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If you have a podcast, you've probably wondered, how can I monetize my podcast? In this episode, I'm going to show you why asking that question is actually keeping you from making money. And I'm going to give you a better question to ask instead. And that question is going to give you what you really want for your podcast to not only generate enough money to pay for itself, but to pay you too, and then some. This is Grow the show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach. And since 2020, I've helped hundreds of podcasters shift this mindset. And they did. Their shows finally started making money, even with small audiences. So if you've been waiting around to have 10,000 listeners or for sponsors to get you paid, you're gonna wanna hear this. Let's dive in. Okay, so one of the biggest questions that I get from podcasters is, how do I monetize? And what I usually say to that is, that is a horrible question. And then the person gets slightly offended for a minute and I say, stick with me for a second. So back in 2019, I attended the Unleash the Power within seminar with Tony Robbins. And it was this crazy four day event. And one of the things that I took away and has stuck with me to this day was when Tony Robbins said, if you want better answers in your life, ask better questions. And I think of that every single time a podcaster asks me, how do I monetize? Because that is a very difficult question to answer. And it's difficult to answer because at what moment does your podcast go from not being monetized to being monetized? When? When does the switch flip? And when I press podcasters and I say, at what moment is your podcast monetized? Some of them say, when I make money from the show, when I get paid because of podcasting. Others say when the podcast is generating enough money on its own for me to do it full time. And when I speak to business owners, even though their podcast brings them sales of their product or service, a lot of times what they mean is that the podcast is selling ads. So they the advertisements that the podcast sells pays for production. And herein lies the problem with this question. How do I monetize my podcast? Because in order to get a good answer, you need to understand what specifically what tangible event are you asking to make happen? Are you asking for you to just make money in any way? Are you asking to get sponsors? Are you asking to build an income from the show specifically if so, what is that income? So here you see, there's so many questions behind the question, how do I monetize my podcast? That that's why it's been so hard for you to answer. But I'll take it a step further, because in order for you to easily answer the question, how do I monetize my podcast? You need to understand how podcast audiences are actually monetized. And a lot of people think that it's just sponsors. When they think about podcast monetization, they just automatically think, oh, my show is sponsored by BetterHelp or something like that. But in actuality, there are several different ways a podcast can be monetized. And on top of that, and here's the key. This is what you want to. Every single strategy to monetize a podcast boils up to one thing. There is only one way to monetize a podcast. Now, I have been growing and monetizing podcasts for the last eight years. I've worked directly with over 500 shows. There have been more than 120,000 podcasters who have come through the grow the show sphere. And so I've interacted with a lot of shows. And I can tell you that there is one singular way to. To monetize a podcast. So what is that way? What is the one way to monetize a podcast? Well, you see, monetization is not about sponsors. It's not about show size. It's not about waiting for the 10,000 downloads magic threshold. It's you getting paid because your podcast exists, but your podcast is not what pays you. This is the key. So when I talk to podcasters and I'm like, okay, at what moment does your podcast get monetized? A lot of them will say, well, when I get paid. So really, what they're saying is, I. I wanna get paid to podcast. I'm like, okay, cool, me too. I get it. But the question is, who is paying you to podcast? And this is usually the part where, you know, the podcast or the entrepreneur kind of, they look up, they're like, hmm, that's a good question. And what happens is, usually these people will say, my podcast is monetized when I get paid by my sponsor. And I'm like, okay, cool, I get that. But let me ask you this. Why are they paying you? And they're like, well, so I mention their products and services on my show. I'm like, okay, so. So they're not sponsors. They are not paying you so that your show exists. Your sponsors don't care if your show exists. They do not care if your show lives or dies. They don't care if you run out of money and you give up podcasting. It does not affect their business. What does affect their business is if people buy their stuff. So sponsors are simply paying you in advance so that your listeners pay them. So for most of you, when you're saying, how do I monetize my podcast? What many of you are actually asking is, is, at what audience size can I get a sponsor to pay me? So that is a better question to ask because it's more tangible and specific. Now, a lot of you think that you need to have 10,000 people in your audience because there's a lot of articles on Google. If you Google how do I monetize a podcast? There's a lot of articles that say you really need 10,000 downloads in order to monetize significantly. While that's fine as a benchmark, it's not true. You do not