637: How to Monetize Your Podcast (5-Level Framework)

Speaker A: Hi, my name is Bryce and I am from the Fat Loss Simplified podcast. And I joined because I felt like I was stuck with my podcast growth, my email list growth, as well as client conversion. I've been able to grow my podcast. As a matter of fact it doubled within the first month and a half as well as I began to see growth on my email list and I saw some of those listeners convert into clients as well.

Speaker B: What's up pod pals? It's your buddy Adam and you are listening to Podcasting Business School. It's the show where I teach podcasters simple strategies to help you grow your audience and turn your podcast content into new clients. Today we are unpacking one of my favorite frameworks and I've changed it a little bit as always. I got some kind of base episodes, some base content that I like to make sure I get in front of you every single year. And every single year I form new opinions. I've got more experience and today we're, I think this is my third episode about the podcast monetization pyramid. This is gonna look a little different than it has in the past. I've simplified things quite a bit and I've made a few updates and changes. Now before we dive into the podcast monetization pyramid, I want to shout out a couple of members of my podcasting business school community on Skool. Because now, uh, one of my favorite new features of school is they allow members to leave reviews, kind of like ratings and reviews, um, for podcasts on Apple and Spotify. So a, uh, quick shout out to a couple of community members. First I want to shout out Vicki from the Biblical Money Tips for Beginners podcast. She left this review. I appreciate Adam's down to earth approach and his willingness to share what he knows openly without holding anything back. I was thrilled when he started a school community so I could learn more and meet other podcasters and it's been a fabulous experience. Thank you Vicki. We got one more here from a pod pal, Isaac from the movies at uh, Grandma's House podcast. He says Adam is a genuine and hard working podcast. You can tell he cares about the community and wants to see everyone grow and succeed. Shout out to Isaac. Alright, so if uh, you guys uh, are interested in joining the now 400 plus podcasters inside of my free school community, learning, sharing, collaborating, if you feel like you are kind of out there alone in the podcasting, uh, ecosystem, uh, you don't have to be. You can join our community. It's free, it's amazing, it's the Thing I'm most excited about right now, and the link is in the show notes, uh, it's the podcasting business school community on school. All right, let's dive in and talk about the podcast monetization pyramid. Um, I originally created this framework a couple of years back because I felt like, uh, podcasters were having a hard time figuring out the simplest path to earning meaningful income. Like when I first started in 2015, I had my health podcast. And right away I started throwing affiliate links out there for like mushroom coffee and athletic greens and just the stuff that you hear everybody talking about. And I'd make, you know, 22 cents here, a dollar here, $3 there. And you, uh, know, my famous quote is I made a total, grand total of $37 in my first three years combined with, uh, all these affiliate links and kind of nickel and diming things as we go. So that wasn't. I was making money. I could say I could, I could have gone online. Like, uh, my podcast is monetized, But I mean, $37 over three years. Yes. Is that monetizing, but is it meaningful income? No. Did that pay any bills? No. I couldn't even pay for my own mushroom coffee with my mushroom coffee affiliate money. I was making delicious. So I want to talk about meaningful income, like car payment income, mortgage payment income, 2k months, 5k months, replacing your income, potentially going full time. That's what this podcast monetization pyramid is all about. Now the other thing is that this is going to be for you coaches, consultants, online business owners primarily. I know that a lot of people listen in that. Have you, uh, know, like, Isaac from who I, uh, read his testimonial from the, uh, the school community earlier. Movies at Grandma's House. He's got an entertainment based show. He's uh, you know, gonna work with like brand partnerships, affiliates, things like that. He doesn't do coaching. Um, but I feel like this is still an important thing for any podcaster to understand because a lot of people that start off with like, entertainment based shows realize that that's a little bit harder path. It's a different path for sure. But, um, a lot of those people end up migrating into the coaching space. So this could be an eye opener for some of you as well. All right, so we've got five levels and I want you to envision this like the food guide pyramid, which, like the old school. And I don't even know they've updated it and I don't even know what happened. Uh, I don't really pay attention so uh but like that old school like pyramid like here's the base of your diet and here's the next foundational layer. So for an online business owner that is trying to turn your content into meaningful income the level one, the base of your monetization pyramid in my opinion needs to be one to one coaching consulting. And the thing that you guys will ring the bell of shame at me will be like Adam that's not scalable. And I will come back with you know as my uh, my my daughter. My my sixth grade daughter Hannah likes to say. Bruh. Bruh. You're making zero dollars right now. There's nothing to scale so we don't have to worry about that. This is the the quickest and path to earning meaningful income as a