Smaller podcasts make money too

Sell products or services

This is the big one. A podcast is a great way to funnel people interested in your niche towards a product or service that is very lucrative. If you charge enough, you wouldn’t need to convert that many listeners to be very profitable.

For example, if I had a podcast (I don’t…but maybe one day…), I would interview Creator partnerships and growth executives from social media and Creator Economy companies. 

The audience would be small - maybe a few thousand if I’m lucky - but they’d likely be founders, executives, product managers, and heads of growth at various companies that work with Creators. That’s mostly who follows me on LinkedIn, aside from Creators.

I’d plug my go-to-market consultancy, Partner with Creators, throughout the show, and make my email readily available in all the show materials. Most likely, I’d get 1-2 inquiries a week (<0.1% of the audience). 

If I converted 1-2 of those per month into consulting clients, at a rate of $10,000 per month depending on services, and I worked with 1-3 per month on average, that would be a $120k - $360k annual business!

Offer exclusive content and/or community through membership

Jay Clouse made >$500,000 in annual revenue from an audience of <100,000 people. His 9000 download/month podcast contributed about 10% of that - so $50,000 - by building deep trust with his audience and driving them towards his high-priced ($2000/year) membership.

Do deeper partnerships with companies selling in your niche

Jerry Won’s Dear Asian Americans podcast only gets about 2,000 downloads per episode - but thanks to its subject matter and charismatic host, it’s attracted big-name guests like Vice President Kamala Harris, Instagram celebrity “Your Rich BFF” Vivian Tu, and TV/movie star Kal Penn (among many other API luminaries).

[You have to] become known as a subject-matter expert - which for me is broadly “the Asian American experience in the workplace” - through sharing content, sharing studies that come out, sharing my thoughts.

The credibility and quality of his content is attractive to big brands like Adobe, who want to sell to the Asian and Pacific Islander Creator audience that he reaches. As a result, he can negotiate larger partnerships that are longer-term, more deeply integrated, and more lucrative than standard ad reads.

Other tactics to generate incremental revenue include:

• Programmatic advertising via a network like Acast

• Affiliates and referrals with codes and links in the show notes

• Ticketed live shows and meetups a few times a year

There are plenty of ways for Creators to make great money off of relatively small podcast audiences.

For his podcast, Matt Payne focuses on membership and supplements with incremental revenue:

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