448. Why Most Podcasters Are Pricing Sponsorships Wrong

0:05 Good morning, podcasting, morning Chat. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2020. Sixth and today listener Mailbag time. We're answering your questions on marketing, your back catalog, how podcasters really price sponsorships, and handling hateful comments without losing your mind. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse, hit the share button, bottom left hand side of the screen and share it. However Clubhouse lets you. And if you're catching us via podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, etcetera, please share this episode with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here.

1:20 Good morning again podcasting, Morning Chat. Thanks so much for being here. I am your host Mark Ronick and currently on stage with me we have producer Ashley Feller, Ralph Estep, Dr. Fay, BC Babbles, Nick Naulback, Jonathan Howard and Sid Meadows. And if you'd like to learn more about those fine people, please go to podcastingmorningchat.com. Go to the about section and Scroll down and you will see everyone's lovely faces, BIOS, links to connect with them, etcetera. So come check them out and that includes yours truly. So if you want to learn more about me, what I do, helping podcasters everyday, you can go there and learn more about me as well.

2:03 Today it's the mailbag segment, as I said, and I am currently reaching for my fake mail. I say fake mail 'cause I don't it's not actually paper mail here that I have, but it's. So I just use papers to create some sound effects doing it old school not no, no buttons to press. I'm just doing that when I reach into the mailbag. A Foley artist. Yes, exactly. I say we get right to it. I feel like there was something I wanted to share. Well, I'll share this one thing with you real quick. Yesterday I sat down with Ralph. Ralph and I are going to work together.

2:44 He's going to help me get my finances in better shape for my business. I've just been in need of somebody like Ralph for a while because I feel a little disorganized and I'm not, I'm not really connecting with my finances the way an entrepreneur should. And I think that's probably at Ralph. You can probably attest it's probably very common for content creators to kind of either avoid their finances or or at least just don't like dealing with them. Absolutely. I call it the content creator money chaos, and there's a lot of people that live in that. And don't forget Mark, I have a little bit of a breaking news item I wanted to bring up. Today that was what it was.

3:26 Thank you. See that it the my intuition was saying go to Ralph and I forgot what it was, but there it is. So yeah, Ralph, do you want to here, I'll even we got some breaking news from Ralph. So yeah, take it away, Ralph. I do, and I was talking about Sub Stack yesterday and that's why I wanted to bring this up today. There's been a breaking news item out of the content creator economy today. And what we're talking about here and now, this is not a red alert. This is maybe a yellow alert. But Sub Stack, the newsletter and publishing platform used by hundreds of thousands of writers and craters, has disclosed a data breach. Now, none of us are unfamiliar with these, but it's affected user contact information. Now, according to reports, an author, an unauthorized third party accessed e-mail addresses, phone numbers and other non financial account data.

4:16 Now what they're telling us is passwords, credit card numbers and financial information were not accessed. Now I'm going to quote CEO Chris Best says this sucks. I'm sorry. We will work very hard to make sure it does not happen again. Now here's why I want to bring this up. The big take away here today, if you or your audience are using sub stack or similar platforms, this is a time radar up. Be extra cautious about unexpected emails or texts. The main thing I'm looking for here is anything that looks like a verify your account or reset your password type message. This is where scammers use this information for what they call fishing. And this isn't the kind of fishing you go do down by the lake. This is fishing for information.

4:56 So if you're a creator or subscriber, this is a great time to consider tightening up your account security with strong passwords, hint, hint multi factor authentication across platforms. And because I talked about this yesterday, I want to bring this up today. We're going to keep on, we'll keep on track of this as the story develops, but for now, the subset data breach update. So stay safe online and and thank you so much for letting me bring that up, Mark. Yeah, thank you for bringing it up, Ralph. Really important. That reminds me also, at least for those of you who have iPhones, sorry Nick and Dr., but I'm sure your Android probably has something similar. I there's a password security category in your settings and it actually tells you if any of your different accounts with different services have been compromised, right? Like data breaches and whatnot.

5:51 So even that might even include Google, your Gmail, right? And I went in there and it was startling to see how many of my different accounts have been compromised. So I am slowly just, you know, little chunks at a time going through each one of them. I think I had over 100 different accounts that have been compromised. So that's a fair warning to you. Maybe you want to go check that out, change some passwords to keep all of your information, data, etcetera, secure. So thank you again, Ralph, for bringing that up. I wanted to just mention on this also that this actually happened October of last year, October of last year and they just found it recently.

6:42 So you may have already gotten that, you know, please verify kind of cool stuff kind of e-mail interesting. I think I have actually gotten that and I just pass it up. My my little trick is I hit the reply button and I see where it's going and normally it's like, you know, some gobbledygook and I'm like, no, this is definitely not it. So it got to go. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Dr. and BC wants to chime in. Go ahead BC. Good morning. Yeah. Do we know this was singular in the fact that it happened and ended in October, or was there any kind of like progression after the initial incident? I hopped on the week of Thanksgiving this past year so I'm a little like, did I miss it or was I still susceptible to it?

