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. Welcome to digital, Podcaster. I'm your host, Dylan Schmidt. So today let's talk about different ways. You can monetize your podcast through digital products and offerings. Now, I've covered this subject before, but I'm going to be talking about some subjects around the idea of monetization with digital products that we haven't talked about on this show before. So first things first. Before we dive into monetizing your podcast, I want to talk to two groups specifically for just a moment. First group is people who are just. Launching their podcast, just getting started or maybe have been podcasting for a minute now and aren't exactly seeing the results that they thought they might have seen. Maybe their listener base is growing steadily, but not much. Maybe they're just seeing like a couple extra downloads a week or something like that. First things first, you don't need a lot of listeners to monetize your podcast and make money. I just want to get that out of the way. That's a common misconception. Think about this. It all depends on your audience. If you have an engaged audience that is willing to spend a lot of money on something you offer, then you don't need a lot of people to make a lot of money, right? On the flip side of that is. People who already have an audience and maybe they are like, I've heard everything you're going to talk about. This is nothing new in here. The curse of knowledge, especially when we're talking about products, online marketing, digital products. Especially, is there's this trap of, yes, but what else? And experts play into this by selling, oh, if you sign up for this program, we'll really tell you what's going to happen. And that's a dangerous trap to fall into because typically it's the fundamentals, it's the foundations that us as people who have been maybe in the space for a while, need to just go back to and be reminded of and not act like, well, what else is there? What else can I be doing? Yeah, okay, I've heard that. But what's the real thing? Whether it's like, what's going to be easier for me? What's going to make the most money? Those are all valid questions. But regardless, just listen to this episode and I urge you, if you're not monetizing your podcast in a way that you're happy with, just pick one of these. The idea here is pick one of these. Not do all of them. Pick one of them, see how it works for you, and then pivot if you need to. But maybe you only need to pick one and you're happy with one. That's cool too. So let's dive in five types of digital products that you could offer your audience. First up, podcasters can offer exclusive bonus content to their audience, so you could offer additional content in addition to your regular podcast content. This is typically done on something like patreon, but you have your podcast patrons or Patreon subscribers. And this is typically done either, like releasing episodes a little bit earlier than when you normally do, if that's something your audience would find valuable. Or extended interviews, like uncut interviews, or behind the scenes footage of your podcast or bonus episodes, even many episodes or regular episodes that dive deeper into specific topics that your audience would absolutely love. The idea here is that you create an offer that's low cost and it's a subscription based access to your exclusive content that they get in addition to what they're already getting through your free podcast. That's powerful stuff. So, bonus content number one. Number two, podcasters can offer online courses or workshops. You know, this is something I'm already familiar with and I offer through digital podcast, or I have since the beginning, but essentially what you're doing here is you're leveraging your expertise or others expertise that you've had on your podcast. You can always invite them to do a special workshop, paid workshop for your. Audience, or they could be integrated in some type of online course, whether it's one guest that you had or multiple guests, or you are the expert. Depending on your podcast type, you could create those online workshops or courses and it'd be related to your podcast niche. Some platforms that you can use to host this Teachable is a low cost option. Kajabi is something I've used for digital podcasts here in the past and it's really robust, you can do a whole lot with it. But a lot of these platforms like Teachable or Kajabi are becoming a little bit more interchangeable where you can pretty much do on either of them similar things where you can offer something like that for sale. You don't even need a platform like. That to sell it. Honestly, if at the very core you could just straight up put it in a Google Drive and sell access. Like, you don't have to go fancy, but you can go fancy if you want. Three podcasters could offer ebooks or guides for sale. So essentially what you could do is compile your podcast content. Or if you've done any type of research on your show, you would put. That into an ebook or a downloadable guide. You could make it in notion, you could just make it in a Canva PDF and then you would sell that. You could sell that through Gum Road. Gum road is awesome. That's what I'm