Monetize your podcast with Patreon and PayPal

In this episode, you’ll learn how your listeners can directly support your podcast.

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

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Transcript

Travis: 0:00

Today on five minute Monday, you'll learn how your listeners can directly support your podcast. Welcome to five minute Mondays where we bring in the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now we are in the middle of a nine part series about podcast monetization, the pros and the cons of each of the currently popular strategies to help you decide which, if any of them are right for your podcast. And today we're going to talk about the listener supported or patron model. And the reason that this is a really popular monetization strategy, especially in podcasting, isn't that not all shows really lend themselves to host read ads. So for instance, if you have a podcast that offers spiritual advice or life advice, you might not want to fill that podcast with ads or podcast with short episodes of your episodes or five minutes or less. You don't want 20% of that to be taken up with a host read ad or podcasts that teach against materialism or consumption doesn't really make sense to put a host read ad in those episodes. Write this week's episode on how to take a digital detox is brought to you by Squarespace. Probably won't resonate well with your listeners. So there are definitely some scenarios where doing a host read ad is not the best way to monetize your podcast. Because remember, the most important asset that you have as a podcaster is the trust of your audience. So you don't want to do anything that could negate that trust or impact it in any negative way. So if you're not interested in doing ads, you can ask your listeners to support your podcast directly. And actually the first group, the first company that did this pretty successfully wasn't a podcasting company. It was a radio station. So one of the most successful listeners pore to campaigns every year is held by national public radio or NPR for short. And they do have lots of popular podcasts, but most of those podcasts are actually radio shows first. And to keep shows on the air and cover production costs, NPR will hold fundraisers. So MPRs radio broadcast do not carry traditional commercials. So they rely on their listeners to support the content that they enjoy. Listening to, and it works every single time they do these fundraisers, they raise enough money to cover their costs and continue to stay on the air. So there are two main ways to incorporate listener support where you say, Hey guys, I'm not gonna run ads on my podcast, but to help cover some of the expenses and to recoup some time and be able to outsource editing and things like that. I need to ask you guys to help me continue to make this podcast awesome. There's two strategies that you can implement to do that. The first is probably the easiest and that is just to create a PayPal account that listeners can donate to. So you would get a link that you can share and then when someone clicks on that link, they can donate money directly to your PayPal account. And so then in each episode you had mentioned that you rely on your audience to keep the podcast going and encourage them to donate with either onetime or a recurring gift using your PayPal link. And then you put that link in your show notes on your website and your email newsletters. And in the support the show field in your Buzzsprout podcast settings, because there are certain podcast apps that actually have a button where you can click a button and go and donate through PayPal, which is pretty cool. So that's the easiest way to get set up. And then the second strategy takes a bit more time. It takes a bit more work, but we'll actually, we'll probably be more lucrative for you. And that is to create a Patrion account. Now, Patriot is just an online platform that allows fans to support the creators that they love. And so what you would do is you would set up a page for your podcast. You'd set up different levels of supports, so$2 a month,$5 a month,$10 a month, et cetera. And then throw in bonus content. We're exclusive access to you as a reward for each of those levels of support. Typically as someone supports you with more every single month, you'd give them more bonuses and more exclusive to kind of sweeten the pot and reward them for supporting you. And the more enticing your rewards are, the more likely someone will be to actually support your show. Patrion has a lot of resources on how to use their platform effectively, and you can certainly go to the Patrion blog and check those out. But if you're going to do listener support, those are the two main ways. Either create a PayPal account and use that or create a Patrion page. So if you're looking for an alternative to host read ads, then you should consider a listener supported model instead. And in next week's episode, you'll learn how to make and sell info products to your podcast listeners. 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 in your favorite app, squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. And I left and link in the show notes to our new blog posts that covers monetization strategies. If you want to peak ahead and see what's coming up, and if there's something that you want us to talk about on a future episode, you can click the link in the show notes to submit your question. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.