Eric Siu outlines seven monetization strategies beyond ads: affiliate marketing, charging guests to appear on your podcast, selling online courses, trading ad space for company equity, running high-ticket communities like his $25,000-per-year Growth Accelerator, paywalled newsletters, and income-share agreements. Audience quality matters more than size.
All right, so in this video we are going to talk about ways that you can better monetize your audience. My name is Eric Siu. If you enjoy videos on marketing and business, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, because we're gonna give you more and more value. All right, so just for context, I have a couple things going on. I have a podcast called Marketing School. That one to date has about 35 million downloads or so and gets about 1.2 million downloads a month. So that's a good-sized audience. So we have a blog that gets about 300,000 visits a month. So those— I just want to share some context first and then talk about the There's different ways to monetize because a lot of people, they think about when I have an audience, what do I do? Maybe I should sell ads. And ads historically, unless you are like a Facebook or Google where you have— we're talking billions and billions of impressions— it doesn't really work out in your favor. Now, I'll give you an example. My other podcast, Leveling Up, it's maybe in a good month, I'll get about 80,000 downloads a month or so. So it's not 1.2 million. But what I can say is the quality of the audience in terms of the average income is a lot higher than what you would get from marketing school. So just because you have a smaller audience, it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. You gotta think about the quality as well. So, you know, ads, advertising is, again, it's not the best unless you have some type of volume. Again, because if you think about Google, they have a program called AdSense, and you can, with AdSense, you can make maybe 50 cents or maybe a couple cents per click. Maybe up to a couple dollars per click if you're running ads on your site. The problem with that is you're not maximizing revenue because in some cases, let's say someone's— let's say you have a dog website and then someone decides to run ads on your site to their product. Well, they might pay, you know, a couple cents for that click, a couple dollars for the click, but they actually make a couple hundred dollars on the sale. So what you can do instead, obviously, is instead of, you know, just running general ads, you can have their products on your site and you can become an affiliate of theirs. So that's the first thing you can do. You can become an affiliate and you can make money that way. Meaning you can just have a link that points to their site, there's a tracking link, and then you might collect, you know, 10%, 15%, 20% of the sale and you make a lot more. You might, in that case, you might make $20 or $30 instead of just making a couple cents, right? So that's one example of affiliate marketing. Now, one other thing that you can do is this. When I think about our podcast, This is a little more unconventional, but for the Leveling Up Podcast, you can charge people to actually be on your show. So in some cases, because we get a lot of requests for people to be on the show, we would— we have an appearance fee now where we might charge, let's say, $1,500, $2,500 or so to be on the show. And believe it or not, people will actually pay it because they want to get in front of their audience, okay? So a paid appearance is the second one. Now, the third one would be online courses. If, for example, you're watching this YouTube video right now, I'm teaching you. So the next progression might be I'll teach you more stuff, I'll teach you more specific stuff, Such as how to start a business. That's another example of what you can do. And let's say you don't want to make money from ads. Guess what? Joe Rogan actually made money. This is number four. He made money, or he got equity in a company called Onnit just by promoting them. So he said, "Hey, you know what? I'll do ads for you, but I want equity in your company because I know I have a really big audience." And that worked out well for him. So you can do ads for equity. You can do an appearance fee, which I talked about earlier. You can do affiliates. You have a lot of different ways to skin a cat here. Someone actually told me there's two. 2 ways to skin a cat only. Now, the 5th way is having a community. Now, for the Marketing School Podcast, we have a very expensive community called the Growth Accelerator. People pay $25,000 for the year. They get 3 live meetings, 3 2-day events. These are all, you know, 7 and 9-figure entrepreneurs, and people just have a good time hanging out with each other. And we have great content, we have great speakers, we have great events that are going on. So it is a good time in general. And, you know, it's a higher ticket, that's great. But you can also do your own community. Maybe you're charging $50 or so per month, $100 or so per month, and you're giving them a lot of value. So a paid community goes a long way because people want that type of connection. So that's number 5. Now number 6 is you can do a paid newsletter or you can do a paid membership. So a paid newsletter might be, hey, we'll give you a free newsletter, but you pay maybe $100 a month, we'll give you the really premium stuff. You can do the same thing with podcasts as well, where you do a subscription where they get the free podcast or they get the ad-free version of the podcast and they get exclusive content because they want to, you know, again, that's kind of part of being a community as well. So the— I think we're on number 7 right now, but the 7th thing I would say is thinking about— I talked about online courses, but, you know, thinking about the business model a little more, can you do an income share agreement? Because there's a company called Lambda School, they do income share agreements where they will take a percentage of you know, the student's salary for the next 2 years, the next 3 years or so. So let's say the student makes $50,000, they might take, I don't know, 20% of that. So that's $10,000 or so over a 2-year period. So you can kind of take that model and then integrate it with the online courses model. But my main point here is that there's a lot of different ways to monetize your audience. So that's 7 different ways. But it doesn't just have to be advertising. I think you have to broaden your horizon. I'm just giving you a couple ideas right here. But yeah, just let me know in the comments. I'm sure there's— you have some other ideas in terms of how How to better monetize an audience, and also don't forget again hit the like button, hit the subscribe button because it helps us grow. And if you want to grow as well more, well, you're gonna you're gonna subscribe and you're gonna learn more. It's gonna be great for you. Also, if you're coming from a podcast, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. That being said, I think that's it, and we will see you tomorrow.
