love you

and will turn up regardless, they are there for you because they have been there

since day one or from day one that they found you, okay? And what this means is that

they are much more likely to continue the commitment because they've got a relationship

with you because you're piping into their ears, you're piping into what they want

to hear from you and that relationship is so strong that if you've got eggs in this

basket... the opportunity to be freer with your monetization and not necessarily

be beholden to all of the different elements of sponsorship or brands or companies

that have got to go through red tape and bureaucratic processes to get you that

invoice paid. You don't have to worry about that as much because it gives you opportunity

if you diversify your monetization. Now, there are other ways that you can diversify.

You can sell merch, you can sell other products, you can sell guest spots, whatever.

But the point is... that you've got to start thinking about diversity in monetization,

all right? And that's why unlocking and unleashing the power of these memberships

and tipping functionalities gives you a bedrock. Okay. I've just turned it on today

for the podcast accelerator, mark.live slash support. You can go and, you can go and

leave me a tip. If you like this episode, you can thank me for this episode. All right.

Brilliant. I'd love it if you did that. Cause I mean, I can buy a beer. I can buy some

of beer. She loved that. If you're listening, Sam, and if I do get a tip. I'll definitely

give that to you as a beer. Why did I say that? I thought myself out of a Mareti.

That's unbelievable. That is not like me. So the point of this is I just wanna drill

this home. I really wanna hammer this home is that you are a serious independent

podcaster and your audience enjoys what you do and loves what you do. And you are deserving

already because of the work that you put in, deserving already of a high quality

diversification in monetization. So many times I see people in the Captivate group

on YouTube talking to me at events saying Mark I wish I could just generate enough money

to cover my podcast hosting because that would take the pressure off. It would

stop it being an expense and it would turn it into something that I could break even

on and maybe after a couple of months I could buy a new mic. Maybe after a few months

extra I could buy a camera to start doing YouTube stuff. This enables that from

day one, from today. All right, so just take that for what it is. It's really important,

I think, that you realize that that diversity is there and that memberships and

tipping can be a really strong element of that diversity, okay? Let's think about

how we might work with memberships. Memberships are really powerful when it comes

to monetising your podcast, but they can be quite tricky because you've got to get

that pitch right. You know, what are the benefits? So with Captivate, what you can

do is you can set up different tiers of membership. You can say like tier one is

free, tier two is like five bucks a month, and then tier three is ten bucks a month,

up to whatever you want, as many tiers as you want. OK. And then you can stack the

benefits up. So you can say on the lowest tier you get... a shout out on the episode.

On the next tier up you get a shout out on every episode. On the tier after that

you get a shout out on every episode plus you get a laptop sticker and on the one

after that you get a laptop sticker, invites to meet ups and early access to public

episodes. And on the tier after that you get early access to public episodes plus

all the other stuff but you also get exclusive member only access. So what you can

do is you can compound these tiers up. You can say right we start with this base and

then we build them up on top of that, all right? And that's a really powerful way

of doing it. Now, some of the things that you can do, I think the important part

to understand here is when it comes to memberships, it's vital to only work within

your means and your boundaries, okay? So what I mean is that one of the risks with

podcast memberships is that you set out to say, I'm gonna provide an exclusive

episode to my members. every single week in addition to the public episode that

I'm already doing. Now, what's the biggest problem that indie creators like you and me

face? It's either money or it's time, and it's usually time. We're hobbyists. I'm

talking about Star Wars on my other podcast. It's this is this a labor of love.

I do it because I love doing it. It's not because I think it's going to make me rich.

Yeah. Does it pay for itself in hosting? Yeah, that's great. But I'm not going to get

rich off it. So finding the time to put. into that, when you've got a family and

when you've got work going on, it's quite difficult. Let's not pretend that it's

not. So for you to say, look, I love the idea of memberships and I love the idea

of offering exclusive content, but you've got to ask yourself, okay, can I dedicate time

to this? Now you might be able to. I know I could with this show because frankly,

what I would do is on an episode like this, I would do like the main episode, and

then I'd do a 10-minute extra episode at the end, which was of this topic but just...

extra content, it was something from a different perspective or a different angle.

