15 Apr 2024
8 Ways to Monetize Your Podcast With Any Size Audience
What do you automatically think of when I mention “monetizing a podcast”? If you’re like most people, your mind automatically goes to sponsors and advertisers. And while sponsors is a legitimate way to monetize a podcast, it is actually the hardest way to monetize a podcast. So today, I’m going to give you some much more attainable ways to monetize your podcast.
Let me give you some better options for making money from your podcast. Some of these options will not earn enough to live off by itself to start, however, as part of a multi-pronged approach to building different revenue streams of income from your podcast, over time they can add up to significant income:
Affiliate Income - takes a little bit of work to set up, but once you start putting out content with your affiliate links, you are building a web of your affiliate links on every piece of content and every post, so over time your affiliate income grows. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, you’ll want to check out this video I made specifically about affiliate marketing.
Merchandise - for many podcasts, this is the first way they earn money. They create a t-shirt, mug or bumper sticker that relates to their show and tell their friends how they can buy it. Most podcasters use print on demand services, like Printify, or Custom Ink. While profit margins are a bit lower per item with these companies, you don’t have to stockpile inventory or ship products out yourself.
Paid Communities or Memberships - This method has recurring income built into the model, and in my opinion, it is the best way to build full time income for the future. There are many different options for this income model from Patreon type subscriptions to ad free podcast feeds and everything in between, and even if you already have courses or programs, they can be turned into a recurring revenue model.
Courses - Whether these are low ticket or high ticket, courses can be used to bring in significant monthly revenue. The problem with courses is that you have to constantly be in launch mode in order to get significant traffic to your course. There are websites like Udemy, or Teachable, where you can put your courses and get traffic directly from the platform, in addition to driving your own traffic there.
Coaching - You can easily fill your coaching calendar with clients from your podcast, if that’s what you desire. When it comes to coaching, I’d recommend only starting group coaching programs where you are coaching 1 to many, vs 1:1. Based on my experience in coaching podcasters, many people are locked into 1:1 interactions in their private practice, and they are hoping their podcast will help them earn more income from the 1 to many option. You never want to create a revenue stream that you really don’t enjoy and want to support. So if you are already feeling burned out from your practice, or your day job, then 1:1 coaching is probably going to further drain you emotionally. So, I’d recommend building out lower touch group coaching programs, if you want to expand your coaching services.
Sponsorship - Last on my list of ways to monetize your podcast is getting sponsors. Let me be clear, I manage ads and ad campaigns for some of the biggest podcasts on Apple, so I am not anti-sponsor. And sponsors can be a part of your overall revenue strategy, but most often I see podcasters getting taken advantage of by sponsor relationships, and often sponsors will play on our ignorance. Let me also give you a word of caution here…if you are going down the route of taking on sponsors, please make sure you are utilizing the dynamic ad insertion features that are built into many podcast hosting companies. Without doing this, you are giving away your value in perpetuity and that is terrible for you. I’ll do an entire episode later on...
