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Podcast sponsorships and advertisements account for a huge amount of the money most podcasters are bringing in – but is there a secret to connecting with the right advertisers and securing lucrative sponsorship deals? Let’s find out.

How do you make money from your podcast?

Everyone wants to make money from their podcast, so this year we’re doing a deep dive into every single major monetization method out there.

Two of the simplest ways to make money are with podcast sponsorships and advertisements. They work pretty similarly to television or radio adverts – let’s take a look at what they are and how you can use them for your own podcast.

What is podcast sponsorship?

Podcast sponsorship is where a brand or company pays you for your endorsement of their product or service. You’ll agree a price, and then you’ll either play their pre-recorded advertisements at some point in your episode or read a personal story of your own experience with the product and why you like it. These two methods are called pre-recorded and host-read ads.

What is podcast advertisement?

You can run podcast ads for your sponsor, but you don’t have to be sponsored to run podcast ads – they’re just any advertisement you insert into your episodes. You don’t have to be specifically partnered with, or sponsored by, a brand to run them – you could fill your ad slots with random ones from a database, for example. This is called programmatic advertising.

What’s the best platform for podcast monetization?

As any good entrepreneur will tell you, the key to success is having multiple revenue streams. This means money coming in from different sources: advertisers, merch sales, paid memberships and live events. If you can diversify your income streams, you can appeal to more people and make more money.

Therefore, it stands to reason that a quality podcast monetization platform would offer you multiple ways to make money from your show. With Captivate, not only can you insert ads and sell sponsorships, but you can also sell premium members exclusive or early access content and accept listener tips and donations. This means you can diversify your income across multiple channels.

Some other good monetization options are Patreon, through which you can sell content based on membership tiers, and buymeacoffee, where you can accept listener donations.

What do I need to do before my podcast is sponsored?

To put it bluntly: your podcast isn’t going to attract advertisers if it isn’t in tip top shape.

But it isn’t hard to get there.

The biggest thing you need to be doing is making sure that you understand who your audience is – once you’ve done that, you can tailor all your content, promotion and even your release schedule and frequency to their needs. You can also profile them for would-be advertisers, which quickly shows them that you mean business, that you know who you’re reaching and allows them to see if you’d be a good match for them straight away.

How do I find and pitch to podcast sponsors?

Finding podcast sponsors

The best way to find podcast sponsors is to look at what products and services your listeners are likely to be interested in. To use a large-scale example – if you’ve got a podcast about books and literature, something like Audible, an audiobook streaming service, could really work for both you and them.

It’s important to think, too, about the size and reach of your podcast in relation to the size of the companies you’re reaching out to. Smaller, local brands could be a good place to start, but if you’ve got an engaged audience, even if it’s only relatively small, it’s worth a shot at a more established brand – after all, you lose nothing by asking.

Pitching to podcast sponsors

Pitching to a sponsor is a lot like preparing for a job interview – you’ll be far better off if you do your research and tailor your pitch to be specific to their circumstances and needs.

Three or four well crafted, personal pitches, showing your understanding of the company you’re reaching out to, will yield far more favourable results than a hundred copy and pasted generic emails.

You can even use Captivate’s free sponsor kit creation tool to help you!

What is Dynamic Ad Insertion?

Dynamic Ad Insertion is a real game changer for the indie podcaster – now, you can sell ads for your whole back catalogue and swap out campaigns with just a click.

Essentially, DAI allows you to select a point (or multiple points) in an episode and place a piece of content there, without having to go in and edit the original episode audio. This means that when you get sponsored, you can go in and place the sponsor’s ads wherever you like across your podcast catalogue.

You can read about Captivate’s DAI capabilities here (spoiler alert, it’s free to all Captivate podcasters), but one of the coolest things about it to briefly mention here is the Bulk Editor. This is a bit of tech that allows you to select multiple episodes – all of your catalogue if you wish to – and swap out or insert adverts in one fell swoop, making it easier than ever to monetize your entire podcast.

Where can I insert ads?

The three places to insert ads in your podcast are:

• The Pre-Roll – this is before your actual episode audio.
• The Mid-Roll – this is during your episode content. Think of it like a television advert half way through an episode.
• The Post-Roll – you guessed it, this is after the episode audio has finished.