If I'm doing an interview with James Cridland like I've got coming up next week,

we talk about YouTube and whether or not you should be using it, whether it's a

good thing for podcasting or not. What I would do is, I would say James, let's stay

on 10 minutes afterwards. We're going to stop the recording. This is for the public

and it's a brilliant episode. It's an hour long, but we're going to do 15 minutes

or so that is just for my exclusive members. Okay. And that can work because what

I'm doing is I'm bundling it in terms of time and workload, bundling that in to what

I'm already doing. But a lot of people make the mistake where they say, oh, we're

going to do another one hour podcast every week. Well, you can't because it's another

one hour podcast every week. That's just, it's, it can be hard to do that. So one

of the biggest pitfalls that people find with memberships is... that they bite

off too much, all right? So what I would say when you're designing your memberships

out is think about what you can reliably achieve, all right? What can you consistently

do? Because remember, it's easier to add tiers. So it's easier to start with things

like, here's a laptop sticker or a shout out on the show. Here's access to meetups and

invitations to events that we might go to because we already go to them. Here's

early access because I'm publishing my episodes Anyway, so I may as well, you know,

it's fine if I give you early access because I've got to do that episode anyway

Leave it at that for now. Maybe all right And then in the future it's better to

add on exclusive content as opposed to saying to yourself I'm gonna do exclusive

content from day one Realize I can't keep up with it and have to cancel it because

that is not a great experience for people All right, the people that are paying you the

money. It's not great for them All right, you lose a little bit of trust with that. So

just that's one of the biggest pitfalls is biting off too much offering too much as

a membership, offering too much as a commitment from you that people then sign up

to that you can't deliver on. So ease yourself into this and you'll be surprised

because people are fans of you, they love what you do. Anything extra doesn't have

to be a big grand gesture like here's a brand new one hour episode every week. Anything

is great because they're such big fans of you that they are so deeply connected to

wanting more of what you do. that extra is enough. It doesn't have to be a big grand

gesture of a full one hour episode extra every week, all right? So think about that.

How do you design that? How do you go about that? And also, how can you provide low

cost things to your patrons? So I know it sounds a bit sort of, I suppose a little

bit odd, but like old school things, like send them a sticker, send them a pen,

send them a mug, you know, these are like two pound, three pound. or in the US,

like three, four, five bucks things. You don't have to do big things, okay? Send

them a sticker, that costs pennies. It costs pennies to get stickers made, all

right? Or like 100 stickers is barely anything. You can send them even just a handwritten

thank you on a compliment slip will cost you pennies. But think about how much

that will mean to people. It will mean the world to people. It will mean the world.

to people, okay? So think about how can I?

How can I, as someone that has a duty of care to my fans, which is what we have when

we have people loyally following us, we have fans, it can be quite difficult to

accept that fact as a creator that people like you, we've got to get over that insecurity

a little bit. How can I give the very best extension of my podcasting experience

to my fans? OK? So. How can I make them feel great about being a member? How can I

make them feel like they've got more access to me than they had before they were

a member? How can I make them feel part of my group, of my crew, of my crowd, of my

people? How can I make them feel like one of us? And that doesn't have to be big

grand gestures, all right? Exclusive content is wonderful, and I'm going to talk

about those differences in a little bit more depth, early access and exclusive

in just a second.

It doesn't have to be the be all and end all, you can do other things. All right,

so think about that. How can you design that? Now, we've got a great set of options

for you to dig into. We've got some fantastic ideas for you over on the Captivate.fm

blog. You can go and check that out. Sarah and Ben have put together a wonderful

tutorial that gives you some Kickstarter ideas, all right, gives you an idea set that

you can use to build upon. All right, it will detail some benefits and some options

that you can use to give to your prospective member. So go take. a look at that. What is

exclusive content? What is early access content? And how does that play with RSS feeds?

Well, first of all, let's just quickly revisit what an RSS feed is, all right? An

RSS feed is all of your content from your podcast packaged up neatly into a box

that the apps and all of the places that people get their podcasts, whether it's

Global Play, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever, they access this box of

information called an RSS feed and they take data out of it and give it to listeners.

Every time you publish a new episode, a new episode goes in that box and that includes

the episode title, the mp3 file, the description, any links, any show notes in there,

an Apple global, Spotify, they go in and they say, oh, there's a new episode there,

let me pop that in the directory and people can listen to it. And that's what an

RSS feed is and Captivate compiles and builds those RSS feeds for you to submit to

places like Global Player and Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So that's the relationship

between you, your voice. an RSS feed and the outlets, the apps, okay? So that's

what an RSS feed is. We know that you're experiencing RSS feeds if you're a podcaster.

But what about this exclusive and early access? Surely that can't all work on the same

feed. Well, you're absolutely right, it can. Because that box of content, that RSS

feed, is public. That goes out everywhere. You couldn't obviously put exclusive content

in a public box. It's like putting something in your safe at home and then putting that

safe. in a box outside on your driveway. It just doesn't work. It's the two opposing

ideas, okay? So early access and exclusive content are delivered by what we call custom

private RSS feed. You don't have to worry about where they come from. Every time

you get a member and that member signs up to a early access or exclusive benefit on

your membership platform powered by Captivate, you... are going to see that the

person that subscribes to your membership is going to receive a custom RSS feed that

is generated uniquely and solely for them. Only they have access to it and they

can listen to that RSS feed and the content they're in using something like Apple

Podcasts or whatever else, okay? They can go and listen to that custom content in

their podcast app of choice

It works. It just does. Okay. That's how they get this private exclusive early access

content. Okay. Side note, Captivate builds in what we call anti-fraud monitoring.

