Avoiding Middlemen: Directly Monetizing Your Podcast

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
When it comes to you and your audience, you wanna keep anybody out of the way between you having a direct connection.

Announcer: Mike Russel [00:00:11]:
Welcome to Your Podcast Consultant. Small lessons with big value. With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this Hall of Fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author and mentor to 1,000. Now he wants to work with you. He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson [00:00:36]:
Look, I'm not anti capitalism. By all means, if you got an idea, throw it on the wall and see if it sticks. But this one makes me scratch my head, and there are a few of these coming out. And this is where you want your audience to give you value in the form of money for the value that you deliver to them. Now that's called value for value. I like that model. I like it a lot because when you have a direct connection with your audience, there are no sponsors to boycott. There's all that stuff is out of the way.

Dave Jackson [00:01:11]:
You wanna keep it direct between you and your audience. And so, consequently, if I am looking into a service and they're like, oh, yeah. Just add this to your feed, I'm gonna think long and hard about that one because if whatever I'm putting into my feed or before my feed, if it's a prefix, if that breaks, everything breaks. And one that's slowly coming up is I'm seeing people come up with these ways to accept donations. And what I don't understand about this is you can use a service like buy me a coffee. So there's one. Right? You buy me a coffee. Audience pays buy me a coffee.

Dave Jackson [00:01:55]:
Buy me a coffee pays you. I just did a episode on this, and they're one of the best in terms of not making a fee. But then there are other things that I go, I'm not quite sure I get this. And there's one, and I'm just, you know, hey. Again, kudos for trying something new. I just don't understand your business model, and it's called Lenny dot f m. And what it does is listeners choose a bundle of podcast to support for $4 a month. And they say they're planning more flexibility, but they have to start somewhere.

Dave Jackson [00:02:27]:
And in US dollars, you pay $4, and it's spit split equally amongst the top 4 podcast, less, of course, a 10% fee to Lenny dotfm. And, again, they gotta get paid. I get that. To start getting support from your audience, just mention Lenny dotfm and use the brand kit for your website. There's no new app for the audience and no extra content crew to create. And we'll let you know when support from listeners starts accumulating. And I guess you have to have a a Lenny dot f m account. But what I don't understand is what what's in it for me again? Because if I'm going to ask my audience to support me, why wouldn't I just tell them to go to my website.com/support? And that's where you can set up your PayPal, your buy me a coffee, your Patreon, your Supercast, whatever it is.

Dave Jackson [00:03:24]:
If you're using, Buzzsprout has a way for you to do that. Now they take 15%, and so does, Captivate. That's why, if you're just looking for donations, buy me coffee isn't a bad idea because you are losing 10%. Now the other thing is you're asking your audience to give you $4 or if it sounds like a dollar, which you're gonna get 90¢ of. Why are you putting a limit on the value you provided? Did you give more than a dollar of value to your audience? Then why are you asking them to give you 90¢ back? That doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Let the audience choose how much your donation is. Because for some people, $5, they're like, I don't know. $5, that's a lot of money.

Dave Jackson [00:04:19]:
And then other people are like, oh, $50. I got that in my couch cushions. And they'll gladly give it to you when you simply ask them. Now I do recommend that if you're gonna do any kind of call to action, a, mention it in the middle. But the other one is, I if you're not gonna do any, do it towards the end. What I don't understand is when people go, hey. Welcome to the show. It's the Dave Jackson Power Hour.

Dave Jackson [00:04:46]:
And before we get into the topic today, I just wanna remind you, if you could go out to whatever and give me money. Like, give you money for what? It's kinda weird when you do that. Somewhere in the middle after you've given them value, whether that's in the middle or at the end or somewhere, I don't recommend right up front. I know I listen to he said the guy that goes to church. I listen to a lot of church podcast from time to time, and they're always asking for money up front. And I go, you do know you are pushing that stereotype that all they want is your money. And it kinda sounds that way. So, again, nothing against the fine people over at lenny.fm.

Dave Jackson [00:05:28]:
I'm just saying, a, why are you limiting the amount of money, people give to you? And, b, now it's it's the audience gives to Lenny, Lenny gives to whatever PayPal, and PayPal gives to you. That's one more person in the connection between you and your audience that I just don't think you need. I don't understand the problem that they are solving. The only thing I can think of is, okay, but, Dave, what if I listen to 10 different podcasts? I've gotta give money to this person and that person and this person, and that's where I'm like, hey. You know, at some of these places, you can set it up to just be automatic so they don't have to come back. And I guess they can support their favorite 4 podcast in some form where before they weren't. Okay. I guess they're making it a little simpler.

Dave Jackson [00:06:23]:
But that's where you as a podcaster, you have to realize you have to make this easy. It can't be, oh, go over here and set up this and then buy some tokens and turn those into whatever, and then I will be able to no. Just make it easy if that's what you wanna do. Now the other thing I need to point out here before we get out of this is you don't have to make money with your podcast. What? Yeah. It's true. I've said it before. You don't have to make money with your podcast, especially when you start out.

Dave Jackson [00:06:54]:
I just saw someone in a Facebook group this morning, and they were like, look. I am 30 episodes in, and we need to start making money. And while I went over, number 1, they weren't 30 episodes in. They were 10 episodes in. So I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm missing something. But when you first start out, I always recommend doing it for fun, know who your audience is, know why you're doing it. Because if you don't get your why, you burn out.

Dave Jackson [00:07:19]:
If you don't know who you're talking to, you're not gonna entertain them. But if you add on top of that, I wanna make money really quickly because I gotta quit my day job in 6 weeks, that's not gonna work. Because, a, it takes a while to grow your audience. I typically say around 3 years, and nobody likes that idea. And, yes, there are people that will sell you hope for 3 easy payments, but I've got the proof if you want me to prove it to you. It's it's typically around 3 years. The 1st year is awful. The 2nd year, you found your voice and you're growing your audience.

Dave Jackson [00:07:49]:
And by year 3, you have an audience that you might be able to monetize. But I just wanted to put that out there because some people think they're a failure because they're not monetizing. And the reason they're not monetizing is they don't wanna monetize. And I'm here to tell you, it's called a hobby, and it's fun. I ride my bike every summer. I did this summer, and, I didn't make a dime. In fact, it usually cost me some money to tune up my bike. So as we talk about monetization today, for those of you that don't wanna monetize, that's perfectly fine.

Dave Jackson [00:08:20]:
Don't let others go you know, it's kinda weird because nobody asked me, oh, you ride your bike? Yeah. How much money is that making? Nobody asked me that, but they do with my podcast, and I think that's somewhat rude in a way. If you need help with your podcast, I would love to help you. It's super simple. Just go over to, school of podcasting.com/join. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do, and I can't wait to see what we do together.