AP 0594: How Do I Find Sponsors For My Podcasts?

AskPat 594 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 594 of AskPat. The last episode in April actually, before we head in May, I can't believe it. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Martie, which is like one of my favorite names in the world, so Martie, awesome.

Before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. An awesome company. It's helping all of us manage our business finances. It's serving over three million small businesses. It served me and it could serve you too. You can actually get a 30-day free trial if you—instructions on that in just a second.

This is also useful, not just for keeping track of your business finances, getting a pulse on what's going on and figuring out what's working and what's not. But also for invoicing, if you do any invoicing, FreshBooks is by far the easiest way for you to get paid and for people to pay you. So check this out, for 30 days for free, like I said, at FreshBooks.com/AskPat and make sure you enter the code “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section. Check it out, love it. Awesome.

So here's today's question from Martie.

Martie: Hey Pat, it's Martie here, from letsbuildwp.com where I teach people how to use WordPress. My question today is, how do you go about finding all the different sponsors for your podcasts and videos? Are you just signing up for their affiliate program and then promoting your own affiliate link, or is there some kind of one off deal between you and that company? I would love to hear your response on this because this is something I would like to implement on any of my new videos going forward. Thank you very much in advance for any response on this and keep up everything you do Pat, because I know I'm not the only one that really appreciates it.

Pat Flynn: Hey Martie, what's up? Thank you so much and for those of you who don't know, that's a reference back to Back to the Future, which is my favorite movie. Marty McFly, right? Get it now? Okay.

Anyway, Martie, thank you so much for the question. This is a really important question because there's a lot of great podcasters out there who I feel could benefit from having sponsors on their show, if the sponsors align. I think that's the first and foremost, that's the best thing I've ever done. It's not get sponsors on the show, but get sponsors on the show that actually matter to those who are listening and the more you can do that, the better of course. For Smart Passive Income it took me 97 episodes for me to get to the point where I was comfortable with putting sponsors on my show and ever since I haven't looked back because it's been obviously, more money, more income, but not only that it's a way to also additionally serve your audience. So it's just a great win for everybody. So that's the first thing.

Now, how do you find these sponsors? Well, sometimes they'll find you because they'll reach out to you, they know that you have an audience and they'll look to want to get in front of that audience. So sometimes they'll come to you. But often times you have to go to them. There has been a number of cases where I've actually reached out to different companies and said, “Hey I have this great show and these are the kinds of people in my audience. I think they would love your stuff, do you want to do a free … or not a free, but you want to do a trial where you can get two episodes in? Maybe we can see how it converts for you.” So that's one way to do it. I've done that with a number of different companies, like I said.

You could do that with videos, with your podcast, you could do that for blog reviews and things like that too. So it doesn't necessarily have to be for a podcast. You could also be creative with your approach, you can also be creative with what you offer, doesn't just have to be ad spots. It could be…there was an episode, Episode 180 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast with two woodworkers who talked about how they had sponsors in their videos, not by actually mentioning, but actually using their products or having them in the background. So product placement is another thing you could do too.

How do you work out that deal? Sometimes it's a one-time deal or sometimes it's a per episode deal type of thing, and then CPMs are involved, sometimes two, which for prime-cast episodes is the traditional way of actually getting paid for a show. You get paid a one time fee per episode, or if you purchase bulk episodes sometimes you offer a discount and things like that. It's basically based on how many downloads your show gets after six weeks. So CPM is Cost Per Thousand. Average industry rates would be anywhere between 25 to 45 dollars per thousand episodes. So if you have 10,000 episodes, you multiply 10 times 25 dollars, that's 250 dollars right there. So, it depends on the company obviously and you can work out separate deals for separate companies but if you have some sort of sheet that has your ad rates and what else you have to offer, that'd be great.

Like I said earlier, it doesn't just have to be the ad spots on the show, it could be a spot on your Resource page, which I also offer, it could be a mention on your Show Notes page, or it could be a link on the description on YouTube, it could be a mention in an email, or any sort of thing like that. So incorporating more things, you're more … likely to charge more and have the person say yes if you approach them.

You could sign up for companies' affiliate programs and there's a little bit of a gray area here in terms of the actual legalities of this in terms of actually calling somebody a sponsor, but only having them be an affiliate. Now there have been some people that've said, “You know it's actually okay to do that,” and my lawyer said it's actually better to be safe and just say a sponsor is somebody who's paid for ad spot, specifically an affiliate is somebody who you sign up for, you get a commission from, if people sign up through your link. Yes, both can be the same thing, but typically they're separate.

So what I would recommend is that if you are signing up for an affiliate program, and you want to mention them on your show, that's great, but you do have to mention that they are an affiliate and not necessarily a sponsor. So I do that with ConvertKit sometimes here on the show. If there's an empty ad spot and nobody's purchased an ad on that particular day, I'll say, “Hey sign up for ConvertKit,” and I'll talk a little bit about it. AskPat.com/ConvertKit, that's my affiliate link, but I don't say they're a sponsor because they don't necessarily know that I'm actually placing them in this episode and we have that there.

There's other things you could do, you could sign up for a company that'll actually will help you find these actual advertisers. You might be able to find somebody, a single person who could do that, to kind of do this work for you and you could share part of the profits with them for finding those advertisers, so everybody wins of course in that way too. Or you could use a company, like the company I'm using for AskPat, which is The Midroll, midroll.com, although you will have to have, what I've heard from them, a minimum of 50,000 downloads per month in order to make that happen.

You can use a company, you could use somebody else or you could go out there and find companies on your own if they aren't coming to you. You could absolutely have an affiliate program for something or be a part of an affiliate program and mention that thing on your episode or in that video. I would just hesitate with calling them a sponsor, you might want to check with your own attorney or lawyers to see if that's actually the case, that you aren't supposed to do that. Either way, you're sharing something and you're getting value and potentially getting paid in return for that. Feel free to do that, I've done that many times myself.

So Martie, thank you so much for the question today, I really appreciate it and I can't wait to hear how this all turns out for you. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much.

For those of you listening, if you have a questions you'd like potentially featured here on the show just head on over to askpat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate you.

One more time, FreshBooks. You can get a 30-day free trial by going to freshbooks.com/askpat, making sure to include Ask Pat in the How Did You Hear About Us? section. They want to know where you guys are coming from.

As always, I love to end with a quote. Today's quote today is from the famous podcaster Marc Maron, and that is, “The medium of podcasting and the personal nature of it, the relationship you build with your listeners and the relationship they have with you, they could just be sitting there, chuckling and listening. There's nothing like that.”

Truly, there's nothing like podcasting. That's why I thank you guys for listening and I appreciate you and if you have a moment, head on over to iTunes and please leave a review for AskPat. I appreciate you and here's to an amazing May coming up for all of us.

Cheers, take care and I'll see you the next episode. Bye.