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How Does Your Podcast Sponsorship Program Work? Q&A with Susan Bratton.

November 18, 2009 at 11:05 am · Filed under Association for Downloadable Media, Personal Life Media

I want to sponsor podcasts beyond those on my Personal Life Media network of forty shows. We are offering CPA campaigns for our information products to podcasters who join our affiliate program at RevShareNow. Here’s a list of great questions we got back from a podcaster who saw my Tweet about looking for shows to sponsor that I thought would be helpful to share.

Question: In October I had about 600 listens and this month about 900 listens so far. Is advertising a step we should even consider?—Would it be worth it with those numbers?

Yes, you can start monetizing your audience immediately. Even with sub-1000 listeners, they can be a very engaged community who will consider the purchase of products you recommend. As well, conditioning your audience early to expect that they will hear ads from sponsors and about recommended products keeps it from being a surprise later. Listeners understand that podcasters need to find ways to drive revenue to support the costs, time and effort you make to produce the show.

Question, Will it cost me anything?

It doesn’t cost the podcaster anything to promote one or more of our products. Actually, all promoting our products does for you is make you money. You get 20% commission every time something is sold through your promotions.

All you have to do is sign up for free on RevShareNow as an affiliate (not a free trial, just free), and then you’ll have access to banners, emails, and links. Also, with a podcast, we’ll create a promo code for you to use so you can advertise and make sales through your podcast.

For instance, the retail price of our typical products is $297. By using your custom promo code from your ad in your show, your followers save $100 just for using your code and get a discount price of $197. You earn 20% of that, which adds up quickly!

So, there is no cost to you, only revenue you can drive by recording ads that you place in your show with a custom promo code so your listeners can get the benefit of awareness of the product or service and discounts, in our case, that they wouldn’t get if they hadn’t heard the ad on your show.

Question: Is there a set amount of ads to place per show? Or do I choose how many ads to place?

You decide what products you like, that fit your audience’s interests. That could be one, or many. You choose the products, then get a promo code from our Affiliate Managers, such as “showname” or similar. Then you record the ads with our supplied talking points, incorporating your personality into the ads in what ever way you’d like. You put those ad in your shows and then we send you checks each month for all the sales you’ve driven. In addition to audio or video ads with your custom promo code, you can blog about the products (we will give you any or all of the ones you think are a fit for 1 penny) perhaps doing a review, and you can run banners (ours are very attractive) on your site or blog as well, which all have a distinct tracking code that ties them to your affiliate account in RevShareNow so no matter what way your followers come to us, we can track the revenue back to you and pay you.