How do I attract sponsors to my podcast

Sep 3

I love hearing from people who have begun their podcast, are really excited about their message, and are now wondering how to make money from their show.

There are different methods to earning money from your podcast, but the one I want to talk about today is finding sponsors.

Unfortunately, the reality is if you are not reaching 2,500 downloads within the first 7 days of a podcast episode release date, you will struggle to get sponsorship brands to come to you.

So, I encourage you to be bold and approach sponsors!

The key is to make it super enticing for the sponsor to partner with you by having a following across different platforms and a sizable mailing list.

You can achieve this by negotiating a midroll ad, or state that the sponsor will also be featured within your mailing list, or use a sponsored post on Instagram. There are many different and effective ways to market your partnership. Get creative!

My advice - Don’t try to go for big sponsors.

Choose a smaller brand that really appeals to you and your business.

In this episode, I share my insights on the pricing models available for determining your sponsorship amount.

But remember, the final amount is a collaborative effort between you and the brand, so make your presentation really attractive to them.

I also always encourage my clients to make sure they choose their sponsors wisely.

Find sponsors that are in line with your brand and your message and keep the ads in your show to a minimum.

Come and have a look at my website and join The Pod Lovers community if you are interested in beginning your own podcast journey. It is an amazing community that is full of support and a wealth of information for podcasters.

Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod Hello, everybody, welcome back to Pump Up Your Pod with me, Brianna from Bamby Media, what is going on? Where are you right now, I would love to know, you should DM me or email me or something. I would love to know where you are, what you're doing when you are listening to this podcast. That's one of the coolest things about podcasting is that I've got no way of knowing what you're doing. You could just be you could be cleaning the house, you could be making food, you could be in your car, you could be exercising, you could be lying on the couch, I don't know what you're doing. It's really cool that you could just be doing anything. So let me know. screenshot where you screenshot where you are, or take a photo of you listening to this if you want. I'm just being a doofus here.

Now. I'm just stalling basically, before I start this episode, which is all about how do I get sponsors for my show? I want to make money out of my show already. Brianna, tell me how to do it. Oh, my gosh, I get this question all the flippin time. And I'm going to just lay it all out for you here.

Firstly, straight off the bat. If you are not getting around two and a half 1000 downloads within the first like seven days of a podcast episode being released, you're gonna have a hard time getting sponsorship, you know, brands to come to you and be like, Oh, I really want to support your show, I really want to sponsor it. Because you know, what's the ROI for them, you're not reaching enough people, this might sound really harsh, and I apologise in advance for beating you down. But you're not reaching enough people from like, in the brand's eyes, for them to go, oh, yeah, this is worth sponsoring, it's difficult to reach those kinds of numbers within seven days, it's something that takes quite a while.

So if you're new to the podcasting game, then it's not super likely that you're going to be able to secure a sponsor. Now, it doesn't mean it is impossible, because you could be receiving not a huge amount of downloads. But perhaps you have a massive mailing list, perhaps you have a great following on Instagram, or LinkedIn or something else. If you have like a culmination, you know of a lot of engagement and a lot of followers or audience size across your business, then you can still go to a brand and go, Hey, you know, I'm getting around this many downloads per episode. But I also have 8000 people on my mailing list 10,000 people on my mailing list, I have a following on Instagram, that is around 30,000 people, you know, LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah.

So you can still achieve a level of sponsorship. With that in mind, knowing that it is across all those things that they could be featured on. So they might get a mid roll. And the mid roll is generally about 30 seconds ish long, and it goes in around the middle. That's why it's called a mid roll in the middle of your show. And then if you don't have a great deal amount of download numbers, then you can also say, you'll also be featured in our mailing list in our EDM that we send out that goes with the podcast. Or we will also do a sponsored post on our Instagram or our LinkedIn or whatever, you can actually make it more enticing. If you have a following across a bunch of different platforms or a decent sized mailing list or some other thing that you think a sponsor would find interesting or useful for their audience.

Another thing that you can do is not try and go for like big sponsors, everyone tries to go for the big brands to try and get them to give them money. And a lot of the time, that's where you're going to fall short. Because, you know, they're already spending big money. They've already got marketing budgets that they're spending on influencers and all sorts of other things and just a whole bunch of different campaigns and that sort of thing. So for you to approach a bigger brand is probably not going to work in your favour. But you could go to like the small local brands or a local coffee shop or something that really aligned with you actually approach them and say, Hey, I've got this podcast, I'd love to have you be a sponsor make it sound like you really want to help their business in return for them giving you a little bit of money to be featured on the show. So it doesn't have to be big brands. It can just be small, local brands that you really love that you really want to support. And you feel like there could be a good collaboration there. So definitely don't discount contacting local businesses. is local brands, local real estate agents, if that's your niche, anything like that really get creative with who you think you could actually reach out to to be a sponsor on your show.