content creator. I've seen it happen over and over and over again. People are trying to jump into selling hands off evergreen courses and funnels and all this stuff and with a smaller audience and you're just getting started. They will pay for access to you and they will pay you higher rate than what you could earn from affiliates and evergreen launches and things like that. We're skipping steps. So I feel like this is the foundation and everything can blossom off of this because you're gaining experience as well. Like when I started off one of the mistakes I made of the mini. So I started my first offer was a course and I didn't really know what my audience wanted. All right. So I spent a lot of time a lot of money. I filmed six months worth of videos priced it at seven dollars. I'm like oh. Thousands of people want this. And 000 people want wanted this. Zero people. Uh. It didn't sell. Nobody bought it for seven dollars. Uh so that sucked. But I was skipping steps. You know. At the end of that three year and $37 of income earned I started doing one to one coaching. That's when this light bulb went off. I was like ah. Uh. Now I can get boots on the ground. I can lock arms with these people that actually want my help figure out what problems they need me to solve. I'm going to get better at solving those problems with hands on experience. I'm going to gain testimonials uh and I'm going to figure out how I can do these other types of offer based off of my experience with one to one coaching consult. So is it scalable? Can you just do an endless amount of one to one coaching consulting?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: Your schedule will fill up. Good problem to have. All right. That's how we move up the layers here, uh, with this, this podcast monetization pyramid framework. So what I want you to have, ideally a few aspects of your one to one coaching consulting. I feel like this should be a starting anytime offer. That means that if somebody listens to your show and they're like, yep, I want to hire Adam, then they can chat with you, discovery call, whatever, and they can start next week. I don't want them to be like, oh, our, our next. I, uh, open up registration every once every quarter. I feel like we gotta strike while the iron is hot. We're making $0. We need to make some dollars and let's start making dollars next week. All right. Start anytime offer. That's, that's. I really strongly believe that, um, we want to leverage expert positioning. So how do we sell one to one coaching consulting? Here's my little magic formula. I wrote a newsletter about it, uh, about a month ago. Here, if you guys are on my newsletter, should be, uh, I'll put that link in the show notes as well. So we want to leverage expert positioning with what I call my 2/3 content rule and a simple call to action do a discovery call. So what that means is if you look at like a three episode, three weeks of episodes, week one, week two, week three, uh, I want two thirds of those for you to be positioned as the expert. Usually that's gonna be solo episode, solo episode, and then maybe an interview or maybe a solo episode coaching episode interview. So one third interviews or less, 2/3 or more solos and coaching episodes. I want your CTA on the solos and coaching episodes to be to a discovery call. Now, could you sell directly your coaching link? Yes, but I have found again that smaller audience, new podcasters will do better. If you have a call to action to, hey, let's talk about working together. Your audience is going to be more receptive and responsive to that. So that's my, that's my formula if you choose to accept it. Simple one to one coaching. We're not going to get into different packaging, the time, length and all that stuff. There's a lot of different options there and it's going to really depend on your experience and your niche. Like, how new are you? Uh, this is something that I help people in my community, my one to one coaching all the time. But level one, the base one to one coaching consulting. Now let's graduate up a, uh, level. Level two is group coaching. So now we move from one to one into group. A lot of people try to start with group coaching and they run into a Problem of I don't know, how do I get a group going? I don't have any people. All right, so let me allow you to kind, uh, of see the progression. You've got one to one coaching and your calendar is filling up like you're getting one to one clients. You're getting testimonials, people are graduating. Let's say you have a six week coaching program, uh, like I do. Then what will start happening is these people will graduate and go, okay, Coach Adam, uh, how do we keep going? I've launched my podcast. Now I need to learn how to grow it. How can we continue working together now? Could they renew the one to one coaching? Yes, for sure. That's great. Uh, but eventually your calendar does start to fill up. So what you could say is, well, uh, we can definitely do another round of one to one. I'm also getting ready to form my first group coaching cohort. Would you like to be put on the first to know list? Here's what it's going to look like, here's what the pricing is going to be. Uh, would you like to be on the first to know list? And if, uh, they say yes and you put them on the list, I would wait until you have maybe five, anywhere from five to 10 people on that list ready to go. Then you flip the switch and go, okay, I've got my first group coaching cohort. I like to have five. At least five to 10 is a really good starting number. And then again you could say, well, I'm going to form another cohort or have just a big group coaching program. The different flavors of group coaching will vary again depending on