Hello, welcome to digital podcaster. So I was talking with a friend the other day and you know what almost every time I talk about Podcasting or what I do in podcasting or what I talk about on digital podcaster the conversation inevitably leads to Money, like people want to know how do you convert? How do you make money with a podcast and it is funny because when I was talking with my friend who works in tattooing? He has no idea about podcasting I don't even know if he's ever listened to a podcast to be honest with you. He's probably seen clips on social media, I'm sure, but he is not a typical podcast listener. And so when I was talking with him, I'm like, that strikes me as funny because he's not even interested in podcasts. And he's like, how the heck does that make, or does that make money? It's such a curious kind of idea. Right? So let's dive in. I'm going to share with you everything I know about making money with podcasts and lay it out step by step. Let's dive in.(upbeat music) This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and welcome to Digital Podcaster. So like I said, I was talking with my friend, friend I've had since freshman year of high school, and he's asking me about how podcasts make money. And I realized too, like I'm not doing enough justice I'm talking about the monetization part in digital podcaster. So that's something that I'm going to work on improving here, cover more topics about that because I really want to balance out the starting, growing and monetizing pillars, if you will, the mindset behind that, the approach to that. And I think that this episode is going to be a really good foundation for setting the frame of what it is to make money with your podcast. because there isn't a exactly one size fits all approach, but I would guarantee you this is as close as you could possibly get of everything I'm going to lay out in this episode. Similar to last week, I'm going to share a framework with you this week. This is a foolproof framework. Like if you aren't sure where you're at currently, you will be by the end of the episode because it's step by step on how to monetize your podcast. And it is deep though. It is a lot. It's not like something that you just flick a switch and then you're like, all right, I'm doing great. Unless you already have a big audience, or they're coming from elsewhere, or you're monetizing through elsewhere, then that makes sense, right? Like you probably don't even have big questions around how your podcast will make money. For most of us. We're like, how does the podcast make money? And if you You are the person listening to this that's like, I've, you know, not done online business. Maybe you have a job that's not related to your podcast. Maybe you don't work in podcasting full time like me. Maybe you don't, you know, in content, maybe you have a normal job, or maybe you're retired, or maybe you just have other sources of income and you don't see your podcast as your primary source of income and you're not even really concerned with monetizing. I hear that too. And just to kind of speak to that for a moment, if you haven't heard me say this before, I kind of say this a lot, but I believe everyone should monetize their podcast because this stuff isn't free. Just the simple electricity to make everything work, your internet, your microphone, your interface, your laptop, your editing programs, all of this costs money. So you might as well monetize it. That doesn't mean it detracts from anything, right? It doesn't mean your content has to suffer, but you can monetize and it doesn't matter what stage you're at. That's the great thing. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out. If you have, you know, 10 downloads or if you have 10,000 or 100,000 or a million, you can monetize by following this framework and I call it the profits framework. And just like last week when I shared the clips framework for making podcast clips from your episodes the profits framework has this acronym and we'll break that down. So quick overview the profits framework. P stands for plan your approach. R stands for research monetization options. O stands for optimize audience value. Sorry optimize for audience value. F focus on one strategy at a time. I implement and track your progress. P test and iterate S skill and diversify. Now I know that's a lot. You're like I don't even remember what P was. That's okay. The goal is not to remember the acronym other than it's just profits and that there's a framework for turning your podcast into like a money making machine while sharing your passion with the world. So really I'm just going to kind of go through here and again the emphasis is not around each letter or getting it perfect. the emphasis is around understanding as a whole the main idea of of this framework. So let's dive in. So first things first is P plan your approach. You got to start by figuring out your target audience your niche. If you want to achieve monetary success or you want to monetize your podcast you need to know more about your audience. So for me right from the beginning I knew it's all about helping podcasters like that was clear to me. But what wasn't clear and which I didn't do a great job of in the beginning is making my content like vague. It was for podcasters, but like I didn't talk about podcasting. And so that made it really confusing because like, how am I going to find my sweet spot of helping podcasters but not talking about podcasting. But then on my social media, I'm talking about podcasting. It is just confusing for myself. So I know the audience is going to be confused too. So finding that sweet spot of like, where can you serve people best? Where does your podcast either already serve people best or where can it serve people best? Like you might need to pivot just a little bit with how you're doing topics, who you're speaking to. And if you haven't started your podcast yet, you can also just, you know, create this from the start. It doesn't mean you need to make big shifts. You don't need to rebrand your whole show. You don't need to, you know, tear it all down and build it up from scratch it might just be a one degree turn or you might already be doing it. And I don't suggest making big shifts quickly anyways. You gotta really kind of pause with it and make sure this feels good for you. Make sure that it's also going to feel good for your audience as well. So next up is research monetization options. So there is so many ways that you can make money with your podcast. It's not just sponsorships and ads which is the most common. If you're a podcast listener, which surprisingly a lot of podcast hosts I talk with aren't podcast listeners, but if you're a podcast listener, then you know that like sponsorships and ads typically are what you hear most common on podcasts. But the list goes on as far as what you can actually do to monetize. There's merch, there's