7:32 Any idea Ralph? BC the way that it's phrased in the article is that there was a third party that was able to exploit a vulnerability. So my suspicion based on that is there was an open vulnerability that goes back to October when it started. It's probably something changed and the way I read the article is it was just plugged up in the last few days. So my suspicion is there was and listen, I don't know the specifics of this. I'm not throwing sub stack under the bus, but I just felt like this was an important thing because I love it. Dr. is 100% correct. This happened in October. That's the problem with these things is these these things get exploited months ago. Maybe even you know, longer than that. And it just the big take away today the reinforcement is multi factor authentication.

8:18 Don't use password 1234 bad plan. Change your passwords by platform, Have different passwords by platform. I use a something called LastPass. I'm not trying to sell that here, but having those things in place. But BC my understanding of reading these couple articles is that there was a vulnerability that was just plugged up. So if you were using this then I suspect that that was something that had been going on for some time. Gotcha. I think Jonathan wants to chime in. Go ahead, Jonathan. I was just going to say Mark, the first time I looked at my Apple password things, I almost fell out of my desk chair. Oh, yeah, it was a little startling and a little overwhelming now, too, to have to deal with all that.

8:58 It's good. That feels very time consuming. So like I said, I'm trying to do it in little bite sizes, even though there's certainly an urgency there. All right, thank you, Ralph. Now let me get the mailbag open. I think Alex was going to try chime in too. Oh yeah, I feel like we've we've done this. Alex, anything massively important you want to add? No, I just use my password as password so I don't. Know what the problem is? That should be very secure. Yes, password. I try to at least add the number one next to password when I'm doing it. All right, so here's what we're going to do with the mailbag. Actually, we've got a real life person to ask and share the first topic of the morning and that's our good friend Sid Meadows. So Sid, please share.

9:43 Good morning. Yeah. Good morning, everybody. I end up with a lot of podcast questions on a regular basis. We've made it over the hurdle of getting Episode 1 launched for Season 7, which is great. And so we've gone back and now we're starting to analyze our analytics so that we figure out what to share with our sponsors. And one of the things that we did, and I shout out to Simona for sharing the spreadsheet with me, it's a spreadsheet about quick, you know, quick look at your quarterly analytics, but it's total downloads. So we went back to January 2023 and we researched and got the total number of downloads per month for the full year for 23/24/25 and now we're capturing them for 2026. So we got to 2026 and we were like, wow, we had 658 downloads during the month of 2026 compared to 79 in the month of January in 2025, which is a 88% increase in plays of the podcast.

10:52 So I'm like, OK, this is great, but what episodes were they listening to? So I went into bus route. I couldn't, I could do the custom date range. I couldn't do was see what episodes were there. So I reached out to bus route help desk, which is really amazing. And they sent me a custom URL with my show in it that would allow me to see the episodes that were played during the month. I'm looking for a trend here. Like what? What is it that they're listening to? Why are they listening? Can we get the more of that? Like I'm that's how my brain is thinking. And because data can certainly inform decisions and I was shocked. Of the 658, a hundred of them were from the the trailer episode.

11:36 The rest of them, which would be 558, came from 165 different episodes. And I went, wow, the back catalog, people are listening. People went all the way back to like the original trailer to the episodes in the first season, which is like, kills me that we went that far back. But then they got me thinking like, OK, you have a back catalog of content. And I had a tremendous amount of people discover my show, listen to a variety of different episodes. How can I better market the back catalog? Because in my marketing, I'm going to imagine in a lot of people's marketing, they think forward to what's right in front of them, which is the most current episode. So my question is, how can you best market your back catalog to increase your reach, to increase your exposure, to increase your downloads that's more than your most current episode? Sorry, that was a long question mark. And important to get the back story too. Yeah, I'm sure there's I have several thoughts and I'm curious what others are thinking as well. So again, the question, I'll rephrase it a little bit for everybody.

12:43 Are you marketing your back catalog of podcast episodes? And if so, how? And if not, how could we be marketing our older episodes? All right, so let's go to Alex, and then we'll check in with Ralph. Go ahead, Alex. Good morning. Hey, First off, you can always talk about the other episodes and refer to them, but the main thing is re edit it and then just relaunch the episode if it's a specific topic that you want to bring forward that you're looking for. The other thing that I love to do if you are on YouTube is having a playlist because people love to just go to the next one.

13:23 Even if you, you know, remastered, if you, I forget what you want to call it, but and then relaunch the episode, you'll end up getting some more hits. And then from that, they may want to talk about that topic. Like if you want to do like some reflection set, like you had a guest that you had three years ago and you're like, things have changed in the industry or whatever else and you wanted to put a little intro into it. Hey, this is what's happened. Let's take a look back kind of thing. That might be a good way of doing it. Interesting. Yeah, cool approach. That's something probably not quite what Sid was thinking about, 'cause I my guess is Sid is thinking about just literally those old episodes that still live on his RSS feed, still lives on all the platforms. How do we specifically get people to go back to those? But this?