your niche, your experience, all that stuff. We want to keep it as simple as possible, uh, early on, but that's how you form your group coaching. It blossoms out of one to one people start asking that what happens? Next question, and you say, we can either renew or we've got this. And now we are starting to scale. We're going from one to one to one to many. So that's level two. All right, now level three is just another little scale up. Your calendar is filling up with the OneToOne. Your group coaching program is getting pretty robust. We can go one to many again with community or membership. This is level three. Uh, this is like what my school community is for me. And so group coaching evolves up into this. And for some of you, you may keep the one to one and the, uh, the group coaching and the community membership. And some people will be like, well, what's the Difference between level two and level three, group coaching versus community slash membership. For me, group coaching is done in cohorts, usually in like 5, 10, maybe 15 people. There's a set schedule with that cohort with a community or a membership that's going to be potentially hundreds of people. Like I've got 400 people in this community at the time of recording. Really proud of that, super excited about that. That is one to many, many, many. Right. And it's more um, it's less direct access to me, but it's also at a cheaper price point. So one to one most expensive price point, group coaching next most expensive price point. Community slash membership next most expensive price point. So like right now my community is free, but people can upgrade into the uh, premium tier. Uh, and you know, I'm kind of scaling that price up as we go. So right now it's $ah19amonth to be that premium tier where you get weekly group coaching and things like that. So um, that is kind of the difference between level two and level three. You know, community memberships usually involve more courses and you know, kind of work at your own pace, types of things, office hours, stuff like that. But again, it's at a lower price point. Now let me pause for a second because I've got level four, I've got level five. You may not need level four and level five. We're just going to educate you on what those are and all cards on the table. I don't use level four or level five. In fact, I got rid of level two. Uh, all I do right now, my entire business is one to one coaching consulting and my school community. That's it. I transform my group coaching into the community we've kind of uh, built. We merged those people that were active in my group coaching program into the community or one to one coaching consulting. So that's all like we don't have to do all five levels. I just want to make that really, really clear. This isn't like for you to have the perfect business, online business as a content creator, you have to, you have to execute at each level. No, this is a progression. And then we simplify. You may not need to continue on. Maybe not even past level two, Maybe not even past level one. Like what is the simplest path? What is the lowest hanging fruit? The uh, the minimum effective dose for you to get to your, that intersection between your content creation goals and your income goals. Let's find the simplest path to that. So again, understand each level. That's good, that's important. But do we need every level? No, really, your goal should be to use as few of these as possible to get to again, the intersection between your content creation goals and your income goals. All right, so level four is Evergreen campaigns. Now here's the deal with this. This is where a lot of us try to start because we see the Amy Porter fields and the, whoever else is out there doing this. They're, they're doing campaigns, they're doing email funnels, they're selling online courses that are hands off, they're preaching scale, scale. You have to scale. Everything needs to be scalable. AI hands off. And that's just hard to do with a small audience and with like, if you're kind of a newbie when it comes to content creation and marketing especially. So an evergreen campaign is something that, you know, we're talking about funnels, we're talking about every quarter you open launch for, you open cart for like a course or a, something that you're doing. Um, it just takes more marketing experience and skill and it's definitely more effective with a larger audience. I'll say it. You know, when I tried to launch a, ah, big evergreen campaign for my first online course, like I said, nobody bought it even though it was only $7. But I didn't have that many people listening. I had like, I think I was Getting less than 40 downloads an episode. And so my download, I had no email list and basically no social media following. So a campaign, especially an evergreen campaign, if you're trying to like do a lead magnet into a funnel into an online course, I'd love to see you, um, at 500 plus downloads per episode, have an email list between 1 and 2000, have a, have uh, at least a thousand people on a social media channel that you can market to. And if you aren't even close to that, we just got to put a pin in this. And again, you may not need this at all. I know it sounds awesome, but, and you see these people doing million plus dollar launches and six figure launches and, and all this stuff and it's so exciting. But if you are just brand new to it, you're just, you know, you can't go to College when you're 6 years old. All right, not that many uh, geniuses. The, the, the uh, Doogie Howsers of the world. Did you guys know they made a, there's a remake of Doogie Howser. My daughter watches it on the Disney Channel. It's pretty cool. Uh, I've dug into that a little bit, but there