Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPSnacks: Ultimate Guide to Podcast Monetization with Hala | Marketing

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Given Young and Profiting’s success, I always get asked how to secure sponsors and monetize a podcast. Truth is, there are many ways to make money from your podcast, and it really depends on the stage of your show, download counts, how niche you are and many other factors.    In this YAPSnacks I’ll be covering I have learned about podcast monetization the past two years like:   How to prepare before pitching your podcast Types of podcast sponsorships and commercial types The pros and cons of affiliate partnerships Monetization through lead generation    Sponsored by Snackmagic: Head over to www.SnackMagic.com and use promo code YAPSNACKS for 10% off your entire order.     #HappyHaladays Goodpods x SnackMagic Contest:   There are 3 steps to be officially entered into the contest:    Download the Goodpods app: IOS & ANDROID   Follow me on Goodpods   Listen to your favorite podcast so it gets shared to your feed   The three podcasters with the most shares on Goodpods will be featured to the entire Goodpods community top of the year and they’ll be featured on my Linkedin profile to almost 70,000 followers, too!  And to make things sweeter, we’ll be giving away 10 SnackMagic snack stashes to those who participated. Learn more

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Yap Snacks for 10% off your entire order. That's Yap Snacks for 10% off at snackmagic.com. This code is valid until March 31st. Hey everyone, you're listening to YAPS snacks, a short series of bite size and actionable content hosted by me, Halitaha. As you guys know, I'm the host of Young and Profiting. Today, we're a top 50 education podcast on Apple, we're a top 10 how to podcast on Apple, we're a top 10 education podcast on CastBox.

And given all this success, I'm always asked how to secure sponsors and monetize a podcast. The truth is, there are so many ways to make money off your podcasts. And it really depends on the stage of your show, how niche your audience is, and many other factors. Everything I'm going to describe in this episode is purely based on my experience with monetizing my podcast over the past. two years. In the beginning, sponsorships helped fund my podcast, and now lead generation has enabled a full-fledged business, a multi-six-figure business. And hopefully my experience will help you move in the right direction and profit from your podcast. Today on the show, we're going to be covering everything there is to know about podcast monetization, like how to prepare before pitching your podcast,

types of podcast sponsorships that are out there, affiliate partnerships, and monetization through lead generation. All right, here's the thing. Before you even think about pitching a sponsor, you want to make sure your podcast is ready. That means getting a few baseline items completed, like making sure your podcast is live and available on all major podcast platforms at the bare minimum,

Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. I would also recommend having at least three episodes published before attempting to secure a sponsor. Make sure your episodes have quality content, good sound and editing. If you can snag a few guests who have some notoriety around their name, that's a plus. And then lastly, making sure that you have your key branding elements there. So mainly a podcast cover, making sure that it's professionally done.

When I first started, my first podcast cover, I got on Fiverr probably for like 30 bucks. And it's really inexpensive. You can just go on Fiverr.com, search podcast cover art, and you can find a million designers who are ready to make your podcast cover at an affordable price. You also want to make sure you have a good podcast description and then scoring Apple podcast reviews are definitely a plus. If a sponsor sees you have an engaged audience, you've got five-star reviews, they're going to be more interested in sponsoring you. And at this stage in the game, Apple Podcast is still the main industry player and that's where sponsors are going to go look first. The next thing you're going to want to do once you have these baseline items completed is prepare a sponsorship package.

In my experience, podcast sponsors look at the following factors when evaluating your show. They're going to look at your analytics, and that's mainly average monthly downloads and average episode downloads. They also may be interested in your Apple podcast ranking. You can get this via chartable, or you can get this by looking on iTunes and going through the category and finding it manually. You can also provide Apple podcast reviews, core demographics, your podcast cover, past guests, relevant topics, and social media presence. So all these things are what a sponsor is going

to be looking at. And a lot of this information, like your download metrics and demographics, can be found within your hosting provider's backend dashboard. You should really think about having this package available in a visually pleasing manner. So creating a PDF that's branded with all of your approved colors and your podcast cover and it shows your downloads and your demographics and charts and it shows your Apple podcast ranking and maybe a bio about yourself. So I would definitely try to create some sort of a PDF. A lot of people also do like a web page. So it's just however you want to present it. And then you want to make sure that you have it in email as well. So like a text version that you can just copy and paste into email and have that available to you.

