How to Monetize Audio Podcasting - Ep 009

Do you have an online business that seems impossible to monetize? For instance, many amateurs feel this way about generating income from audio podcasting. If you can relate to these sentiments, then Episode 009 of Marketing Podcast Weekly is a must-listen. In this episode your host Rob Booker talks with Jason Pyles about how to monetize his "hobby podcasts" about movies, Movie Podcast Weekly.com and Horror Movie Podcast.com. Marketing Podcast Weekly brings you strategies for marketing and specializing in marketing for the retail trading industry. Join us! Links for this episode: Email your questions: business@robbooker.com Website: Rob Booker: Mr. Pyles. Jason Pyles: Good morning, sir. How are you, Rob? Rob Booker: Happy early morning. Jason Pyles: Yeah. I know. Right? Rob Booker: It is happy. Have you ever wanted to grow your podcast business? Jason Pyles: Yes. In fact, coincidentally, that's true. Rob Booker: We had a conversation this week by email, and you brought up some really interesting thoughts about your podcast business. Jason Pyles: Yes, sir. Rob Booker: Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Jason Pyles: Oh, please. By all means. Rob Booker: All right. How many podcasts are you on specifically? Jason Pyles: Let's see. In terms of my movie related podcast business, I would say two. Yes. Rob Booker: Okay. How many episodes of those shows exist? Jason Pyles: Okay. Movie Podcast Weekly has 259 episodes, and then Horror Movie Podcast has about 129 episodes. Rob Booker: Nice. Jason Pyles: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Booker: Nice. Jason Pyles: Yes. Rob Booker: Lifetime downloads on those two podcasts? Jason Pyles: Okay. Collectively, it is now over ... It's over a million collectively. Rob Booker: Wow. Jason Pyles: It's like 1.3 million so far. Rob Booker: What are some lessons that you've learned along the way in producing, distributing, doing a podcast? What kind of lessons have you learned? Jason Pyles: Don't start podcasting. That was one thing. No. I'm just kidding. Rob Booker: That was like writing advice from Ernest Hemingway. Jason Pyles: Exactly. Let's see. I think one of the most important things is to continue to put on consistent content as consistently as possible. That was number one for me. Rob Booker: Yeah. Keep uploading. Did you grow your audience almost purely organically? Jason Pyles: Yes. That's true. Rob Booker: You ever spent any money on advertising or marketing? Jason Pyles: No. No, I haven't. Rob Booker: I wonder what that would accomplish anyway. It's truly amazing that in this day and age, someone with good content can upload consistently and grow an audience. Jason Pyles: Yeah. It is. It's remarkable. Rob Booker: So, to what end originally did you start the podcasts about the movies? The Horror Movie Podcast and The Movie Podcast Weekly specifically. Jason Pyles: I just wanted to become a film critic initially, because I used to work at a newspaper. And my film reviews, they ended up in print in the newspaper, and that was pretty exciting to me. It felt very fulfilling. And then those jobs disappeared after the great recession. Rob Booker: Right. Jason Pyles: And so I picked up podcasting for another outlet to review movies. Rob Booker: Did you have any idea that it would grow to this level, or did you imagine that podcasting would lead then to more newspaper work? Did you ever imagine that podcasting would represent such a huge distribution network? Jason Pyles: Wow. No. I had no idea, actually, to be honest with you. And it's weird because I would say that at this point, I have enough of an audience where at least I'm getting at least as many listeners or readers as I did when I worked for the newspaper, so that part of the itch should be fulfilled, but it's interesting. Rob Booker: Do you have any sense of community amongst your listeners, meaning, do you know them and do they know you? And do they know each other? Jason Pyles: Oh, yes. Yeah. All of the above. Rob Booker: Okay. Where do they get to know each other and where does that happen? Jason Pyles: That generally happens in our comments at the bottom of each episode, especially on The Horror Podcast. Rob Booker: Interesting. Have you ever thought about monetizing your podcast? Not to make it crass, but have you ever thought about sort of ... Okay. You've got two movie podcasts that have a lot of downloads, and now you have a movie podcast network, which we can talk about. But, have you ever thought about taking it to another level and then turning that into sort of a business? Jason Pyles: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Rob Booker: All right. We discussed this over email, but I guess it bears repeating. If you're listening to this episode, and you're wondering. Wait a minute. How does this apply to