Are there different kinds of Dynamic Ad Insertion?

The two main kinds of dynamic ad insertion are directly sold ads and programatic ads. Let’s take a look at them:

Directly sold ads

When you reach out to a sponsor directly (or they reach out to you) about advertising their product on your podcast, that’s a direct relationship between you and the advertiser. This is called direct selling, and it can be extremely fruitful to build relationships with advertisers in your niche in this way.

If the ad placement is fruitful, it could lead to a long and lucrative relationship for the both of you!

Programatic ads

These are where you don’t have any direct contact with the advertiser(s) at all. You simply have a slot in your podcast with a marker which says “insert an ad here”, and this goes off to a DSP (Direct Service Provider, which is essentially a big database full of adverts) and is returned with a random advertisement in the slot.

This is very useful for making some quick revenue, and if you’re getting big name brands – which does often happen – it can make your podcast appear big and successful by association, increasing your standing with listeners and other advertisers.

You don’t just have to use one kind of ad insertion, either – a hybrid of the two is a fantastic way to make some serious money from your podcast.

Do I have to declare sponsorship?

If you’re endorsing a product, you have to be upfront about the fact that you’re getting paid to say it. If a sneaky advertiser asks you not to, it’s not worth the risk. A simple “this is a paid endorsement by [product]” will do!

“How big does my audience need to be?”

This is a question we’re asked all the time, and the truth is that it entirely depends on your niche. If you’ve got a fishing podcast, and 100 engaged listeners each week with a keen interest in fishing, sponsoring your show is actually going to be very appealing to a company that makes fishing rods or camping chairs – even though on paper you’re not doing crazy numbers.

This is an absolute testament to how important it is to know your audience and pitch your podcast thoughtfully and engagingly to brands who would genuinely benefit from advertising with you.

You can use Captivate’s one-click sponsor kit to automatically pull through all your analytics figures to a super professional looking pitch – the biggest thing you need to be doing is making sure you’re sending that pitch to the right people.

How to give so much value to directly sold sponsors that they renew happily

Give them granular data

You can use Captivate’s attribution links to track exactly who’s clicking through to your sponsor’s products from your podcast, allowing you to prove to them exactly how much interest you’re generating in their website.

Data like this allows them to justify continuing to pay you – they can see how much you’re doing for them, so your work becomes far more tangible than just another marketing expense.

Go above and beyond

When you’re direct selling ads, you should be working with brands that are actually relevant to your niche and that have genuinely good products. Anything less undermines your own credibility and the trust you’ve built with your audience.

Taking that as read – use the products or services that you’re endorsing! Ask for samples from the advertiser, and then you can give genuine and helpful endorsements, explaining to your audience how and why this product is so good, and why they absolutely need to get on board ASAP.

What advanced podcasting features should I be using to monetize?

Attribution Links

Captivate’s attribution links (also known as shortlinks) allow you to create concise, visually appealing links to anywhere and then track interaction from your listeners. Not only is this great data to share with advertisers, it also helps you to track the best place to actually put adverts. Switch where you’re inserting ads from episode to episode between the pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll sections and analyse which one gets the best clickthrough rate.

Dynamic show notes

Captivate’s Dynamic Show Notes allow you to construct reusable show notes from customizable blocks, templates and shortcodes. Not only does this save you time each episode, but it also allows you to swap out the “advertiser” shortcode once, centrally, and have this track through to all of your historical episodes where the shortcode was used.

Basically, when you change your sponsor, you don’t have to go through each episode and reflect this change manually. Very, very handy.

Memberships and tipping

Read our full guide here – the feature warrants its own article – but we have a fully in-house membership solution, wherein you can sell premium and exclusive content to your listeners. This fully integrates with your RSS feed, so you can gate episodes to be early access for premium members, or entirely exclusive to them.

Membership tiers are fully customizable, and so is pricing. There’s also a tipping portal, so you can accept listener donations. Do yourself a favour and check it out now.

Next steps

Check out our other monetization guides to diversify your revenue streams and start making serious money today, and enter your email below for exclusive podcast monetization help straight to your inbox.