Today’s topic is Making Money Podcasting (Part 3). If you didn’t hear parts 1 and 2, they were several episodes ago (episodes 003 and 004 of the show). In those episodes, we talked about making money through having clients, sponsorship, crowdfunding, memberships, coaching/consulting, and selling your own products and/or services. Today, I have a few more ideas for making money podcasting that I’d like to share with you.

First (and I can’t believe I forgot to mention this before) is affiliate marketing. If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s the process of recommending/selling other people’s (or company’s) products, for which you receive a commission. So, if I recommend the Shure SM7B microphone and I post a link to buy it on Amazon (assuming I have signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program and used their specific link associated with my affiliate account), and you click through my link to buy it, then I get a commission from Amazon. I believe it’s still true that if you happen to buy a bunch of other stuff on Amazon at the same time, I get paid for the other stuff as well because you used my affiliate link. So, if you feel like doing all of your Amazon Christmas shopping through one of my affiliate links, I would certainly appreciate it. ;)

You can also use affiliate marketing as a means to sell your own products through other people. Some marketers are recommending selling products through affiliate relationships with influencers that have large (or just different) audiences as a primary sales strategy. So, let’s say I launch my podcasting course, but I don’t have a huge tribe with an email list of 100,000 people to market it to. If I can get a couple of influencers to try out my course and recommend it to their tribes for an affiliate commission, I could sell a lot more and increase my own tribe significantly. This is (potentially) huge! I’ll let you know how it goes.

The next money-making strategy podcasters can employ is syndicating your show on YouTube. This is one I have not tried yet, but it’s in the plans. I haven’t bothered yet because I like audio podcasts and, frankly, my basement studio isn’t pretty and I don’t love the way I look on video (Ah, Vanity, thou art a heartless wench). However, I really don’t have a good excuse because I could still just put my audio on YouTube with a still photo of my logo as a video. As an aside, if you have a podcast, you may want to check YouTube occasionally to see if some scammer has taken your audio and posted it to his YouTube channel with a still photo as if it were his content. This is a real thing. It happens.

Another stream of podcast income is public speaking. You can book yourself on the public speaking circuit on the strength of your podcast. If you have a decent-sized podcast audience and you’ve been posting episodes consistently, you will likely be recognized as an expert in your subject matter and you could get paid to speak in public at conferences or online, etc.

Lastly (I say “lastly” but I may come back to this topic again if I find more good ways to make money podcasting), you can repurpose your podcast content and sell it. For example, if you have written transcripts of your episodes, they can be used as articles for online magazines, blogs, etc. You could package them together and sell an ebook. You could use the audio to create an audio product that you sell. As I’ve said before, the possibilities are endless.