I Hit 1,000 Podcast Downloads. Now What? (3 Steps to Monetize Faster)

When I first started podcasting, accurate reporting on analytics was scarce or really nonexistent. And so when I hit a million downloads in the first 10 months of my podcast, I got excited and I made a grave mistake. I decided to launch a $5 a month membership. And that was a mistake because I knew nothing about my audience. And so while I got a couple of members, the people who truly loved what I was doing, I put a ton of time and effort and extra work into a membership that ended up making me $6 per month. So, in today's video, I want to tell you what you should really do when you hit those download milestones, like a thousand or 5,000 or even 10,000, so that you're not wasting your time and you have a faster path to monetization for your show. Hey everybody, my name is Joe Cababona. I am the evangelist and video creator here at rss. com and I have been podcasting for a very long time, 15 years by my account. I've been around the block. I've experienced a ton. And today I want to tell you how you can make the most of those downloads. Let's dive into it. Okay, so first of all, congratulations. Most podcasts do not make it out of seven episodes or just singledigit downloads. So, you are already performing well. You're hitting a,000 downloads or you're hitting 5,000 downloads. So, what do you do? Now, you might think, "This is great. I can monetize. " And I will say that at rss. com, we are IAB certified, which means that we have as accurate download numbers as possible. We try to figure out how many people are actually listening to your show and subscribed to your show. So, we do our very best to give you accurate reporting, but don't just jump into trying to launch a membership just yet. There are three things I think that you should do when you hit those download milestones. So, let's start with you've hit 1,000 downloads. What do you do next? My recommendation is to do a tuneup. Now that you have some episodes under your belt and some data coming in, it's worth looking at that data to see what episodes are performing well, what episodes are not performing well, and double down on the topics that are working best for you. So, if I do a podcast episode about all the reasons that you should have a solo podcast instead of an interview podcast, and that does really well, and then I have an episode about all of the ways to launch a membership, and that doesn't do well because that's not what people are looking to me for. I'm gonna double down on the solo podcast episodes, more of the workflow and content focused stuff and leave the membership stuff to the experts. So, that's what you should do as well. Look over your stats, see what episodes perform well, and then double down on those episodes. On that same token, you also want to look at what we refer to as your packaging. You want to review things like your title and tagline, your description, your artwork to figure out and see what's working and what isn't. For example, again, if I look at my tagline here, so the name of the show is called Streamlined Podcaster. Then there's a tagline, tips to help solo podcasters save time and create great content. If I'm looking over my stats and I notice that people aren't resonating with the save time part or maybe they're not resonating with the create great content part, I'm going to change this tagline. Maybe I call it streamline podcaster tips to help podcasters produce engaging solo podcasts. and I adjust that so that when people are searching for that in Apple podcasts or Spotify or just in Google that'll show up. The same thing with the description. I need to look at the description and look at the episodes that are resonating most with my current audience so I can double down on those keywords. I want to look at my artwork to see is this artwork communicating to people what the show is about. Is it standing out in directories? Once you have a thousand or 2,000 downloads, you have some data to go on and you want to make sure that you are optimizing for all of this. This is called podcast SEO.

