A Podcast Doesn’t Have To Popular To Be Profitable - The Podcast Report Episode #32

A podcast doesn't have to be popular to be profitable. It's the podcast report episode 32. Show notes and links. And the conversation is all over@thepodcastreport.com 32. It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Hey, this is Paul Culligan and this is the Podcast Report. Our hotline is 503-897-1290. It starts at Big Idea. This one's easy, this one's fun. I'll give you a little bit of history on what happened, where this one came from, and we'll have even more fun with it. But in short, the big idea is this. Your podcast doesn't have to be popular to be profitable. There are people playing the Twitter bombing game. We've chatted about that in previous episodes. There are people freaking out about getting thousands and thousands of downloads when the fact of the matter is that's not the only angle. That's not the only model. You don't have to be popular to be profitable. And that's what we'll chat about in today's episode. Anyway. Me, my name is Paul Colligan, seven time bestselling author. I wrote the business podcasting Bible. I wrote how to podcast coming out very, very soon. Within weeks of when this is released, probably many of you, it's already out there. I've been part of the podcasting since the beginning. I love the industry. I have since day one. Two audiences for this show. There's the podcaster, those podcasters who've reached out to me appreciating this show. Thank you, I appreciate you. And of course, there are those thinking about getting into podcasting who want to do well. And you know, boy, one of the things you're thinking about is, gosh darn it, do I need to be popular to be profitable. It's not a massive play, but it's a big one. Podcast Report is for the professional podcaster people looking to do this for a business. And I am having a blast with that said and done. Let's get to the topic. Okay. Why this topic Originally, believe it or not, this episode title was going to be. And I'll probably do this at another point, but the title was going to be Time to do some Podcast Math. I just listened to an episode of Cereal. I'm not, I'm sorry, not Cereal. I just listened to an episode of Startup, which isn't doing as well as Cereal, but sure doing a lot better than most podcasts. And it was interesting because the math on that episode was just confusing. And we'll hit this in a future episode. But basically, to support the type of podcast they were making, man, they had to get a lot of downloads. And I wanted to chat to that. Yes, it's a great show. Yes, it's amazing. But I'll tell you, our little project here, the podcast report, doesn't quite have the overhead. There's just. Well, it might just be time to do the math. So what I did was I went to the podcaster community at Google, and it has its issues, but fact of the matter is, there's a lot of podcasters there, and I pitched them one of three big ideas. And the three big ideas I was going to pitch to this podcast math idea was big idea number one. If you don't know what your podcast is worth, how will your audience? Number two, a podcast doesn't have to be popular to be profitable. And number three, don't strap your podcast to old financial models. And oh, my goodness, all the response was, a podcast doesn't have to be popular to be profitable. Every single person said they wanted to hear about that. I realized, gosh darn it, let's just do an episode on that topic. It was number one with the bullet. And the cool thing is, it's extremely liberating, this idea that you can't make a profit until you see thousands of downloads, until you're in a top 10 list somewhere or that type of thing. No, you don't have to. You don't have to worry about that. So let's liberate you. Let's get you to a good place. Earlier today, I had a podcast consulting client who has a show, and his show's doing well. He has hit top 10 lists. He's done quite well. He has a $3,000 product, among other things, but he has a $3,000 product. His audience absolutely loves him. But here's the thing. At A$40cpm, and for those of you who don't know what CPM is, CPM is just a metric inside of podcasting. It basically means you make $40 for every thousand downloads, which is the standard for supported podcast. He would have to get 75,000 downloads of his podcast to reach this $3,000 product range. And I just asked him, you know, do you think you could sell one of your products every 75,000 downloads? And he said, of course I could. This is my product. This is the podcast that supports that product. How can I not sell that? Well, exactly. Could he sell that product one per 1,000 downloads. Yes, he could. He was thinking about this metric that everybody else thinks about and I just freed him up to sell his own product, the product that he was already selling, the product that he thought the podcast was actually supporting. He realized now the podcast can support directly and it was really exciting and it was really liberating. I can hear you now, Paul. I don't have a $3,000 product and we'll chat that a little bit. But it is possible to have a podcast very profitable without popular. Step one is you got to get out of the sponsorship model. Sponsorship model is fine for some. It's great for startup, it's great for cereal, it's great for a number of the big players out there. But it's not my preferred model. I'd rather serve my audience deeply. I'd rather get a high level consulting client like I get from this show on a regular basis than necessarily worry about getting tens of thousands of downloads. Now, the sponsorship model is fine. It's just not the only model. And that's what I want to chat about on this episode. How is it possible to have a profitable podcast that isn't popular? Well, it just depends where the money's coming from. You know, let's chat some of the money options out there. I mean, number one is ads is sponsors. That requires, gosh darn it, lots of downloads. There's just no way around it. The only way you're going to do well is to get a lot