Welcome to the Podcast Answers Podcast. If you have never joined us before, we help
people start and grow their podcasts answering questions about podcasting along the way.
And so if you have any questions that you want answered, please comment right here in
the video where you're watching or go to podcastanswers.com slash contact and you can ask me a question
about podcasting. I love talking about podcasting. I love that's why I started this podcast and
I love just being able to talk to people about that. So without further ado, let's get into
our topic today, which is how to make money at your podcast. And what I'm going to say
is going to sound a little bit controversial right now, but there is no money in podcasting.
Yes, you can get paid, but if you do that, it's going to come later. Do it for fun now.
Don't stress out about growing so big to get your sponsors. Start your podcast, start it
small. Even for me, this podcast started small and I've been doing podcasts since 2007. And
I just started this one and it's still, I mean, it's growing, but it's definitely not
numbers to get sponsors right now. So don't stress out about getting so big that you need
to get sponsors. I mean, you're not Joe Rogan, right? I mean, even he was famous for something
else first, you know, as the famous Doc Rock said on the flow podcast, you know, Joe Rogan,
you are not Joe Rogan and he was even famous for something earlier before he did his Joe
Rogan experience podcast. So yes, there is money in podcasting and we're going to talk
about how you can make some money, but you're not going to get rich at podcasting, especially
right out of the gate, especially as you start your podcast right now, you are not going
to get rich at that. So now what you first thing you need to come down and decide is
what is the point of your podcast? What is the purpose of your podcast? Is it to have
fun? Is it to make money? Is it to drive people to buy your products? All of those things
are good and all of those things can be purposes for your podcast and they can all, it can
all be, all of those purposes can be why you're podcasting, but you need to sit down and decide
what is the purpose of your podcast. And for me, it's a little bit of having, having fun.
I love podcasting. I love being able to get out there and talk about the things that I
love to talk about. And so for me, it's, it's, it's having fun. For me, it's hopefully at
some point I can make money. I do release episodes of these early, a week early for everybody.
And so you can become a plus member and you know, do that in Apple podcasts or in buy
me a coffee and you can get those episodes that I make of this podcast early. And that
makes me a little bit of money. It also, for me, the other last thing that I'm hoping
for is to drive people to buy my products. And while I don't actually have a product
per se, I do help people along the way. I'm available for one-on-one consulting and that
does come at a cost. So it is a product. And that's the goal of this podcast. This is one
of the goals of this podcast is to help drive people towards my one-on-one podcast consulting
as well as, you know, just giving away some free information because I like giving my
information away free. But I also know that some people aren't going to be the ones that
sit down and listen to a hundred podcast episodes or a hundred YouTube videos. They're going
to want to just ask somebody point blank. Here's, here's what I want to do. Can you
help me do it? And I'm available for that podcastasters.com slash contact. But you need
to decide what the, what's the purpose of your podcast is. And, and so one of the things
to, so then if you do decide you want to get sponsors, one thing to note that usually you
have to have around 1000 downloads per episode before you can even get ads from ad agencies.
So a lot of podcasts hosts are willing to add, you know, adds the advertisements into
your podcast, but usually the cost, you either need to have a thousand downloads per episode
or the cost is based on 1000 downloads per episode. And that's usually like $25 per,
you know, 25, 23, that's kind of the going rate right now per 1000 downloads episodes.
So you may not be making a lot of money off of your show unless you have tens of thousands
of listeners, which you could just right at first, you're not going to have that. And
so you don't, don't expect to get ad agencies right at first. So, but there are some ways
to go about getting some money and getting some sponsors for your show. One of the best
things that you can do is do a trade. If you know of somebody who has like a business,
but it doesn't have unnecessarily a budget or there's, you know, a small bit, small business,
but want to do some advertising, you can do a trade. You run an ad for them and their
business in your podcast in exchange for some promotion in their, in their business, you
know, for your podcast. So for instance, we, you know, you can go to your local barber
or local, whatever, somebody that, you know, that you, you know, you go to their shop,
you experience their shop, you buy things from them and see if they're willing to do
a trade with you. That may be putting up a poster in your, in their shop for your podcast
in exchange for a 10 second ad or this episode is sponsored by XYZ. That's probably one of
the best ways, especially if you don't have a big marketing budget, they don't have a
big marketing budget. And that's a good way to exchange and get some ads. If you have
ads in your podcast, that's kind of proof of social, social proof, excuse me, which
basically means that people are going to hear ads in your podcast and those are, they're
going to be more willing to, to invest in your podcast because if you don't have any
podcasts with advertising in them, they're going to say, Hey, you know, how much is your,
how much is your podcast? You know, how much do I cost me to advertise? How many other
businesses, what, you know, what, how much, how much have they paid? Things like that.
