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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
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The Showrunner
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Zero to Book
The Showrunner
hosted by Jerod Morris and Jon Nastor

No. 070 3 Important Lessons About Sponsorships That Will Make You More Money

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Previous Episode:No. 069 How to Identify Potential Guests for Your Show More Episodes Next Episode:No. 071 When Is the Right Time to Start Another Podcast?

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No. 070 3 Important Lessons About Sponsorships That Will Make You More Money

Do you want to make more money from your podcast? Rhetorical question. 🙂 Of course you do! We all do. One of the clearest paths to revenue with a podcast is sponsorship, but it can also be the most difficult to tap into it, especially for newer or niche shows. In this episode, Jerod shares three lessons he learned recently when he signed a new sponsor on to one of his shows.

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In another yes-we-kept-it-to-less-than-30-minutes episode, Jerod and Jonny discuss:

  1. Why you always need to be on the lookout for potential opportunities — and what, specifically, you should look for
  2. How to be ready for those opportunities when they hit
  3. The benefits of being a showrunner, not just a podcaster, and creating an experience for your audience that goes beyond your podcast

Plus, Jerod discusses how he handled the legal and payment aspects of the sponsorship.

Listen, learn, enjoy …

Listen to The Showrunner below ...

No. 070 3 Important Lessons About Sponsorships That Will Make You More MoneyJerod Morris and Jon Nastor
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The Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Remarkable Podcast is a simple, no-frills, 9-step plan to get your podcast off the ground..

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The Show Notes

  • Follow Jerod on Twitter: @jerodmorris
  • Follow Jonny on Twitter: @jonnastor
  • Showrunner FM

The Transcript

No. 70 3 Important Lessons About Sponsorships That Will Make You More Money

Jerod Morris: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Welcome to The Showrunner, where we have one goal: teach you how to develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. Ready?

Welcome back to The Showrunner. This is episode No. 70 of The Showrunner. I am your host, Jerod Morris, VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined by my co-host, Jonathan Nastor, host of Hack the Entrepreneur and many other things. Jonathan, how are you today?

Jonny Nastor: I’m doing excellent, Jerod. I wish there was a long form of Jerod I could use right now.

Jerod Morris: We know that regular people call you Jon. Your friends can call you Jonny. Who exactly calls you Jonathan?

Jonny Nastor: My mother.

Jerod Morris: Your mother. Okay.

Jonny Nastor: And other people when they’re angry. One or two other people in my life when they’re angry.

Jerod Morris: Ah, okay. When we get angry, we can call you Jonathan Nastor. All right, folks, keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. Jonny, real quick to kick off today’s episode, I’m going to put you on the spot. Are you ready?

Jonny Nastor: I’m on the spot, so I guess that means yes.

Review: The Four Essential Elements of a Remarkable Podcast

Jerod Morris: You can’t really be ready to be put on the spot. What are the four essential elements of a remarkable podcast? We haven’t talked about these in a while, and I figured I don’t want to get too far into season two before we quickly review these, especially for our newer folks.

Jonny Nastor: I believe it’s AUSP — so authenticity, usefulness, sustainability, and then profitability.

Jerod Morris: Yes, and you can use the mnemonic device ‘A Unicorn Sings Plaintively’ to remember those, AUSP. That’ll work, but yes, you are correct — authenticity, usefulness, sustainability, and profitability. I think over these next few episodes we’ll probably be touching on these as we move forward.

Why Profitability Is Also Essential

Jerod Morris: Today, we’re going to talk about one specifically and that is profitability. Ultimately, Jonny, obviously we’re here to create authentic connections. We want to be useful, and we want to create shows that will last. But the other thing for a podcast to remain, to grow, and to be great is that it’s got to be profitable. It’s got to be profitable in the sense of, for us as showrunners, the amount of time that we put into it. We’ve got to get more out than we put in. Our audience has to get a payoff, a return on the investment of their time, and it’s not just about time. It’s also about money.

At some point, our shows have to make money to pay for themselves and to even possibly become profit centers of their own. Today, we want to talk about that and want to talk about sponsorship and some important lessons that I learned recently from something I went through with one of my shows that, if you pay attention to these, if you pay heed to these lessons, they will make you more money. Not that they might make you more money. They will make more money if you do these. So we wanted to outline these and discuss them today.

Jonny Nastor: I say we do it.

Jerod Morris: Are you ready, Jonathan?

Jonny Nastor: Let’s jump into it, Jerod.

Jerod Morris: Let’s do it.

