With the help of podcasting, you can easily build a dedicated audience online these days. All you need is a smartphone and an affordable mic. Once you have both of these, starting a podcast becomes easy.
Just like starting a blog, you can start a podcast on any topic as well. It means that you can start podcasting in your area of expertise.
All that is good, but unless you monetize it, it is very difficult to benefit from podcasting, so the big question is: how do podcasts make money?
How to monetize a podcast in 2021?
Fortunately, there are four different ways in which you can do so. We will touch base on all these four ways to help you understand how to monetize your podcast in a much better way.
1. Online courses
One of the best ways to create a revenue stream from podcasting is to create your online courses.
You can create a video course, an audio course, or an e-book as well, for that matter. The choice is yours.
If you do not want to deal with payment gateways or create landing pages, you can go with sites like Gumroad.co to sell your courses.
There are other sites like Udemy and Skillshare, which can help you out with the same.
In a nutshell, once you create the course material, you do not have to worry about the other extras.
There are quite a few advantages of monetizing your podcast with your online courses. These include:
• Setting up your own price.
• Creating a course to which your audience can relate with.
• Updating the course as per the demand of your audience.
Do not want to create your own course?
You can promote online courses of other creators as well. By doing so, you can directly team up with them to get a significant chunk of the selling price.
Thus, online courses are one of the best ways you can use to monetize your podcast.
2. Coaching and consultation services
Do not mind devoting a bit more time to monetization?
If so, you can offer one-on-one coaching to your listeners. If you’re truly an authority in the field, you can get paid hundreds of dollars for a single hour of one-on-one coaching. Doing so will ensure that the amount of money you make is much higher than a regular course.
Not only that, you can offer consultation services to incorporates as well. As long as you brew your credentials and have some social proof in the form of testimonials, you can easily earn hundreds of dollars in consultation services.
While both of these require you to set aside some time daily, but the amount of money you can make is enormous.
Not only that, it can open future opportunities for you as well, which will help you earn even more.
Thus, if you need a large revenue stream by selling courses, you can offer coaching or consultation services.
3. Sponsorship
If you do not want to create any resource to monetize your online podcast, sponsorships are the easiest ways to monetize it.
You might be thinking, how to get a sponsorship for your podcast?
We will cover that below.
We will share with you a step-by-step procedure that will make it easy for you to find sponsors.
• Firstly, you have to populate your content calendar in advance. Only then can you decide which sponsors you should contact for which podcast episode.
• You need to also get listenership data so that you can convince companies to sponsor your podcast.
• Depending on the type of content in the episode, you have to contact sponsorships or companies with whom the content resonates.
• You have to directly email them and then send them a follow-up email as well. In that email, you have to share with them the listenership data and the topic on which you are planning to relate the podcast email.
Sure enough, most companies want to respond. However, you need to remember that you need only a single sponsor. Therefore, if you contact 20 to 25 companies for each episode and have a dedicated audience, you can get sponsorships.
It requires some work, but you can easily get paid hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars from each sponsor as well. That is why it is well worth it.
4. Affiliate marketing
The last method, of course, is the easiest. In this, you do not have to contact anyone. You do not need to create anything as well.
It is known as affiliate marketing.
In this method, you can promote products, services, courses by other creators and companies.
Whenever you get a sale, you can get up to 75% of the selling price.
You need to promote these in your podcast episodes.
There are, however, a few things that you have to keep in mind when choosing the product, services, or companies to promote. These are:
• You have to ensure that the product or services are entirely legit. Otherwise, you will lose the trust of your listeners.
• You have to use an affiliate network, which ensures that you get paid on time.
• You have to always choose products and services that your listeners need. That way, you will retain their trust.
• You have to always ensure that you are subtly promoting them. If you promote them repeatedly, the listeners will get bored, and your listenership will decrease.
• If you’re using a third-party platform for uploading podcast episodes, make sure that you go through the terms and conditions regarding affiliate marketing. Only then, promoting products and services is a good idea.
Once you follow these few tips, it becomes easier to monetize your podcast using affiliate marketing.
The advantage is that you can choose from thousands of different products. That is why; finding a product that is relevant to your listeners is undoubtedly easy.
As you can see, monetizing a podcast in 2021 is not a difficult task. You can choose from any of the four methods highlighted above. All of them can help you make a significant amount of money. If you have a large enough audience size, making thousands of dollars from each podcast episode is not difficult.
For more business and entrepreneurship tips, subscribe to our weekly newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.