14:09 But that's a really good strategy as well, yeah, to republish old episodes and maybe edit them a little bit with a little bit of a spin to it, you know, make it a little bit different. But yeah, I think that that can work really well. And maybe one way to make it a little different is just to re record a new intro or record a new intro all together and say why you're re releasing this episode. What's what's so important about it that you want to re release it again? Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to go to Ralph 1st and then I think Ashley had something. Go ahead, Ralph. Sid, I had a question for you. When you looked at the data, was it multiple downloads of all the items in your back catalog or was it just one of each one?

14:51 What? What did you actually see? Because I'm interested in that because I've seen something where these AI bots are now going through podcast episodes and they're bringing all that information into the AI. And I was just wondering, did they give you data to show? Was there a multiple number of downloads per episode, or was it just one per each episode going backwards? Yeah, Rob, Wendy, they gave me the custom URL. Great question to you, by the way. It showed me what episode and how many plays per episode. And I'm going to say the first 100 on the list had multiple plays. The first ten were, you know, 20-30, forty different plays. Then the last 60, whatever were one each, which is, you know, also maybe a little bit of discovery. Because as I was listening to Alex talk and thinking about this, one of the things I realized just now is that in December we changed a lot about the podcast. We went in and updated the about section of the podcast. We updated the footer of the podcast, which went across all of the episodes we included and updated all of our keywords. So this may be leaning towards being discovered based on some of the things, the marketing things we did prior to the launch of this season.

16:04 So that's very possible that some of this is impacted by that. I think that's great. So I'm glad that they gave you that data. The thing that I would add to it, Alex said is go and look at the subject matter of the ones that were getting replayed and think about a different angle of what you could use that because if you find that the audience is keyed into something, you might not record the same thing over again. But you can say, let me take this and and tweak it a little bit. Let me take a different angle. And that I do that on my show, having hit 1000 episodes a couple weeks ago, I'm always looking for something else. And I go back into my back catalog and say, OK, what landed, what didn't land? What could I say that reinforces that, but maybe adds a little different spin to it.

16:44 So congratulations, by the way, said that's awesome. Because what that's telling you is the things that you're changing are making a dynamic impact on your audience. So congratulations. Agreed, and I'm going to go to Ashley in just a moment. I wanted to also. I was thinking more about what Alex was suggesting, and that reminded me of a strategy that I often share with my clients at Ironic Media, what we'd tell them if they really want to get those old episodes out there, get more people to watch or listen. I often suggest you don't have to necessarily repost the episode. Repost the social media content that you've you used that's associated with that episode. Yeah, you may have posted, let's say, a couple of Tik Toks, a couple of reels from that episode way back when it aired, but now go ahead and repost those. That's a strategy that we have kind of lost, at least here in the mornings.

17:41 We don't talk about enough. It's OK to repost your old social media content. Don't feel like, oh, I posted that. You know, it's three months ago, six months ago, two years ago. It doesn't matter. Most likely people aren't getting that far in your social media feed anymore. So repost. I have a question. Yeah. Does Sid number his episodes? We do not number them publicly, meaning. In the titles. I don't think they're not. Yeah, they're not numbered in the title, but they are numbered for us to know what they are in both in our Google Drive and in click UPS as well as in bus route. We number them like S7, O1 so season 7 #1. So if you were just to do the social media thing, I mean, how would they would they be able to find? Well, what I was going to say to that, thank you for asking that question.

18:32 A platform like Instagram that it makes it more challenging, right? Because you can't share links with the post, right? So you have to provide that information. How can they get it? Well, one way you could do it is using some of those services that I know plenty of you have seen where it says, you know, comment podcast and I'll send you, I'll DM you a link, right? That's one way to do it. There's lots of services out there. I would recommend one in particular from community member Jeff Dwoskin. He has Stampede Social. That's his company and they do that very thing and it's really awesome tool if you want to check that out. That's one way to do it. Also, you could just say link in bio.

19:13 I know some people don't love that strategy, but I've found it to work OK for me. Link in bio and just put your link in your bio on and IG. But and and TikTok, I think has similar challenges as Wells, but you could use similar strategies that I just shared. But then on some other platforms, let's say Facebook, for example, you can share that link directly to the episode. So I just so you have to understand the platforms. Yes, Sid. Yesterday I posted a reel about this week's episode and I put a link in the com in the about whatever the copy and I posted it, which I knew the link wouldn't work but I put it there anyway people could read it. It's a super easy link, right?

19:55 I posted it and then I got a pop up from Instagram. I'm wondering if Jonathan knows this. I can actually pay to be a whatever member of Instagram and the links will be live for 4995 a month. Whoa, 50 bucks? Well, that. Is yeah, man, I was shocked. I was shocked. Like yeah, paid to have links live 49 and whatever. There was like multiple options and it showed me the business option because my Instagram is a business but this link to my Facebook business for $49.00 a month the links would be clickable. Wow, Jonathan. 5 links I believe you only get 5 links for that $49.00 Yes, but that is the. Link. It is something like that because it goes up to $500 is the Max on that membership thing. Wow, that's fascinating.