How Jerod Seized an Opportunity to Secure a Valuable Sponsor

Jerod Morris: All right. Jonny, I’d like to tell you a quick story, if I may. This is in relation to my show, The Assembly Call, which we’ve talked about on the show a lot. Started as a post-game show for Indiana basketball games and has become kind of a year-round thing now.

Along with the podcast, we have a website that we do a lot with, and we had a sponsor last year. SeatGeek sponsored us. They were really getting into sports sponsorships. They really wanted to go with niche sites, and so they reached out to us. That has become a really, really good relationship for us. They re-upped again for this year.

Actually, I didn’t mention this as a lesson, but we can preface this by saying that, once you do get a sponsor, you really want to do a good job. Treat it like a partnership. As you said before, Jonny, as you have said many times, so it can sustain and so it can keep going.

That sponsorship for us, SeatGeek, has continued, but as I entered the new season coming up — and this show really gets hot and heavy during basketball season, which is from November until about April — I really wanted to expand and get more into sponsorship. I didn’t exactly know how I wanted to do that. I’ve gone over to Midroll and submitted the show there. They consistently tell us that we don’t have big enough traffic numbers, which is a little bit disappointing, but hey, it is what it is.

I just realized that we’re a niche show. We do very well with our niche. We get donations. We have the SeatGeek sponsorship, but to get additional sponsorships, it was really going to have to be going out and finding opportunities, identifying opportunities. This happened several weeks ago when something went viral on Twitter.

There’s a T-shirt company, and they’re called Hoosier Proud. Indiana, we’re Hoosiers. That’s what the state nickname is, and that’s what our university nickname is, Hoosier Proud. They created a T-shirt that went viral. I saw this, and I thought to myself, “You know, we make T-shirts for The Assembly Call, and we could use a new T-shirt provider. Hoosier Proud, that name, it really is a nice branding fit with what we do. I wonder if there would be some kind of opportunity there.”

I had no idea kind of what their background was, if they even thought about podcast sponsorship, anything about them. If they even knew what the show was. Ended up just reaching out to the guy and just introduced myself, said, “Hey, I run The Assembly Call,” gave him a few just quick overview numbers, said, “I’d love to talk to you sometime about a potential sponsorship because I think there could be some real synergy here between our audience and the people that you’re targeting.” Emailed me back, we talked, and within about 48 hours, we had ironed out the details for a really nice sponsorship deal for the entire season.

They’re actually going to sponsor, at the beginning of every episode we have what’s called the Banner Moment where we highlight the biggest moment from the game. It’s now going to be called the Hoosier Proud Banner Moment. So they’re sponsoring that part of the show.

They’re also going to be sponsoring some of our email blasts that we send out, and it was a great lesson — there were three lessons, and I’m going to detail those — but it was really just eye opening to me. I think a lot of times with podcast sponsorships we think it’s this thing that only big sites get, or we have to go through Midroll to do it or that it’s going to be really complicated.

It was a really great eye opener and reminder that, look, at the end of the day, a sponsorship is going to be about a relationship that you can build. That relationship can begin simply by reaching out and beginning a conversation. That doesn’t mean that you have to have an exact end in mind — and maybe you reach out and try to start a conversation and it doesn’t even happen — but sometimes it does, you go down the road, and it turns into something really special and really lucrative.

I’m going to detail three lessons here in a second, three specific lessons that I learned and how you can apply that to your show, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on that, Jonny. In part, I was inspired by you and what you did with your sponsorships before you’d even launched with Hack the Entrepreneur and the idea of, look, treat sponsors like partnerships. Treat people like people. Be human, and good things are going to happen from it.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. It’s good advice. It’s making me think that I maybe lost some of that. You mentioned Midroll a lot. They’re great to work with, but I don’t get contact with my sponsors anymore. They middleman the whole thing. It makes my job easier in that way, but at the same time, you lose that connection that I used to have people like FreshBooks. It does get hard. It’s hard to scale, I guess, keeping those relationships going, especially if you have two different ad spots a day, and you’re running three shows a week.

It’s a lot of relationships to keep up with, but I admire going back to that and almost, as you were saying explaining this, it was like, “Man, I should just go back to that model,” because it was cool. It was good. I liked it. I think it’s more profitable, not even just monetarily, but I think for the show and for the sponsor, too. Then you just hustled, man. That was awesome. See something go viral, reach out like, “Let’s make something work.”

