Today I’m talking about 5 Signs That Your Podcast Is Not Monetizable and I really want you to understand why it is important for your podcast.
When I talk about 5 Signs That Your Podcast Is Not Monetizable here’s what you really need to know:
1.You are creating a podcast that “everyone” should listen to.
When I’m coaching podcasters, I often ask them who their podcast is for. When they explain to me that anyone could listen to their podcast or everyone could get something out of their podcast, I know we’re on the wrong track.
You don’t want to create something for anyone or something for everyone – you want to create something especially for one specific person. The more you can get clear on what that is and who it is, the clearer your path to monetization will be.
And in case you start rationalizing that you don’t want to eliminate potential listeners by narrowing your focus, don’t buy into that line of thinking.
You can get more listeners, better listeners and listeners that you can convert to clients by only focusing on one very specific avatar.
2.You aren’t focused on monetization yet because you just want to get your podcast started, and monetization is something you will focus on later.
In the podcast coaching space, you’ll hear this advice a thousand times over. But just because everyone is saying it doesn’t make it true. In fact, this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you haven’t engineered your podcast for monetization from the start, then you are destined to be stuck in free content creation mode.
Believe me when I tell you that most podcasts that don’t start with a monetization plan end up podfading long before they ever get around to tackling the making money part.
If you “just start” and begin “putting it out there” without any thought for how you are going to turn it into money, then you will also end your podcast without making any money.
You will quickly find out that if you are new to podcasting and you ask a question even remotely related to wanting to make money from your podcast, someone will quickly “podsplain” that you are wrong for wanting to start a podcast just for the sake of making money.
So, if you’ve ever been “podsplained” about this before, wear it with a badge of honor because you are on the right track. So proudly ignore the “podsplainers” and go turn your podcast into a cash machine.
3.There are a lot of things you would like to do “if your podcast really takes off”, but until then you’ll just focus on creating the podcast content.
When I’m working with clients and they mention their podcast “taking off”, they think they know what they are talking about until I start questioning them.
Can you define “taking off”? I ask them.
Well, if a lot of people listen.
How many is a lot? I probe further.
Well, what’s a good number, I don’t really know?
And the conversation goes from there.
The problem is that you can’t make a tangible goal contingent on an unquantifiable pre-qualification.
You see, podcasters equate success with downloads (or listeners). But they don’t know how many downloads you need to monetize.
The reality is that downloads have absolutely no impact on your ability to monetize. Now, don’t get me wrong, the larger your audience, the more money you can make from your podcast. But you can monetize your podcast with any size audience if you know what you are doing.
So the argument of waiting until your podcast really takes off doesn’t hold water. And if you hold to that fallacy tightly, you will miss the opportunity to monetize that already exists at the level your podcast is today.
4.You believe your audience doesn’t want to be sold to, so that’s why you haven’t really sold them anything.
When a podcaster tells me this, it reveals more to me about them than it does about their podcast audience.
My response to this is “Tell me you have money blocks without telling me you have money blocks.”
A podcaster that believes this is projecting their own money blocks on their audiences and it will doom you to failure when it comes to monetization.
If I ask that same podcaster how much engagement they are getting from their podcast audience, they will tell me very little.
If I ask them how often they hear from their podcast listeners, it ranges from never to rarely.
So if you rarely, if ever, hear from your podcast audience how would you know that they don’t want to be sold? You don’t, but you assume that is the case because you feel insecure about trying to sell your audience anything.
5.You don’t have a regular publishing schedule and you just randomly publish when the mood hits.
You’ve probably seen those podcasts that put out maybe one episode every 3 months and there’s no predictability with their publishing schedule and they just do it willy nilly.
I’ve had some clients like this – I may hear nothing from them for 10 months and all the sudden I get an email telling me they are “back”. They publish one episode and then I don’t hear from them for 4 more months.
It’s simply impossible to monetize a podcast when you don’t publish regularly.
The same way that eating one healthy meal a month won’t be enough for significant weight loss, publishing one episode randomly every quarter won’t bring in the revenue.
You have to consistently publish and nurture your audience if you want them to buy from you.
Anything less is pretty much a waste of time or a vanity project.
What is the perfect consistency? In my experience working with almost 300 podcasts in the last 10 years, a weekly show is the bare minimum you can publish and build consistent revenue from.
As a random fact, the podcasts that I work with who have monetized and lasted more than 5 years all have one thing in common – they publish multiple times a week.
There’s no magic number of podcast episodes to publish for monetization, but the truth is monetization happens because of the actions of the podcaster within the episode, not because they simply publish a podcast.
You can easily publish multiple podcasts a month and never monetize your show.
I hope that none of these describe your podcast. Because if your goal is monetization you will have a hard time doing it if you are making any one of these 5 mistakes.
It takes specific actions to monetize a podcast, so it definitely won’t happen on its own.
If you need help figuring out how to monetize your podcast, you should join my free Podcast Cash Machine Challenge.
In just 5 days, I’ll show you how to monetize your podcast in a big way, so you can live the life you want.
Our next Podcast Profit Challenge starts soon! This is the perfect opportunity for you to get the help you need to begin to monetize your podcast. It doesn't take years to monetize your podcast, it can be done in as little as 90 days!
What tools should you use for your podcast?
When it comes to your podcast, we have a lot of recommendations that can help make your podcast journey easier. We've used almost every tool available and we only recommend the tools that we use, know and love.
Here are our favorite podcast tools:
Hardware:
Best USB Microphone: Shure MV7 USB Microphone
Best XLR Microphone: Heil PR-40 Dynamic Microphone
Best Headphones: Apple AirPods Max Headphones
Best Microphone Interface: Scarlet Focusrite 2i2
Software:
Highest Quality Recording Platform for both Audio and Video: Squadcast
Best Podcast Hosting Company: Captivate
Best Software for Email Marketing and List Building: Active Campaign
Best Software for Building Sales Funnels: Clickfunnels
Best Software for Keyword Research and SEO Optimization: SurferSEO
Best Software for AI Generated Writing: Jarvis
Best Software for Creating Captioned Video Snippets for Social Media: Zubtitle