And because there is not a lot of algorithmic discovery for podcasts just yet, you want to make sure that you are doing everything you can to make sure your shows up in search results. Google or Bing or even LLM's now because a lot of them have a web search function and so you want to make sure that your show is doubling down on the things that your audience is really resonating with. Number two, have a killer call to action. This was really the biggest mistake that I made after I hit the million download mark is I still didn't have a killer call to action. So when I launched that membership, the only place I had to promote it was on the podcast. And if people were only listening in and out and I wasn't promoting it as often as I could have been, the people I was trying to reach, my most engaged listeners were never hearing it. So once you get I mean this is something that I think you should do right off the bat. But again once you have some of that data for a thousand downloads or 2,000 or 5,000 downloads you can understand the type of stuff that is resonating with your audience. And so you want to direct your audience to do one thing. I personally think that join my mailing list is the best because you capture your audience and you want to offer some sort of lead magnet. So again, looking at tip one, right? Doing the tuneup, reviewing your analytics to see what episodes are resonating well. Is there some sort of free content upgrade that you can offer on those episodes that will resonate from your audience? Using my example of how to create a killer solo podcast episode, maybe I offer a checklist. quiz, just a five question quiz. It's like, how can you convert your show into a solo podcast? What do you need to do? How to generate 20 solo podcast episode ideas? Any of those could be great for getting people onto my mailing list. And once you have a killer call to action where people are doing the one thing you're asking them to do, like join your mailing list, that gives you the opportunity for other asks as well. provide great content, promote your show, and then you can also do things like ask for a rating or a review. Ask them, would they find a membership useful? And what kind of content are they willing to pay for? Because that's really the key here. You want to open up a direct line to your audience. And the best way to do that is to get them on your mailing list. Now, once you do that, those are the two things I really once you hit a thousand downloads, those are the two things I think that you should really double down on. Review your analytics. Make sure you have a killer call to action because you are capturing your most dedicated audience and you are finding more people who look like that audience. And then once you do those things, you start to build momentum. Maybe you hit 2,000, 5,000 downloads. What do you do next? Now is the time to start thinking about monetization. And there are a lot of ways. There's one surreptitiously missing from this list, which is the membership, Apple podcast subscriptions. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I would say start thinking about monetization. Have a donations button. Do value for value, which is the cryptocurrency. People can donate for every minute streamed. offer paid ads, right? The dynamic ads, that's the name of our program. So, programmatic ads inserted dynamically. So, you can start adding dynamically inserted ads to the beginning, middle, and end of your podcast. And look at affiliate programs like through our partner code adx. Let's take a look at what this actually looks like on our dashboard. So, if we look at the rss. com dashboard, you see that we have several ways to monetize. I specifically mentioned all of them, but paid ads, right, which is monetizing your podcast through paid ads. You can enable that. And uh you could see that this is my smaller show. It's relatively new. I relaunched it about a month ago as I record this. And it's already made, you know, six bucks or so between the estimated balance and the lifetime withdrawals, which is fine. This is not the main reason I'm doing this. But it also tells you that you can build momentum as long as you are consistent. The more downloads you're getting, the better these will do. But you can enable them and add them to the pre, mid, and post roll. You can also see that I'm not adding any midroll ads because my episodes are pretty short and I don't want to interrupt the flow of what I'm saying with midroll ads. But if you have a longer or segmented show, midroll ads could be perfect for that. So, I know I'm leaving a little bit of money on the table by not putting midroll ads in, but

I definitely want to make sure the experience is good because if the experience is bad, people are going to stop listening. The other thing I mentioned here was code adx. So, you can find sponsors. You can discover brands and earn 15 to 20% commission based on, you know, what you're promoting. And this is a great way to easily find and integrate with affiliate programs on your show. So again, we have partnered with code adx to make this integration as easy as possible. And then the lowest hanging fruit here is the donations and funding. You can put in a URL and it will show up on your show's website as well as in supported apps that support the donate button in podcasting. So this is a way to uh directly appeal to your audience and ask for donations. And then value for value. Again, this is micro payments. So people uh especially using crypto can donate to your show on a basically per stream basis. So for the people who really want to support you, this is a great option for them. And then the other thing I mentioned was Apple podcast subscriptions. Now this is a big question because I opened this video by saying I made a huge mistake launching a membership with a million downloads. So, should you launch a membership on Apple Podcast with Apple Podcast subscription with a thousand or 5,000 or even 10,000 downloads? It's a very nuanced answer because what you also heard at the beginning of this video is stats were not as accurate then as they are now, especially on RSS. com because we are IAB certified. So, we are giving you the most accurate download numbers and analytics we possibly can. The other thing is that I told you I had no direct line to my audience. And so I put the cart before the horse. I launched a membership without ever talking to any of my listeners. Which is why those first two steps, doing the tuneup and having a clear call to action are super important. Then you can reach out to them and say, "Hey, what content would be super valuable to you? Valuable enough to pay a few extra bucks for? " And then once you do that, we make it incredibly easy to launch a supported show, a paid show with Apple Podcast subscriptions on Apple Podcasts. So, those are just a few things that you can do once you hit that thousand or 2,000 or 5,000 download mark. Do a tuneup, see what episodes are resonating most with your audience, and double down on that. Number two, have a clear call to action to capture your audience. And number three, start adding in some monetization features. Now, if you haven't started your podcast and you're worried that you're going to have to make a big upfront investment to even start thinking about monetization, we've got you covered. You can start for free over at rss. com. We have a completely free local and niche podcast plan. No limits on downloads or audio files uploaded. We give you everything you need to get started completely for free. And then when you are ready to monetize through paid ads, for example, or Apple podcast subscriptions, then you can upgrade. But you can start and experiment and see what resonates with your audience completely for free over at rss. com. That's it for this video. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions about what I talked about, what is podcast SEO or how do you figure out what episodes are resonating with your audience or how does Apple podcast subscriptions work, definitely leave a comment below. Subscribe to this channel because we do cover a lot of these topics on our YouTube channel. Like this video and until next time, I'll see you out