Jerod Morris: You do. It’s funny because now I think back to other opportunities when I could’ve done this in the past and hadn’t. I don’t know what it was about this moment where I was like, “This would be a good thing. Let me just reach out here real quick,” instead of waiting or thinking of all the reasons why it wouldn’t happen.

Lesson 1: Why You Always Need to Be on the Lookout for Potential Opportunities — and What, Specifically, You Should Look For

Jerod Morris: This leads to lesson number one, which is to always be on the lookout for potential opportunities. You never know when they’re going to pop up, and you really want to be on the lookout so that you can identify them and take action. That’s the sub-lesson here: be on the lookout for potential opportunities, and then you’ve got to take action on them. We’ll talk about, in lesson two, how to be ready when those opportunities hit.

You may be thinking, “Okay, I’ll be on the lookout for opportunities, but what am I looking for?” Well, one thing you’re looking for, obviously, is synergy between their audience and your audience. If you don’t have that, it’s not going to matter. The SeatGeek sponsorship wouldn’t do anything if they didn’t sell tickets to athletic events and we’re a sports podcast. That obviously works.

With Hoosier Proud, we know that our audience buys gear and buys T-shirts because they’ve already done that with gear that we sell. But more specifically, we are a very Indiana-focused audience. It’s a niche audience, and Hoosier Proud sells T-shirts for people from Indiana. I mean they’re T-shirts of the state logo and mottos of the state. It’s the kind of stuff our audience will really like, so there’s perfect synergy there. That’s what will get the sponsor, the potential sponsor, looking and say, “Hey, okay, we’re looking to reach more of our target audience. They’re talking to these people. Okay, let’s start this conversation.”

The next thing, when it comes to being on the lookout for potential opportunities, is make sure there’s definite value for your audience as part of the deal. Now that we’re doing the sponsorship with Hoosier Proud, they’re giving us a promo code that we can read out on the show so that our audience gets 15 percent off of the shirts. That was important to me.

It’s not just, “Hey, Hoosier Proud is sponsoring this.” It’s, “Hoosier Proud is sponsoring this, and because you’re an Assembly Call listener, you get something special.” There’s value for the audience because they’re finding out about a really cool site, about a really cool source for potential shirts they may like — and they get a discount.

Maybe you don’t have to get a discount. You may not be able to work that out with the sponsor, but there’s got to be value for the audience. The audience can be the third party in these sponsorship conversations that doesn’t get taken into account, and I’m now taking 45 seconds to a minute at the beginning of our shot to talk about a sponsor, which will do the audience some good in finding out about them. It does them even more good the fact that they get a discount. As much value as you can bring to your audience as possible, and then of course the ability for you to show value to the sponsor.

If I didn’t think that sponsoring the Banner Moment and doing this promo code for the audience would give value to them, I don’t want to take their money right now, show them no value, and then run and hide in the other direction. I really want to make sure that I’m going into it knowing, “Okay, you’re giving us value by paying us money to sponsor. Our audience is getting value, and now I know that I can show you value because of this.”

When you find opportunities where you can check those boxes, that’s gold. You don’t wait to reach out. Go reach out, and start the conversation. You don’t have to have a professionally done PDF and a salesperson and do it all fancy. Just open an email. Send a Twitter direct message. Get the conversation going, and see where it leads.

Jonny Nastor: Right. How much did you direct the conversation around the metrics that you wanted to direct it around?

How to Direct the Conversation with Potential Sponsors

Jerod Morris: I put a few big-picture metrics just in the initial email just so he would know … actually, it was in the second email. It turns out, he was a big listener to the show, which was kind of nice. That came totally out of the blue. But I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the metrics, and what’s interesting is, I actually got more into the metrics when it came to our email list and some of the additional non-podcast things they’re sponsoring, which I’ll get to in the third lesson. That was actually where the metrics came in more than just the podcast.

Now a part of that is because he’s a listener, knows that the show is growing, and has a decent audience size, so I didn’t have to do that. It may just depend on how much you have to educate the potential sponsor on who you are and what you do. I didn’t have to do that as much with the podcast. I did it more for the email.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. I love it. I know a lot of people get stuck. Two years ago, the first questions was, “What are your downloads?” A year ago, it had changed, and now, to me, it’s almost completely changed. People to want to deal with you as the brand and not just, “What are your downloads?” I know people fear that — “Well, I don’t have the downloads” — so they’re afraid to even make that first reach out to the people.