20:43 I know why they're doing that. Because they don't want you to send their users to other platforms. So if you really want to send a user outside of their platform, they're going to charge you for it. It's an interesting strategy on their part. I don't knock them for it. I get why they find it, you know, really challenging to lose people and they want to keep everybody there. I get it. Interesting strategy. I'm sure not a lot of people take advantage of it. But you know what, big companies with budgets, maybe they're they're budgeting for that, who knows? All right, I know there are three people that wanted to chime in, so let's try to be as concise as we can. I know Ashley's really good at that. Ashley, the floor is yours.

21:24 Go for it. What I would. First do is determine which episodes and how many are going to be in this re releasing if you will. I'm not. I don't mean actually re releasing the episode, but the ones you're trying to give more hype and love to. And I know you're on YouTube. What I would do is create a playlist of those episodes. And then what I would do is I would do a e-mail and social media campaign in which you announce, hey, we're going to start showcasing some of our old episodes from the archives. And This is why give a little preview about, you know, what those episodes might cover, the value in those.

22:08 And then, as Mark was saying, release the social media clips associated with those episodes to compliment them and also make new social media clips, which you can also share in an e-mail hyping up those episodes. Oh, great suggestion, especially the last one. They're actually because that just reminded me that, yeah, why not promote it in a newsletter, right? You could have a section in your newsletter that says something like, you know something about visiting the archives, right? Just to remind people that there's a lot of good content out there. I, I love those ideas. Thank you. What I would probably do is go check to see like if your, if your podcast is on a website, if you have your own website.

22:50 And this kind of ties back to what we were talking about yesterday of trying to drive people to your own place. You can connect your website to different SEO tools. Google Search Console is a free one that you can connect to and you can put in the URL of your episode whatever like show notes page or whatever for that specific episode and it will give you a list of keywords that people are using to find your page. So I would go back through some of those episodes and you plug that URL in, see what it's already ranking for or what people are searching for on that, and then update the copy on that page to better reinforce those keywords. Because that's going to ultimately drive your rankings higher in Google search where people are going to end up finding it and it's going to drive people back to your older episodes.

23:44 I love that suggestion, Nick. Thank you. Thank you for thinking outside of our box here, right? That might not be an out-of-the-box suggestion necessarily, but certainly is as far as this conversation has gone. So thank you for that, Nick. I appreciate that one. I'm going to again, keep it moving BC you're up and Ralph, I'm going to give you the final word so that we can keep moving on here. Go for it BC. Let's not downplay the free version of the whole 50 bucks for only 5 links thing on Instagram. The free version of course put a story out there. You can put a free link in the story. Sure, that'll take someone anywhere. Another thing that I like to do is to take your social media reels for your podcast.

24:25 Turn them into a highlight on Instagram. That way they're always there. They're not I archived and shoved away somewhere. Reuse the highlight every now and then as well. All right. I love it. Thank you. BC and Ralph, final word on this question. OK, Mark, here's the thing I'm thinking. I just figured out how to podcast. I figured out how to set up a host. I figured out all these things and now you're saying to me, but now you got to do something else. Mark, let me ask you a simple question. Is this something you can help people with? Oh, absolutely. And as I said earlier, yeah, this that this one of the suggestions I gave, that's something that I work on with my clients, whether it's my production clients, whether it's my consulting and coaching clients. Yeah.

25:06 These are the different types of strategies that I work on every day with our different clients at Ironic Media. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Because this can feel a little overwhelming, you know, if I'm new to this and I don't understand SEO, I don't understand social clips. And if if you could help somebody do this, I think that'd be amazing. Yep, absolutely, Ken. Thank you. Ralph and Jonathan, did you have a question? I know you said Ralph got the last word. I just want to remind people that when you use a link in your story on Instagram, it does actually decrease the reach of your stories in general. If you can use a mini chat connector connector for those, that's going to always be better off for you. Thank you Jonathan Dr. did you want to share the what was in the chat?

25:50 I did so. Dave Campbell in the chat in Clubhouse says something really important. A download is a delivery of a file, not always a human listen, right? So be sure to sign into your Apple and Spotify backends to see time spent listening careful making decisions solely on your hosting site data. So I fully agree with Dave, and the bottom line here is whether you've got a bunch of downloads on an episode or no downloads, whether they've listened all the way through or not, if Sid wants to continue to promote his show and the old episodes, by all means, that's still legitimate. You can still do that.

26:37 And I think it's important because I think a lot of us as podcasters get stuck in the most recent episode. We think that's the thing that we have to promote and we forget about everything else. And why not promote your new episode this week and maybe one or two older ones that's sharing this week as well? Why not? This is more content for you. So I think that's why I'm very focused on this question, not because I think maybe the way that Sid got here is the most effective, but he's here and I think promoting your back episodes is can be really valuable. Sid, did you want to comment since this is your question? Thank you all very much for the information, insights. We have a call tomorrow, marketing person to talk about this and I'm going to actually send her this episode and let her listen to the 1st 20 minutes or so of it to get some additional ideas.

