We are covering a topic today, that makes a lot of podcasters uncomfortable. Now, I'm not going to say that every podcaster is uncomfortable with selling on their podcast. But if you don't know where to even get started, I think that this is one of those ideas that just kind of freaks people out there like I, what do you mean, I can sell to people on my podcast? Don't I have to have a brand sponsor? And no, they have to just tell me what to do? No, absolutely not. I sell on my
podcast all the time. But there is just a certain way that I believe you can approach it and do it in the right way. And I also think that we just need to talk about selling on your podcast anyway, I get this question a lot. Like, how do you feel about people selling on a podcast? And I don't mind, I really don't, I don't care. It doesn't bother me. So we are going to talk about what products or services I specifically sell, like, I'm gonna give you examples, because I know you're
always always up for a good example. We're going to talk about how you sell. But we're also going to talk about where to draw the line. When is it too much, so let's get right to it. Welcome to the Proffitt Podcast where we teach entrepreneurs how to start launch and market their podcast. I'm your host, Krystal, Proffitt, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Because if you've been trying to figure out the world of podcasting, think of this show as the
time saving shortcut you've been looking for. So let's get right to it, shall we?
You can probably tell in my voice. I am super congested right now. And hopefully getting over a sickness. And I mean, it's just all in the nasal area. And I'm like, really, like when you talk for a living when you podcast. It's like this congestion is not working for me, like I at least sound better than I did a few days ago. But oh my gosh, like this is just
killing me. I've been waiting to record this episode, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna feel better and a few days, and then I'll be able to record it, I'll be able to record it. And I'm just like, you know what the show must go on, we're just going to record this, I may have a lot more stopping and pausing to cough. Or to take a drink of water during this episode.
But this is a really important episode, because I know that many of you listening, want to sell your own products. Or maybe you want to have a membership or service that you offer, to your listeners in selling on a podcast is something that I believe people have pretty strong opinions about. Either people are all for it, or people are like, Oh, my gosh, no, no, no, you don't sell on a podcast, which is just kind of weird to me. But we're gonna
we're going to get into into all that. But that is the initial question that came up is how do you feel about selling on your podcast?
And first, I want to dive into what do I sell, like me Proffitt Media on this podcast? Like, what are the things that I sell? And if you're a longtime listener, you're like, I can tell you exactly what Krystal sells. I sell the digital courses, right? I have my own digital courses. I have the podcast toolkit, like I have my own programs that I will cycle through, and we're going to talk about how I
actually sell them in a second. But this is something that I sell on a regular basis, either by mentioning them or having actual launches and promotions around them. But that's one thing. Another thing is affiliate launches and partner promotions. Like we're in the middle of a campaign right now. And you've probably heard me talking about it. And these are things that I use my podcast because it's part of my platform to talk about the benefits of being a part of an affiliate
launch or partner promotion. And then another thing is the products and services that I endorse, right I tell you all about buzzsprout. I tell you all about stream yard like these are products and services that I use on a regular basis. So I talk about them here on the podcast. So those are the things that I quote unquote, sell even though some of them are like affiliate commission type things I'm not actually selling you a physical products, it could be a digital product or service. But
those are the things that I sell. How do you feel about it? Right? This is the actual essence of the question. And I gotta be really honest, I didn't know how to sell on my podcast when I first started playing around with things. So all the things that I'm sharing here with you today are from my own experience of trial and error in what has worked with my audience, my like, topic, my category, my industry, so it could be totally
different for your audience. But you know, I love giving you good examples and sharing with you the things that I've learned along the way.
So my favorite way to sell on the podcast, and this is only been made available recently, like in the last year as even been a full year yet, is dynamic content. If you're a buzzsprout user, you have this feature already in your dashboard. Like you can actually just upload a audio file to the very beginning or the very end of your podcast. And that could be your own self sponsored ad, I'm gonna link to a few of my favorite resources I have about dynamic content.
If you're like crystal, I don't know what that is, don't worry, I got you covered. I have lots of YouTube videos, I have some podcast episodes for you to check out. But the reason why I like this so much is because it's not difficult to do. And it can be applied immediately to all of your episodes. So when I sit down to create a piece of
dynamic content, I'll record it. And it's usually less than a minute and a half, because of the way I you know, technical things on the back end, I just like to have my music playing in the background. And I know that the music that I have, in order to make it to where it's not too much editing on my part, I have to make it a certain length. So I will record the audio clip, put some music behind it, upload it into buzzsprout. And then I can click a button and apply it to all of
my podcast episodes. It's just my favorite, it works so stinking well. And I think that if there's one place that you can really experiment and try new things, if you're like, I just don't know, if I want to say that in every episode, that's fine, put it in your dynamic content, and then you can swap it out and change it. And buzzsprout has recently updated to where the dynamic content feature where now you have like a back catalogue and a library of all the dynamic
content pieces that you've used. So I can see which ones I have played or how many times they've been played or downloaded. Which is really, really cool. So I love dynamic content. It's my favorite favorite way to sell on a podcast.