But I think everyone will find that the more you do this, people still want to know what your downloads are, but that’s not the make it or break it, yes or no. With Midroll it is. They only deal with shows of certain level, and that’s just them. But they’re not sponsors. They’re like a middleman for sponsors. Just know that these metrics that you feel are going to hold you back are just you in your head. There’s ways around everything, and Jerod’s showing us how to do it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so that’s lesson number one. Always be on the lookout for potential opportunities.

Lesson 2: How to Be Ready for Those Opportunities When They Hit

Jerod Morris: Now lesson number two is be ready for those opportunities when they hit. What really made this go and made it go quickly is basically being able to have a vision. When I first sent the email, I thought, “Okay, Hoosier Proud, how perfect would it be for them to sponsor the Banner Moment?” In a way, that whole section of the show is our proudest moment as fans. “What’s the moment in this game that made us the most excited that we’re going to win a championship?” Calling it the Hoosier Proud Banner Moment, we almost could’ve named it that without a sponsor from the very beginning. It is perfect.

Having that section of the show already as a potentially sponsorable segment, that allowed me to be ready for when this opportunity hit. It’s like, “Okay, Hoosier Proud Banner Moment, this is perfect,” so when I’m talking to the guy, it’s like, “Hey, we’ll call it the Hoosier Proud Banner Moment. We’ll give the Banner Moment. Then we’ll do about 30 to 45 seconds right after that talking about Hoosier Proud, and then move on,” and it was great.

I think if it had been a little bit more nebulous like, “Hey, do you want to sponsor the show?” Okay, well maybe that gets the conversation going, but the fact that there was a clear vision, a clear element they were going to sponsor, that really, I think, allowed it to hit home for him, especially since he had never done any podcast advertising before, for exactly where this will go, what will it look like. “Oh yeah, I can envision that. Yes, let’s do it.”

I think that’s one big lesson here. Consider having some recurring segments on your show like this that might be sponsor-able. The Banner Moment, Jonny, you have the Hack on Hack the Entrepreneur. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about having that sponsored, but you certainly could. I can think of tons and tons of different examples of how that would work. Have you ever thought about having the Hack sponsored?

Jonny Nastor: That was the very first thing that ever came to my head when I created the Hack, was going to be, “the Hack brought to you by this,” and then into it. I couldn’t sell it because it was so far into my show.

Jerod Morris: Really?

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, and I pushed. I pushed so hard like doing direct sponsorships, and I was selling sponsorships at the time. People were buying them, but they wanted to buy them in the pre-roll, in the mid-roll, which they wanted before the 40 percent mark of the show. I was like, “The thing people are listening to, I know, my data is showing me, is that people are listening to the Hack.” I couldn’t, and Midroll wouldn’t even sell it. I couldn’t even, which is crazy.

I agree with you 100 percent, having that sponsored place, but the problem is you do the Banner Moment at the very beginning, which is really, really smart, and my Hack’s afterwards. It kind of messes up my way of doing things. You’re absolutely right. It’s brilliant, brilliant idea, and everybody should put that into their show.

Jerod Morris: But that’s a great lesson. There is a bias for the beginning and middle parts of shows, so remember that, especially if you’re going to do these recurring segments. I was just listening to a fantasy football podcast. They had the Cane’s Chicken Stud of the Week or something, and it’s about 15 minutes into the show. It’s a recurring segment. It’s sponsored.

Again, it allows your sponsor to visualize themselves in your show a little bit easier. Consider those recurring segments, but then also have your ad spots set and filled, even if by yourself. It’s going to be a lot easier to sell ad space on your show if there is already ad space on your show.

The recurring segments can be a potential place for an ad, but if you’re trying to set your show up for success to have ads in the future, maybe it’s new, and you think, “Well, I don’t have any sponsors yet.” Okay, that’s fine. Guess what? Then your email list sponsors your show, and after you do your introduction and you want to dive into an ad read, then you talk for a minute about why people should get on your email list. Then when you do have a potential sponsor, you can say, “Hey, this slot right here. This is where we’ll do it for you.”

That way your audience is used to it. They can get into the rhythm of your show. It’s not going to totally disrupt everything when you add a sponsor, and it’s easier, again, for you to sell a spot to your sponsor that already exists as opposed to having to create something brand new. It makes that conversation easier and, again, allows them to visualize themselves in your show better — which is going to help get them more excited to do it.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Always be running ad spots, and then just take it even one step further, Jerod, I would push everybody to have a sponsorship page on your site. One thing you never know … like you said, you finally reached out to this sponsor, and he’s a listener. I’m sure he’s been to your site numerous times, and there’s possibly no sponsorship page. It’s one thing for somebody to work for a company or own a company and listen to your show, because you never know who’s listening. They’re going to go to your site and look for the sponsorship page and be like, “Oh, there isn’t one.”

