175: Uncorking the Secrets of Podcast Monetization
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Well, hey there, friends. If you're ready to turn your podcast into a pure profit machine, I've got a little something super exciting for you. We are opening registration starting today for the seven-figure podcast bootcamp. Oh my gosh, I am so excited.

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As you start studying the data of your premium content and seeing what people are buying, when do they turn it off? How long does your average subscriber stay subscribed for? The minute you start pulling your data in, you can begin to make decisions on when to increase your price or decrease your price or whether you have it spot on. Generally speaking, when we're looking at pricing, if you price it too high, the market will tell you no one will subscribe.

The power of a podcast extends well beyond plugging in the mic. So if you're ready to learn how it can help you build a big business, then I'm your best friend. Hi, I'm Joanne Bull and I am obsessed with all things podcasting and creating an unapologetically big revenue business with it. From podcast guesting to podcast hosting and everything in between, we're going to dive into it all and show you step five.

by Awesome Step, how using a podcast can and will grow your business. So grab a glass of wine and pop your headphones on because girlfriend happy hour has begun here on The B Word.

All right, guys, welcome to day three of Monetize. We're going to get into all of your revenue opportunities. And by the end of this session, you will have embarked on a transformative podcast journey for sustainable income. We're going to talk about premium content. We're going to talk about guest appearance again, and we're going to talk about ad sponsorships, especially some of the terms that you need to know as you venture into this aspect of revenue for your podcast.

So our roadmap today is to unveil to you the potential of premium content. I use it all the time. It is super successful. We're going to explore repurposing your guest appearances for more revenue. We're going to dive into those almighty ad sponsorships that I know you are dying to get into and determining your audience's ad tolerance. I think it's really important to know how to figure out how tolerant your people are going to be to ads before you start selling space on your pod. So the pillars are,

of this piece of your long-term strategy is that you've got premium content, repurposed content, and ad sponsorships. And that is page five in your workbook that you can come back to at the end of this. Now let's talk about premium content. Premium content. The value of this is to give your listener an experience that they may not get by listening to the free version of the podcast. And

And you can charge for premium content. That's the subscriber only. You can do this on almost every platform. So if you're on Buzzsprout, you can actually produce premium content that goes out to every player out there. Or if you really just want to offer premium a subscriber on Apple, you can do that as well. That is when you really know that your following is on one platform or if you want it available to everyone. Now, what do we mean by premium content?

We're talking bonus episodes, you know, behind the scenes, extended interviews. If you got a really hot commodity on your podcast, maybe you have brought in a Marie Forleo and she's just a mega, mega name.

And she's willing to give you not only your 45 minute standard interview, but also a behind the scenes of her next launch, her next book, her next anything that she's not openly talking about on every single podcast episode that she's on. I would recommend something like that be what your premium content is. People will pay for that stuff. Think of it this way. Do you remember going to the movies or TV shows when you were younger and they would show the bloopers at the end and like everyone was

sat through the entire movie or sat through the entire TV show just to get to the bloopers, because that's the funny stuff. That's the stuff that we were actually dying to see. You can offer some of that as your premium content, you know, you cracking up or, you

stumbling over your words or like whatever it is, I can tell you that a lot of our bloopers for the B word when we're doing guest interviews actually occur before we ever hit the record button. So I've actually played with the thought in my head of maybe I should hit record from the very beginning while me and the guest are kind of getting to know each other and we're laughing together because that could make some great, great premium content. Always be thinking about could I turn this into premium content?