27:28 We're going to, we are going to do like a throwback Thursday kind of thing where we promote on Thursdays. A previous episode, I thought that would be one way to kind of have some fun with it. So but for conversation for another day. So I'm going to put a pin in this and then you can move on. We went to Apple Podcast Connect to look at a couple of episodes. The data is starkly different. Buzz Route tells me one episode had 100 downloads on Apple. Apple tells me it had 9. There's something wrong with Apple analytics though. It is important to go look at Apple. We don't look at Spotify because less than 1% of our plays come from Spotify for.

28:09 So that data is not relevant to us. Like only 5 listens come from Spotify. So as you're looking at data, just know that I at my opinion, I think something is wrong with Apple Podcast Connect and is maybe we could talk about it one day. Maybe we could all go do a comparison and see what we get, Mark, like looking at your platform versus what Apple says because something is wrong with Apple. Yeah, I'm with you there. Said I've seen those discrepancies as well for sure. Ralph, I see you grinning. What? What are you grinning about? No. And so here's the thing, I think looking at percentage of completion in Apple is huge and it makes you want to stab yourself in the heart sometimes because you look at that download number, you're like, man, I'm really knocking it out of the park.

28:57 So I agree with Sid and I disagree with Sid. At the same time, I think we've got to use all the data. Sid, I'm not disagreeing with you that there could be a disconnect on the Apple thing, but I think that even in its little piece of it gives us information. And if you're seeing really good completion numbers and Apple, I think that speaks to things. And if you're seeing not great completion numbers, I think that speaks to something as well. I don't know about the total download numbers, but I know that percentage of completion is something we really need to lean into and and it's not an easy thing to stomach that. That's all I was, that's all I was smiling about. Mark, is it? It's like that come to Jesus moment when you're like, oh man, really? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. OK. I know BC and Dr. both have their hands raised.

29:40 Do you guys have something? OK, Dr. says no, no. OK, Neither of them do. OK, good. Because wheel of jargon, we're going to get into the wheel of jargon. And by the way, this wheel of jargon is brought to you by my company, Ironic Media. And what we do is we Ralph to your question earlier, we help podcasters launch, grow and stay consistent. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, growing your show, or finally getting consistent, that's exactly what I help people do from full production to strategy, coaching and turning your podcast into something that supports your goals. I'd like to talk with you.

30:25 You can schedule a discovery call using the link in the show notes or I think Ashley will, Yep, she's shared it right here on Clubhouse. And you can schedule that discovery call anytime. You'll see my calendar. You can pick a day and time that works for you. And yes, I don't do that very often, gang. And it's something that I'm working on and I'm sharing that behind the scenes because I know that you are a fellow podcaster and I know that podcasters struggle sometimes promoting themselves. I'm calling it out because yes, I struggle with that too. I've been called out by multiple people on this very team through the years. Mark, why don't you promote what you do?

31:07 I don't think that people know exactly what you do. I hear it all the time. I am going to embrace that moving forward. No, I'm not going to just Riddle you with promotions all the time, but I am going to start talking a little bit more about what I do. Well done, Mark. Thank you, Ralph. All right, I'm going to spin the wheel jargon. This is a newer segment of ours. And basically what we do is we collect all the common terms that we just throw around here on this show, assuming that every listener knows what we're talking about, when that's just not the case. We have new podcasters here all the time, and sometimes some of these phrases and terms are unfamiliar to them.

31:49 So I'm going to spin this wheel. I hope you can hear it. So I think last time Clubhouse couldn't hear it. Yeah. Ashley, you can't from Clubhouse, but we can hear it here. Oh, OK. Good. All right. You heard it. All right, Here is the term, and I'm going to go to Jonathan, if you don't mind. Jonathan, I think you can answer this. The term on the wheel today. Not as directly related to podcasting, but as we've just shared, most of us are using social media to help promote our podcast. So this term, Jonathan Shadow Ban, what can you tell us about that term? The fake term shadow ban, actually shadow ban comes from Twitter where they use People used to be banned for doing things, saying things on Twitter at times.

32:39 And that's where it originated from on and a lot of the social media platforms, you're not actually shadow banned. You are banned for a reason, something that you did that's against community guidelines that they will send you information about and that's something that will decrease your reach. So if you get shadow banned, a lot of times it's for a violation of community standards or the expectations on the platform. And it's not really shadow banned because that kind of implies that you don't know about it. You're many times you're given the reason be your central reason by like Instagram has a place you can go to see if you're in good standing. Right. And I think TikTok does as well. Yeah, I believe so as well. Yeah. Yeah, And as a matter of fact, TikTok, I think these days, the shadow ban thing, like Jonathan was saying, it is kind of fake in the sense that a lot of these platforms now they're telling you they're not hiding it from you, right Then that's what shadow ban used to be.

