How To Make Money From Podcasting In Nigeria
With the recent rise in the popularity of podcasting, more and more people are beginning to delve into creating podcast shows to build audience for their products to boost the overall performance of their businesses. In addition, most people are using podcasts as a source of revenue stream; individuals and businesses included.
In Nigeria, we see brands like Pulse; leverage podcasts for making additional revenue. In today’s fast paced world; online revenue streams is beginning to phase out more conventional means of income. Today, anyone with a podcast and a vision can easily turn this craft into a steady source of income.
If you’re interested in making money from podcasting in Nigeria, you need to first learn the monetization strategies that other podcasters are using.
Ready?
Find a niche
The online front is vast, so if you don’t focus on a particular audience; chances are; you can easily get lost if you don’t know who to reach. And if you can’t build an audience, you won’t make money. Quite simple. So how do you channel a niche audience? To answer the question, first; who do you want to talk to? What kind of content do you hope to create?
Define your audience so as to tailor content suited to their needs. It is easier to get noticed with more specific podcast content. Build up your audience by regularly making interesting content that is engaging and tailored for your average listener.
Make great content
You can only attract more listeners with quality content. Give your listeners a feel of what they seek, and more. When starting out, your audience will be small, take advantage of this phase to develop better content that is both relevant and unique for your target audience. Follow these tips to create great content for your shows.
- Be consistent. Ensure that you create consistent themes and topics so that your listeners can keep coming back for more.
- Your presentation. When presenting your shows, you’ve got to be engaging as well as interesting. No one will listen to a boring person, so bring all you’ve got to the table.
- Use better techniques to edit and produce higher quality shows.
- Call to actions. When presenting shows, prompt listeners to do something; like buy a product you’re selling.
- Build a community. Engage all social media platforms to generate followers and build a community for your podcast.
The more followers you have, the more money you will make from sponsorships and business relationships.
Building relationships
Nigerians love the “knowing game”. If you want your audience to engage more podcasts; focus more on building relationships. Be relatable, let your audience connect with you more as a person than a podcaster.
Interview people on your podcast who you can get together with later on for business collaborations. For example, if you run a music podcast, do interviews with managers, music producers, musicians etc to build your relationships. This way, when an opportunity comes up, you are in a better position to get noticed.
Sponsorships
This is the way most podcasters monetize their podcasts. Big brands are beginning to sponsor podcasts due to huge payoff. With sponsorships, popular podcasts can make thousands of naira per month. Podcast ads have always been more of a ” traditional response ” where podcasters talk about a product for promotional purposes. Businesses see the potential of reaching the right people, so if you can create a podcast that fits a specific target audience then you’re on to making a lot of money. If you have a large enough following then you can catch the attention of sponsors.
Tips to approach sponsors
Before you approach a potential sponsor, work with the following tips
- Make sure you have a high quality engaging content. Make great content, presentation, and production.
- Know your audience. What products and services are they likely to patronize. How engaged are they?
- Know your stats. You need to have an actual feel of your statistics. You can use blurry stats and Lib syn for this.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing allows podcasters to make money by promoting and selling a company’s products and services. The company will have to give you a special link or code to promote whatever products they want you to push to your listeners. By pointing listeners towards a particular merchandise, you can easily generate a passive income. You can sign up as an Amazon affiliate. Create unique links for your account and have them embedded in your website. The more traffic you get through these links, the more your passive income increases. Affiliate income builds over time, the more content you put out, the more you’ll build your reputation and build a large archive of relevant affiliate links.
Even if you don’t get offers from companies for affiliate marketing; take the first step and approach them. Also note that; when promoting a brand through affiliate marketing, you should only promote brands you believe in, because your reputation is in line anytime you endorse a product; so tread carefully. Make sure you really think about whether your listeners will benefit from what you’re promoting. Your listeners should come first before monetizing your shows. So if what you endorse isn’t relevant to your listeners, then its really not what it truth be told, regardless of what you earn or stand to earn.
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Products and services
Another way to make money from your podcasts in Nigeria is through sales of products and services. So even before you step out in search of sponsors and shots at affiliate marketing, take inventory of what you already have and can easily produce: your own products and services and leverage your podcast to promote your stuff and increase sales. Start using your podcast as a marketing tool that can help transform loyal listeners into paying customers.
Everyday more people are downloading and listening to podcasts in Nigeria, take advantage if this trend to sell your products and services on your own podcast.
Networking
According to podcaster Yann Ilunga; networking is a great element to making money through podcasts.
“Regardless of whether you’re hosting an interview-based podcast or not, relationships are a very powerful element in podcast, just like in business. After interviewing several top podcasters I can say that networking is the number one reason why many entrepreneurs, marketers, authors and coaches decide to start a podcast”.
Building networks is an essential ingredient to making money from podcasts in Nigeria. You need to be able to develop meaningful business relations. Start interviewing high profile guests on your shows. How? Tap into your existing network, attend hangouts related to the subject of your podcast, cold email potential guests,directly message potential guests on social media, and any other media. When on the look out for guest to interview; focus more on like minded people than on their status quo per say.
Virtual summits
Virtual summits are video interviews of over twenty experts on a certain subject, which viewers can join. These summits are usually free for a specific period of time, like 24 or 48 hours. After the allotted time phases out, your audience members will be required to purchase an “all access pass” to be able to continue watching the show(or rewatch the content at a later date). Podcasters in Nigeria can pull a lot of revenue from virtual summits. Just be creative in producing your content. For it to successfully engage your listeners to the point of keeping them coming back for more; it’s got to be relevant to them. So keep that in mind when creating virtual summits.
Create the best podcast possible
The better your podcast, the more listeners and followers you will get. Even if you start with a minimal audience as most podcasters do; take advantage of this stage for creating the very best quality content with relevant context. So in this stage as you work on building your audience, you should hone your hosting, presentation, interviewing and marketing skills.
Here are some skills you should work on when mastering podcasting for yourself
- Audio clean-up and production
- Building and engaging a community
- Creating a marketing buzz on social media
- Creating apps alongside your podcast
- Field recording
- Converting calls to action
- Voice talent
- Editing
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You can easily outsource all of these though.
Develop a unique selling proposition( USP) for potential advertisers
If you can show potential advertisers that you have 300 dedicated listeners every week( i.e community members) who spend a particular amount on X products monthly; that’s a much convincing business proposition, much more convincing than a blog which draws thirty thousand anonymous and unengaged readers with no specific targeted interests. And that’s because in the online world, advertisers and sponsors care more about being able to reach a very specific targeted demographic and interest group, rather than just large numbers of people. Podcasts aren’t exactly a game of numbers, it’s more profitable to focus on a niche market that is more easy to reach.
It doesn’t matter what type of podcast you have; just follow these actionable steps to rocket your podcast to the top of the charts in Nigeria.
To your success!
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