Monetizing Your Podcast

[00:00:00] Hey there, Craig Hewitt here from Castos. Today we're going to be talking about everyone's favorite topic, which is making the money from our podcast. So how are we going to monetize a podcast? To me, this comes down to two very different kinds of approaches. One is direct monetization and the other is indirect monetization. I'll talk about indirect monetization because it's a little more cut and dry and clear, and that is how we create content here at Castos. Right. The goal of our content at Castos is not to make money directly from it through things like ads or sponsors or anything like that, but it is for you to learn how to be a great podcaster and say, hey, I need a podcast host. I'm going to use Kastos because they taught me everything I know about how to be a great podcaster. That's my goal here, right? Is to educate and inspire you as a creator to create great, amazing content and for you to hopefully use our software to do that. That's indirect, right? So think about it. If you're a coach or a consultant or a Main street business, you want to create content to attract your ideal customers and solve a problem, or show them how you can help them solve a problem, and they'll use your solution for that. So to me, that is content marketing and that is indirect monetization of a podcast. You're not making money directly from it, but you're selling a product or service that is related to the content and your ICP. Direct monetization has a few different flavors over here. In no particular order. They are donations, subscriptions to like gated content and programmatic or host read ads. So I'll dive into each of those a little bit. So, donations. Through our castos Commerce platform, you can set up either one time or recurring donations so you can say to your audience, hey, if you want to support the show, you can donate 510 $20 a month or a year to help support me as a creator. These are optional. There's no kind of extra benefit for them other than feeling good about them supporting you as a creator. They're really kind of great way, I think, to get in, into direct monetization as a creator. The next one is subscriptions. So if you want to charge for access to your content, think about it like a membership site in podcast format. You can absolutely do that. At Castos, we have an integration with the very popular payment platform called Stripe to where you can create stripe subscription links to create a way for customers to and listeners to pay you for access to a private podcast. So this is a great way for you to say, hey, um, maybe you have like an audio course on something you can sell that people can pay you whatever amount of money you want. That can be one time, it can be annually or monthly for access to your content. And then you publish that premium private podcast content into your Kastos dashboard, and they get it. And they can listen to that either via the Kastos mobile app or a private RSS feed in their podcasting mobile app, like Apple Podcast or overcast. And the last one is ads. And this is really the carryover to the conventional radio days, I think, where advertisers will say, hey, this creator is talking about this topic to this audience that I have a lot of interest in. I want to get myself and my message and my brand in front of that. I'm going to buy advertising space on this podcast, and this can be done programmatically. Castos ads does this kind of on the fly, very much programmatically, to where you literally just click a button, say, make me money for my podcast, and we will determine the best fit for the ad inventory for you and your show and the location of your listener. And we'll insert that and deliver that file to your listener with the ad baked in. And then based on the number of impressions that you get, you're paid out at the end of the month.

[00:03:43] The other option, which probably requires a little bit more work, but is a great way to make more money, is you putting your sales hat on and going out into the market and selling exactly that fit of, hey, I talk about this thing on my podcast and my audience are these people and their kind of pains and fears and wants and desires are these things. I think you, you know, Company X would be a great fit for this. To sponsor my show is $300 an episode or whatever that number is, right? And then you come up with a script and record an ad, and then you bake that in to your podcast episode. So just at a very high level, those are the few ways that we think about podcast monetization. You can have indirect monetization by ultimately selling a product or service that you have direct monetization. There's donations, there's subscriptions, and there's ads. In our final video of the how to start a podcast series, we're going to talk about scaling. Stay tuned.

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