How to promote and make money off podcasting

The latest online money making opportunity that is heavily being discussed over the internet is podcasting. Internet marketers are podcasting not only for fun but also as an online business and earn money. What is podcasting? Basically, it is similar to broadcast which is delivered over television or radio. Other similarity is that both broadcasting and podcasting is to create a show for audiences. The main difference between these two, a podcast is a digital audio format and it is delivered over the Internet to subscribers. A podcast can be played on the computers, iPods or other portable digital audio player. Another difference between broadcasting and podcasting which gives an advantage over podcasting is that you can target a specific niche or audiences, while the broadcasting is for the general audiences. This allows you to make money off podcasting.

There are 3 ways to make money online with podcast:

The first one and one of the greatest ways to generate money for your podcast is via commercial sponsorship of your show. If you can get a major sponsor, you can bring in money for your podcast. Over time, more and more large companies are beginning to recognize the true potential of podcasting.

Your podcast program can be in a ‘sponsored by’ format for the product or service that you have received payment for advertisement. You can talk about good and quality information about your niche market and at the same time indirectly you mention about your sponsored product or the company in certain part of your show. For instance, you can say that you face a problem, and your sponsored product or service amazingly solve the problem. However, do not over promote your advertiser. When you make a reference to a product, and it is in line with the theme of your podcast, it is a half way of appropriate publicity.

Secondly, you can earn money through donations - if you newly start podcasting, it is quite hard to get sponsors or advertisers as you have less visitors. Therefore, donation is a great way to earn money as your visitors grow.

Finally, you can make money from pay per click or affliliate. Just like the common website and blog, you also can place Google Adsense or other PPC and CPA advertisements on your podcast website. You also can promote various affiliate products on your podcast website.

If you provide precious and beneficial information for free, the visitors are going to like your service and your efforts are appreciated by them. Then they are more likely to make a donation. You can say that donation is to help you to maintain the podcast website. So, they will not hesitate to donate money so that you can continuously run the website. They might feel that if you discontinue running it, they will not be able to get the same exact free valuable information somewhere else.

So how are you going to create podcast that brings money in? First, you need to plan the content and theme of your podcast whether it is just for pleasure or information. Pick something you enjoy doing, speaking and you know about and then begin from there. Podcasting is a fast way for you to create an authority on something and make sure it is interesting to watch and listen. Be yourself and create something unique on your show so that people will feel excited to subscribe. Remember, you aim to get as many as subscribers as you can because less subscribers means no sponsors.

Podcast promotion is also essential for the success of the podcast online money making opportunity. Like a website, you need to promote your podcast in order to expose it to the largest possible number of potential visitors. So, you must make sure that your site is interesting and unique enough so that when they come to your site, they will sign in to be your subscribers or becoming your returning visitors.

What can you do to promote your podcast? Here are six ideas that you can implement:

1. Podcast directories submission - the directories are free to submit. You also can make link building and receive lots of qualities inbound links from these high ranking directories which is beneficial for your search engine optimization campaign. However, you can’t expect to get lots of listeners and subscribers from podcast directories submission.

2. Press Release - if you can write it will, it gives more powerful influence towards the potential audience than the paid advertising or promotion that you do via online.

As with the podcast directories submission, press Release submission also not only bring more exposure, but also improve your podcast link popularity and ranking in search engines.

3. Publish summaries and transcripts

To make your podcast even rich in contents, you can produce transcripts, notes or summaries and place it on your podcast website. These texts are very ‘catching’ to the robots of search engines as most search engines familiar with this type of format.

Those texts also can help the visitors to get an idea of what your podcast is all about before they attempt to download or subscribe to your podcast.

4. Implement some essential search engine optimization – if you want to get the most traffic to your podcast from the search engines search, you need to do some essential search engine optimization strategies. At least, you need to know what keywords you want and related to the podcast and locate it on as many pages as you can.

For better result, place the main keyword once in the title, once in the main headline and the rest spread it throughout the body content. To get inbound links with the main keyword in the anchor text also helps a lot for your podcast website to be listed on the first page of search engine results.

5. Discussion boards and forums - public discussion boards and forums are typically allows you to insert a few lines of signature that is to be displayed at the end of each post. You can use the discussion boards and forums signatures to promote your podcasts.

However, you can’t just simply post a link to your podcast or make a meaningless post just to make your link being shown on the signature. Instead, you should contribute meaningfully to help to build your reputation and you’re your expertise before they interested to visit your podcast website.

6. Video marketing - another good way to promote your podcast website is via video marketing. The video can perform as a ‘puller’ to ‘drag’ the video viewers to hear more from your podcast and give them ideas of what your podcast is about. Entice them so that they want to know more of what are you going to say.