If there is a subject that you love talking about, then you owe it to yourself to find an audience for it through podcasting.
Although this is still a fairly new medium as far as making money is concerned, it is clear already that there is money to be had, as some people have latched on to several ways that they can do just that with it.
The key is to find a subject that people are interested in and reach that audience in as many ways as you can by making your podcast available to them – and then it’s just a case of waiting for the money to start rolling in.
Okay, so you have a subject you love and you could talk about for hours. Does that make a podcast? No – you need to work on it to make sure you can create podcasts that everyone will want to listen to. You need to script each one at least roughly so that you know what to expect. Otherwise there will be a degree of umming and aahing and you don’t want that. Short podcasts – let’s say fifteen to twenty minutes for example – do very well, so you don’t want to be waffling on for hours at a time. Keep the structure tight and well planned.
The next step is to work out how you will make money from them. It is possible to treat podcasts in much the same way as you would treat e-books, CDs or DVDs – release them in a program that you can charge money for. Perhaps one or two a week on a specific subject, revealing information that people would be prepared to pay for.
Be wary of this though – you can’t do this unless you have really good information that people cannot get elsewhere without paying anything.
Another good way to make money from podcasting is to use it as a way to promote an existing business. Let’s say for example that your business sells e-books. You could start a podcast on e-books in general and mention the name of your website, or perhaps some of the books you sell, once or twice during the podcast itself. This can provide very good publicity and your sales should start to go up as a result.
You can even make special offers to those people listening; offer them a bundle of books on a specific subject, or a special package deal that lasts for a limited time. Direct them to your website to buy it and see what revenue you get from that. If it works well you can extend it to take place with each podcast you make. This in turn should get you more listeners as well.
If your podcast becomes very successful you can also sell advertising space on it. Businesses are always looking for new ways to find new customers, and if your podcast can connect them with their ideal target audience then you can make extra money in this way too.
Some people have even started creating special promotional items that feature the podcast itself, and sold them to their listeners. Not only does this fill a need if your podcast is that successful, it also means that you get some additional publicity yourself.
There are plenty of ways to make money from podcasting, but as always you will get the best results from researching your subject and finding out what people want first. Once you can do this you stand a better chance of starting a podcast that will run for a long time, and pick up more and more listeners as you go.
And don’t forget YouTube. If you aren’t charging anything for the podcast itself, you could film yourself doing it and put it on YouTube for some valuable extra publicity.
Got some ideas already? If you have then there is no better time to get started – but leave us a comment first! Good luck.