Now, when you unlock that premium content, there are a lot of different models like Patreon, for example, where creators offer tiered subscription levels with varying content. So you can go and put your podcast on Patreon. Or like I mentioned, I only did my premium content on Apple because most of my listeners were on Apple. So I went to Apple Connect and opened up an account there where I did that. Now, what did that mean for me? It meant that although Buzzsprout

our platform player at the time,

pushed out our entire episodes to all players, I had to go specifically into my Apple account and add on the subscription only portion. And that was okay. It was just another step to take. But you can go to a lot of different levels of what you want your premium content to be tiered could even be like the video streaming, a mid tier could be, you know, with behind the scenes, it really is up to you how you want to unlock that and make it look

And you can actually start that almost from day one. So although this is day three of monetize, if you start thinking about how you could do premium content, work toward building your audience up to be an audience that would want that premium content, going back to that thought on your ICA that we talked about on day one, and make sure that when you do unlock premium content, it's something someone will pay for. And another little thing to think about, you can go into this on page six,

Your pricing. If you're thinking about pricing for premium content, you want to price it to where it's an easy yes for someone and it's a hell no to have to go and turn off. So for me, when I did the Apple, the reason I did it in Apple, actually, we charged on our subscription like $1.

I mean, a dollar a month. It was almost a no brainer for someone that if they saw that there was extended content or an extra episode, it was a no brainer for them to hit yes, subscribe because it was cheap. Because it was cheap, if they got tired of listening to it and they wanted to turn it off, honestly, most people don't take the time to go into their subscriptions and then turn it off. So we priced our subscription content where we needed a lot of people listening to it to actually generate revenue.

because we were going for the entry level thought, you know, building that strategy on premium content. But we put it at that point where it was just a no brainer to say yes to and too difficult and not worth your time to go and turn off. Now, if you were doing a higher level of content, you were routinely putting out subscriber only or behind the scenes or those bloopers, things like that. You might be able to charge a little bit more. You can play with the pricing and

As you start studying the data of your premium content and seeing what people are buying, when do they turn it off? How long does your average subscriber stay subscribed for? The minute you start pulling your data in, you can begin to make decisions on when to increase your price or decrease your price or whether you have it spot on. Generally speaking, when we're looking at pricing,

If you price it too high, the market will tell you no one will subscribe or such a low amount of people will subscribe. That is going to be obvious to you. If you price it too low, everyone subscribes. That's when you know you've priced it too low. When you price it spot on, you start getting about the number of subscribers that feels good to you financially. Now,

The next phase of this process is repurposing with purpose. We talked earlier in the week about guest appearances and charging them a fee to be on your show. One of the things that I love to also bring into my strategy is the repurposing of their show.

So we will offer guests who pay the appearance fee an additional fee that's slightly less to be repurposed later in the year when we do throwback episodes or to send them back out on our email list or to go live with them on Instagram when we release their episode. You don't have to just do the guest appearance fee. You can then put into your financial strategy a way to take that guest appearance fee and

and keep going. Kind of like that downsell to someone. You know, if someone offers you a product and you're like, yeah, I want it, want it. And then you click the button to buy. And then you get another button that says, oh, and do you also want this? And you're like, yeah. And so you click buy and then you get another ad and it's like, well, do you want this? I mean, at some point you'll say no. Most of you, I don't, I'm a terrible like point of sale shopper, but you can create the same strategy with your guests.

Offer them the price to be on the show. Offer them a price to also be blasted out on your email list or your Instagram or your Facebook or your LinkedIn. And then offer them the repurposing price that six months down the road, your episode will be re-aired as a throwback episode. The only thing you want to make sure if you decide to go down that route is

Is that you talk to your people ahead of time, whatever they discuss on your podcast needs to be evergreen. So if they're coming on to specifically talk about the launching of a book, if that book isn't going to still be sold six months from now, that's not the right episode to think about a guest appearance repurposing.

But if they're coming in to talk about their photo course for photography and that course they plan on it being up on their website for the next 15 years, I mean, who knows what could happen, but that's their plan. That's a great evergreen one that you can help them repurpose most of the time.

Whoever you have on your podcast that's willing to pay the guest fee will look at that and it's a no-brainer for them to pay for the repurposing six months down the road. And oh, by the way, it gives you more content to redo on your own podcast and now you have another episode to put out. Now, let's talk about sponsored ads. I know you guys are dying to get into that one because that's where my DMs have been blowing up for the past few days.

When we look at monetizing a podcast from sponsor ads, there's a lot of things that go into play. But here's the thing I want you to understand.

