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Or: how to stop worrying and love the ads. Control your podcast brand and monetize your whole back catalogue. It’s not complicated, it’s not difficult, and we’ll walk you through the entire process.

Rule 1: Put your audience first.

The relationship between you and your listener is what the advertisers are buying. We’re saying listener instead of listeners because that’s how you should be thinking about it: a personal connection, a person in a room listening to your voice, trusting your words. This warmth, this trust, is what makes the slots valuable to advertisers, it’s what makes your podcast worth paying for. It will go away, and fast, if you start advertising things you don’t really believe in.

When you’re working with direct sales, especially with host-read ads (where the advertiser gives you a script, and you read out the advert yourself), there’s a great rule to follow:

Would I feel comfortable recommending this to a friend in real life?

If the answer is “not really”, don’t run the ad.

You don’t have to personally use every product, but you should at least believe it fits your audience. A productivity app on a business podcast? Perfect. A random mobile game on a serious mental-health show? Not so much. Bad advertisers don’t just annoy listeners, they erode their trust in your voice, and over time they reduce your ad slots in value. Once listeners suspect you’ll promote anything for money, future ads stop working too.

Rule 2: Get comfortable with negotiation.

When they’re asking to buy your ad slots, advertisers will have a range in mind that they’re willing to pay, and they’ll come in at the bottom of that range. They’ll have budgeted in for you to bump them up a little from their initial offer. This concept is so integral to direct ad sales that it’s built in to a lot of advertising marketplaces like Captivate’s.

Podcast ads aren’t priced by episode, they’re priced by listeners.

This is typically calculated using CPM (cost per 1,000 listens). General ballpark ranges look like this:

• Pre-roll: roughly $15–$20 CPM
• Mid-roll: roughly $18–$25+ CPM
• Post-roll: roughly $10–$15 CPM

You are not being awkward by negotiating, you’re being professional.

Rule 3: Work closely with the advertiser.

You’re protective of your podcast’s brand, and you should be. You worked hard to build it. Advertisers are often protective of their brand, too.

Sometimes, they’ll send a tight script over that they want you to read verbatim. If that’s clearly what they want, that’s what you should be doing. If it’s not what you want to do, if you can’t sell what they’re selling convincingly, then it’s probably not the right partnership.

Sometimes, advertisers will send over the points they want you to hit, without a fully written script. They’ll want you to use your unique voice, to appeal to your listeners in the way that only you can do. You’ll send a proposed host-read back, and they’ll sign it off.

Both of these are valid ways to work with direct sales. Most ad marketplaces, including Captivate’s, provision for a bit of back and forth between advertisers and podcasters. Sometimes, bigger podcasters will have a fee for recording a draft so that advertisers aren’t wasting their time, and again a lot of ad marketplaces provision for this in their UI.

Rule 4: Know when to say no.

For a lot of people, this is the hardest one. When you’re monetising your podcast for the first time, every deal feels important. It’s tempting to accept anything just to prove the show can make money.

It’s important, though, to put your brand first. Don’t run adverts you don’t believe in, don’t devalue your audience. Your podcast is a community, not just a piece of content, and maintaining that listener relationship is absolutely key.

Go forth and earn with confidence!

Think about direct sales as like renting the trust of your listeners to an advertiser’s product.

Listeners trust you with their time every week, and the reason podcast advertising is so successful is because advertisers get to borrow that trust for 30 seconds at a time. Treat that with the respect it deserves, and the results will be profitable for everyone involved!

Next steps

Read about Captivate’s other huge features, like our in-house monetization tools and our unmatched dynamic ad insertion technology!