So if someone like say, let's say that you subscribe to the podcast Accelerator membership,

you get your exclusive content via an RSS feed that is unique only to you. You then

share the RSS feed. and you give it to someone who isn't paying their membership,

but they're getting that membership content for free, naughty, that's piracy, all

right? That's naughty. That is sharing RSS test feed, that is fraudulent, okay? We've

built in some fraud monitoring tools, so what that allows you to do is see how many

times each episode has been downloaded by each individual member. Because if someone's

downloading an episode 10 times, Well, they simply don't need to do that. They just

don't need to do that, all right? So we build in fraud monitoring so you can see.

You can then regenerate their RSS feed if you think they're sharing it, regenerate

it, kill the old one, automatically send them a new one, all right? So that's how

protection works. That's a little bit of a side note, but it's useful to know. Early

access and exclusive. They're sort of two sides of the same coin, okay? They both

work delivering content via an exclusive RSS feed, so a private... member only RSS feed

that only each member has unique access to. The difference between the two is this.

Early access content is content that you will release publicly later. So I could

take this episode, like I said earlier, release it on Thursday the 18th of May, but

choose actually to give it to you, the member of the podcast accelerator, a week early

or two days early, and it will go down your private RSS feed you will get it before

anyone else and then eventually whenever I tell it to, whenever I set it in Captivate

to, it will switch over to being public. So that's a big benefit for you. It's exclusive

to you until that window ends. And that's very, very common. Very, very common. Exclusive

content is essentially member only content. It is content that will only be published to

your members. So it will never go from being exclusive to being public. This is fully

exclusive content and that tends to be extra content. Okay, where early access

is early access to normal content, exclusive content is different content. Okay, that is

huge. That is huge. All right, works really, really well. So that's the difference

between early access and exclusive content. I highly recommend that you take a look at

these because you can be using them today to generate revenue from your podcast.

There's a lot to this subject and I am going to be putting out more and more episodes

about this particular topic. Next week we've got an interview with the wonderful James

Cridland about YouTube and it's foray into podcasting and what that might mean for

us, the serious indie creator. And then we're going to be back with another episode

on really how to work with memberships and tipping more specifically. So this is really

an overview introduction episode that I wanted to bring to you quite early. And to

close up... on this. I want to really, really just hone in on just the idea that this

is about diversity. It really is about diversity in podcasting and about diversity

in revenue. Okay. If you are a serious independent creator, if you want to create

content that really resonates with your audience but that will give you a return on

that time investment, then I highly recommend that you look in to memberships and

at the very least, activating tipping on your podcast right away. It's so important

as a serious creator to get rewarded for our time and for our efforts. What we don't

often realise is that our fans are ready

that validation and to give us that thanks. We just don't always have an easy means

of asking for it or more importantly, a secure, safe and easy way to financially

transact with us. Now we do. Built into your Captivate Dashboard is all this goodness,

all of these features that I've just talked about. It's all powered by Stripe Marketplace.

It's all safe. It's all secure. It's all powered by Apple Pay and GPay and card

transactions and you can do so much with it. I've talked about some pitfalls. I've

talked about the differences between exclusive and early access content. We've talked

about RSS feeds. We've talked about some base level structures that you could use.

And you can find more about that on Captivate.fm forward slash blog. And we've

talked about generally. how and why you should be activating memberships and tipping

functionality for your podcast today in order to begin that diversity in monetization.

Please take heed of this. It's very, very important because I truly believe that

now is the time for creators like you and me to spread our wings, to open up a range

of options for monetization and to start being fairly compensated for the time that

we put in. And our fans are more than willing to do that. We just have to ask them.

Our fans, let me say that again, our fans are more than willing to help us and to

support us and to thank us for all we do. We have to be just willing to ask. So go

and ask. Go and get this set up. Get started with memberships, get started with

tipping and go and check out mark.live.com forward slash support and you can leave me

a tip if you want me to buy some that beer. But until the next time, I'll be back

next week with an episode. featuring the wonderful James Cridland where we go deep

into YouTube for podcasting. And if anyone is at the podcast show in London next

week, maybe we'll use some of that tip money to buy you a beer as well. Until next

time, keep up the great work, enjoy what you do. Keep on sharing your voice because