Okay. So let's talk about how you get paid for sponsorships and what the different rate methods are. The first one we're going to cover is CPM or cost per mill. Basically what that means is you're going to get a certain amount of money for every 1,000 downloads that you have. So the average CPM for podcast is $25. That's what typically people are going to pay for every 1,000 downloads. It can range from $15 to $40. It really depends on how relevant and desirable your niche is.

The more niche audience and more desirable that you are to a sponsor, the higher end of the CPM range that you can charge. So definitely keep that in mind. When it comes to CPM, your sponsors are going to want to see IAB certified downloads. If you don't know what IAB stands for, it's the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And they basically have a set of standards that define a download. It makes sure that advertisers get quality downloads from reputable sources. And you can find your IAB certified downloads in any major hosting provider for your podcast.

So Podbean, for example, will provide all your different IAB certified downloads in your dashboard. If you host your podcast on YouTube or Spotify, that's okay. It's not IAB certified right now, but you can manually add up those downloads and present it to your sponsor and let them know that these are your downloads across all platforms. That way, your stats are as impressive as possible. The next rate method I'm going to talk about is CPA or cost per acquisition, also known as an affiliate partnership. I think that these work best for a podcaster with a large social media or web following. From my experience, CPAs or affiliate marketing doesn't work that well with just a podcast read.

You really need to have a social following or a web following to be successful. And that's why people who are listening to a podcast are often multitasking. They're driving, exercising, cleaning. And it's just a lot of effort for someone to remember to go to your show notes, find the link, and then follow the funnel to purchase once they are available to. to do so. So that's why it really works well for people who have a social media presence or a popular blog. And then you can just stick the link right in your post so that people can go by and then you should see results. In fact, I just interviewed John Lee Dumas. He is the host of

entrepreneurs on fire. He has a huge podcast and he told me he makes over $100,000 a month with ClickFunnels being an affiliate. He's the number one affiliate partner for ClickFunnels. So that's huge. That's a lot of money and he's obviously crushing it. So there's definitely examples of podcasters out there that are crushing it with affiliate partnerships. Okay. So the last method I'm going to talk about is a flat rate sponsorship. This works best for podcasters who have a large social media following or something

else that they can offer and bring to the table in regards to their podcast sponsorship. So for me, I have a few things. I have a big LinkedIn community. I also have a podcaster community. I do like a monthly podcast mastermind call, right? So these are two things that I can offer in my sponsorships in addition to my podcast downloads, which is CPM. So once I add other elements aside from just CPM,

that's when I can start to charge a flat rate. So basically what I do is I think about my CPM, how many average downloads per episode am I getting right now, and how much do I want to charge based on the relevancy of this sponsor? Is it going to be 25? Is it going to be 40? it really depends on how relevant I think this sponsor is and how much I think they're going to want my audience, right? So I decide on what that number is. And then I come up with, okay, this is how much

I'm charging for my podcast, right? Then I think about or eight, I'm going to do a LinkedIn contest. This is how much I think that is worth. I'm going to throw in a demo on my podcast mastermind call. I think that that's worth this much. And then I present to them a flat rate for that sponsorship. and we go from there. And so a flat rate, like I say, is really when you can bring other elements into the table. The other thing I will mention is that flat rate could also work if you're getting somebody who has no idea how the podcast industry works.

So if you're working with a company that's never advertised on a podcast or a mom and pop store, they might not know how CPMs work and how all that works. And so you might be able to get away with a flat rate. But podcasting is getting more and more popular. and so I would suggest sticking to CPM and being fair to anybody who wants to sponsor your show and then considering flat rate if you're going to add in other things and bundle in other things into your sponsorship. Let's talk about different podcast sponsorship types. So basically how you

actually execute your commercials. The first one is host read ads. So this I think is the most popular. Basically, the host gets on the mic. You guys hear me all the time reading commercials. and they read a commercial and they give their own spin on it. And it's very personable because the audience is connected to the host. There's really three placements for host read ads. There's pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. Pre-roll means it happens before the episode. This is the least desirable spot or compared to mid-roll.