need 10,000 downloads per episode to monetize a podcast. I have never gotten a podcast episode of my own that's gotten more than 10,000 views. Oh, my God. The Grow the Show guy hasn't gotten more than 10,000 views. No. My shows have been unbelievably niche. My first show was about the city of Philadelphia, and my second show is for podcasters. There are not a lot of podcasters. The shows that I work on and the shows that I help get hundreds of thousands, millions of downloads. But mine are very, very niche shows, and podcasting has generated millions of dollars for me in my career. So what does this mean to you? Well, you do not have to wait until you have 10,000 subscribers. All that needs to happen is you need to have a sponsor believe that if they give you money, you have an audience that will give them money. Ah, but here's the thing. The next thing that you think is, ooh, but I'm not sure if my audience will give my sponsors money. Aha. That's the key. And within that little thought is the answer to, how do I monetize my podcast? What is the single way to monetize my podcast? Because if you think about other ways to monetize a podcast, if you think about other ways that you get paid in order to podcast, it's not just sponsors paying you in advance. You also can have affiliate relationships where you tell your listeners about a product, and if, and only if they buy it, you get a little commission. Now, it looks a lot like sponsorship. It looks the same, but sponsors pay you in advance. Affiliates Pay you only after your audience buys. But here's the key. In both cases, your audience is buying something from a company and then that company is giving you a cut of what they bought. But the third way, and what I generally recommend for most people and the way that is way simpler and makes you way more money that you get to keep, is very simply, your audience pays you. We skip the middleman. Now this is when you're an entrepreneur and you have a product, a service that could be a course membership. My Philly show was heavily monetized with live events, which by the way, you can double dip because you can sell sponsorships to the event and then sell sponsorships to the episode. But there's a, there's many different ways to get your audience and your listeners to pay you so that you don't have to go through the trouble of finding, closing and keeping sponsors happy. Because that's the other thing that if you don't have sponsors. Yes, I know it is fun to think about a scenario where you just get the podcast. I just read books and I interview smart people and, and my sponsors pay me. But that's not how it actually works. If you have a podcast that has tens of thousands of listeners. Because yes, if you want to make a full time income where you're making several thousand dollars a month in profit, then you're going to need way more than 10,000 listeners. You are probably going to need upwards of 50 to 100k or more for a regular, normal audience. If you've got a really high paying niche show, sure, you could make it work. Like, I used to know somebody who had a show for fishermen and he had an affiliate deal with a boat retailer. So if one of his audience members bought a boat, he made like 10gr or something like that. So still you gotta get, you know, make 12 boat sales a year. But this dream of you being a podcaster and just spending your time having amazing conversations and sponsors just pay me to have those conversations. It's not that common because in actuality what you're building is an advertising company because you are going to probably have to talk to 100 different sponsors a year or more. Because you know, for every 10 sponsors that you speak with, 10 to 20% of them are actually going to do a deal with you. And on top of that you are going to have to keep them happy. So if you accept a sponsor's money and then you run your ads and your audience does not buy from those sponsors, guess who is not gonna be your sponsor anymore? Because they're like, we threw this money down the drain. Now, I often get a question when I explain this. People are like, yes, Kevin, but what about when I interview guests and I charge my guests to be on the show? Isn't that a way of monetizing? That isn't getting my listeners to buy something? And I say, no, that's a form of sponsorship where your guests are paying you in advance to have you on the show so that your listeners buy their stuff. So you may notice a theme here with every single possible monetization path that there is, it is this simple. You have a podcast. If you listen to what we talk about here at Grow the Show, that podcast has listenership. The way that you make money from your podcast. The only way to monetize a podcast is by getting your listeners to buy something. That is it. It is simply influencing purchase decisions in a way where you get a cut from those purchase decisions. It does not matter whether you are getting paid in advance from sponsors so that you influence your audience to buy their stuff, or you influence your audience in advance to buy stuff from a company and then they give you a commission, which is affiliates, or you create a product or service that you sell them, which I call direct monetization. That takes creating, building, designing, and fulfilling a product or service. So that can be a lot of work, but it is where the most money is, in my opinion. Monetizing your guests doing live events and your audience buying tickets, selling the merch, selling books. It's all the same thing, folks. Every single form of monetization is you get your listeners to buy stuff and you get a cut of those things. So with that in