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From this day forward, I need you to think of your podcast as a business. Either a business of its own or a subsidiary of a business you already have. Because truthfully, having a podcast is having a business. It takes equipment, capital, skills, labor, production, research, development, marketing, and sales. Everything a business needs to grow and thrive, a podcast also needs. So, why wouldn’t we call it what it is?

Since 2021, I’ve helped podcasts of my own and podcasters all over the world close over $200,000 in revenue directly resulting from their podcast. This episode is all about how to find your first podcast sponsor and some of the tips, tricks, and mistakes I’ve made monetizing podcasts. Friendly reminder, advertisers will spend $2.37 billion on podcasts in 2024 and you deserve to get a slice of that pie. 

Know Your Podcast’s Purpose and Audience

No matter what stage a business or podcast is in, the most important thing is knowing the purpose, vision, and mission behind what we’re doing. Why are we doing this? Who are we doing it for? What are our long-term goals and outcomes? What are the short-term steps that will bring us to those long-term goals and outcomes?

Size and Engagement of Your Audience

The first thing I want you to look at is the size and engagement of your audience. Notice I said size AND engagement. There’s no magic number, and that’s something that gets to people before they even get started. Have you ever caught yourself saying any of the following?

• I’m going to monetize when my audience is bigger.
• When I have more downloads, I’ll try to find sponsors.
• I haven’t had enough episodes to start reaching out to brands yet for sponsorship deals.

If you’ve said any of these, it’s time to rethink your approach. I was working with a podcast about a month ago that still hasn’t launched. They’d hired me to put together a deck and pitches for prospective sponsors and help position their current brand to sell advertisements on their podcast. This podcaster is pitching their podcast before the first episode is even live. They’re betting on their established following and engagement to follow them to the podcast.

Knowing Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is crucial. If you don’t know the people who are listening to your podcast, you have pretty much zero value to provide to a potential sponsor. That’s why they’re working with you. That’s why they’re giving you money. They want to know their message is falling on the ears of listeners who are aligned with their missions and goals, have the resources and accessibility to purchase, and will hopefully convert into paying clients.

Collecting Audience Data

You need to have a rock-solid target audience and listener demographics to share with potential partners of your show. Who are your listeners? Where do they live? What’s their age? What’s their gender? Roughly what’s their income and career demographic? Why do they listen to your podcast? What other podcasts do they listen to?

Some of this information you’ll be able to find on your podcast hosting website, some of it you’ll be able to find in Apple Podcast Connect and Spotify for Podcasters. If you haven’t set up your accounts for those, please do so!

Some of this information will come from your knowledge of who the show is made for. My best advice is to do an internal reporting for yourself, compare it against the information you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and from your own hosting website, and go from there.

Understanding Your Podcast’s Financials

Evaluate how much time, money, and resources it’s taking you to make this podcast. You need to have a profit and loss and you need to know what these partnerships or sponsorships need to look like from a financial perspective that actually makes sense for your show.

Calculating Expenses

Add up your monthly expenses. Here’s an example:
(Please note, these numbers are totally made up.)

• Adobe Creative Suite: $60/month
• Podcast Hosting: $20/month
• Part-time audio engineer: $80/episode (4 episodes/month = $320/month)
• Equipment: $66/month
• ChatGPT Plus: $20/month
• Riverside: $15/month
• Descript: $24/month
• Your time: 20 hours/month at $20/hour = $400/month

Total: $925/month (roughly $12,000/year)

Knowing these expenses helps you realize that even a small-scale podcast operation has recurring expenses. Making a podcast isn’t free content.

Crafting the Perfect Pitch

Before making a pitch, take what we’ve collected about our audience size and engagement, target audience, and monthly expenses and lay out a pricing guide to send to potential partners.

Structuring Your Ad Placements

You have a few options on how to sell podcast ads and sponsorships:

• Pre-roll ads: Before the episode starts, usually the second most expensive.
• Mid-roll ads: Halfway through the episode, typically the most expensive and longest.
• Post-roll ads: At the end of the episode, usually the least expensive and shortest.

Permanent vs. Dynamic Ads

• Baked-in ads: Forever part of the recording.
• Dynamic ads: Temporary ads that sponsors pay for, for a given time slot.

Pricing Your Ads

Here’s a possible pricing structure if your podcast costs roughly $1000/month to operate and you want a profit of $500/month:

• Pre-roll: $130.00
• Mid-roll: $165.00
• Post-roll: $80.00

This is dependent on your audience behaviors, how your episodes are laid out, and the value you’re bringing to the sponsor.

Creating Your Pitch Deck

Put together a pitch deck or PDF to reach out to sponsors. Provide the information in a way that will quickly show potential sponsors the core values of your podcast in an easily digestible way. Include:

• Audience demographics
• Total digital reach
• Monthly total downloads
• Average individual episode downloads
• Why they should partner with you
• Partnership/individual ad pricing

You can quickly put together a pricing guide in Canva or lay it out in a Word document.

Reaching Out to Sponsors

Podcasting is a relatively new medium for advertising, but it gives something most other social media can’t – a true personal recommendation. Look for brands and companies that are aligned with your podcast, your listeners, and you as a host. Start by reaching out to products you already use and love or you’ve maybe already talked about on your podcast.

Managing Outreach

In the beginning, try reaching out to 10 brands per week. This can be done via email to send pricing PDFs and information, but sometimes you have to reach out via DM and that’s okay. Keep track of who you’re reaching out to. Use an Excel spreadsheet with the name of the company, who you tried to reach out to, the day you reached out, and the day you followed up.

Remember, the podcast is a business, and businesses take time to grow and make money. Most businesses take 18-24 months to break even, so give yourself some grace. Keep trying. Keep going, and as always, I can’t wait to listen to your podcast.

SO WHAT’S NEXT?
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