It's a less desirable spot because people may just skip over this part of the podcast, right? They're used to having commercials in the beginning. They may just skip into once they interview. starts. Mid-roll is in the middle of the content, typically at least 10 minutes into the episode, and this is going to be the most expensive spot. So you could charge a higher CPM for this spot because it's when listeners are most engaged. And then lastly, there's a postural spot, which means it's at the end of the episode. This is the least popular type of ad read. Typically, I just throw that in pro bono for my sponsors to be nice and just for good measure. So I'll just say,

oh, thanks again to our sponsor, XYZ. So, those are the three spots. It's pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. Aside from these types of commercials that you can have in your podcast, you can also do creative integration. So basically, you can decide to integrate your sponsor in a more discreet way. So maybe you can just bring them up during the episode in a more organic way. Or maybe you hold up a product if it's a video podcast and you do like a product placement. Or maybe you interview the CEO or the brand CEO. You can think outside the box when it comes to sponsorships and you can get creative. It doesn't have to be an actual thought-out commercial. It can be more organic. It really depends on what your sponsor wants

and how you want to present your show. Next, let's talk about dynamic ad insertion. These are ads that get played in your podcast that you didn't actually record. So basically, your hosting provider has an advertising marketplace in most cases. Every major hosting provider, I use pod bean. They have a dynamic ad marketplace. A lot of different hosting providers have them. And brands typically go on these platforms and they upload a pre-recorded commercial and then they pick out the podcasts that they want to advertise on. And this really works for brands that are looking for targeting certain types of podcasts. So they can search what kind of category the podcast is in, where their audience is from. They can decide that

they only want to promote to the U.S. audience and ignore everyone else. They could do a lot of targeting in. So that's why a lot of brands like to use dynamic ad insertion. The downfall for the podcaster is that you don't really have control over the messaging. It's not your voice. It's not your commercial. You might not even know what the commercial is going to sound like. And so for that reason, a lot of podcasters don't do dynamic insertion. They prefer host reads. I personally like host reads. That's my preference. Yeah, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers.

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to their entire community at the beginning of the year. This is going to be huge visibility for any up-and-coming podcaster. Essentially, anybody who logs onto their app, they're going to see these recommended podcasters first thing as soon as they log on. If you haven't heard of good pods, it's a really cool app where you can follow friends and influencers like Malcolm Gladwell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alyssa Milano, and Rachel Hollis, to name a few, and you can see what podcasts they're listening to. That's why if your podcast nomination is chosen, you'll get entered into a raffle for a chance to win a snack stash from snack magic. Companies like Uber and Spotify use snack magic to boost employer morale during this crazy time, and since they ship snacks internationally, you can enter this class.

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The three podcasters with the most shares on good pods will be featured to their entire community at the top of the year. And they're going to be featured on my LinkedIn profile two to almost 70,000 followers. And to make things sweeter, we'll be giving away 10 snack magic snack stashes to those who participated. I hope you guys enjoyed this contest and follow the link in my show notes to learn more. Okay, so now that we talked about your sponsorship package and what you need to prepare, we talked about different rate methods, we talked about the different commercials that you can have, let's talk about getting sponsorships that align with your podcasts. One of the best ways to do this is to just reach out cold. There's so many different brands out there. You need to try to think about what brand

best aligns with your podcast. What industry best aligns with your podcast? Like who listens to your podcast and what do you think they're going to like and buy from? And how can you convince this sponsor that you would be a good choice for them, right? So something that I do for my podcast and an activity that I actually just did last week with Critty, who's on my team, is I told her to look at every company that we subscribe to. So Young and Profiting, I just started a marketing agency. And so we're subscribed to headliner and Canva and ClickUp and which is a project management tool and Adobe and a million different things.