mind, what would be a better question to ask? Cause like I said at the beginning, when you ask yourself, how do I monetize this podcast? Monetize is an abstract word that doesn't mean anything. A better question to ask is, how do I set something up where I influence this audience to buy something and I profit when they buy that thing? That's it. Now, now that we've established a better question to ask if you wanna make money from your podcast, you still might not know the answer to that. You still might not know what can I influence my listenership to buy so that I profit from them buying that thing? You may not know the answer. And if that's the case, then you shouldn't try yet. Because here's what's important to understand. Number one, if you don't understand your audience well enough where you can answer that question and you can Say, oh, I know that my audience buys these things. Then you don't have a good enough understanding of your audience to build a business around. You need to understand your audience that well. On top of that, if your audience is not growing, I also don't recommend that you try to monetize because if you don't know how to grow your show, then you have a finite list of people who are listening to your show. And when you try to monetize them, you will say, hey, you should buy this thing. And some of them will buy that thing. But the problem is next month you have not grown your audience at all. So you say, hey, you should buy this thing. And they're like, we already did. I know that I don't wanna do it. I know that I don't wanna do it. And I already bought this thing. And you're like, crap, how am I going to make any more money? What you need is you need more listeners to be entering the fold so that when you say, hey, will you buy this thing? They're like, oh, I do want to buy this thing. And they do. That's why I don't even care about monetization strategy until you have a regular, steady inflow of people into your audience. Because until that is the case, monetization is just going to be a one shot thing. It's going to happen once and that's it. Or you're going to have to come up with new products or service every single month because you're like, well, what about this thing? You want to buy this thing? Oh, sure, I'll buy that thing. What about this thing? You want to buy this thing? No, I don't want to buy this thing. So you got to completely all the time be coming up with different things for this finite audience to buy. Or you can learn how to actually grow your audience so that you can just keep saying the same thing all the time. There's always new people hearing the message. So you're always making money from the show. And this is the recommendation. I recommend you pick one thing to monetize with after your show is growing. And again, if your show is not growing, I know you want to see the plan, I know you want to know what the future looks like. How am I going to monetize this thing? But here's the thing. If you get good at growing your audience, where new people are entering the fold on a regular basis, that means that you have a great show. And what happens when you have a great show is this. People tell you how to monetize them. So you will get comments on YouTube that says, do you offer coaching? Or they may not ask that directly, but they might ask questions like how do I blank? Or they might say, do you have any recommendations for X, Y and Z? That's the ticket. So if you are a fitness person and people are asking you, what supplements do you recommend? Bang. That's an opportunity for an affiliate deal. Or let's say that you're a business show and people say, what conferences do you recommend we attend? Bang. Get a sponsorship from a conference. If you have a how to show, here's how to do something. You will get people who reach out and say, can I just pay you to do this for me? Bam. You can launch a product, a service, something like that. So in summary, what to take away from this piece? Number one, how do I monetize a podcast? There is only one way to monetize a podcast and that is by getting your audience to buy something. That is it, full stop. And then the second thing is, okay, I don't know what to offer them. They will tell you. Or if you really can't wait for them to tell you, you can just ask them, hey, what products or services do you pay for? Are you happy about them? What do you wish existed? So my hope is that this episode helped you answer that pesky question of how do I monetize this? And hopefully help you see that it's actually the question itself that's keeping you stuck. Because while sure you can come up with a bunch of different ways to monetize your podcast, it really just comes down to one way. Getting your listeners to buy something and making profit off of the thing that you sell them. Whether you wanna offer them a product or service and you wanna build a company takes a lot of work, but you can make a lot of money. Or if you just wanna chill out and spend your time podcasting and pitching sponsors and then have your sponsors pay you, that's cool too. Just know you are going to have to work to get sponsors. It is not. It will be work. It is a full time job to sell out sponsorships on a podcast and you're going to have two customers because now you're going to have to keep your listeners happy and you're going to have to keep your sponsors happy. And those two parties don't always want the same things. So my hope is that this episode gave you some clarity so that you can ultimately grow and monetize your show to your heart's content. My name is Kev Michael, I am your podcast growth coach, and I'll see you in the next one.