Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian are trying to answer the question of whether you should use a podcast to focus on communicating with your audience or to earn money in Episode 44 of their Internet Marketing Podcast. I won’t tell you what the final word is, so you’ll have to head on over to listen.
I look at it another way. I believe you should be using your podcast as part of your funneling process. Since podcasts are offered free, this should be the item that pulls prospects in. Your podcast is the breadcrumbs and you use it to lead them to your website to purchase the full course meal.
So, in a sense, I’m saying that you are using your podcast to communicate in order to monetize later on. Yet, you should think about your podcast as feeding your product funnel so that you’re clear about the action you want listeners to take after listening to your podcast.
Technorati: alex mandossian, paul colligan, podcast monetization, funnel, sales
Good question Steve. I’ll have to take a listen to your podcast and hear what you’re doing before I can offer my tips, although I still think the funnel approach would work for your podcast as well.
I guess for the average podcaster who’s producing notthing more complex than an audio blog, I guess this strategy makes sense.
But what if your podcast is your product? What if, like mine, your podcast takes hours of production for minutes of finished product? Wouldn’t you want to find a way to support that work directly, rather than using it to make other work for yourself.