It’s such a huge leap for somebody, “Well, maybe I’ll go randomly through the contact form and ask them.” Your barrier to entry is too high now for most people. Even if you don’t have sponsors yet, you should at least put on there that you are looking to take them. You don’t have to have prices and packages, but just a page that says, yes, you are looking for sponsors, and here’s how to reach you. Very simple. Make it easy for people to sponsor you if they do get the chance to discover or hear your show.

Jerod Morris: That’s a huge part of being ready for when those opportunities hit. Absolutely. Lesson one, be on the lookout for potential opportunities. Lesson two, be ready for those opportunities when they hit.

Lesson 3: Be a Showrunner, Not Just a Podcaster, and Create an Experience for Your Audience That Goes Beyond Your Podcast

Jerod Morris: And now lesson three, be more than a podcaster, be a showrunner. What do we mean by that? That means create an experience for your audience that isn’t just a podcast. We’ve talked on here so often about the power of an email list and what you can do with your website to create more of an experience than just what happens with the audio. You limit yourself if all you can offer to a sponsor is a slot in your show, but man, you can really expand what you can do.

I learned this just over the last few weeks with SeatGeek and Hoosier Proud. They would have paid X for the podcast sponsorship, but they ended up paying a lot more because we incorporated some of the other elements of what we do.

For example, every week we do what we call 6-Banner Saturday. It’s a new roundup, just a curated email newsletter that rounds-up the most recent news in IU basketball. That goes out to our email list, and we also post it on our blog. We also, for our members, every Friday do a deal of the week. It’s an affiliate play. I’ve been doing this for a little while now. I’ll go find a good affiliate deal on some IU gear, and we send it out to the email list.

Well, when I was talking with Hoosier Proud, I told them, “Hey, we do these deals of the week. We could also basically dedicate one deal every month to a new one of your shirts, and that’ll be the deal of the month.” He’s like, “Well, that sounds really good,” but he’s like, “I’m ready to do the podcast sponsorship. I’m still a little iffy on the email thing because I’m not exactly sure how that would work.”

What I did is, that next week, that shirt that went that viral, I just made that the deal of the week. Without telling him, I just did it and said, “Here, we’ll do a test, see how this is.” That drove a bunch of sales. He was able to visualize what it would look like, and now he’s ready to do that part of the sponsorship. It’s adding onto it. You’re engaging your audience, obviously, in more ways than your podcast, but from the sponsorship point of view, you’re giving the sponsor more opportunities to be exposed to the audience, different ways — which is going to be extremely helpful.

With our email newsletter now, after the very first section, after the first story, right after that is a little section for SeatGeek, and we link out to hot deals on IU tickets, talk about how we’re really proud to have SeatGeek as a sponsor, and it’s just there. It’s an ad, but it’s also kind of native content in a sense because we’re giving IU fans the best deals on IU football and basketball tickets. Really, it fits with the content.

Again, I showed it to him, he was able to visualize himself in there, and now instead of SeatGeek just paying to sponsor our podcast, they’re also sponsoring that. When we do our Bracketology blog posts later in the basketball season, they’re going to be the sponsor for that. It was an entire package, not just, “Here, you’re getting this sponsorship slot on every show.” It’s, “You are getting The Assembly Call content package, a sponsorship on the show, inclusion in our email newsletter, inclusion on blog posts,” and it makes it so much more valuable for them.

Again, we talk about being a podcaster, not a showrunner. It’s all about creating a great audience experience. It’s applying the four essential elements of a remarkable podcast, and especially the authenticity and usefulness, to create this great experience.

But a byproduct of that, especially when it comes outside of the podcast, is you now have more real estate that is going to be potentially attractive and sponsor-able for a sponsor. Keep that in mind. The more that you do that, the better off you’re going to be and the more attractive package you can offer to potential sponsors.

Jonny Nastor: So good. You’ve given the listener three important lessons about podcast sponsorship that will, in fact, make them more money. I want to cover two things, or I want you to if you could. Two sticking points that I see that you’ve taken them now to getting this sponsorship. What did you do for a contract? Did you have one or not, and what did it look like, roughly? Then, did you make it so you had to get paid before you did sponsorship, or did you work something else out?