aren't that many Doogie Howsers of the world in content creation and marketing, you can't skip steps. And that's what I definitely tried to do. That's a huge mistake that I made early on. So level four is that evergreen campaign, the funnels, the launches, the scalability that needs to come with time and experience and audience growth. Then level five, uh, the kind of top of the pyramid, uh, is the sponsors, the brand partnerships, the affiliates. Had a great episode with Justin Moore a few episodes back. I believe it was 6:33 or 6:34. Um, you know, he is the expert in this, and this is definitely more effective with a little bit larger audience. And he talked about, you know, helping people with smaller audiences, for sure. Um, but I think when he talks about smaller audience, he's talking about, like, still getting 500 to a thousand downloads an episode, maybe at least 200 downloads an episode. Um, and a lot of people are still way less than that. But, uh, so, you know, it's definitely a thing. The key question is, especially if you are currently trying to monetize by selling your own programs, products and services, and this is why I haven't shifted gears into brand partnerships and things like that, is that you have to consider the trade out of distracting your audience's attention away from your own offers. Like, right now, I'm really banging the drum of my school community because I'm passionate about it. We have amazing momentum in there. We've got a great community. It's really helping people. And I don't want to be like, you know, talking about a mattress company or something or some sort of AI thing, or, you know, like, I'm going to get paid 5% of every time you guys buy it. So we have to consider that as, uh, you know, there's a definite trade out there. All right? I. If You've listened to 10 episodes of my show, you'll have heard me talk several times about simplicity. Especially with our call to action. We cannot spray 12 different CTA's out there and expect our audience to take any action. We need to get repetition with a single call to action. Usually a discovery call. Or, you know, for me, it's raising awareness for my, my free community. Um, that's more powerful and that's going to help me and my business. And honestly, it's going to help you more. Like, I'm week after week, school, community, school community. Join, join, join. It's free. Get in the free group. You'll get results. Um, I'm just banging that drum because I'm Seeing such great results in there, and I. It's a disservice to you for me to go. And by the way, this episode is sponsored by these five different companies. Go get them all. And I get paid a little bit. Um, now, you know, all income is good, but this is kind of just like cherry on top for me. And again, I know a lot of you, like, want to focus on this, and that's 100% fine. But I'm just kind of mapping things out and there are trade offs at each level. Maybe it's a time trade off. At level one, we're spending a lot more time, but we're earning more one to one, you know, income there. Uh, level two, we're charging a little bit less. Level three, we're charging a little bit less. Level four, the trade out is you gotta have that experience and skill. You gotta get your reps in to be effective with an evergreen campaign. And, uh, at level five, with sponsors, brand partners, affiliates, there's a trade out because you are gonna distract your audience's attention away from your core offers. So this one was all about just educating you all, painting a picture, helping to provide some clarity so that you don't try to skip steps. All right? Like, uh, if you really trust me and trust that I've got your best interests in mind, follow this. If you have not made any money yet and you are a coach, if you are teaching and educating with your content, start at level one. Create a simple one to one coaching consulting program. Make sure it's a start at any time offer, and let's start making some freaking money. And then let everything evolve and grow from there. Keep it simple. As my coach, Dan Sullivan, uh, used to tell me, Adam, we gotta simplify so that you can multiply. So pod pals, uh, again, if you need help with this, dive into my free school community. I'll say it again.

Speaker A: It's.

Speaker B: It is the place to be. I've got 400 plus pod pals in there. We're jamming out, and I am active. That's the thing a lot of these reviews are saying. Adam is in there. Like, I answered 300 questions. Uh, a couple weeks ago when we did, uh, an SEO challenge, I was in there answering question after question. I'm in there every day. Every question gets answered. It is, um, you know, it's not real scalable with me, but I love it. Like, I love getting in there and I love just seeing people go, oh, wow, this is the place that I've been looking for. So if you're looking for a place. If you're looking for a community, start with the free level. I'm not worried about the premium tier upgrades and the VIP upgrades and all that stuff yet. Like, if that makes sense, let's do that. But just get in. Let me help you. Let me prove to you this is the place that you need to be. The link is in the show notes and with that pod pals, I'm gonna send you out into the world. Wishing you health, happiness and many downloads. I will see you on the next episode.

Speaker A: Hi, this is Sue Willoughby from Midlife Strategies for Badass Women. I needed help growing my podcast and expanding my reach. With Adam's laser focused guidance, I've been able to successfully rebrand my show and and 10x my downloads. My favorite part about working with Adam is that he gives you exactly what you need when you need it. Also, his training and coaching sessions are nothing but pure value.