Podcasts are a great way to communicate your message with your target audience. You can choose any niche and make a podcast on that. There are a lot of podcasts available these days on various websites and apps. If you have a podcast and are looking for ways to monetise it. Bingo! You are at the right place. Here we will be enlisting nine different ways you can monetise your podcast.
There are a lot of ways to monetise your podcast. Some, however, will depend on the number of followers/listeners you have. There are still some strategies that you can utilise to make some extra money for your podcasts. Let’s take a look at them.
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1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is done by selling products or services that you are familiar with. Sounding authentic and having complete information about the products or services that you are promoting is very important. Hence, be careful to only target those brands that you are familiar with.
Earnings from this method are made once someone purchases through the link that you provided.
Including the sponsorship in the podcast can be tricky. Try making an ad spot within your podcast if your audience size is smaller than required for a traditional sponsorship. Another way you can add this sponsorship to your podcast is by mentioning the product or service in your monologue and introduce people to this product or service.
Amazon and Shareasale are popular platforms for affiliate marketing. And there are so many more options in the market as almost all kinds of products and services pick up affiliate marketing deals. Lasso is also another great tool that allows you to redirect people to your very own special tracking website link, and you can memorize it as it's a small URL, which is easy to say during the podcast. Creating a WordPress blog for your content is also a great way to redirect audiences to your content and all the products that you mentioned.
2. Sponsorships And Advertising
Advertising and sponsorship deals are the first things that come to mind when thinking of monetizing your podcast. There are specific networks that help you connect with some great brands. These advertising agencies do all the work for you, for instance, contacting and finding the perfect brands and negotiating rates with them and lots more. All of this is done by the agency; however, to be able to get into the agency, you may require an audience of at least 5k to 10k listeners per month.
Midroll and Authentic are the top networks providing this service at the moment. However, podcast hosting companies will generally have a network of their own and can help you connect with some brands.
Another way of getting good podcast deals is to reach out to the companies that are suitable for your audience.
3. Courses
Making a course on the niche that you are targeting via your podcast is a great way to earn extra money, provided that the course offers some value. You can conduct a webinar to announce the launch of your course. A webinar is a one–to–many communication tool that allows the host to speak to a large group of audience at one time from any space of their choice. You can create a course using the Teachable Course Platform.
4. Services
If you are good at something and you know you can reel in some clients by showcasing your expertise, then what's the harm in that. Make full use of the podcasting opportunity to sell your abilities to clients. Once they hear you talk about the skill that you are good at. You may just end up having a large clientele based on your podcasts.
Talking about a specific niche allows them to get to know you better and know your level of experience and expertise in that particular area.
5. Coaching and Consulting:
This falls under the same umbrella as Services. In this option, however, you aren't doing the work for them. You are merely guiding and providing a helping hand to the people. Consulting and coaching mean you guide them on the right path and make sure they follow suit.
Diets, fitness, teaching, and business are some of the areas where coaching can be conducted. However, there are various niches out there that you can tap into.
6. Crowdfunding and donations:
You can add links to your PayPal, Stripe Account or set up a GoFundMe campaign page to allow your viewers to pay if they enjoy your content. This method is very successful in the entertainment industry. You can also set up a Patreon account to provide extra content there and set tiers to decide which tier gets access to which type of content. This leads us to our next point, which is to create custom content.
7. Premium Content:
Make sure you provide valuable and premium content to your followers or people who buy any tier. Making sure you offer them something unique. Such as early access to your content, behind-the-scenes clips, bloopers reel, and much more. You can also create custom content just for the people who have taken the membership and conduct live sessions with them. This model has already been applied by YouTube. Youtubers provide their viewers the option to gain membership by clicking on the button join, and you can view exclusive content. Youtubers even go live with their members-only accounts, which provides the members an edge over other followers.
8. Physical Product:
People love to associate with the people they watch online. They not only love to follow their work but idealize them. Hence, they are willing to spend money to get something that associates them with that podcast. Physical products include mugs, t-shirts, stickers, pop sockets, phone covers/cases, and so much more. You can use a site like Teespring to create your merch and sell your product.
9. Books:
If you can write a whole book, then great, go for it! Otherwise, a way that you can write a book is by choosing all your podcasts that are related to one topic. Transcribe them, either yourself, or you can use the Speech to Text tools available online. Once transcribed, make additions to it and add some value proposition to it so that the consumers find some reason to buy it.
Endnote:
You can use either one of these strategies to not only grow your audience but also to gain their trust and earn some money along the way. These methods are a surefire way to make you some money; the beginning is always slow, but once the ball starts rolling, there is no stopping it.