my business? Think about the fact that anybody who can produce content, which is you, if you're listening, it is at some point and time going to have a body of work. You're going to have a set of blog posts, or you're going to have a set of Instagram posts, or you're going to have a following on Twitter, or you're going to have a following on a podcast. The question is going to become: Am I doing this for love, or am I doing this for money, or am I going to do this for money, so I can continue to do it because I love doing it? There are a lot of hard questions that come at this point, and there's a model for thinking about this. And the model is: What is it that I want most? Number two, then you ask: What is true? And we'll get to that in a minute. And then the third question is: What am I going to do about it? And those three questions, I originally was introduced to those three questions when reading an early copy of Ray Dalio's book, Principles, which is now out in book stores. That's a subject for another podcast and another time, but we'll just get to the heart of the issue. Now that you have a body of work, and you love it and you want to continue doing it and you would like that work to be self sustaining. Is that the answer to what do you want? You want this work to be self sustaining. Jason Pyles: Yes. I think it is, honestly. And the secondary answer would be, I would also like to be efficient enough at it that I can enjoy more of life without it being quite so time consuming, so it would take less time, but it would make more money. Rob Booker: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Jason Pyles: I call that the Rob Booker model. I feel like that's ... Rob Booker: Yeah. Okay. I got it. I got it. I like it. All right. There's a number of models for making money in the world of podcasting. One model is that, it's the most obvious of them all, is that you advertise, you offer advertising on your podcasts. In order to do that, you either reach out to a company like Midroll that sells ads, or you know enough about the demographics of your audience that you can reach out directly to sponsors and offer to get those sponsors in front of the listeners of your show. I think that this is, initially most obviously, the way that someone like you first approaches the subject. I think that there's a huge opportunity for you in that arena, but at the same time, you've never really done any advertising on your shows. Is there any amount of concern that your listeners will be unsupportive of that stream of revenue? Jason Pyles: No. I believe they would be okay with it, as long as, if I didn't get too obnoxious with the advertising. I think they'd be fine with it. Rob Booker: Okay. Yeah. Do you know much about your average listener, the demographic or the profile of your average listener? Jason Pyles: Yeah. I think so. I mean, they're generally male, and they're usually from like age 30 to about 50. Rob Booker: Right. Jason Pyles: And they're movie nuts. They love movies. Rob Booker: They're movie nuts. Jason Pyles: Yeah. Rob Booker: Do you know much about what they want in life? Do you know much about, besides more movies or more good movies? Jason Pyles: Right. I think that varies. It seems like the connecting thread, besides movies, would be they all like audio entertainment. Many of them, apparently, can spend a lot of time listening to audio podcasts, so that must be important to them. Rob Booker: All right. Okay. Now we're naturally migrating into what is true. We're saying, here is what is true about my listeners. They're largely male. They're probably in an age range of ... What would you say if we were going to give an age range? Jason Pyles: Like within a 20 year range, 30 to 50. Rob Booker: Okay. 30 to 50. If we know they're 30 to 50, and they're men, and they mostly live in the United States, we know a lot about these people. Jason Pyles: That's true. Rob Booker: We could generally and without, I think, getting into too much trouble, but we could back this up later if we really wanted to. We could say that they either generally want to spend more time with their family, or they want to travel more, or they want to make more money with less time, or they want to date more. I don't want to get crass or anything. They want to have more relationships or whatever you want to call it. Jason Pyles: Right. Rob Booker: If you're age 30 to 50 in the United States, and you have the amount of money necessary to have a phone on which you listen to podcasts, and the time to do it, you probably have a job and you probably have a disposable income. And you probably spend that disposable income on entertainment. You can sort of answer the question. What is true? That question naturally leads into: What kinds of things do these people buy? What is true about what these people buy? So, in addition