And you're going to say, I don't have any people that, that have paid. I don't have
any podcasts advertisers. And so if you can do the trade like this, that's going to help
you because you're going to be able to say, no, hey, look, no, this person's sponsored.
They don't have to tell them it was a, it was a exchange for, for them. You can just
say, no, this person wasn't advertiser on our podcast. The other thing that you can
do is go to local businesses that you know and ask them to support you. This works especially
well. Again, if you know the people that are running the businesses, but up even that,
if you know people that have small, medium sized businesses that are local to your area,
you can go to them and say, Hey, I have this podcast on whatever. And I think that you'd
be a great fit. And here's why. Now, again, you're not going to want to maybe necessarily
advertise in have, they're not going to want to advertise with you. If it's you're completely
different fit lows, let's say you're talking about a barbershop topics and you go to a
shop that sells bananas, they're probably not going to want to advertise with you.
But if it's just a generic podcast or a podcast that could be about any topics, it's really
easy to go in and I could even with this podcast go to someone local and say, Hey, I'm trying
to help people, especially local people, start podcasts. And I would love to get your business
and I would love to be able to advertise for you and your barbershop and you can then get
some more people coming in from that. People will hear it. It doesn't have to be a very
expensive ad slot. I mean, you can start making money, $5 a month, $10 a month, whatever you
can make and you can say, you know, or per episode. So let's say you do four episodes
a month and you're charging $5 an episode. That's 20 bucks that you're making right
there that you didn't have before. Now it's not going to pay your mortgage and podcasting
for the most people isn't going to pay their mortgage, but it could allow them to invest
in new equipment. It could allow them to have date money to go on a date with their spouse
or significant other. So those are a couple of different ways on how you can get sponsors
to your show. And other ways that you can make money on your show that don't include
sponsors and advertisements or is what's called value for value. And this is something
in the podcasting 2.0 EgoSphere where people say, I'm willing to give you back this much
value because I'm getting this much value out of your show. And that could come into
the buy me a coffee. I mean, that's what I'm doing essentially with buy me a coffee. People
are saying, you know, people can say, I want to sponsor you. I mean, I do have levels per
month that they can pay, but people can also go in there, buy me a coffee.com slash podcast
answers. And they can say, I want to sponsor you. I want to give you support, you know,
$40 a support or $100 of support or $300 of support, whatever they think that my podcast
is worth to them. They can go and give that money back to me. That's value for value again.
They're getting value out of the content that you're producing with your podcast. And then
they want to put it back in. They want to give that value back. And if you limit that
to say you have to pay $5 a month and then you get early episodes, which again, not a
bad thing. I'm doing that, right? I'm doing that. But don't value for value in and of
itself is not limited. You need to have a way for people to give however much they want.
And so again, buy me a coffee is good at that because yes, I do have levels, you know, $5
whatever, you know, a month or going up from there. But buy me a coffee also allows you
to say, I just want to spend $100 on this producer, on this content producer. And so
you're not limiting it because it may be worth $100. Your episode may be worth $100
to them. You may have given them this huge, great idea. And if you're saying, you know,
you can come in here and just become a $5 a month sponsor, you're limiting it yourself.
People will give you money for what they feel your show is worth. And value for value is
not necessarily just money. That can include time, talent or treasure. So people may give
back to your show. They may, if they're great at artists, you know, become if they're an
artist, a digital artist, they may create you digital art. And I've had that happen for
my show, one of my shows that I've had before, someone came in and said, Hey, I'm an artist
that I want to do some cover art. And they did. And to this day, there's a derivative
of that, that artwork that's still on that podcast. And there's so people can come in
with their talent, because you know, they may be good at doing voiceovers, they may be
good at creating something that you didn't even know you needed. And they want to give
that back to you. Or they're also people may have their time, you know, they may volunteer
to to count your episodes or organize your episodes or something that necessarily is
just something anyone can do, but they're willing to spend that that time, they're willing
to give their time back to you because they feel like what you have given them is a great
deal. So don't don't count out value for value and like booster grams and booster grams are
something with streaming streaming Satoshi's new podcast apps can do that, you know, where
they can, as they're listening, they can give small amounts of Satoshi back to Bitcoin back
to you, as well as sending a message and boosting again, however much they want to get a message
back to you. And I've seen it, lots of people who have never had any engagement on their
show. All of a sudden, people are sending in multiple booster grams per week, just because
they want to get their, their, their content heard, they want to get their comment heard.
And so they send these booster grams in, and they're showing value, they're doing actually
value for value in two different ways because they're not only giving their treasure to you,
but they're also giving their time and commenting back to the show. They're actually giving
you value to make for your show. So it's great because that, that system allows them to listen
to something you said, whether they agree or not, give you money back and then actually
be part of the show again and give you more content to put on your show.