33:31 That was the interpretation of it is that behind the scenes, the platform has done something to your account where they're hurting. They're pulling away from your reach. You can, you no longer can reach the same amount of people because you violated some terms. Well, they tell you now. And as a matter of fact, I'm mad at TikTok because a while back, if you remember, we had Riverside joining us, Kendall, and she was telling us about some new features that came to Riverside. And I had a clip of that that I put on all social media platforms. And when I put it on TikTok, it immediately took it down and said I was violating some policy. It didn't tell me what, just some community standards policy. I couldn't figure it out why?

34:18 Because there was nothing wrong with it. Every other platform had no problem with it. I wasn't doing anything weird. We were just talking about this new feature. So I thought, oh, it's got to be just something's wrong with it. Like it just must be a mistake. So I tried it again and then I got notified that I've got my first warning towards, I guess being banned from TikTok with again, no real explanation. So it is kind of annoying, but at least you know, it is not a quote UN quote shadow ban. At least there is some transparency, although there needs to be more in my opinion. Ralphie Oh, go ahead, Jonathan. 11 more thing I just wanted to say about a shadow ban. If you feel like your content is not getting reach and you haven't been notified about anything, look at your content and make sure it aligns with what your audience is actually looking for. Agreed.

35:08 Yeah. Thank you. Jonathan. Ralph, what do you got? OK, now you fired me up. Now, Mark might get a little spicy here for a second. Well, it is spicy week here on the morning. Crosses into something that really annoys me because I've gotten these community standard alerts because they say I'm making promises I can't keep because I'm saying things that aren't true. I am a 30 year professional licensed accountant with credentials. When I say something about finances, when I say something about money, I can stand behind what I'm saying. And these platforms are constantly saying you're making promises you can't keep. And the problem is you can't talk to anybody. All you got is a stupid community thing violation.

35:49 You can't appeal to anybody. So I am just really frustrated this because let me share my credentials, let me share my license, let me share the CPE classes that I have to take 40 hours every year demonstrating competency in my field. So Mark, this just really steams me because there are people out there that aren't scammers, that aren't playing games, that actually have knowledge that's useful to people. But we're banned from saying it in any kind of proactive or in any way that it seems like clickbait, but it's not. When I say to somebody, I can save you thousands of dollars in tax money if we sit together and do something to look at what you're going on in your situation, I can stand behind that. And for these platforms that just say, well, you're making a statement that you can't back up just steams me. So thank you for letting me the vent a little bit there. But since it was on the wheel of jargon, I had to throw that in there.

36:41 Ralph is riled up. I'd love to hear that. Go ahead BC. Mr. Ralph's point yet? Don't tell me that my 20 years of experience and me putting myself in the 32K of more debt means I don't know what I'm talking about. Sit down and listen up. But going back to to what you were talking about with the violations, I've seen people get kicked off of their lives because they were pushing their business or their company during a live, which would take people away from the TikTok platform. So they were pushed off their lives immediately. I'm like, why? Yeah, what's the point? Yeah, it's really frustrating. And you there is, you know, usually at least with TikTok, I know you can appeal.

37:23 I've had it happen before and appealed it. And then I've actually had success with it saying, Oh yeah, our bad and they remove the warning or what have you. But again, they don't really give you an opportunity to really prove yourself. It's just like, please look at this again, please give me another chance, right? And then maybe they will, maybe they won't. Exactly, it's not like everyone who's got who can go live is in the creator fund account so not everyone's being paid by some Commission from TikTok. So why not let them push a service outside of TikTok that is letting them get some kind of revenue? Like chill out, jeez. Yeah, thank you, BC. All right, let's get back to the mailbag. All right, there we go.

38:07 What do we got here? OK, How do podcasters actually decide what to charge for sponsorship? This comes from somebody on Reddit. In the podcast in the podcasting Reddit they say. Been wondering about this for a while. I listen to a bunch of indie podcasts and some of them have sponsors but I'm curious how they figure out pricing. Like when a brand reaches out, do most people have a fixed rate based on downloads? Use some CPM formula? Just throw out a number that feels right, ask the brand's budget 1st and negotiate from there. This person goes on and says I've heard everything from $18.00 per 1000 downloads to I just doubled what the last brand paid me lol. Would love to hear from anyone who's been through this. How do you figure out your rate?

39:00 Did you feel like you undercharged at first? I see Sid wants to chime in. And Sid being somebody who I know has just recently gone through some some of this himself, I think he's a great person to start with. Go ahead, Sid. First thing I'm going to say is remove CPM from your vocabulary. That is not a strategy that works for independent podcasters. You have to remove that. Don't even think about it. It is not viable. The second thing you have to do is you have to look at what does your show cost you? So production costs if you use an editor, marketing cost if you use a marketing person, I mean add up every expense including your host cost. If you use Opus clips to do social media, like what is everything cost you?

