Monetizing Your Show
Episode #9 of the course How to make your own podcast by Adam Ashton
Welcome to lesson nine! You may have been wondering about when and how you’re going to make money from your show. As I mentioned at the start of this course, you should have a strong reason “why” that isn’t just to make money. When you’re committed to podcasting, you’re creating great content that people are connecting with, and you’re building a solid audience, you can DEFINITELY make money from it, either directly or indirectly. Below are some ideas and suggestions for different ways to make money from podcasting:
1. Sponsorship and advertising
If you have shown that you’re committed to you podcast and you’ve built an engaged audience, other businesses would LOVE to talk to your audience too. You can do short ads before, during, or after your show. Definitely don’t overdo this, though! If you start putting in too many irrelevant ads, people may turn off.
2. Affiliate relationships
If there is a product that you believe in, use yourself, and think your listeners could truly benefit from, you can investigate an affiliate relationship. Being an affiliate means you send your traffic to a site and get a percentage commission on any purchases they make. A lot of large online sites have affiliate programs already (for example, you could sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program and put a link to a product you love on Amazon). Again, don’t overdo this and only do this for products you use yourself—you’ve built trust with your audience, so don’t just start pushing out affiliate links to dodgy products just because you want to make a few dollars.
3. Market your own business/product/service
If you already have your products or services, you can do ads for your own business! I would recommend this over advertising someone else’s business, at least in the beginning. You could give your podcast listeners a special offer or discount.
4. Write a book
If you’re interviewing great guests in a specific topic, you will be learning a lot. You could compile all of these lessons and advice into your own book! I strongly recommend writing a book, especially if you have a podcast, but that’s another entire course on its own.
5. Speaking/coaching/masterminds
As you’re building up your knowledge, networks, and authority in this field, you may try and get some speaking engagements, offer paid coaching, or run mastermind events. Again, the actual how-to of this requires more than a few sentences, but it’s definitely possible.
The list doesn’t end there, but hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea as to what you could do to make some money from your podcast. But remember, don’t start a podcast just to become an overnight millionaire—do it because you want to do it whether you make money or not.
Tomorrow is the last day of the course. I’ll bring everything together and give you the opportunity to speak with me about either answering those last niggling questions that are holding you back from starting or giving you the opportunity to talk about your podcast in front of my audience.
Can’t wait!
Adam Ashton
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