Affiliate Marketing 101

In this episode, you’ll learn how to make money by promoting someone else’s products.

Learn more about the Buzzsprout Affiliate Marketplace in this recent blog post.

Check out our new blog podcast: How to Make Money Podcasting.

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Transcript

Travis: 0:00

Today on five minute Mondays you'll learn how to make money by promoting someone else's products. welcome to five minute Monday. We were bringing the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now you are joining us in the middle of a nine part series. If you're new to the podcast, all about podcast monetization, the pros and the cons of each of the currently popular strategies and then also try and help you decide which, if any of them are right for your podcast. And today we're going to talk about the third way that you can profit from host read ads. And that is from affiliate marketing. So a simple definition for affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's products or services in exchange for a commission. So let's say for example that you want to promote Buzzsprout to your listeners because you think bus is pretty awesome. If you have an affiliate agreement with Buzzsprout than every time someone becomes a bus route customer than you would get a kickback or reward like a, like a finder's fee for helping bus route. Get a new customer. So that's essentially how affiliate marketing works and it really has many advantages, especially when you consider and compare it to sponsorships and CPM agreements. So one of the big advantages for being an affiliate partner is that you can promote or not promote products in any way that you wish. You can do it twice, every episode, once a month, every other episode. Literally whatever you want to do, it is up to you. You get to decide how much or little you want to promote someone's product. If you want to try and make more money, you can feature the product more. But if you're really satisfied with your income and how your podcast is doing, and you want to limit the amount of distractions from your podcast and you can do less ads promoting those affiliate products. So you have a lot of control in the frequency and the cadence that you choose to promote your affiliate products. The other thing that affiliate marketing gives you is more creative control over how you promote the product. So with sponsorships and CPM agreements, companies are much more particular about how you do your host read ads, right? As soon as you say this episode is sponsored by your listeners, now associate the next words that come out of your mouth with that brand or company. So if the things that you talk about in your podcast don't necessarily align with the brand or company that you're promoting, then you're gonna have a hard time getting a sponsorship agreement, but a much easier time as an affiliate. So as an affiliate, you can make personal recommendations for products that you love and believe in, in the way that makes the most sense for your podcast. Now many companies have open affiliate programs that anyone can apply to. So if you start brainstorming things that you love or products that you use and you say, Hey, I want to promote this product and see if they have an affiliate agreement that I can join. Many companies do, but they often come with a couple of caveats that you should be aware of going into it. So most entry level programs are actually referral programs. And the difference there is that instead of earning cash, you get store credits, which isn't necessarily ideal, but it's better than nothing, right? But then the programs that actually pay cash usually have a level of influence threshold that you have to meet. So if you don't have enough Instagram followers or podcast listeners, then they won't let you in to the program. So just be aware of that when you start researching different affiliate programs. Those are very common. Those two things. Now, referral programs and level of influence requirements are two of the reasons that we created the new bus route affiliate marketplace because we want to podcast just to be able to get cash payouts from reputable companies and wave that level of influence requirements so you can get approved even if you're just starting your podcast. So host read ads are definitely the most popular monetization strategy in podcasting right now. And if you're an independent podcast, you're, we think the best way to get started is by joining a great affiliate program. So if you want to learn more about the Buzzsprout affiliate marketplace, just clicking the link in the show notes to see more details. Now, in next week's episode, you're going to learn about the listener supported model where your listeners can support your podcast directly without purchasing any products or services. Well, that's it for today. Hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on YouTube or you can subscribe to the five minute Mondays podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. I also left a link in the show notes to our new blog post that covers monetization strategies. So if you want to peek head and see what's coming up, you can go and check that out. And if there's something you want me to talk about on a future episode, just click the link in the show notes to submit your question. Well, thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.