Now the second one is baked in ADS within an episode. So this is what I used to do before dynamic content became a thing. And it's what you hear and a lot of other podcast where if there's like a corporate sponsor, I always think of like better help. Like they have done an amazing job in securing a lot of really big name podcasts. Like I feel like I mean, I know about the company, because I've heard them from host
read ads on so many different podcasts. But what will happen is typically, the podcast will go to like a short break. And you'll hear the host reading an ad. That's all about the better help company or how the host is used it or how it's helped someone and that they know, that is a bait in AD within an episode. But you can create those for yourself like this is what I did. Prior to dynamic content being an option, I would go I do
the same thing with the dynamic content, right? I go, I record it and then I would just have to do some more work on the editing. Like in the actual episode, I would have to drop in that audio clip within the episode that I had just recorded. And then make sure everything flowed well. Like there was just it was a little bit more finessing to the actual audio file. But it wasn't complicated. Like it wasn't this overly they look oh my gosh, it's so stressful to do it. It wasn't it was it was
totally fine. So I've done baked in ads, and that is totally a way to go about selling something within an episode.
Another thing is just mentioning When you're selling, so here is a great example, at the very beginning of this, I talked about some things that I sell, or you know, the that I'm affiliated with. And I mentioned buzzsprout, and stream yard, I didn't say anything like, like, Oh my gosh, you have to buy, or you have to sign up for buzzsprout with my account, and you have to sign up for stream yard using my affiliate link. I just mentioned it.
And then what I would do is have a link in my show notes for you to go, you know, take advantage of the free trial that is associated with my affiliate account or tell you about another way that you can grab a special promotion that they're doing. So you don't have to be like overtly over the top when it comes to selling on your podcast. If a more natural fit works for you, where does it feel like there's a break in what you're talking about on your podcast, versus like having an actual ad spot
within your show? to sell something? These are just options. I'm just telling you all the things that I've done over the last few years to sell things on my podcast and what's worked for me. And admissions are just super easy. Like I mean, I could even say, you know if you if you want to give us brown a free trial, you can go to KrystalProffitt.com/buzzsprout. And here's another like side note, like podcast hack, if you want to
call it that. But whenever you're creating URLs for your affiliates, make sure they're super easy to remember. Because that's the only reason why I can say KrystalProffitt.com/buzzsprout, or /streamyard. Like that's how I set those up, because I want them to be easy for me to remember, but also for you as my audience, so and that I kind of blended in the last two together. So let me count these down again.
So number one, how do you sell on your podcast dynamic content number two baked in ads, number three ad mentions, and number four, is telling people to go to the show notes to learn more. And this is where you know how if you go to someone's website, if they'll have like, the Google AdSense or, you know, some people will have just different types of ad, whether it's media vine, or Google ads, whatever, whatever they're
using to run ads on their website. Well, instead of doing that, I will put my own like, I have an affiliate ad for buzzsprout on there, I also have an ad for my book, start a binge worthy podcast that's always in my show notes. I just leave that there. It's just a recurring poster, like, on it's it's advertising is free advertising, because it's my show, and it's my show notes, so I can set them
up. However I want to. And I love the idea of promoting my own products and services and having control over that, as opposed to, you know, trying to get Google AdSense or something else displaying on my website. Okay, and it's a lot cleaner and more uniform, because it's all my brain colors anyway. Alright, so we talked about, what do I sell? How do you sell?
And then the last thing I wanted to touch on is when is it too much? Because this is a question people that are hesitant about selling on their podcasts, they're like, what is it just I don't want to bother my audience. What am I bothering my audience? In? Honestly, I think it's only too much. If you aren't adding value to your audience like I In other words, like I know a good majority of listeners who will hear an ad on this podcast, you're not going to be offended.
You're just going to be like, Oh, that's not for me right now. And maybe you'll fast forward or maybe you'll tune that out. And then you'll come back in and you'll be like, Okay, look, I'm ready to. I'm ready to hear what this episode was about. You're not offended by it. And I think that so many people are terrified to offend their audience. They're like, well, I came here to listen to this podcast, but oh my gosh, like they they mentioned something that they're selling.