41% of millennials listen to podcasts on a weekly basis. I was actually reading an email this morning from Pod News that said millennials are now saying that they are spending more time listening to something auditorially like a podcast and less time on video games, which of course made this mama's heart happy. Although I have a Gen Z or X or whatever that generation now is, and I'm hoping like, oh, maybe we can transform my son into more of a listener and less of a

participator, but we'll see. Most of your podcast people have money and that's why sponsorships are so critical. And that's why sponsors are investing into the podcast world. Most of your podcast listeners have a college degree.

And they have an average income of $75,000 a year. And when we talked about the affiliate strategy on day one, the listeners are about 83% more likely to purchase something that their favorite podcast host recommends to them. So for that reason, when you're thinking about ads and how to craft your pitch to someone, I really encourage you to do what's called a post-read ad.

Versus a sponsor ad. A sponsor ad would be the owner of the product, service, or business coming in and pitching their own ad. That can feel like a commercial.

A sponsor or a host read ad is when you get their material, you get to put it into your own words and you get to talk about their product in a way that feels good and aligned to you and your listeners. Then your listeners are more likely to actually click the button and go purchase. And that makes your sponsors super, super happy.

Now let's look at some other stats because I'm a numbers nerd. I love to get into the numbers. Podcasts are the preferred channel by consumers, 68% over radio, social media, TV, and even YouTube. NPR notes that 75% of its podcast listeners do respond or take action, which we just talked about that. I actually think I've read it's up to 83%. I think that's probably more likely. But how do you know what to charge?

So when we think about what we're going to charge our sponsors, you have to know what is going on in the industry. And in the industry, it is looked at with a term CPM, cost per mil. Mil is Latin for thousand. So let's hope you can remember that. But CPM, the overall average rate for a baked in podcast host and a baked in means you have actually recorded that episode's sponsor straight into your episode.

A dynamic means you recorded it differently from the episode and you are having your podcast player insert it into the podcast episode. Dynamic episode sponsorships are worth less because they're there for a specific amount of time and then they come back out of your podcast. Baked in are worth more because they are evergreen and they are always in your episode. You actually have to take the whole episode down.

delete out the ad and re-upload your episode if you want a baked in ad to be removed. Whereas dynamic, they dynamically come in and out. And there's different pricing for 30 seconds, 60 seconds,

There's also different pricing for pre, mid and post role. A pre done baked in ad is worth that's premium because that's right before the episode starts. Everyone's going to hear that and it's always there. Then you get the mid role, which about 50% of people make it midway through an episode. So those are worth a premium.

pretty premium spot as well, but not as much as the pre. And the post roll is worth the least because you have to have your audience member listen all the way through and not stop toward the end of your episode and go to someone else's in order for that post roll to be heard. So you can kind of start to see why they're priced a little bit differently. On average, if you're thinking about your cost,

you can know that it's about right now at the time of this recording, it's about $25 per CPM. So if you want to calculate that, you look at the cost equals the reach. So how many downloads you're going to get times the CPM, 25 divided by a thousand. So if your reach is about 2000 per, you know, flight, which is what we call a campaign for, for a sponsored ad,

$2,000 times $25 divided by 1,000, you're going to make about 50 bucks on that sponsored ad.

That is why most sponsors don't go for the smaller podcast because if they're going to pay a lot of money toward their advertising, they want it to have a big, broad reach. So they're going to look for a podcast or getting between three and 8,000 downloads per episode, 25,000 downloads per month. Because again, that ad, especially if it's dynamic, it can be in all your episodes in a given month. It doesn't have to just be in one. Now,

How do you measure your audience ad tolerance? And here's what I mean by tolerance. You've all been there. You've got your favorite podcast.

And all of a sudden that podcast host goes from no ads to a lot of ads. And you start hitting that forward 30 second button. And then you get fed up with having to skip forward on the commercials. Because let's be honest, an ad is a commercial. And our culture has gotten very wary of commercials. Like we have been conditioned because of Netflix and Netflix.

streaming TV, like we don't have to see commercials anymore. We can skip past that crap. So people don't want to hear the commercials as much on their podcast anymore. So the question for you as the host is where is that tipping balance of, Hey, I can put three ads or I can put 13 ads and only you can answer that. I can't answer that for you. Here's how you start to understand.

