We all want to be able to focus on our craft. But most of us have bills to pay. We have fun shit we want to buy, and we have podcast expenses to cover.
So we need to make some money from talking into our microphones. The problem is, all the classic podcast sponsorships you hear on podcasts require a minimum of 10,000 downloads per episode. For an indie podcast, that’s a long way off.
But there are other ways. Ways you can monetize your audience without sponsorship. Here are four ways we monetize Generally Spooky History.
Patreon
Your audience loves what you do, they want to support you, and they want more. What do you do? You make yourself a Patreon.
Offer up extra content and charge people a monthly fee to enjoy that content. It feels like the purest way to monetize your audience and is my favorite method. And if you look at some of Patreon’s biggest users, many of them are podcasts. Between all the spicy content that’s on there…
Last Podcast on the Left are one of the biggest podcasts on Patreon and they’re earning upwards of $80,000 a month! And while my wife and I’s humble podcast obviously doesn’t earn nearly that much it’s still our favourite platform for earning money with our podcast.
Workload: High – You need to be creating extra content which can take a lot of work
Potential Earnings: High – This is the highest recurring revenue we get on Generally Spooky history
Merch
Got a logo? You can put it on T-shirt. But more than that, you can turn inside jokes into T-shirts. The same goes for common phrases that come up repeatedly on the podcast.
For instance, on Generally Spooky History, we’ve had multiple requests for a T-shirt that says, “Kieran saw a ghost and all I got was this stupid T-shirt”. For the whole of season 6, this was a joke that came up again and again. The listeners love it, we love it, so you bet your ass this is going on a T-shirt.
We use Printful for our Merch. It connects with Shopify, where we sell it which is useful and they handle all the printing and shipping. They take a fairly big cut for this privilege, but the work at your end is minimal. Once your design is up and live, you just set and forget.
Workload – Low – Once you have the design selling it is passive.
Potential earnings – Medium – It depends what price you set your merch at and what your audience is willing to pay.
Affiliate links
An affiliate link is a tracked link to an online shop, and if someone clicks and buys from that shop then you get a commission. On Genearlly Spooky History we got approached by a tea company, Brid and Blend, who created an affiliate link for us that meant we get 10% commission when ever somebody buys tea through our link.
We loved Bird and Blend Tea so this was all the simpler to promote. At the start of an episode we would tell people about how wonderful Bird and Blend Tea is and then to use our discount code with them.
The hardest part is finding the relevant partners to work with. For the success we had with Bird and Blend we’ve had two other affiliate partners who resulted in no sales.
Wordload – Medium – Finding who to work with can be difficult but easy to incorporate once you do
Potential Earnings – Low-High – It really depends how well you know what your audience wants, how high your commission is, and how expensive teh product is. Well worth trying out.
Donations
This is another very pure way to make money from your podcast, your audience wants to support you so they can send you donations to do so. We set this up with PayPal initially, we were trying to raise money to buy new microphones and our few early listeners were happy to help us do just that.
Other platforms can help you do this; Ko-Fi and Buy Me A Coffee come to mind. They are set up so that your audience can send you a few bucks if they like what you do. It’s a perfect way to put out a gentle ask to your audience to let them support you.
Workload – Almost zero – another set it and forget it
Potential Earnings – Who knows? – You never know who might want to leave you a donation!
Final thoughts
Those are your basic ways to make some money from your podcast. But it’s a matter of being as creative as possible. You might be able to sell art prints about your episode. You might be able to get paid speaking gigs. Who knows? I’ve not had experience with those, but head out and try them out!
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