Ways To Make Money Podcasting
Making dollars and sense getting started with podcast affiliates, sponsorship deals, and advertising without requiring a huge audience.
Podcast creators, thanks to technology breaking barriers to entry, often forget to consider their own time when creating podcast content.
With a little persistence and digital elbow grease, you too can pay yourself what you deserve. The potential to earn is definitely there.
The country with the biggest heart for podcast content is the United States.
42% of Americans listen to podcasts on a monthly basis.
75% of podcast-loving Americans listens to 3 or more podcasts per week (average of 9 actually)
1/2 of this polled audience earns over 75k annually.
Podcast listeners prefer comedy, news, and true crime podcasts as their favorite. Who knew? What’s your favorite podcast genre?
Either way, nearly half of the US population has their ear on a podcast right now. The world exists of hundreds of millions of podcast fans and only about 250k podcasts are released each week.
Now that podcast is more mainstream, and socially accepted as popular media, there’s a an opportunity to make money from podcast creation.
Let’s check out a few ways that will help you start earning money with your podcast.
Affiliates
All you need is an unique link. Well, and for people to actually click on the link and buy something (I’m sure you get the idea).
Starting out is really straight-forward.
Find a product related to your podcast that you want to promote.
Check if the product has an affiliate marketing program (try searching [product name] + affiliate program in google).
Sign up.
Get approved.
Consider referencing the product during your podcast, providing a link in your podcast description, and including the link in your socials (such as pinterest).
The effort, here, is the selling. Often, you’ll be offered tools, videos, media, and other goodies to help you bring awareness to the product that you’re helping to sell.
When someone does buy the product via your unique affiliate link you get paid a commission.
How you curate affiliate links, or how many affiliate programs you sign up for, is totally up to you. Use cautious with acquiring multiple affiliate links all at once as this may come off in a negative, or untrusting way, to your audience.
Examples of some well-known brands that have well-established affiliate programs that you may join:
Sponsorship Deals
Sponsorship may either be provided by an individual or business.an individual may choose to support your creative efforts through a subscription or donation. Alternatively, you may often hear “brought to you by..” which is often followed by a brief description of a company product or service.
Individual Sponsorship
Patreon and Substack are popular ways to obtain sponsorship/support from your listeners.
In either app, you may choose the subscription model and set the payment tiers. Patreon offers a reward program in exchange for listener sponsorship. This reward is something you’d set as well. Usually, many Patreon creators will include rewards as a discount on merch, private content/bloopers, Q&A/meet and greet with creators, mention of listeners’ names during the episode.
A donation service, like Buy Me a Coffee, is a great way for creators to enable listeners to give a custom amount of money at any given time. This offers a solution for those who don’t wish to participate in a monthly subscription.
Business Sponsorship
A business may entertain providing a larger sponsorship payment (compared to shorter advertisements) in order to be exclusively mentioned for a content segment or full episode.
This can be a great way to avoid competition with other businesses who may also have an advertisement placed within the content or episode. The creator can often increase the sponsorship amount due to the exclusivity.
You can either choose to perform outbound sales on your own or hire an agency to do the heavy lifting to match you with a suitable business.
Advertising
A creator may choose to read an advertisement script, talk about a product sent for testing, or insert a pre-produced advertisement (fixed or dynamically inserted in after the recording takes place).
A host read advertisement can be placed in the beginning (pre-roll), middle (mid-roll), or end (post-roll) of an episode.
Generally speaking, podcast ads are 15, 30, or 60 seconds in length.
Fee for an advertisement is usually charged at a structure borrowed from radio measured in CPM (cost per thousand). Currently, an average CPM is $25 USD (according to Acast).
If you don’t yet have 1000 listens/downloads from one episode in the first 30 days, you may opt to charge a fixed rate determined between you and the advertiser.
Advertising Agencies
Feel free to check out a few examples of advertising agencies that support smaller creators and businesses.
Podspike caters to small start ups and indie creators.
Podcorn is a match-making service that lists businesses, budgets, and what type of advertisement is requested.
You’ll negotiate whether or not you perform an unedited host-read script, work off of speaking points, or insert an advertisement supplied by the business.
Dynamic ad insertion involves pre-produced advertisements inserted into your podcast episode. A positive of this is that the advertisement always changes (depending on particular needs of the agency/advertisers. Yet, the down side to this is that listeners rather skip polished ads vs the natural sounding ads read by your trusted podcast creator.
Take a gander at some dynamic ad insertion agencies (platforms) that offer dynamic ad insertion.
Keep in mind that dynamic ad insertion platforms usually require a higher listener count. Feel free to perform your own due diligence as always!
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