How Jerod Handled the Legal and Payment Aspects of Sponsorship

Jerod Morris: Excellent. As far as the contract, I do not have a contract with these folks. It’s all in email. With SeatGeek, I’ve already worked with them for a year. They’ve been fine, so I felt good about expanding it a little bit more. Same thing with Hoosier Proud. There’s no set contract. It’s all there in email. If either one of us argues about the details, we can always point back to the email, but I didn’t feel the need.

I have had good relationships with these folks. They’ve done everything they’ve said they’re going to do, so have I, so that’s never come up. If the dollar amounts were bigger, maybe I would think about it. But I haven’t felt the need to do it, so I didn’t. What was the second part?

Jonny Nastor: Payment — is it an advance?

Jerod Morris: Oh, payment. Yeah, they’re going to pay in advance. That was what we agreed to was pay for everything up front. For SeatGeek, that worked out instead of me invoicing and them paying every two weeks, which actually created some issues just because they go through a third-party vendor for the payments. There had just been some communication issues there. Everything was fine. Just the communication wasn’t always great. It made sense for them, “Hey, we’ll pay you up front. Let’s just get all this out of the way up front.”

Same thing with Hoosier Proud. With them, I actually gave them a discount to pay up front. I actually said, “If you pay up front, it’ll be X. If you wait, if you want to pay by week or by month, that’s fine. It’ll just be this, but you’ll save money paying up front.” Actually, for them, I made it kind of an incentive to pay up front.

Jonny Nastor: I love it.

Jerod Morris: Now I will say, the other thing I did do with SeatGeek is, because it’s more than just them sponsoring, like I said, The Assembly Call podcast. It’s the emails, and there’s a second podcast that we’re coming out with. This is the other thing. We’re creating a new podcast, and they’re going to sponsor that new podcast without it ever being out or getting a download. He’s like, “We trust you guys. We’re willing to take that risk.” That’s priced into what the price was.

I created a big spreadsheet that went by month exactly what they would get. So six episodes of The Assembly Call, three episodes of this new show, this email, so it’s very, very concrete, Like, “This is what you will get.” That’s all in a spreadsheet. Again, no signed contract, but everything is spelled out in detail so that there are no miscommunications and everybody’s on the same page.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent, I love it. I love it. I was hoping that was going to be the answer because, to me, that makes it easier for everyone to get started. You don’t need lawyers. You don’t need all that. Definitely, I did the same thing, which was always getting paid in advance. Actually, everything that’s outside of Midroll that I do personally, it’s all paid in advance. That’s just how it works, and people are used to it, which makes it easier for you and less risky.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and you can price it that way. Have two prices in your head. If someone does want to pay every week, then set a price that makes that worthwhile for you if that’s what’s going to be the case. But then, obviously, you can give a discount for paying up front. I agree with you — you want to make that one more enticing because it’s easier for you and better for you in the long run.

Jonny Nastor: Awesome.

Jerod Morris: Awesome. Quick review. Lesson one, always be on the lookout for potential opportunities. Lesson two, be ready for those opportunities when they hit, And by all means lesson three, be more than a podcaster, be a showrunner. Create a true audience experience, not just a podcast experience. It’s better for your audience. It’s better for potential sponsors. And obviously, it is better for you. Take these three lessons. Use them to make more money. I certainly am, and I think that you can as well.

All right, everybody. That concludes this episode of The Showrunner. Once again, we come in at under 30 minutes. That’s our new goal for season two. Right, Jonathan?

How to Take Your Showrunning to the Next Level

Jonny Nastor: Yes, but before we go, go to Showrunner.FM. Join The Showrunner newsletter and get it. We’ve updated that, as well as the format here. We’ve updated the format of the newsletter, and I think you’re going to really enjoy it. It includes free announcements of the public events. It’s going to be moved off Blab, but we’re not sure yet. But that’s where we’re going to tell you about it, so get on that list.

Each new week’s episode comes out there. A simple link to it to pass you through, and you can check it out on the site. And that ‘highly recommended’ section we used to do has now been snipped and gone because it’s just not efficient enough for us anymore. Go to Showrunner.FM.

Jerod Morris: Right. We may still recommend things, but the email is just going to be a little bit more informal and personal than templated, which I think will be good for everybody.

Jonny Nastor: It was really fun to write yesterday, so I’m looking forward to it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it was good.

Jonny Nastor: Showrunner.FM is the place to get on that list.

Jerod Morris: Yep. All right, we will talk to you next week on another brand-new episode. Take care, everybody.

Jonny Nastor: Take care.

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