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Advertising
On radio, television, newspapers, or the Internet, advertising is the mainstay of marketing. Companies will pay to have their name and/or product included in the program. Radio and television first started advertising by having the show "brought to you by..." and by inserting commercials into their programming. Newspapers and the Internet have placed advertising all around their medium in banners or classifieds or display ads. Even text-based e-newsletters delivered to your email account usually have at least one advertiser buried in the text.
If you become a podcaster, you may want to consider advertising as a way to make money on your podcast. This can be done in a couple of different ways.
- Your program can be "brought to you by" the product you're being paid to advertise.
- You can mention the advertised product or company part way through, kind of like a mini commercial, or you might say "let's pause for a brief word from our sponsor" before launching into an advertisement.
- Or, like modern television advertising, you can "embed" advertising inside your highly informative podcast by providing good quality programming to the listener while casually mentioning a specific product or company. This has to be done very carefully, but it is quickly becoming the new form of advertising on television. For example, in response to an interview-format question from a listener who has a problem, you might say, "I had that problem too and I tried using XYZ product and found it solved the problem."
>>>TECHNICAL TERM: EMBEDDED ADVERTISING
Advertising has long been the way marketers have moved their product or raised consumer awareness for the company. As consumers become more savvy however, advertising has had to become higher-quality or less obvious in order to be successful. If you offer free podcasts people will probably understand if you include advertising in your podcast, but make sure it's not too rampant or else the perceived value of your podcast will be lost.
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An infomercial is an hour long commercial while popular sitcom Friends had a commercial-free episode with embedded advertising. Which would you rather watch? Advertising is a necessity but consumers get tired of it easily since we face so much of it every day.
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You may also face a challenge as you look for advertisers for a couple of reasons: first, podcasts are available to people all over the world so a local company with one store in your town might not be interested in paying for advertising that will be heard by people on the other side of the world. Second, podcasting is such a fledgling industry that advertisers may be reluctant to pay good money for something they don't understand.
To overcome these obstacles you need to make sure that your podcast has value. And you'll probably be more successful finding an advertiser if your podcast has a niche market it serves. That way, if you were podcasting on the latest in horse racing, you are probably going to have a better time finding an advertiser than if you are simply podcasting about animals in general.
When marketing your podcast to advertisers, develop a very quick explanation of what a podcast is, then tell them what your podcast does, and how many listeners it reaches. And most importantly: tell them the benefit they will receive from advertising with you!
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