We're subscribed to so many different things like 50 different brands were subscribed to. And so I told her, go find the partnership email or the marketing email on their website, any email that you can find, go on LinkedIn, search for anybody who's in the marketing department in that company and create an email template that we can customize and let them know we've been a longtime customer. We love using their product. You know, we stand by their product. We've got all this going on. We get over 100 downloads a month. We've got a huge LinkedIn following and tell them about everything we have going on. Give them past examples of our podcast sponsorships, some of our contest giveaways and we give them links showing them like you know what we've done in the

past and a lot of the time they respond right away and they're and they're interested in fact click up which is a project management tool they are very interested and they want to sponsor us in the new year and we landed that just from like an hour activity of reaching out to all the different platforms that we're subscribed to and so i want you to think about those creative ways that you can reach out to people and have relevancy with them. So because we were an actual customer, I think that it worked really well. So I would definitely encourage you guys to reach out cold. Don't be shy and look for the marketing contact, look for the partnership contact, go on LinkedIn and search for anybody in the marketing department at that company. You can reach out to them via DM. You can scrape their email

using a Google extension to get their email from LinkedIn. So there's a million ways to get the contact. You just need to make sure that you've got a great email. You've got your proposal attached, you know, your PDF, your branded PDF that I mentioned before, or you just have everything nicely in an email. Honestly, a lot of the times we just have everything laid out very clearly and succinctly in an email and it works just fine. Okay, so let's talk about affiliate partnerships. These are going to be much different than a sponsorship. So a sponsorship, you typically want to have like at least 5,000 downloads, right? Without 5,000 downloads, you're not going to be of interest to any sponsor. They're going to want somebody who has at least 5,000 downloads an episode.

So if you have less than 5,000 downloads in episode, then affiliate partnerships are definitely for you. And if you have more than 5,000 downloads, then affiliate partnerships are certainly good for you as well. Look at John Lee Dumas, who I mentioned earlier. He's making over $100,000 per month from ClickFunnels, and he gets over a million downloads per month. So affiliate partnerships are good for big and small podcasters. So in terms of securing an affiliate partnership, it's a lot different. You're not going to like cold pitch any affiliate partners. You're going to go on their website. So there's companies like Audible, Fiverr, Target, Airbnb, and eBay. They all offer affiliate partnerships for podcasters. So basically you're going to fill

out a form. If you get accepted, there's going to be a back-end dashboard where you can track your results. You're going to get a customized vanity URL like Audiblechile.com slash yap. Or you're get a promo code that you can use in a podcast read. So these are the types of marketing tools that they're going to give you. They could also give you banners that you can put on your website. They'll give you like a whole slew of marketing materials that you can use to sell their product. And they're also going to show you what their compensation model is. So typically you get some sort of percentage for anything that you sell. And that's how you're going to make your money. The other thing that I'll say is that if you become an affiliate partner for multiple brands,

you can strategically decide which brands you promote for each episode based on your podcast content. So, for example, anytime I did an episode on marketing for a while, I would promote my Fiverr affiliate link. And I saw a decent lift when I did that. Fiverr, in particular, I'll say, offers very fair compensation for purchases made using your affiliate link. So far, Fiverr has been by far my most lucrative affiliate marketing endeavor that I've tried. I've done Audible before. I didn't see great results, but with Fiverr, I saw really great results. And I have to say that affiliate partnerships work, whether your podcast is big or small.

So first of all, you usually don't even have to present your download metrics to be accepted as a partner when it comes to affiliate sponsorships. Sometimes they don't even ask you for your download metrics. They don't even care. They just want you to give it a shot, right? And so if you have an engaged audience, but you don't have that many downloads, you might want to go with an affiliate partnership because for a sponsorship, you typically need at least 5,000 downloads before they even consider you, right?

And look at John Lee Dumas. I just gave you guys the example. He gets over 1 million downloads per month, and he's making over $100,000 just on his ClickFunnel affiliate link. So that's huge, and he's got a super huge and engaged audience. And so it clearly works for podcasters big and small. And the last way I'll suggest to secure a sponsor is through a podcast sponsorship platform. So there's a lot of new marketplaces with the sole mission of connecting podcasters

to sponsorship opportunities. Podcorn is the most popular example of this, and they've actually sponsored Young and Profiting podcast a few times. And basically, podcasters of all sizes, they can browse and choose sponsorship proposals right on the Podcorn platform. You set your own rates, you collaborate with brands directly without any exclusivities, and you get paid for your reads. Now, I would highly recommend podcorn over going through any sort of third-party agency. I had a situation last year where Skillshare sponsored my episode through an agency for three episodes. And the deal was pretty big and I was very excited about it. And I went through an agency. An agency reached out to me and said, you know, Skillshare wants to sponsor your podcast. These are

