Get Ready to Generate Revenue

Even if you're not looking to get rich from your podcast, we're confident you wouldn't mind generating some income from the hours you'll be putting into show prep, recording, and post-production. There are several business models for generating revenue that are available to you. They are

• The Associate/Affiliate Model

• Donations

• The Sponsorship Model

• Distribution to Paid Subscriber

In this chapter, we're going to explore all of these models and help you decide which one is best for you. Before we do, however, there are a few points you'll want to consider.

Podcasting is an emerging technology. It's still developing and jockeying for its place in the wider panoply of communications media. Even so, as a communications and entertainment medium, it shares some fundamental characteristics with radio, television, magazines, and even newspapers. While we don't yet know all of the specifics of how podcasting's economics will evolve over time, we do know enough to share with you some principles about how to generate revenue with your podcasts.

It would be wonderful if we could tell you that it's possible to generate income based primarily on the value of the content you create. Unfortunately, that simply isn't realistic (with one exception we'll discuss shortly). In this way, podcasting is just like every other communications medium. No matter how terrific your content is, it will take some additional effort to turn it into revenue.

In fact, regardless of the business model you eventually adopt, there are two essential steps you'll need to take first:

Build Up Your Audience

For those of you who podcast in Latin, we'll begin by saying that building as large an audience as possible is the sine qua non of generating revenue. If you don't podcast in Latin, we'll simply note that the more successful you are at attracting and retaining listeners, the better positioned you'll be to generate revenue. With lots of listeners, you'll have multiple means of generating revenue at your disposal…and, with enough listeners, it will be almost impossible to avoid making money. With few listeners, your income options will be severely constrained regardless of the quality of your content or the creativity you bring to the business side of your podcasting endeavors.

When you're ready to begin making money as a podcaster, then, the first thing you'll want to do is go back and re-read the chapter on promoting your podcast. Pay particular attention to the strategies for promoting your podcast to the niche at which it's aimed. You'll want to understand these strategies intimately. Beyond understanding them, you'll need to implement them.

Promoting your podcast needs to be on your agenda every single day. Unfortunately, there is no magic technique to gain a hundred new listeners to your podcast. However, there are probably 50 techniques for gaining a couple of new listenersand you'll want to use every one of them.

In addition to growing your audience, some of the business models you might want to pursue will require you to document your audience. If you decide that one of these business models is right for you, then you'll want to structure the distribution of your podcast in a way that provides as much documentation of your audience as possible. For example, syndication services such as Feed Burner provide you with usage statistics that are more credible than the statistics you'd be able to generate by hosting your RSS feed yourself.

Never be satisfied with the number of listeners your podcast attracts and never stop your efforts to find new listeners. Your revenue opportunities will increase exponentially as the size of your audience increases.

Understand Precisely Who's Listening

The second preliminary step you'll need to take before you start generating revenue is to learn as much as you can about exactly who is listening to your podcast. Knowing who your audience is will allow you to make better decisions about revenue opportunities you might choose to pursue. In addition, if you decide you're going to pursue sponsorship arrangements (which we'll discuss shortly), you'll be able to use this information to convince potential sponsors of the value of sponsoring your podcast.

Some podcasts are inherently well positioned to do this, at least to a certain extent. For example, the popular podcast MacCast has an audience that is composed primarily of owners of Apple Macintosh computers. The very nature of the podcast contributes to an understanding of its audience. Other podcasts are not as well positioned and will, as a result, have to work a bit harder to unearth listener information.

If your podcast doesn't inherently define its audience as MacCast does, you'll have to be proactive in getting the information you want. A great tool for doing this is an online survey.

Online surveys can be administered on your website or you can solicit participants through email. If you don't have email addresses for your listenersand most podcasters don'tthen you can simply ask for volunteers in your podcast. You might tell your listeners, "We're trying to learn a little bit about our audience so that we can improve our podcast and meet the needs of our listeners more closely. If you'd like to participate in a brief online survey, drop me an email and I'll send you an initiation."

The responses you'll get will be self-selected, with means that the listeners who respond are not necessarily exactly representative of your entire audience. While that's not an ideal situation, it's also true that having some information from a self-selected sample is still better than having no information at all.

The type of information you'll want to obtain will depend on the type of podcast you produce. For example, if your podcast is about cooking then information about your listeners' computer configurations will be of limited value. On the other hand, if your podcast is technical in nature, then information about your listeners' computer habits can be valuable indeed.

Here are some things you might want to ask your listeners about:

• Age

• Listening habits (How often they listen, where they listen, and so on)

• Computer platform

• Use of portable music player

• Other information that's specific to the subject matter of your podcast

When you're ready to send out a survey, you can use email and tabulate the results yourself, but that can be tedious, time consuming, and prone to error. Another option is to use an online survey service like Zoomerang, shown in Figure 13.1.

Figure 13.1. At Zoomerang.com, you'll find tools that will allow you to create online surveys to learn about your listeners.

Zoomerang allows you to survey up to 100 listeners for free. You can design your survey questions and send them out to a list of respondents you select. When the surveys have been completed, Zoomerang will accumulate and analyze the results.

Okay, you're promoting your podcast as vigorously as possible and have accumulated as much data as you can about who is listening. Now, it's time to take a look at the specific ways you can start generating revenue.