donations, there is sponsorships and ads, there's selling digital products and services, there's affiliate marketing, like there's so many options you can choose from that fit any size of show that you have, no matter where you're at. And you know, like I remember when I was first starting out or before I even started digital podcaster, I was like, I would just be, it'd be so fun to just talk about what I wanted to talk about and get paid for that. And I would love to talk about like tech, for example. If I wanted to, I could, if I had time, I could maybe also start like a tech podcast, example where I talk about just gadgets and things like that or things that I'm using or all this stuff and just put affiliate links and really focus on affiliate marketing and that doesn't just mean Amazon so you can sign up for like an Amazon influencer program and the products that you're using for your podcast you can get an affiliate link for and then when people ask you like hey what do you use for your podcast how do you make it sound so good you just give them an affiliate link to the Amazon page where you bought it and then when you get a commission on that. The commission is tiny though, like it's not gonna blow your mind. So there's other types of affiliate marketing too. So say I was talking about tech for example, and I don't really wanna be perceived as the expert, I'm not trying to be the YouTuber, the go-to guy on YouTubing, but say the first one that comes to mind, well two come to mind, there's Matt D'Avella, who talks a lot about the power of small steps, about like basically it talks about YouTubing with integrity and then there's Ali Abdaal who focuses on a part-time YouTuber people who also want to grow their YouTube channel. But say that wasn't me. Say they had an affiliate program where if you refer your audience to their program you get a cut of that. Now how much does that typically look? It really depends. I know some people who are selling courses and they split it 50%. So if they were selling a $2,000 course and you refer somebody to them, you get $1,000. Now what's cool about that is you don't need a lot of people to make a decent chunk of change and it all goes back to how interested is your audience, right? If you were really, if you had a really engaged audience and they were with you with what you were saying, they were tuning in all that stuff, they are more likely to trust you and And they are also more likely to buy something that you might recommend. And if you really believe in the thing that you're selling or referring people to with the affiliate, it makes a lot of sense in that situation, right? If you had an audience of 30 people and three people signed up for the program and you could even say like, Hey, I'm going to be doing this YouTuber course. Would you like to do it with me? Here's a link to sign up and we can go through it together. say $3,000 like most people are trying to you know scrape by for pennies on ads or you know Amazon commissions but there's a lot more to be made with just thinking around like what type of affiliate marketing you want to be doing. Moving on we got O which is optimize for audience value. This is super important so you have to give your listeners what they want and that is focusing on creating valuable content that speaks to their needs and preferences. And this goes back to the first one, which is planning your approach. But now you have to deliver on this approach, right? You can't just wing it here. You can't plan it and then drift from the course. And I see this happen a lot. People either fail to plan and they say plan what is a they fail to plan if you plant. If you fail to plan you plan to fail. Which is true in this case, like if you don't have a good foundation, you're not going to build a house that's going to withstand the test of time like you want it to. So step one is just planning your approach. Even if you've already started, you can still plan and it's good to revisit the plan from time to time. So when you optimize for audience value, it's all about delivering on what you planned on. So if you defined your audience and who you're going to be speaking to in my case, podcasters, and then when it comes to optimizing for audience value, when actually comes time to deliver that. And I actually just do what like I don't, um, you know, give you what I planned for, or I just didn't show up. So it's all about optimizing. And we'll talk more about that in a second. Next is focusing on one strategy at a time. When I first, you know, kind of stumbled upon all of these different monetization options, I was kind of like, all right, let's just do them all. Like I want to do, uh, you know, a course, I want to do coaching, I wanted to affiliates, uh, I want to do everything and what can I do? You know, I'll do anything that just makes money. Oh, maybe sponsors and ads. I've never really been interested in the branding and the whole brand deal thing. But if I wanted to, it was like, Hey, if someone came along with the right amount of money and it was just a no brainer for me, uh, and I could easily incorporate that without sacrificing the value I'd give my audience. Well, yeah, sure. I'd do it. But here's the thing. If you try and do all of that at once, you're not going to see progress. You can't track what is working or what's not working. Uh, and also your audience is going to be confused too. And, and really like, I don't want to downplay this. It's a lot to just do, uh, one of them well, and you want to just do one of them well. That's why I say focus on one strategy at a time. You don't need to do all of them in the beginning. If you could just do one really well, Like say your only way of monetizing your podcast was through selling a online course like Matt D'Avella or Ali Abdaal. Like say if you were affiliate for that, again, I don't know if they actually have affiliates. I'm just using them as an example. I know there's a lot of different courses out there, for example, that have affiliates. But say that was the only thing you did. There are people, I know of people, that make over six figures a year just through one or two affiliate things a year. That's because they grow up such a big audience through delivering value and they optimize their podcast and their platform for audience value. Then when it comes time for, and they don't sell anything besides the affiliate thing that they're selling, then when it comes time to sell that, their audience is like, yeah, I wanna buy that thing. And so it's a very real way to make money with your podcast. So just focus on one strategy at a time. You don't need to implement everything at once, which leads me to the next thing of the profits framework, which is I, implement and track your progress. So you got your strategy, you know who you're talking to, you know how you're gonna monetize, it's time to put it into action. And then you wanna keep