the rates, blah, blah, blah. We signed a contract. And I did the commercials. I held up to my end of bargain and they didn't pay me. It took them over a year to end up paying me after I basically exposed them on LinkedIn and went after the agency and the guy had like a blocked me on LinkedIn so I couldn't even find him and they just screwed me and it's really scary. So I never did that again. I decided I would always just have a direct relationship with the brand. I didn't know anybody at Skillshare and so I couldn't contact them in terms of saying like, hey, I didn't get paid because they paid the agency. The agency just didn't pay me and they were trying to get away with it.

And I can't imagine how many podcasters have gotten screwed by this agency and other agencies that may do that. That lie in say that you're going to get paid by a sponsor and you hold up to the bargain and then they kind of screw you over. So beware of podcast agencies and use a platform like podcorn, which is tried, true and tested and get your sponsorships from there if you're not. going to reach out cold. Okay, so the last thing I'm going to talk about in terms of podcast monetization is monetization without sponsorships, namely lead generation. So sponsorships are a great way to make a little money off your podcast when you're just starting out. Whether it's affiliate links or sponsors, you're not going to be rich from any of that until you really reach hundreds of thousands of listeners per episode or if you have a very niche audience and a lucrative

industry. In terms of an example of a very niche audience in a lucrative industry, I'm going to talk about my friend Jason Cash. He has an insurance podcast and he was able to secure over $80,000 in sponsorships because he targets insurance agencies and insurance companies really, really, really, really want to talk to those people. And so because he has such a super niche audience, insurance companies are dying to get insurance agents exposure to their companies, there will to pay him a big dollar value in order to sponsor his podcast. And he offers other things. Like he has got like an insurance agency community and call and all these different things that he adds into the package. So he was able to secure over $80,000 in sponsorship money in one year. And he gets less than

14,000 downloads a month. So he's not even getting a lot of downloads. He just has a very engaged niche following. And he's able to make a lot of money off of that. So the last thing I'm going to talk about is lead generation. So this is how I've found success with monetizing young and profiting podcast. For me, my audience is not niche. It's broad. And so sponsorships don't give me the money that, you know, I really want. Typically for sponsors, I'm trading, I'm trading podcast placements to get visibility in apps and things like that. I don't really care about monetizing my commercials on my podcast. That's not really how I'm generating money off young and profiting right now. What I do is lead generation. So basically, I use my podcast as a way to generate clients for my

business. I launched Yap Media, which is a full service podcast marketing agency, focused on high profile clients like bestselling authors, top podcasters, and CEOs. And if you listen to my podcast, those are the exact people that I typically interview on my show. And it's become an amazing lead generation tool for me. I don't even have a a website for my marketing agency. My podcast just does such a good job generating leads that I can't even keep up with the demand right now. I have a laundry list of potential clients, people that are interested in our services, and I don't even have time to get to it. And it's because people come on my show and I just do a great interview. They see that the process is seamless from the start when

they get booked to when they come on the show to when it gets promoted. And then they ask me, They always come and ask me, who does your marketing? And then that's when I say, we do our marketing. I own a podcast marketing agency. Is that something that you're interested in? Is that something that you need? They see all my visibility on LinkedIn and they get very interested. And so that's how I generate money for my business now.

My podcast is not generating six figures off sponsorships, even though I get quite a lot of downloads more than the average podcaster. I'm really making my money off lead generation. And so if you thank you. that your potential listeners or guests could be clients for your business, then monetizing through lead generation could be the way for you. So if you think that your clients could either be listeners of your podcast or the guests themselves, then your podcast monetization strategy should be lead generation. Well, that just covers about everything that I wanted to go over in terms of

podcast monetization. We are well over the app's next time limit. And I think my editor Matt is going to be really pissed off at me because he might have a late night tonight getting this uploaded and ready for tomorrow's release. So my bad Matt, but I love you. Thank you so much. And to everybody out there listening, if you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on Apple Podcasts and take a screenshot, upload it to your Instagram story. Tag me at Yap with Hala. Tell me that you loved this episode about podcast monetization. I'll definitely repost. And until next time, this is Hala, signing off.