39:48 And then be sure to include yourself into that cost structure. So if you think you spend 3 hours per episode and your hourly rate if you were a consultant is $250, you got to add that to the cost structure. And then you get your total cost. And then you ask yourself how much percentage wise do I want to make on this? And then that's your starting point. The other question to ask, in my opinion, is how much do I want to make? With sponsors, chips of my podcast and then come up with a number. I mean I'm always one to shoot for the moon and go high because you can always come down. It's really hard to go up once you've already started a negotiation. So start high and give yourself some room. I set goals for what we wanted to accomplish with our sponsors. We have 8 sponsors, we have 3 bronze sponsors, 3 silver sponsors and two gold presenting sponsors. And my goal was $10,000 per month in revenue and we got to $7000 per month in revenue.

40:53 So I'm really proud of that and it finally makes my podcast viable as it relates to being a revenue stream in my business, which is what I was after. And so and we just put numbers out there. What I did that was wrong in this process was I had like had a couple people say no, I had a couple people pushed back on the number, but I stood my ground with it and they ended up signing. But what I did wrong was what you got for reframe that What I did wrong, what I will rethink the next time we do this is we will. I gave them too much for being a sponsor. They got too many things. And that was me trying to make it easy for them to say yes.

41:34 And now that we're putting all this crap together, my head hurts. So you know, we will be changing and adjusting that for the next season. But I will also tell you we are not done selling sponsorships. We will continue to sell sponsorships throughout the course of the year and we will prorate based on when they potentially join. We've got some new targets. And the other thing that we're doing which is new is if a sponsor, if you're the gold sponsor, you got it, you got a show out of it, so you got a full episode out of it. But we've had other level sponsors ask us to do a show to update on their business. As long as it's not for full promotion, I'm OK with that. We're going to charge them for that episode, $1500 for that episode if they want to do it, and which is another way to bring revenue into the business.

42:22 So I'm really focused on this and making this a true monetary component of my business. And at the end of the day, there are no rules around this. You can do what you want to do, know what it cost, you know what you want to make and start there, but always start high because you can come down. So hope that was helpful, Mark. Very. Let's give Sid a round of applause because this not only was it very valuable information, just kudos to you, Sid, for yeah, for really just going digging deep and figuring that all out and finding success. And also by the way, Tim, in the chat, I like what he shared. I have a couple clients that do this as well. He has a client that charges sponsors to cover the costs to produce the podcast. Tim produces their podcast.

43:07 So their standard, what they're going for is they just want to make sure their costs are covered. And so that's what they charge with their sponsors. I think the bottom line about sponsorship. Is it is. Evergreen And that's what people are like. Podcasters have to remember, yes, you're trying to get money, but as long as that podcast episode is up, that sponsorship is in there. So they're going to constantly be getting it. And I and I just commend Sid. For like, just ABC's exactly. So whenever I hear something about money, it's almost like Beetlejuice, you know, like I got to feel like I got to chime in here. But a couple of things. First of all, congratulations, Sid. Number one thing I think we need to talk about is you don't monetize a show, you monetize an audience.

43:53 So you've got to have a focus on what value you bring into your own. That's number one thing. Secondarily thing I said, I agree with you, look at your cost, but I think you can get trapped there. So don't get trapped there. The third thing, and this is going to be my big take away for this segment is what do you have that you can sell? That's yours. I think the first place you got to go because, and a lot of people, Mark might, if you're a new listener, you might not know what CPM even means. So maybe we should take a second and just define what CPM is because CPM in my view is a race to the bottom. And if you think that's going to be the way to monetize your podcast, it's probably not going to work because if you don't have at least 10,000 downloads per episode, CPM is not going to pay you enough to buy a cup of coffee. So I tell people all the time when I work with them, when I coach them, hey, what do you have that you can sell? What are your consulting service? What are your coaching services?

44:48 And if you can't do that, maybe some affiliate income. But CPM, if you want to talk about what that is, Mark, I think it'd be a valuable discussion, is a race to the bottom. Since I was debating who to go to to define CPM just because you were already talking Ralph. But then Sid was like, you remove that from your your vocabulary. So Sid, you want to tell us what CPM is? Or is that really gone from your vocabulary and you don't know anymore? I'm going to have to go rinse my mouth out after I actually say I think it's. I think it's cost per million I believe is what it is 1000. Per thousand, yes.

45:31 Yeah, OK. It's stupid, whatever. But what the M is, is Millie, I think is what it actually stands for, but it's Greek and it's really for thousand. So basically what does that mean? It means you are charging for every 1000 downloads really in the in podcasting terms, that's what it that's what it comes down to which that's why. You're going to put it in real numbers, like some companies will pay you $0.18 per 1000 downloads, which means you got 1000 downloads, that customer had an ad in that episode and you made $18.00. That is not a sustainable revenue model.

46:13 Right. Agreed. Agreed. I like the model that you've chosen. I like the model that Ralph has chosen much better than that. Yes, Dr., go ahead. OK, well, first I think that Sid needs to create one of those self-guided mini courses on how he just schooled us in in his. In monetization. Secondly, who came up with the whole CPM? Radio. TV. Where $0.18 per thousand was. Oh, well, the number, yeah, the number, I don't know how that was ever factored in, but yeah, the the strategy, that's an old media strategy. Well, I want to know who came up with the number and I want to punch him in the throat.