of downloads. You're not going to get an egregiously high CPM. Maybe you'll get 50, maybe you'll get 60. Who knows, even if you get 100, doesn't matter. You still got to get a lot of downloads to see any decent revenue. And by the way, you're not going to get a hundred. But once you step out of that, we have some options. Number one. Well, you could sell something. This client I spoke to earlier today has a $3,000 product. Obviously, if you can sell something on your podcast and there's a decent profit there, you're in a really, really interesting place. Now, obviously it's all based on how you can sell. But here's the thing. If you had a podcast about a topic and you've got a product for that audience and you're not able to sell, you either don't have a good product and boy, the knowledge of that would be worth anything that you might make from sponsored downloads or you don't have a good understanding of your audience or something like that. Other models, you know, We've got the tip jar or now the famous Patreon model. There's pros and cons to that. But, you know, I was looking at one Patreon sponsor, one podcast sponsored by Patreon today. And it was funny because, you know, there were $1 sponsors and they were $25 sponsors and there were levels in between. But I just, man, which do you think it's easier to get? $125 sponsor or 25 $1 sponsors, $1, $100 sponsor or 101 dollar sponsors? And we can take rid of the credit card payment and that kind of stuff, but it really, it depends on how generous your donors are. You know, Paul, what if I don't want to, you know, steal from the old say anything movie? I don't want to make anything. I don't want to process anything. Well, you know, Cliff Ravenscraft recently did a Disney cruise for his Disney podcast. And, you know, you know, Cliff made some money there. And God bless Cliff for doing so. I've got a link to Cliff's podcast cruise information in the show notes. You can head it out to the podcastreport.com32 to get that. And you know, Cliff did well there. Maybe you team with somebody, maybe you have an event, maybe you have a cruise, maybe you do things. Another option is the good old fashioned premium podcast. I realize they're not that sexy right now and everybody thinks podcasting should be free, but man, I had a podcast for a while, the nmic, the new media inner circle, had a couple of dozen people in there and they were paying $97 a month. You know, you do $20, 20 users and had more than that. But I'm just making the math easy on me. 20 times 97. You know, I still can't do the math. It was good money, it was good numbers to get together with these people on a regular basis. That was 20 customers, 20 listeners to a podcast, and it was extremely profitable. Another option to take a look at is maybe it's a twist, it's a play on the premium side of things. Maybe you give people special access. You know, if you've got any sort of following on your YouTube channel. Right now it's about 5,000 subscribers. If you got 5,000 subscribers, you can do a paid channel at YouTube. Maybe you record your episode live in front of a camera to your YouTube audience. And then all that's managed by YouTube. That's managed by Google. Well, who would do that, Paul? Well, a lot of big radio guys are doing that right now, paying to watch the recording of it live and the interaction that comes with that. And think about this. You know, if you had 20 people, just 20 people paying $2 a month, that's going to make you the same amount of money as a weekly show with 250 downloads, what do you think you could get? 20 people paying you $2 a month or 250 downloads, you know, and you could do the math, and that can go higher. And $3 a month makes it less, or $4 a month makes it less. You know, I just want to give different options out there. But the fact of the matter is, you know, just a few bucks from the right batch of people and you're a really good place. You know, a lot of bucks from one person, and you're at a really good place. So how do you work this out if you're listening to this podcast at all? I speak to the 4M's of podcasting market, message, money, media. You know, you got to figure out who your podcast is for and all the amount of people who tell me, oh, my podcast is for everybody. Okay, if your podcast is for everybody, it's for nobody. And if you've listened the podcast for any time, you know that. What's your market? You know, I defined my market at the beginning of this. I told you it was for people podcasting right now or thinking about podcasting. That's. That's a very specific demographic. That's a very specific market. I know my market. What's my message? Well, my message is, is. Is if you think a little bit deeper and you go a little bit further and you work a little bit harder, you can see revenue outside of some of the ways that people are slaving themselves to death on their podcast. My message is one of freedom. My message is one of excitement, and I'm having a great time with it. Where's the money made? The money's made. Well, a lot of times it's in consulting. That's where the majority of it's coming from. But we got the book coming out, got a podcast course coming out. I'm not going to sell ads for anything on my show other than my own stuff. What's the media? Well, the media is podcast. That's what you're listening to right now. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you're reading the transcripts that either came because someone forwarded them to you, or maybe you bought them at the Amazon Kindle store or that type of thing. I worked it out. That's my model. What's Your model. And you know, I can hear the hesitant right now. Oh, Paul, that's fine for you. That's so much work. But really it's not. You know, if I told you that there was one customer out there, just one customer who would pay you a million dollars to podcast, how hard would you work to find that customer? You'd work very hard to find that customer. And the entire process that you took on, you know, your attention, your effort, your focus, everything that you were would be to find that million dollar customer. You know, you would find who that market is, that one person, what is the message they need to hear because the money could come for them. So if you work that hard for a million dollar customer, why won't you work that hard for a million dollar podcast? Just a thought, just something I want to walk you through. Market, message, money, media. That's how you work this stuff out. So what am I doing? I'm producing a podcast for the purpose of selling my podcasting training, my podcasting books, my podcasting consultant. I got two gigs this week, actually, that I was working on. That would have made me, that did make me, you know, not what if I'm not waiting for checks for anybody? The money has came, has come. That would have made me a lot more money than if I was 40 cpm on the show or if I was even 100 cpm on the show. To be honest, if I was 200 cpm on this show, and I'll tell you, a show where I just speak heart to heart, podcaster to podcaster, and then let the revenue come in some other way is a lot more natural than, I mean, imagine if I said, now we've got a break on the show for godaddy and I told you to buy an ad or I'm sorry, a domain name, or I told you to buy a razor or I told you to buy a blowout bed or something like that, that's a disconnect. I tell you to head out over to www.howtopodcastbook.com okay, that's interesting. So by me selling my own stuff to my own audience, that the transition is easy and you can do the same. Now, this podcast got me a gig at the 2015 Podcast Movement event where I'll probably sell more copies of my book and I'll probably sell copies of my podcast products and that type of thing, you know, the how to podcast book came out the aud. We were a number one bestseller in pre sell in four different countries. As a result of this podcast, the check I'm going to get from Amazon the day this thing releases. Or the check probably won't come the day this releases. But the check represented by the money the day it releases again would be more than if I put a $40 cpm on this show. So what do you do with this? It's funny. And I'll link to this conversation in the show notes. You can head out to the podcastreport.com32 to see the link. You know, the different people said they're different things and all of them said some version of I want to hear about, you know, this one first. But one guy said, oh, podcast just because it's fun, you know, for goodness sakes. Definitely podcast just because it's fun. But don't listen to my show about podcast monetization. If you're not interested in making money from the podcast, that's okay. It doesn't have to be a popularity game to see a profit. If you want to work your way into sponsors, that's one fine model. But realize that's not the only model out there. And personally, if you don't have a big ticket product, well, go back to market Message Money Media. Maybe you find one in there. If you take through that process, maybe you rejigger your show, maybe you stop, reinvent, do what you're doing. Relaunch season two. You know, I watched Michael Hyatt, you know, 100 episodes of his extremely popular this Is yous Life with Michael Hyatt. And to go from one model to an extremely different model because he rejiggered his show, you know, if it's good enough for Michael, it's good enough for you. And you can do this. I know that you can. So your podcast doesn't have to be popular to be profitable. Please don't believe the lie. Love your thoughts on this one. We're all over social media. The long and short of it is you can go to the podcastreport.com Twitter to find us on Twitter or to find us on Facebook or forward slash Google even. I put up a Google page if you want to go that way you can make a comment right on the website over about this specific episode@the podcastreport.com 32 and one thing we do here at the podcast report, if you're not familiar with it, is you can we have the show hotline 503-897-1290. Feel free to call in, feel free to leave a voicemail if you'd like. But one thing, everybody's doing well not everybody. A lot of people texting EP and the episode number. So text hashtag ep32 to 503897, 1290 and I will get you the transcript for today's show. I will also get you the mind map that I kind of worked today's show from. Some people find those to be very, very interesting. The links that I've got over@the podcastreport.com 32, the link to the message of the Google group, a link to podcast movement that I told you I'll be at. Be a lot of fun if you're there. Come by, say hi. A link to the how to podcast book, and a link for information about Cliff's Disney cruise. Because I thought that was a really, really brilliant idea. Next episode. We don't have that one figured out yet. I got a long list to pull from, but I'm open for suggestions. If you want to go out on any form of social media and make suggestions or heck, you know, email us the podcastreportlook.com and who knows what we might do. You can certainly voicemail if you'd like to. Love you to subscribe to the show. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast report, you're not getting some of the real power of podcasting. And I wouldn't be a good podcast about podcasting if I didn't recommend that. Once you subscribe and you can do it on itunes, Stitcher, Pocket, Cast, Tunein, Spreaker, iheartradio, Overcast, I don't care. And by the way, all those are@the podcastreport.com iTunes, Stitcher, Pocketcast, TuneIn, Spreaker, slash, iHeartradiovercast. They're all there. Subscribe. Get yourself in a situation where every time we release a new episode, you are updated automatically. That is the power of podcasting. And then you don't have to maybe stumble across what I've got, you know, on social media next week. But yeah, actually get updated when it happens. Reach out to me on social. Leave a review for me if you'd like, inside of Social, inside of itunes, or Stitch or those places. With that said and done, thank you so much. Get yourself a profitable podcast. Talk to you next week. Bye.