Selling Yourself

You hear a lot about "host-read ads," the equivalent of radio's live spots, and how they're the most effective advertising on podcasts. That should be obvious: Once you've established a connection with your audience, a sincere, naturally-delivered ad is more likely to be effective than a pre-recorded hard sell. But for most of you, getting ANY ads is a challenge, because you don't have enough downloads to sell and you don't have a rep firm and you're not Joe Rogan.

That's okay. You can still sell ads, but you're probably going to have to do it yourself. And you can.

Think about local businesses in your area, places you frequent, restaurants and stores and dry cleaners and, hey, maybe lawyers. Think about people in your community who you know and with whom you have an existing relationship. And then hit them up.

Okay, it's not that easy, and they might not want to give you money. But what you need is a track record of attributable success, and the only way to do that is by getting some ads on the show, so to start, offer a business with whom you have that relationship some direct response ads -- the traditional offer-code ads -- and suggest a token payment for every referral. Worst case scenario is that there's no response, but neither you nor the client are out any money. Best case scenario is that it works, drives business to the client, and the client is then willing to pay for the ads, or you can take the evidence of that success and sell other clients on paid packages.

Yeah, that's not easy and it's not fun, but you said you wanted to get advertising, right? And you don't have SXM Media/Stitcher or AdLarge or Federated or PodcastOne or Acast representing you, right? So you gotta do it yourself. Be prepared to be rejected many times along the way, but it only takes one client to break the logjam.

Or just forget about making money and enjoy being creative. Your bank account won't be enriched, but maybe you'll be.

Got a question about podcasting? Go ahead, send it to psimon@allaccess.com or tweet it at @pmsimon. That's what I'm here for.