When it comes to you and your audience, you wanna keep
anybody out of the way between you having a
direct connection.
Welcome to Your Podcast Consultant. Small lessons
with big value. With more than a
decade of experience and millions of downloads, this
Hall of Fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author
and mentor to 1,000. Now he wants
to work with you. He's your podcast consultant,
Dave Jackson. Look, I'm not
anti capitalism. By all means, if you got an idea, throw
it on the wall and see if it sticks. But this one makes
me scratch my head, and there are a few of these coming out. And this
is where you want your audience to give you value
in the form of money for the value that you
deliver to them. Now that's called value for value. I like that
model. I like it a lot because when you have a
direct connection with your audience, there are no sponsors
to boycott. There's all that stuff is out of the way. You wanna keep
it direct between you and your audience. And
so, consequently, if I am looking
into a service and they're like, oh, yeah. Just add this to your feed, I'm
gonna think long and hard about that one because if
whatever I'm putting into my feed or before my feed, if
it's a prefix, if that breaks, everything
breaks. And one that's slowly
coming up is I'm seeing people come up with these ways to
accept donations. And what I don't understand about
this is you can use a service like buy
me a coffee. So there's one. Right? You
buy me a coffee. Audience pays buy me a coffee. Buy me a
coffee pays you. I just did a episode on
this, and they're one of the best in terms of not making a fee. But
then there are other things that I go, I'm not quite sure I get this.
And there's one, and I'm just, you know, hey. Again,
kudos for trying something new. I just don't understand your business model, and it's
called Lenny dot f m. And what it does is listeners
choose a bundle of podcast to support for $4 a
month. And they say they're planning more flexibility, but they have to
start somewhere. And in US dollars, you pay
$4, and it's spit split equally
amongst the top 4 podcast, less, of course, a
10% fee to Lenny dotfm. And, again, they
gotta get paid. I get that. To start getting support from your
audience, just mention Lenny dotfm and use the brand kit for
your website. There's no new app for the audience and no extra
content crew to create. And we'll let you
know when support from listeners starts accumulating.
And I guess you have to have a a Lenny dot f m account. But
what I don't understand is what
what's in it for me again? Because if I'm going to ask
my audience to support me, why wouldn't I just tell them to
go to my website.com/support? And that's
where you can set up your PayPal, your buy me a coffee,
your Patreon, your Supercast, whatever it is. If you're using,
Buzzsprout has a way for you to do that. Now they take 15%,
and so does, Captivate. That's why, if you're just
looking for donations, buy me coffee isn't a bad idea
because you are losing 10%. Now
the other thing is you're asking your audience to give you
$4 or if it sounds like a dollar, which you're gonna get
90¢ of. Why are you putting a limit
on the value you provided? Did you
give more than a dollar of value to your
audience? Then why are you asking them to give you 90¢
back? That doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Let the audience choose how much
your donation is. Because for some
people, $5, they're like, I don't know. $5, that's a
lot of money. And then other people are like, oh, $50. I got
that in my couch cushions. And they'll gladly give it to
you when you simply ask them. Now I do recommend that if you're
gonna do any kind of call to action, a,
mention it in the middle. But the other one is,
I if you're not gonna do any, do it towards the end. What
I don't understand is when people go, hey. Welcome to the show. It's the
Dave Jackson Power Hour. And before we get into the topic today, I just
wanna remind you, if you could go out to whatever and give me
money. Like, give you money for what? It's
kinda weird when you do that. Somewhere in the middle after
you've given them value, whether that's in the middle or at the
end or somewhere, I don't recommend right up front. I know I listen
to he said the guy that goes to church. I listen to a lot of
church podcast from time to time, and they're always asking for
money up front. And I go, you do know you are
pushing that stereotype that all they want is your money.
And it kinda sounds that way. So, again,
nothing against the fine people over at lenny.fm.
I'm just saying, a, why are you limiting the amount of
money, people give to you? And, b,
now it's it's the audience gives to Lenny, Lenny gives
to whatever PayPal, and PayPal gives to you. That's one
more person in the connection between you and your audience that
I just don't think you need. I don't understand
the problem that they are solving. The only thing I can think
of is, okay, but, Dave, what if I listen to 10 different podcasts? I've
gotta give money to this person and that person and this person, and
that's where I'm like, hey. You know, at some of these places, you can set
it up to just be automatic so they don't have to come
back. And I guess they
can support their favorite 4 podcast
in some form where before they weren't. Okay.
I guess they're making it a little simpler. But that's where you as a
podcaster, you have to realize you have to make this easy. It can't be,
oh, go over here and set up this and then buy some
tokens and turn those into whatever, and then I will
be able to no. Just make it easy if that's what you wanna do.
Now the other thing I need to point out here before we get out of
this is you don't have to make money with your
podcast. What? Yeah. It's true. I've said it
before. You don't have to make money with your podcast, especially when you
start out. I just saw someone in a Facebook group this morning, and
they were like, look. I am 30 episodes in,
and we need to start making money. And while I went over, number 1, they
weren't 30 episodes in. They were 10 episodes in. So I'm not sure
why. Maybe I'm missing something. But when you first start
out, I always recommend doing it for fun, know who your
audience is, know why you're doing it. Because if you don't get your why, you
burn out. If you don't know who you're talking to, you're not gonna entertain them.
But if you add on top of that, I wanna make money really quickly
because I gotta quit my day job in 6 weeks, that's not gonna work.
Because, a, it takes a while to grow your audience. I typically say
around 3 years, and nobody likes that idea. And, yes, there are people
that will sell you hope for 3 easy payments, but I've
got the proof if you want me to prove it to you. It's it's typically
around 3 years. The 1st year is awful. The 2nd year, you found your voice
and you're growing your audience. And by year 3, you have an audience that you
might be able to monetize. But I just wanted to put
that out there because some people think they're a failure because they're not monetizing.
And the reason they're not monetizing is they don't wanna monetize. And I'm
here to tell you, it's called a hobby, and it's fun. I ride my bike
every summer. I did this summer, and, I didn't make a dime. In fact, it
usually cost me some money to tune up my bike. So
as we talk about monetization today, for those of you that don't wanna monetize, that's
perfectly fine. Don't let others go you know,
it's kinda weird because nobody asked me, oh, you ride your bike? Yeah. How much
money is that making? Nobody asked me that, but they do with my podcast, and
I think that's somewhat rude in a way. If you need
help with your podcast, I would love to help you. It's
super simple. Just go over to, school of podcasting.com/join.
I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I
do, and I can't wait to see what we do together.