In the last episode of the year, we’re rounding up our month-long conversation on monetization. Marketing your won products and services on your podcast is my favorite monetization approach, I utilize it 95% of the time in my own business. I consider this monetization because it’s a direct lead into my services and ties directly to my income. As an added bonus, I’ll also be touching on creating paid memberships for your podcast!
Clocking In with Haylee Gaffin is produced and brought to you by Gaffin Creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about our services at Gaffincreative.com, plus you’ll also find resources, show notes, and more for the Clocking In Podcast.
Content Marketing (1:30)
What Can a Podcast Look Like in Your Strategy? (2:42)
Goals to Set Up (3:04)
Sell Your Products and Courses (3:58)
Build Trust Through Content (4:53)
Track Your Sales (5:41)
Memberships for Podcasts (6:22)
Links
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Check out the other episodes in this series:
Episode 039: Ways to Monetize Your Podcast
Episode 040: How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Monetize Your Podcast
Episode 041: What to Consider When Looking at Podcast Sponsorships
Review the Transcript:
It’s the final episode of the year! Can you believe it? All month long, we’ve been talking about monetizing your podcast!
Now it’s time to talk about my personal favorite way and the approach I take to my podcast about 95% of the time… marketing your own products or services.. and I consider this monetization because it’s a direct lead into my services and ties directly to my income. As an added bonus, I’ll also be touching on creating paid memberships for your podcast!
Hey y’all welcome to the clocking in podcast the podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world I’m your host Haylee Gaffin this podcast is produced and brought to you by Gaffin Creative a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs learn more about our services at Gaffincreative.com plus you’ll also find resources show notes and more for the clocking in podcast so let’s clock in and get to work.
Now, this topic isn’t new to the podcast, as I highlighted how you can use your podcast for your business back in episode 2 of the podcast.
Now, to get the basics of using a podcast in your business, I encourage you to go back and listen to that episode when you have a moment, but for this particular episode, as part of this month’s monetization series, I want to talk all about making money from your podcast by marketing your services or products on your show.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of content marketing, basically it’s when you create valuable resources and education in your business to set yourself up as an expert and gain the trust of your audience so they’ll convert into paying clients.
The value of this is that you’re not relying on ad spend in front of a cold audience to drive sales, but rather marketing through content, hence content marketing.
Additionally, content marketing does include social media marketing, at least in my strategy. It’s content I’m creating to market my business.
If you’ve ever purchased from my shop, enrolled in my course, or signed on with my podcast coaching or production services, you probably came through via some type of content marketing or a referral.
What I love about content marketing and monetizing my podcast this way is that it serves a long-term purpose. For example, I have downloads every single week from old episodes. That means that the efforts I put into my podcast 7,8,9 months ago are still valuable and working for my business.
So now that we’ve kind of introduced content marketing, I want you to consider what a podcast could look like in your content marketing strategy.
My personal content marketing strategy includes a podcast episode, blog post, and newsletter every single week. I market each of those pieces of content through social media (instagram and pinterest primarily).
There are a few different goals you can set up in order to make your podcast work for your business. Let’s start at the top of the funnel.
- Growing your email list.
I use this pretty often with downloads and opt-ins. I create these to go along with my podcast episodes in order to get my listeners to sign up for my newsletter in exchange for something of value to them. Most of my episodes can stand alone and not require a downloadable, but there are a percentage of listeners who will download that content. This approach allows for you to grow an email list that you can educate, serve, and sell to long-term.
- Sell your products and courses.
Now, this approach does actually correlate to direct income in your business if you approach it correctly. I think it’s really important to consider introducing your products and courses in an episode before you sell them if they’re brand new to your audience. You can do this by creating introductory episodes or highlighting the products and courses in an organic way with content based on those products. I have done this will both my products and courses in past episodes in hopes that my listeners have the problem that my product or course could solve.
- Build trust through content to sign clients.
This has actually been the most beneficial for me. I’d say about 60% of my clients listen to my podcast… and clients, if you’re listening, I’m about to spill a little secret, but likely you already know that because I teach you to do it. My podcast was created to build that trust so that potential clients would know the value I can bring to them.
There are a handful of my clients that have literally booked me because of the podcast. This isn’t a one-off project either, these are monthly ongoing clients who book with me with contracts for production. Those few clients alone have made the production time and costs associated with episodes worth it.
I think monetizing your podcast by marketing your own brand is so valuable, but I also want you to consider creating a way to track your sales. For example, you could create a custom landing page for download opt-ins from your podcast to track the difference of those who found you from the podcast vs those who organically found your freebies page. Then for product or course sales, you could offer a special discount code with the code podcast. And then on your intake forms, you could list your podcast as a referral source.
This will help you track the value of your podcast listenership.
With that value, I also want to touch on memberships for podcasts. This isn’t something I always push for… mostly because it’s hard work to build and create a membership that is worth your time unless you have a big audience. And I hate when we opt out of doing things because we have small audiences but in this case numbers matter.
Back in episode16, I did talk about getting paid for your podcast with Apple’s podcast subscription that they introduced earlier this year. So if you’re curious about how that works, you can check that episode out. But when to memberships, essentially, you’re encouraging listeners to pay for access to bonus content that isn’t available anywhere else. I think these are a great opportunity, especially for educators, but it has to be sooo beneficial for the subscriber and you HAVE to be consistent in order to make it work.
There are a few approaches you can also take to these… You can create a Buy Me A Coffee account and open it up for your listeners to do this on an optional basis just to thank you for the content you’re putting out there. Or you can do an actual subscription and membership with services like Patreon or Memberful. Even some podcast hosting platforms have membership options built-in, or you could even look at creating them in your current education platform like Kajabi, Podia, or Teachable.
No matter how you decide to use your podcast or how you’ll monetize it, make sure you have a goal, a plan, and strategy behind it!
I hope you all have an absolutely wonderful new year, and I can’t wait for what 2022 has in store for your business, monetization, and more! Join in the new year as we pivot with this podcast to bring you more episodes on small business, growth, and yes, even interviews! I can’t wait to share what’s to come. Happy New Year everyone!
This has been another episode of The clocking in podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at Gaffincreative.com. Thank you so much for your listenership and support. If you love this episode, I’d be so honored if you leave me a review in Apple podcast app. Until next time, I’m your host Haylee Gaffin, clocking out.
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