to thinking about advertising, you can also move into the next area, which is: What kinds of products and services do people that are your listeners buy? In other words, what is it that you could bring to your listeners that you know that they would love? Or, you at least anticipate that they would love. If you don't mind, we could brainstorm about that. Jason Pyles: Okay. Yeah. Sure. That sounds really good. Rob Booker: Without worrying about whether it's practical, and without worrying about the source from which this content comes, let's just lay it out. They probably consume or would be willing to consume content related to improving their relationships. My guess. I think that depending on who they are and where they live, they'd probably be willing to either strengthen their current relationships with someone that they're in a relationship with, or they buy products and services, or are open to products and services related to dating, relationships, or whatever you want to call it. That's my guess, anyway. I don't know if I'm right about that, but I'm guessing that I'm right. Jason Pyles: I would agree. They seem to be lovely people, Rob. Rob Booker: All right. That's awesome. I'm not sure that these are the types of people that want to buy a Casper Mattress. I'm not sure that these are the types of people that want to order and have a weekly subscription to Blue Apron. Although, it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case, but I think that's possible. And I think that you're advertising on Midroll or wherever else, I think that's going to handle most of that. You're going to see a bunch of ads for stamps.com and Blue Apron and Casper Mattresses and audible.com, the stuff that you always hear about on podcasts. They ought to be hearing that from your podcasts as well. Jason Pyles: Okay. Rob Booker: But, I think it goes deeper than that, and I think that this is where true revenue opportunities to monetize a podcast. And I'm not crass about that, and I'm not trying to take away from the content. I'm trying to say, what do we do in order to make sure that ... Content isn't free. Newspapers aren't free. Magazines aren't free. But, you can't operate in an environment where an artist is expected to distribute their content absolutely at no charge, just for the love of it. It just doesn't work that way. People have to eat, and everybody gets paid for what they do. Without being crass and without trying to say, hey, let's exploit your listenership. That's not what we're talking about. Let's say, what else is it that these people highly value? I think that it's possible that dating and relationships is one of those areas. And I think that another area is financial success, financial freedom, improvement of financial circumstances. I think those are two really big areas where people have been known to spend money. Other areas where people have been known to spend money consistently are not appropriate, like alcohol, drugs, other types of vices. We're not interested in those things, but we know that those things work. Jason Pyles: Right. Rob Booker: We're not interested in that. That's exploitation. We're not interested in that at all. I'm going to say it is true, or most likely true, that your listeners consume or even purchase content in those categories. Jason Pyles: I think you're right, for sure. Rob Booker: Okay. I think that the two major revenue opportunities exist in offering advertising that is acquired by, or sold by, or advertising inventory space that is managed by a third party, which does a really great job at that. And I think that's a couple spots during the episodes to begin with is an obvious area for that. And then the next obvious area, which I want to come back around to, is offering content in dating relationships and access to increased financial freedom, which sounds sketchy, but I don't know any other way to say it, so I'm just going to leave it at that. We'll come back to that, but the third area is this area that you have explored so far, which is subscriptions to the podcast, or subscriber, or patronage from your listeners. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Jason Pyles: Yeah. Absolutely. When we put the network together, which is now eight different podcasts, including my two, we decided to have a special features feed, which is kind of like the special features on DVDs, where you get their extras, basically. And so at least once a month, often more frequently than that, we will release an exclusive type of bonus episode into this special features feed. And those who

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How to Monetize Audio Podcasting - Ep 009 is an episode from Marketing Podcast Weekly.

This episode is 28:33 long.

This episode was published on Oct 9, 2017.

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