When you get into your podcast, there are data and analytics involved. So when you start looking at sponsorships, I would really start looking at things like if prior to sponsorships, all of my episodes, the average listener was getting 83% through the episode before they dropped off because you can get those analytics and most of your platform players. Then post sponsorships, are they starting to really drop off at the 63% or they stay into 83%?

Because if you're not dropping down and where they're leaving your podcast, you can probably add on one more sponsor and then do it again and do it again until you get to that tipping point of my audience is done. And now they're not downloading my episode anymore or now they're getting 25% in and then they're piecing out.

So you always want to play that game of analytics when you're doing sponsorships. It is so, so critical because if you get to that point where people aren't listening any longer, you can't charge your sponsors because they're paying you per download.

And you're not getting the downloads. And they know that because you have to show them the statistics. So play around with that one. I would always start slow and steady before I ramped up my sponsorship. That's also where UTMs become critical. UTM are vital tools in digital marketing. What they do is they add this little snippet of code at the end of your

um, browser ID. So you have to, you actually have to generate a UTM. You can do that in Google analytics. It's pretty easy to figure out how to do, but your sponsors are going to want to know where their campaign is generating revenue. So if they're buying ad space on my podcast and three other podcasts,

they're going to want to know which one is performing the best. So we create something called a UTM, which adds that little snippet of code at the end of the URL so that we can actually track through our own podcast how many people are then clicking from our episode show notes to that sponsor's landing page or wherever it is that they want us to go. And we can provide that information to the sponsor because when you can provide the data to the sponsor,

especially when you can pull data from other campaigns, from other sponsors, and you can show your click-through rate, then you are better positioned to get more sponsorships. And I'm going to give you the reason why this is super, super important for you to dive into and figure out how to do. And it goes back to my real estate days.

When I started out in real estate, I was with Keller Williams Realty and we had an in-house mortgage company, which meant that in our physical office, there was a desk space for a guy who sat there from home bank mortgages. Home bank isn't even in existence anymore. So that's not relevant. But his job was to help our customers get a loan for their homes. Here's the problem.

HomeBank paid around $10,000 per month for the right to sit exclusively in our offices. So we had about 300 real estate agents in that particular office. HomeBank had access to all 300 of those agents. And they were the only mortgage company that sat in that particular Keller Williams office. They paid for that right. The problem came up where

They got a report every month from the office of how many contracts closed on the buyer side because buyers are the ones getting loans. And they would look at it and say, oh my gosh, this is not equating to our 10,000. We are only getting one to two to 3% of the homes that are closing on the buyer side, yet we're paying $10,000 a month to be here.

They couldn't track down really where the loss was occurring, or they couldn't really equate what they were paying every month to what they were getting in revenue.

Had we had UTMs in the real estate world, that would have been a whole heck of a lot easier because then we could have shown them, well, here's how many buyers actually applied for your mortgage. Whether they got a mortgage with you or not, that's not my job. My job is to give you the opportunity, put them in front of you so that you can close that deal. Now, had we had a way to track that,

Home bank and the other mortgagees that came afterward probably would have continued to pay that kind of money to be in the office because then they could look at it and say, well, we may be closing one to three percent of y'all's closed loans, but we're getting the opportunity to 50 to 60 percent of them. And then they could close their leaks and their funnel system.

That is where the power of UTMs comes into play for a podcaster. Because if you've got a sponsor who is going to pay you, you know, maybe your CPMs could be $10,000 a month. And yet that sponsor says, oh, but Joanne, we're paying out about $10,000 a month for you to mention us on the B Word podcast.