selling podcast academy through and some notion templates that I'm creating. But essentially you would just take what you've already made on your podcast, compile it in a certain way, and then. Put it into an ebook or some. Type of guide, some type of template and then sell that. I'm not going to go into the. Reason of why someone would pay for. This because I think that's its own episode that I should cover in the future is like, why would someone pay for your content if it's already free? That is a great topic for another episode. Four podcasters can sell merchandise. So merchandise related to your podcasts doesn't. Have to be reinventing. The wheel t shirts are already in abundance. But people like buying T shirts. I love buying. I can never have enough T shirts and mugs and stickers and things like that. It's a way for us as listeners and fans of your podcast to show. Our appreciation for your show. It's a way for us to create an identity in the physical world of what you're creating on the digital world, which I think is really cool. As you can see, or if you're watching this, if you're listening to it, I'm wearing a hooded sweatshirt that says Content Clips. And the Content Clips logo is in the style of Little Psychs, I think it is the kids company. But I made this on Printful and you can sell merch that you make on your website. You can use services like Printful or Cotton Bureau is another one that I've used. I use for digital podcaster because I get asked, especially with digital podcaster, I have Mic, which is like the little walking microphone logo. I've been asked, where can we buy that? And so I've sold merch. I don't constantly make it for sale, but it's live right now. You can buy pretty much everything aware on Cotton Bureau if you just search digital podcaster and you can see there. But you can use printful or Cotton bureau. There's one thing with merchandise I just always want to add this disclaimer, is if you're going to take on the cost of selling the merch, like you're not going to use Printful or Cotton Bureau because you want to box it up and ship it and things like that. Typically you'll want to do like a presale so that you get paid before you actually buy the thing that it is that you're selling and then you fulfill it that way. Or you use a print on demand service like Printful or Cotton Bureau because you don't want to be incurring the costs and then nobody buys it and. You'Re just stuck with a bunch of. Product that's happened to so many people over time. Five podcasters can sell sponsorship packages. I just sell my own stuff here on digital podcaster. But say, for example, that I was like, I wanted to work with let's just choose Road because I see their name here, Road, which is like they make electronics, a lot of podcasting gear. Say I reach out to Road and I'm like, hey, can we do a sponsorship package? I will promote road in these different ways. I have an audience that's interested in podcasts and it's really targeted. Like I'm not just going to like a pizza company or some random thing. I look around, all I see is electronics. But a wallet company, for example. Yeah, sure, maybe you use wallets, but in terms of the demographic of my audience, wallets probably aren't the best option for a brand sponsor. It'd be more lucrative for the company and for me to go to a more targeted company, like a podcasting company, whether it's some type of new AI startup or something like that, that would be way more advantageous for both of us. All of us, really? You listening to to have a more targeted company that I work with and sell sponsorship packages. Now, the packages is the key part here. Packages means like saying twelve episodes, twelve months, twelve posts on social media, whatever it is. And again, when you think of sponsorship packages, you might think of your podcast, but it could also be social media included. It could also be email, if you have an email newsletter. And we could get into the weeds about that too in another episode if you'd like. I wanted to share all these five just so you start thinking and pick one. Because probably every time I talk about making money with podcasts is I meet so many podcasters, some who are successful business people and they see podcasting as just a hobby, it's just a networking tool and that's cool. But like, podcast listeners you listening to this aren't going to just totally tune out whenever a podcast ad is read on an episode. We're used to it now. We're totally used to podcast ads. And I just shared some data on my Instagram or knows my newsletter about podcast advertisements and how engaged podcast listeners are with what they hear on podcasts. So, food for thought here. If you're not monetizing your podcast start, just pick one of these and just go and get comfortable with doing ads. Get comfortable bowl of how do these ads work. Just start getting in the habit of it and just know that it does not take away from the content of your episode. It's not making your podcast less valuable. I just want you, the podcaster, to make money and get comfortable familiarizing yourself with all this. All right, I'll leave it at that. I hope you found this episode helpful and I'll talk to you in the next one.