The amount of money that you ask for depends on many factors. So it's hard to kind of gauge as to what you should sort of ask for because what you asked for depends on the listenership, you have the audience size, the following, as I've said before on Instagram or other places that you're going to be spreading it your mailing list, that sort of thing. So the amount of money that you get in a sponsorship is a collaborative effort. That depends on how many ways you're going to be distributing or featuring them as a sponsor. So if you get approached by a sponsor, or you're looking to have a sponsor on your show, and they're saying, Yeah, I'm keen, a lot of them will want to work on the like cost per 1000 type method, the CPM, as it says, In the States cost per mile.

As an example, if a podcast episode receives 10,000 downloads, and the sponsor says they'll pay $20 per 1000 downloads, then the podcast host would earn $200 for that episode, do you see what I mean there that it's based on how many 1000 downloads you receive. And that's why if you're receiving less than two and a half, 1000 downloads, it's like barely worth it even for you the amount of money that you would make off of it wouldn't be very much if you're working within the CPM model of payment there. But there will be a lot of sponsors that that is the way they will work, they will operate. So knowing that means you'll need a lot of downloads for that to actually start making any sort of money for you. The bigger podcasts that have huge amounts of downloads, they make a crapload of money off this kind of model. And they have different sponsorship setups as well that incorporate other things like the EDM, like their Instagram posts and the LinkedIn and those sorts of things that I've mentioned. So something to be aware of there.

But if you're just starting out, this CPM model is not really going to be super lucrative for you as a whole. So apart from the CPM method, there's also a value based model. This is something where a sponsorship might happen in the case that they say okay, well, we'll give you $300 per episode, because they can see that there's value in sponsoring your show, as in, it's super aligned with them. And then even though you might not get a whole lot of downloads, you have a really high conversion of people doing something after they listened to your episode. So if you've got a really, really engaged audience, and you sell something, and they buy it, and you can prove that like, let's say you have affiliate marketing setup, or you have your own courses, or things that you've already sold previously on the podcast, and they've converted really well, then you could approach your brand and say, Look, you know, I think we should go with a value based model. Because this is what the conversions have been like, for the past in the past for my audience. And that's why I think we should do this model. So that's a more lucrative model, because you make a lot more money out of that, as in, it's not dependent on how many downloads you're getting. It's more dependent on how engaged the audience is what they've done in the past. And this is generally a model that that can work really well.

08:27
So that's the next thing I would say about that. Now, the next thing I'll say on sponsors, and I feel like I don't even really need to say this, but I'm gonna say it anyway, is to make sure that you choose your sponsors wisely. Let's say you're a mental health podcast, for example. And then you have a sponsorship, an ad in your show that is completely unrelated to that, that is like, you know, cookies. Although cookies are good for cookies, maybe good for your mental health, I certainly think so. But something that's completely off brand, it doesn't make sense, as an ad to be in your show. That's just dumb, that's really a dumb thing to do. Don't go for a sponsor, that is going to have to put an ad in your show that doesn't relate to something that makes sense for your show and your audience because it's just going to piss your audience off. And you're not going to that's just not going to work out for you. So please be very wise with the sponsors that you do choose.

The other thing to note here is to just make sure that any ads that you do have in your show, keep them to a minimum. It has been proven that people listening to podcasts and certainly people that listen to podcasts a lot. They actually will it does convert into sales from ads, I guess because at this time there's it's not like it's the days before YouTube had ads everywhere, right like in podcasts at the moment. Not everyone has ads everywhere in their shows. So people are still kind of okay with them. Being there, if you have an ad in your show people are okay with it. And they actually listen to it, especially if it's in that mid roll section. So just make sure that you are aware that people do get annoyed when there are lots of ads or when they take up too much of the show, and they will stop listening to you. So keep it to a minimum, and you everyone will be happy.

Now, there are other ways to get sponsors for your show. There are other ways to make money from your podcast, which I'm not going to go into, because we're just looking at sponsorships and getting that going on your show today. But there's definitely a whole bunch of other ways to make money from your show and what I would say, better ways to make money from your show as well. But we will go into them at a later date.

If you want any more information about anything, you can go to Bamby media.com. And you can see all the lovely things that we have on offer there. If you're looking for help with your podcast, recording production, post production, video production, online course creation, branding gifts, we do so much fun stuff. And we have a team of beautiful, wonderful humans that make this all possible over at Bamby media.com. So if you're looking for help in that way and support for us to do things for you, definitely head there.

If you're looking to start your own show and you want to do it yourself, and you want to be led, then you can go to the pod lovers.com That is my free online community join there. And then you'll see there are a bunch of other podcasters in there or people that are wanting to become podcasters. And very shortly I'm going to be opening up the doors to let's get launchy the course which is a podcasting course that you can join and you can learn how to launch your show all by yourself. And yeah, that's going to be pretty sweet. So there your options. Thanks for joining me today. I had a lot of fun going through all the different ways that you can have sponsorships make some money and do the things for your show. And I hope you have a lovely rest of the week.