47:01 All right, well, there you go. There's. Honestly, I think it's the yeah, I think it's the brand TR that determines like how much they want to pay. I'm not going to do a mini course on how I did it, but I am going to apply to be a speaker at the Empowered Podcasting event, I believe in August to share the message around how I did this with everybody that's there. So I love you know anybody put a good word in for me, if you know anybody, I. Know a couple of people. I know a couple of people over at Empowered Podcasting. And if you want to get a ticket now to see that talk, because let's be real, Sid Sid's got the job at this point. He's also selling sponsorships for that talk on the side, but he didn't want to say anything to mark sponsorship.

47:44 Great idea. There's a sponsorship package for his coffee cup as well as his pen and his jacket on the back. He's going to be like a racing car jacket, so he's plenty of opportunity for you. Perfect. Great. Well. Mark, I'm going to put a pin in this too. OK? Sorry, but Ralph said something that I can't let slide, which is he's 100% on point. They are sponsoring because of my audience. They're sponsoring because of the people that follow me, the people that listen to me. And I am zoned in as to who I am talking to. I know exactly who my audience is. And this is payment for access to my community.

48:25 This is payment to access to decision makers who will buy or influence the purchase of what the people that are my sponsors are of what they're selling. And that cannot be more heavily confirmed. I've lost my words here. But that's exactly the benefit of I'm seven years in. It took me at least three to five years to really build this audience that I've got that's loyal. And I know exactly who they are. I know exactly what their problems are and I talk to them everyday. And that's exactly what my sponsors have purchased. Sid, I know earlier you shared a little bit about downloads. When you were talking about the anomaly you were discovering about your downloads, I'm curious, are you open to sharing with the audience, say, your average downloads?

49:08 And let's just put an asterisk there and acknowledge what Dave had shared earlier, the fact that, yes, downloads don't mean everything, but that is a metric that is commonly discussed. So. And I want to want to give people an idea of the size of an audience and what Sid's charging to really give them a little more confidence that yeah, you can charge even with a quote UN quote smaller audience. Can I can I preface that question with another question first? Sure, Sid. Word downloads discussed in your negotiations with these sponsors. That's a great question to Nick. So downloads were discussed, but averages, but it was not heavily discussed because in our sponsorship document, I shared the ecosystem, meaning the website, LinkedIn, Instagram, I shared my ecosystem of the people that are part of my ecosystem. My website gets 84,000 visits a month. That's significant.

50:06 Like significant. I don't know what the hell to do with it. We're working on that. That's significant, right? But the bounce rate's really high too. So we're working on that too and changing pages and moving things around. So yes, Nick, they were considered, but that's not the one thing It was I, I presented the entire ecosystem. I have a whole page. It's a three page document. I have a whole page that are that are reviews the people have left me ratings and reviews of the show so that the sponsor could read what people were saying and they go back to the very beginning and to the most recent. You know, I gave a full page of analytics where we were listed where you can find us. The website statistics is much other demographics I could provide from, you know, Apple and Buzz Sprout, including our consumption rate, which is 84%.

50:54 But to your question mark, on average we get 200 downloads per episode. In the first week, we get about 100. So the Trend Report is a small podcast. It's a small podcast compared to, you know, DR's favorite personality. We're a really small podcast. I'm really proud of what we've created and what we've done and the fact that every time we publish an episode, we have 100 loyal people that come back and listen in the first seven days. I love it. Thank you, Sid. I'm glad I asked that question because I think that makes you even more relatable in your situation, even more relatable. And I hope give some people some hope and pause about what they're doing, including yours truly. So thank you for sharing that, Sid. Mark, I wanted to add something there because it encapsulates the discussion.

51:50 So if Sid is getting 200 downloads per episode, imagine if he went to the CPM route, he would be making zero O. This just proves if you're a small indie podcaster and you've built a family and that's what Sid has built. Sid has built a family. You can use that family to benefit you financially. You just have to understand what you're doing. Don't get in that race to the bottom of CPM, but use that. Build those relationship with your family. Fantastic job Sid, and this is like the mic drop moment. If you're an indie podcaster, you can do this, you can make this happen. You just have to think about what is the value you're giving to your audience and then what is the value they're expecting from you in return. But make sure you measure wisely. Make sure you pick the right sponsors also, because what you don't want to do is put your gold out there in front of somebody that's going to take advantage of them or not be a good fit.

52:47 So this works both ways. You want to find the sponsor, but don't. Don't put yourself out there for something that's not going to be a good fit for your audience. Thank you, Ralph. Listen, gang, I think we are out of time and we have more questions to get to. So the plan is we will get to a couple more of these tomorrow on the show, bright and early, 7:00 AM Eastern. And then of course we'll wrap up tomorrow and the week with our wins from this past week. So bring your questions, bring your wins tomorrow. We don't want to just hear from our usual cast and crew. We want to hear from you too. So please join us. You can get all the information and all the different ways. You can join us in the show notes or just go to podcastingmorningchatcom.

53:34 So until tomorrow, make it a great day everybody take care.