Now, again, we talked about having to have lots of episodes, you know, don't stress out
about the amount of people that are listening to your show. But if you do want to grow your
show, some of the ways that you can do that are buying ads on, you know, Facebook or Instagram
or Twitter or wherever. Now you can limit those to a certain area and that will give
you some, some people that'll get people that click like on your Facebook. So you see more
of your things may not be the best investment, but it does allow people to see you and you
can target those and it's fairly cheap to do that. You can target those ads based on
what you want. So you can say people who, you know, for me, I could say people who like
podcasts, people who are into digital producing things, people who are, you know, I could
limit it to people who are, you know, 20 to 40 or, you know, so I'm not getting people
that are younger like in high school. If I wanted to, I mean, I do, I want to help people
no matter what their age is, but you can limit that to be whatever you want it to. Now some
other ways to do this is to get your promotion to increase your listeners and followers are
getting business cards. Business cards are super cheap. I mean, you can get 100 business
cards for $20 on Canva and it's super simple to design a business card on Canva. I've done
that and so you can get 100 business cards for $20, not again, not a lot and you can
go around and put them in all your local shops. So, you know, I've been in Jimmy John's and
there's a Bolton board in Jimmy John's and there's a Bolton board in your local coffee
shop and there's a Bolton board in a lot of different places that people are exchanging
their business cards. This is a great idea, especially to get people local to know your
content. Now, again, that's not necessarily going to be global, but I've passed out business
cards lots of different places. I've been driving and I pass out business cards when
I go to a rest stop or wherever there's a place for me to put a business card. I go
ahead and do that because it is something that people want to see. I mean, people, you
never know where you might come up with new listeners at. And so, you can put things on
the, some of the things that I like on the back of the business card is a QR code to
either the website link or a specific episode. If you have an episode that has like a really
huge guest on it, you can have a QR code that goes right to that episode. You can, you know,
you want to do that. You want to put a link on it to your website. You may want to put
your cover art too, so people know what they're looking at and it might be good to have like
a play pause button around it. So, it kind of looks like a iPod or a podcast player of
some sort. And then your show description. So, when they're looking at it, they're going
to go, oh, that's the cover art for when I, when I search for this podcast. So, it's
going to be a show name, your cover art in a little bit of your description. And if your
description is written right, people are going to know what your podcast is about. And then,
you may want to also put logos to some podcast apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube,
if you're doing video on YouTube, things like that, because that way when people see it,
they know, oh, it's a podcast. And that's why I would also do something with like a play
pause button around your cover art, just to kind of make it a little bit more descriptive
that that is a podcast and that is something that they can listen to. Now, one of the other
ways that you can do this too, to help grow your show is becoming a member of Facebook
groups that deal with topics that you cover. Now, you have to be a little bit careful with
this because you can't just go in and promote your content. Like, you can't become a group,
you know, join a group of podcasts people, in my case, and just start promoting your
content. Hey, I do this podcast episode, come listen to my podcast. People are going to
ban you from their podcast groups because they don't like spam. But one of the ways
that you can do that is be helpful. Go in there, start answering people's questions,
you know, and this doesn't have to be on podcasts. I mean, just that's what I'm thinking of because
this is a podcast app or podcast about podcasting. But you can go in there and you can be super
helpful. And just if people have questions about a product or something, just be super
helpful about it. Be helpful, be helpful, be helpful, be helpful. And then maybe you
have an episode on a specific topic that they're asking. So once you've established yourself
as somebody who's helpful in that group, so you don't get kicked out right away, then
maybe you can start like gently promoting things. And when I mean that, you can say
things like, Hey, you know, this is a great question. Here's, you know, here's the answer
to your question. But if you want to hear more about that, I have a full episode of a podcast
about that and link directly to that, that episode. And that people are going to be more
likely to let that go because you're not necessarily going to be self promoting. I mean, yes, you
are promoting your thing, but you're also being super helpful. You've, you have a track record
of being helpful in that group. And then you, you are going in and answering a specific
question. You're not going to go in and just say randomly, Hey, I have a podcast about
podcasting, but you're asked, you're answering a specific question in that group. And then
maybe linking to your content because you can say, Hey, I've answered this question,
but I have a better, a more fuller episode on that that you can go out and listen to
right away. So guys, I hope that you really find that helpful. If you did, go ahead and
make sure you like and subscribe to our podcast. We're on all the podcasts players as well
as YouTube and a lot of social medias. So if you're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
we're on all of those places. Just look at that podcast answers is our name for almost
everything besides Twitter on Twitter. It's podcast answers one just because they didn't
have that, but I hope that you find this episode super helpful. If you have any questions about
this again, I am available for one-on-one consulting and I would love to answer your
questions about podcasting. You can ask a question at podcast answers.com slash contact.
And again, we love to get you in and we'd love to answer your questions as well as I'm
available for one-on-one consulting and can help you personally do this thing. So thanks
guys. Have a great week.