One of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to podcasting is ‘how do I work with sponsors?’ and on today's podcast episode, I'm going to walk you through the three ways on how to make money with your podcast. I’ll also be diving into why sponsorship should be the last way in which you approach making money with your podcast.
A few of the questions I hear most often are:
How do I make money?
How do I work with sponsors?
How many downloads do I need?
What I'm going to share with you today is my personal opinion after running and producing a podcast since 2015. There are three key ways (buckets) to make money from your podcast. They are:
Marketing Your Own Products & Services
Affiliate Marketing
Sponsorships
Do you sell courses or digital services such as group coaching or copywriting? Market these. Promote them to your listeners and allow them to gain traction with your audience. Spend time building out your own offerings rather than spending hours looking for sponsors.
If you don't have a business yet, no worries. If you simply have an idea of the type of business you want to start it doesn't necessarily commit you to figuring out the product right away. If you're clear on the direction you want to go with your business you could set up the content of your podcast to provide value and solutions for the pain points of your audience. What you would do is invite your audience to engage with you beyond the podcast. This could be in the form of a free guide/ download, an offer for a free training, the offer to join a free Facebook group, etc., so that you can really begin to nurture and build that stronger relationship with them before you even try to sell them anything. When you are ready to start selling to them, you’ve already built that ‘Know, Like & Trust’ factor with them.
Maybe you don’t have a product or service yet, but you know about a software that would benefit your audience. By sharing a software/ product/ service of someone else's using a unique URL code, you get a piece of that revenue by sharing. This is affiliate marketing.
When I first got into online business, I remember learning about affiliate marketing and I thought, ‘oh my god, this is so gross’; and the truth is, you're going to find whatever you look for in life and I think I was looking for that.
Now, I look at affiliate marketing and think, ‘okay, this totally makes sense’. The thing I love about affiliate marketing is when you share a product or service with your audience, it's simply the business's way of compensating you. So rather than the company paying for their own marketing, by you sharing their product or service with your audience, they're essentially redirecting that money to you.
A great example of this is a few years ago my friend Natalie Bacon had a blogging course. She started her online business blogging about finance and she created a course. I had people in my audience asking me if I could talk about blogging and essentially, I was like, ‘No, I actually can't because I can talk about podcasting’, just not about blogging. So Natalie and I partnered together to do a webinar training for anyone who wanted to learn how to blog. For me it was truly an aligned fit because she taught people how to start a blog, and she was successful at it, and with the podcast I was able to then share with my audience about the free training. Once the training was over Natalie then promoted her (paid) course to all of the attendees and anyone who enrolled in her course using my link, I then received an affiliate commission.
An example of a software service that I'm an affiliate of is Podia. If you go to the She Did It Her Way website and look under ‘Start A Business’ you'll see Podia listed. If you click that link, it is an affiliate link. There are two reasons why I promote Podia:
I use it personally
I love it
These are excellent examples of aligned affiliate marketing and having integrity behind who you partner up with. Affiliate marketing, when you do it right and you do it intentionally, can be lucrative. Lastly, you can certainly be able to create revenue in your business from using affiliate marketing.
Sponsorships are a wonderful way to generate revenue and we have generated 1,000s of dollars in sponsorship revenue with the podcast. I am so grateful to be able to have so many of you to tune in and listen to the show, which then allows for brands to reach out to us to say, ‘hey, your audience and what we offer is in line, can we do a partnership?’.
There are highs and lows with sponsorships. 95% of the time sponsors and brands have reached out to us, so I wasn't investing my time or energy trying to seek out sponsorships. I think that's something that's really key is that in the beginning, your time is so limited. You should always be assessing our time in terms of ‘if I say yes to one thing, then what am I indirectly saying no to?’.
I recommend that the time that you're going to spend reaching out to sponsorships and cultivating that relationship and finding those that are going to sponsor your podcast and instead use those hours and really invest in marketing your own products or services. So the way that I like to look at sponsorship is it's great when it's there and it comes in a supplemental, but it's not the backbone of how I make money.
Do we still work with sponsors when it's a good fit and it's aligned? Yes, absolutely. I always want to make sure 1) I am protecting your ears. I'm not just going to serve up a ton of ads on my show. 2) It has to make sense and feel really good. Sponsorship is a great supplement, but I would not consider it the end-all-be-all.
Inside my upcoming training, How to Launch Your Podcast In 5 Easy Steps, I'm covering my exact plug-and-play content planning framework. I'm going through the specific tech setup that you need and also some of the specifics I teach to my students inside Podcast Your Way. This way you can actually start recording the day after you leave the training, and have specific tangible next steps laid out for you. Grab your seat here.
I am so grateful that you tuned into it another podcast episode and until next time, keep doing it your way,