your eye on the analytics and the performance metrics to see if it's actually working. Remember data is your friend here. So I am not the type to focus on, you know, random arbitrary numbers that don't move the needle. And it's not so much about making your world like tough around this. It's really about optimizing what you're doing. And, and this is where it comes in also kind of blends in with the next one here, which is testing and iterate. So you want to experiment. And that means like if you put a link somewhere at the bottom of your episode description or your show notes and you're expecting to make money from that, say it's an affiliate link from a course you're selling or your own course, whatever it is, however you're going to monetize and no one's clicking it and you're tracking the clicks, you could use something like rebrandly, which is a link shortening software that will show you how many clicks a link got. And if you put that in there and you see nobody's going to click the link, then you need to iterate, right? You need to pivot. You need to make that link maybe higher up. You maybe need to make your call to action different in the episode. You maybe need to move where you say the call to action in the episode itself. So maybe instead of waiting till the end to say it, you say it at the very beginning. It's all about testing and iterating and experimenting, analyzing, refining what you're doing, right? It's not like sticking with the same thing and being like, it doesn't work. If you're testing and iterating, that means you're actively working towards the solution. But don't think it's a set it and forget it. You don't have to like do any work. This isn't me trying to sell you on like some, you know, get rich overnight thing. It's not like that. It's about this about real results and actually making a difference and actually moving on to the next thing, which is scaling and diversifying. Because once you've got your monetization strategies working, you want to scale it up. And that might mean adding more, you know, monetization options. Once you've got the one working, then you can focus on a second strategy. But if you want to scale it, you've got the only way you can scale it is you've if you nail it, I forget it might have been read Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, but there's a quote, if nail it before you scale it. And what that means is, like test and iterate, like really know that it works before you spend more resources in to scaling it right. Same with your podcast. Like, I don't really talk with people that are smart with their money that go, yeah, I want to invest thousands of dollars in my podcast, but I have no way of knowing if it's going to make me back any money, right? That's that would be scaling it before they nail it. They go, let's make sure this works. We'll start small. I'll invest a little bit of money into it. And then if it works, we'll invest more. Same thing with your podcast. And the good thing about your podcast, especially if you're not sure about how you're going to monetize is you don't have to worry about like a lot of the costs associated with that because it's not a huge cost involved. If you start your podcast out lean. And again, this is, you know, we're talking a lot of like strategy and money and like making money from your podcast here, but at its core, the kind of core idea that I want you to really pick up here is that it's optimizing for your audience. So it's not like sacrificing anything. And it is really about, um, evolving your approach to monetizing your podcast and not just sticking with one thing. It's, it's like you wear so many different hats as a podcast host. And if you can, just for a moment with me, think about all the different hats, right? You've got like, if you're doing it more so by yourself, or if you have a very, very small team, you're wearing the hat of the scripter. So you're thinking of ideas and what you want to talk about. You're thinking about, you're the host. You're talking on the episode. You're providing the value for the audience. And then sometimes you're the editor or you're overseeing someone who's editing it. And then you're the promoter. You've got to promote your podcast somehow. And then you've got to analyze what's working what's not working. Like that is a very similar to a business in a lot of ways. And I think some podcasters don't realize that, like, they're just kind of like, I'm doing all these things. Last thing I want to do is more. And I get that, but you're already like doing so much. And one thing, what I like about monetization is that like it helps you scale it. Like you're already doing all of these different tasks. Now it's just like, let's work smarter, not harder so that you can actually grow more, help more people reach more people, whatever your goal is, whatever your mission is with your podcast, even if it's just to keep it fun, you can still get like you can still get help outsourcing the things that aren't fun for you. So you can make it more fun. So you could step more into your zone of genius. That's where you should be. You want to be in the seat that is like driving your podcast where you want it to go. And you do that through monetizing. You do that through getting help and monetization is how you pay for that help. I hope that makes sense. I know that there's a lot so I just want to do like a really quick recap before I leave you today. We talked about the profits framework. The profits framework is the step by step process of monetizing your podcast no matter how you're going to monetize it right. Doesn't matter what size of audience you already have. The profits framework is how you monetize. E stands for plan your approach. R stands for research monetization options. O stands for optimize for audience value. F stands for focus on one strategy at a time. I stands for implement and track your progress. T stands for test and integrate. S stands for scale and diversify. And I just got to say because I know it sounds like a mouthful. You don't do all of this stuff like at once right. don't do all of this stuff in one day. You do this slowly over time and you take your time with it, right? There's no rush. You're building something that's for the longterm. You're building something that's real and a value, uh, and it's going to help and serve a lot of people. And if you try to rush the process, the more confusing and the more let down you'll be, cause you're like, you're probably skipped a step if you go too fast. So I just want you to take your time with the profits framework, but I do want you to know where you're at on the route. It works one by one, right? Start with the plan. Move to research. Go to optimize. Go to focus. Go to implement. Test and iterate. Scale and diversify. Just like that. All right. That's it for now. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you in the next episode.