Yeah, if your podcast is part of a business, which most of you it is, then you are likely going to be selling Do you have to sell it every episode? No. Do you have to sell on every other episode? No. Do you have to even put an ad in your podcast whatsoever? No, you surely don't. But I believe that when it becomes too much like I think this is almost like an irrational fear that people have like I'm bothering people. If I'm talking about My
own products and services I'm bothering them. But the truth is, the only way you're going to be bothering them is if you're not adding value. Like, I don't come on here and tell you, okay, here's a great example, I get a lot of really bad pitches for collaborations. And this is just really been increasing a lot in the last six months, there's brand new startup companies, that
will reach out to me. And I mean, it's just, it's a hot mess, y'all, there's so many typos like, it's, it's, it's just not a good fit for me professionally. And personally, I'm just like, I wouldn't use this product. So I, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. But where it would be too much for my audience, if I said, Oh, but this company is going to pay me. So I'm just going to push this to my audience, knowing that it's not
a good fit. Well, that's when it's going to be too much, because your longtime loyal listeners, they're going to know, they're going to know when you're not being authentic when you're just phoning it in, and you're just, you know, reading an ad on a piece of paper, because you're getting paid to do it. I'm sorry, I'm not about that. And I know that there's some people that they're totally fine. They're like, yeah, I'll take, I'll take somebody's ad money all day, if, you know, if
they're gonna pay me, I'll read their ad. That's not me. That's not me, it needs to be aligned with my podcast, my message my audience, in order for me to feel good about it at the end of the day. So where it gets less appealing to the bigger, like, broader audience, is when there's so much like constantly happening, right? There's so many ads, there's so many mentions, there's too many calls to action. And there's just not a lot of relevancy to the audience, and no added value to the
listener. So that's what I think gets quote, like too much is when you've lost sight of why you're mentioning something, or why you're talking about a product or service. If you can't answer that, then yeah, you may need to reevaluate and think about what are your goals with selling on your podcast? And what does that look like for you? Now, I didn't actually write this down. I'm like, going off the cuff, you're going off script here.
But people will ask me what, how often can I sell something on my podcast, I say every episode, every single episode. And I believe that there is a limit to how many times you can say something on a podcast, and then it just becomes white noise to the people that have heard it. So this is why I like dynamic content, because I can change it up, you won't hear the same piece of dynamic content on this podcast for more than probably two to three weeks. I don't like to leave it up any
longer than that. And honestly, I think that that's still a long time. But that's because I have two episodes every single week. And so that's if you're a regular listener, you listen every Tuesday, every Thursday, that's a long time for you to hear the same ad over and over and over again. But if you are just publishing one episode a week, you could put out a piece of dynamic content once a month. So that's like 12
opportunities for you to share, right? If we're thinking of a monthly basis, over the course of a year, you could just have 12 things that you promote on your podcast, and you just change it out every month, you're like, Okay, one month, I'm going to sell my digital program. And then the next month, I'm going to talk about my favorite, you know, planner that I like to use, and I'm going to share my affiliate link, and then the next month, and then you just measure, you sit
back and measure. And the reason why I'm sharing all this here with you today is because that's all I've done, y'all, this is just me trial and error telling you what's worked, what hasn't worked, and letting you know that it's okay, if you're afraid, like I'm gonna try this and it may not work, it might not anything that I shared here with you today may not work for you and your podcast, or it could blow your expectations out of the water. Right. So I don't want you to be afraid to try
something on your podcast. And if you're like this feels icky, it didn't feel right or felt forced, it didn't feel authentic, then don't do that again, whatever that thing was that you tried. That didn't feel true to you true to your audience. Don't do it again. But just because you try something one time to sell on your podcast and you're like, Oh, this doesn't work. I tried dynamic content once Hello Get up for one day and
nothing happened. No, you got to give everything a proper chance to try it out, put it out there and see how your audience responds to it.
But that's all I have for y'all today. I hope you enjoyed this. I really been wanting to talk about selling on your podcast. I think that it's something that like I said, I had to learn by trial and error. And I'm gonna link to a bunch of other important information about dynamic content and self sponsored ads in the show notes. So
KrystalProffitt.com/episode289. And if you're listening to this in real time, I'm really excited because my friend and mentor Amy Porterfield, she has this awesome brand new training coming up. That is all about the five little known mistakes most course creators make and how to avoid them. So if you're thinking about selling a digital course, and you're like, I don't even know how to go about that. I don't even know what that looks
like. Come join us in her free training because it's going to have so many awesome takeaways, especially if you're just getting started. And you're like, I want to avoid all the mistakes that most people make. You definitely want to come to this training. So I'll have a link in the show notes. So again, KrystalProffitt.com/episode289. But that's all I have for you today. So as always remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.