5 Effective ways to Monetize a Podcast.
Everybody loves podcasts, for podcast’s host one of the most rewarding feelings ever would have to be earning money for all your efforts among others. There are a ton of ways to earn money from your podcast and I will be giving 5 ways to monetize your podcast that actually work.
- Sponsorships: A sponsorship is basically when a company pays you to promote their products/services. There are different ways to get sponsorships for your podcast, which are by :
- Reaching out to a company: if there are companies that you are interested in, you could send an email to their PR team saying you’d love to work with them, as well as your show stats. I suggest you do this when you have more than 1,000 listens per episodes, if the company chooses to work with you, you can set your pay rate for them.
- Joining a podcast network: there are a bunch of podcast networks out there that get sponsorship for you already, so that you don’t have to do that yourself. Examples of such networks are Anchor, redcircle, buzzsprout, e.t.c.
- Companies reach out to you: if your podcast is garnering significant attention, companies could reach out to you to promote them.
- Streaming Platforms: Aside from distributing your podcasts on apple podcast, spotify, google podcasts, e.t.c. You could upload your podcast episodes to streaming platforms like youtube and twitch. Youtube uses google adsense to pay and you can also set up subscriptions on twitch for people to pay to watch your episodes. You qualify for google adsense when you have over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time.
- Merchandise: you can create merchandising for your podcast, this could be hoodies with your podcast catchphrase, mugs, shirts, phonecases and even notebooks with your catchphrase/podcast name. You could use teespring to get started.
- Donations: You could ask your listeners to donate money to support the podcast or create exclusive podcast episodes for your listeners on Patreon. Your listeners could send your donations to your Paypal or however you choose.
- Affiliate Marketing and Referral Programs.
I think the best part of programs like this is that they are passive income. Someone makes a purchase with your link and you get a commission from that sale. With referral programs, you refer someone and earn from it, when they make a purchase also. The beauty is that you don’t need to do any heavy lifting or work at all, just share your link to your listeners.
As a podcast host you could share affiliate links for your equipments like your microphone, laptop and camera if your podcasts are videobased as well. These are some popular affiliate programs:
- eBay affiliate program
- Amazon affiliate program
- AliExpress affiliate program.
Referral programs are profitable for almost anyone, mostly all you have to do is share your referral link to someone and when they use the link to register and shop with the platform, you get paid. A very good referral program is Rakuten.
- Rakuten
Rakuten is a cashback service and it pays for you $25 when you refer someone and that person spends $25 dollars. I think this is a pretty decent for passive income. Let’s paint a relatable scenario, say you refer your listeners to join Rakuten and they spend over $25 shopping casually on amazon or wherever, you’re going to make $125 from referring and the person who made the purchase is also going to get cashback from that purchase, it is a win for everyone. Making $125 just from sharing a referral link is pretty awesome.
In conclusion, monetization of your podcast is very rewarding because of all the efforts put into making it. Endeavour to create quality and engaging podcasts episodes that will encourage listeners to want to support you.