But we're not closing sales or we can't tell that our sales are coming from the B-Word podcast. Well, I can pull up the UTMs and say, listen, this is how many people literally clicked from my podcast. So they heard it. They made the action to click and they went to your landing page. If you didn't convert them into sales, that's on you. That's not on me. And so having those UTMs and understanding how to set them up and use them is that next level of critical thinking when you're thinking like a business owner of a podcast.

Now, if we break down the UTM parameters, we've got all the information on it right here. You've got the source, which is the traffic origin, like Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. You've got the medium, which is the type. Maybe it's a social post. Maybe it's a video. The campaign is the specific promotion name. The term is the keywords that you're targeting.

And the content distinguishes between similar links in the same campaign. And by leveraging these stats and discussions with your sponsors, again, you demonstrate that investing in your podcast places your brand in the best position possible for them to earn revenue. Now, that was a lot of nerdy technical information, and I am super well aware of that.

I am not here to teach you about UTMs and CPMs in this particular course. We go into that into the teaching and coaching I do in the studio. But I want you to have that information so that you can go forward with it in your own business and know when it's time that that stuff is out there. So how do we get from understanding how we track it to actually getting that sponsor? Well, we call that the gateway to monetization.

And what that is, is a well-crafted sponsor pitch. A well-crafted sponsor pitch is the first step that you're going to take because that is your bridge between you and the sponsor. It is generally a PDF or a landing webpage or a personalized Loom video that you're sending to sponsors that gets their attention and gets them looking at your podcast. Your podcast pitch should emphasize your unique value.

How many people you reach? What's your engagement? Who are your demographics? Why you are an ideal platform for that particular sponsor. You should craft a well-prepared pitch because if it's just an email that you kind of throw out to people, they're not going to look at it. Our emails get too crowded with stuff. That's why a personalized Loom video with a clickable PDF

or a landing page showcasing some of your best campaigns and showcasing some of your statistics are your best way to build relationships for your pitches. Customize it as often as possible. Yes, you can use templates. We're actually going to send you our template for a polished pitch that we use all the time here to send out pitches.

It's in Canva. You can customize it to your own podcast, and we're going to send that out after the class is over. But I would also recommend that you customize it as much for each individual one that you do. So you can have your template with your overall information, but maybe you do lead it off with a personalized Loom video introducing yourself and your podcast and speak the subject's name.

So it's much more effective if I'm going to send something to, let's say, Coca-Cola, where I actually say, hi, Martha, if that's the head of marketing for Coca-Cola versus hi, hey,

I'd like to introduce you to. When it sounds canned and generic, they're not as likely to open it as when you are capturing their attention by speaking directly to them. With this strong sponsor pitch, you can unlock opportunities to monetize your podcast super effectively and super quickly. You don't have to have huge downloadable rates in order to get a great CPM. Let's just say you're getting 100 downloads or less on your podcast.

pitch to someone that they can actually purchase a sponsorship with you at a very low rate. Maybe it's only $10 per CPM until you reach those higher levels. A lot of times companies have already allocated their marketing budget for the year by like mid third quarter of the year before. So if you go in with the, Hey, it's not going to cost you $500,000 to advertise on my podcast.

But I can show you how engaged my hundred listeners are and I can show you how often they click through on stuff that I give them. I can show you how loyal of purchasers they are. And by the way, your campaign may only cost $50. They're more likely to actually listen to you because you become a micro-influencer for them. Now, here's the bonus. We're going to craft your pitch.

We, again, in your workbook, page eight, what I want you to do now is grab that workbook. Let's start outlining your podcast value, your audience demographics, your unique selling points so that when we send you the template later on, you can just insert them on in.

You just finished another episode of the B-Word Podcast. Cheers to you. If I were with you, I would literally pop a big old bottle of Prosecco and pour you a glass. Since I'm not, why don't you do the next best thing and share this episode with one of your besties? Because we all know you've got that one girlfriend that needs to hear it. Thanks, friends.

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We have got a free gift that we are changing every single month here on The B Word. So head on over once you've given your review, grab a screenshot of it, and then go to thebwordpodcast.com forward slash review. Upload it for me and I will send you a free gift immediately. Thanks in advance.