Other Ways to Make Money from your Podcast
Lesson 29 from: Podcasting for Crafters and MakersTara Swiger
Other Ways to Make Money from your Podcast
Lesson 29 from: Podcasting for Crafters and MakersTara Swiger
Lesson Info
29. Other Ways to Make Money from your Podcast
Lessons
Class Introduction: Build Trust and Increase Sales
03:12 2Why your Handmade Business Needs a Podcast
06:42 3What is a Podcast?
03:13 4How to Set up your Studio in 5 Minutes
04:48 5How to Launch a Podcast in 1 Week
05:58 6What Kind of Show will you Have?
03:02 7About the Interview Format
06:39 8About the Solo-Show Format
16:41About the Roundtable Discussion Format
07:55 10Which Format is Right for You
21:40 11Challenge: FInd What's Out There
03:25 12Choosing the Right Topic for your Podcast
14:19 13How to Make your Show Special
02:23 14Make Magic: Combine for a Unique Show
07:46 15Content Development Strategies
16:12 16Naming your Podcast Best Practices
07:34 17How to Introduce Yourself
11:34 18How to Write your Intro
03:48 19How to Exit with Confidence
09:00 20Where does your Podcast Live and Why iTunes Matters
20:06 21DEMO:How to Get your Podcast on iTunes
07:18 22How a Listener Becomes a Customer: The Customer Path
07:58 23Your Home Base: How to Set it up for Podcast Listeners
15:19 24How to Generate Content Upgrades
12:39 25How to Leverage your Podcasts to Sell your Product
04:53 26Question And Answer
06:58 27How to Launch your Podcast Successfully
18:06 28Defining "Success" for your Business
07:41 29Other Ways to Make Money from your Podcast
08:25 30How to Find Time for it all: Tara's Exact Workflow
25:19 31Wrapping it all Up
02:03Lesson Info
Other Ways to Make Money from your Podcast
Next I want to talk about a question I get asked all the time. I know some of you asked me before I came if I was gonna talk about this or not, so we're talking about it. Should you run ads on your show? Should you run ads. So, are we all familiar what podcast ads are? You hear it at the top of the show, at the end, sometimes in the middle. That means that someone paid the podcaster to read their ad copy to sell a product, and because you're listening to that show and you trust that person, you're more likely to buy the product. There is absolutely nothing wrong with ads, I don't think that they make you dirty, or you shouldn't sell them, or anything like that, I have no moral objection, but if you are running a podcast for your business to sell your product, then this is my answer: No. Just no, you shouldn't. In my notes for this I wrote, "Should I run ads? No." That's it. That's like, it doesn't make any sense to send people to buy another product if you've built an audience of peopl...
e who know I can trust you and you sell a product, then you should keep talking to them about your product. It doesn't make any sense that you would build this audience and send them away unless you don't provide something that they're coming to you for. So if people are... I work with a lot of moms who have creative businesses. If you did consulting for moms with creative businesses, well, I don't have kids, so I could send them to you, but that wouldn't even need to be an ad relationship, that would just be a referral. So I refer to other businesses all the time, but if you're coming to my podcast I want you to go back to my site, I want you to buy my books. And I recommend other books all the time, but I'm not taking money to talk about them cos I'm getting my money through my own sales. So I wanted to talk about other ways to monetize your podcast, though, and by monetize we mean make money from your podcast. It sounds a little fancier than it is. So, number one way, sell your own product. You are listening to this show, or this class, and not some other class because you sell a product and so do your podcast for that. Unless you just want to create a podcast to get a lot of listeners, kind of like an NPR show, or a news show, or something else, you're not, your goal isn't just to build an audience, it's to sell products and reach buyers. That's what we've been talking about all day. So sell your own product. The other way that you can monetize your podcast in a really natural way is to build relationships for collaborations. So if you interview somebody for your show, or somebody interviews you because you have your own show, you're gonna build relationships and, often times, those will turn into collaborations. So I've collaborated with a lot of other teachers to create different products, I've collaborated with students to do teaching gigs in their town, they've invited me to teach at conferences, we've worked together on book projects, that's what I mean, collaborations. Those don't always turn into money, but sometimes they do if you create a product and you both sell it. Maybe you collaborate to create a kit, somebody does the yarn, somebody does the pattern, maybe you collaborate to have a wholesale relationship, you can build those relations through your podcast, especially for an interview or a round table show. So, build relationships. It's a good way to monetize it very naturally. Another way is Patreon and Crowdfunding. I'm not gonna spend tons of time on this because, from my polling everybody before we got started, only some of you are interested in this, but Patreon is a site that makes it easy for your audience to pay you for the product you're creating. The product being your show, your episodes. So you can take funding either per episode that you put out, or per month. So I have one because I was getting emails from people saying, "I bought your books, "I bought your classes," or, "I don't need that class, "but I love your podcast, I wanna support you." Well, okay, so I'll give you a way to give me money. So Patreon lets them support my show by pledging in between $1 and $7 or $14 a month to just to help run the show; the hosting that I pay, the website that I have, and they just wanna, in some way, support the show and they don't necessarily need my products. I really went back and forth for a long time because I was like, well, if people wanna support the show the next step they should take would be the books or the classes. If they like the show that's gonna be what helps them, but after so many years, people either have everything that they want or need, or they're just not at that stage in their business where that's gonna help them, but they still wanna support what I'm doing, and they want it to stick around, and they want to just express the value they're getting out of it by exchanging value with me. So that's what Patreon lets you do. The site is just Patreon.com and it lets people become patrons of your work. So you can do it for a video show, an audio show, you can do it for pieces of art, I have some clients that sell their art in that way cos they just have patrons that wanna support their work. And if you are doing a podcast and you don't have a product yet, but you do have listeners who wanna support you, that's a way to go. You can also do something like you could Kickstart a big project. I talked to one podcaster who wanted to do like a tour through the United States and interview all these people in the specific industry, and she's trying to figure out funding for it and she already had a huge podcast audience and I was like, "Girl, Kickstart it." Like, put it there, it's a lot of work to get all set up, it's not like it happens easily, but then get your audience. They want you to go on this trip, and they wanna support you to go on this trip. And she doesn't have any product to sell so it's one way for them to support her podcast. And then another way to do it is you can create products specifically on the things people love best. So I have a couple popular episodes that I've been thinking about. People love and listen to the show and recommend it so much there's a need here. The fact that people are talking about it and sharing it and listening means it's filling some need. Is there a class, or a book, or a workbook, or a content upgrade I need to create to fulfill that need more? Cos to go back to what we've been talking about all day, you're creating this show for your best buyer and it's a back and forth. She's gonna send you questions, she's gonna have ideas, you're gonna see, based on her activity, what she most needs and wants, and then you fill that. So I create new podcast episodes all the time because somebody sent me a question. Not even like I requested it, they just sent it to me. Or if I have a conversation and you ask a good question, I'll go home and do a podcast episode cos I know more people have that. That's exactly where my class, and book, and product ideas come from. So, a lot of my students will get the same question all the time about their product and they realize oh, I could add this to the tag, or the packaging, or the description, or I could create a whole new product that serves this need or question, and that is giving people exactly what they asked for. And I think all of these are a more sustainable way of exchanging energy and value with your audience than just running ads because in order to run ads, what you have to do, and I should have said this at the beginning, is get lots and lots of listeners. Tons of listeners. And then what you're doing is you're selling those listeners' attention to the person who wants their attention, who is the advertiser. And that's totally fine and makes a lot of sense for a lot of different kinds of podcasts, but if yours is for your business, then what you wanna do with that attention is you wanna serve them back. You have their attention, now you wanna give them what they're wanting and if you've created an audience full of people who want what you sell, then you wanna actually show them how you get that by helping lead them down the path. If you are, a lot of people get mixed up in this why I talked about finding success for yourself, and ads is cos they see successful podcast have ads and they forget that those people's goals were different than theirs, right? Like they created a podcast specifically to create and audience to sell ads to. That's different than creating a podcast for your business. And you're a maker and an artist, most of you who are listening, and so you have super limited time to work on this, so you need to make it as effective as possible at reaching your goals and helping your handmade thing grow and reach more people.
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Ratings and Reviews
Tess
I design embroidery patterns and I love podcasts but I wasn't sure what I would talk about in my own podcast without being able to show pictures. After watching this course I already have 20+ ideas for podcast topics, plus I now know how to get a podcast up and running, step-by-step, AND how it fits with my business goals. Tara Swiger is an excellent teacher and coach. I filled page after page with notes!
Rhonda M.
Excellent, practical information.
Dawn Craig
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