Giving voice to the black community seems to be imperative for Charlamagne Tha God as it directly seems he feels there is nothing else other races could well thrive at that blacks could not. Thus, the formation and launching of his Black Effect Podcast Network With iHeartMedia. He took his time to study how things work with efficiency podcasting was certain, just as he was that he could make affluence through proper and adequate packaging, just any black person could leverage on the avenue he has provided and then make affluence. Now, in his understanding and in my conscious evaluation of what he meant by “packaging,” it is the one difference between those who are making waves in the profession and those who are not.
In the meantime, if one must indeed hit jackpot podcasting, there is the need to consider understanding the rudiments about packaging with the sophistication that would eventually result in that desired outcome –making legit money. Of course, this is when you can grow your audience over time based on consistency and uniqueness of style. The following are the core rudiments to packaging podcasting properly that’d lead to wealth for a podcaster.
1. Platforms for online or interactive courses
Many platforms, like teaching and thought, are designed for the use of people who teach online courses. These platforms have been viral in that particular market. Many have tried to adapt them for other uses, particularly podcasting.
However, these platforms are not designed to host a podcast, so while success with them is possible, there are several disadvantages:
Pros
- You will be able to schedule content early, so you can upload several episodes and release them weekly.
- They have useful analytics so that you can access a lot of details about your clients or customers.
Cons
- These websites tend not to explicitly concentrate on podcasting and are a little more focused on video distribution.
- Your consumers must access a website and do not directly receive the new episodes. By design, these sites do not give customers the episodes when they are published. This makes retention harder because consumers can easily forget the show and encourage unlisted episodes to accumulate.
- Some of these websites have better functionality behind a wall, and they take a significant cut in income if you’re on their simple plans.
- Many people listen to podcasts on their tablets, but these pages are tailored for those who browse desktops.
The Outcome
The drawbacks of using these platforms for most podcasters would greatly outweigh the advantages. They aren’t really built to be used in a way that is friendly for podcast listeners. If your podcast is not included in a broader multimedia course involving e-books, videos, and quizzes, it is probably not worth considering this choice. If you’re an instructor who gives video tutorials, it may be the way forward, but it’s the wrong tool for most podcasters.
2) Try and Roll Your Own
At the other end of the scale, absolutely, by using a teaching site, you can do it by hand. Any podcasters who want to monetize their podcast will simply use a regular podcast host, set up a payment processor account such as Stripe or PayPal (or accept Bitcoin donations these days), and subsequently send a connection to the RSS feed for any person who sends money.
This choice has a certain appeal to it, since it allows you to manage every aspect of your business and has some disadvantages.
Pros
- You should hold all the money yourself (other than payment processor transaction fees).
- You have full power-you can switch hosts to a podcast and send the new URL to customers.
- No new software is needed for your listeners — audio software that supports RSS feeds can be used.
Cons
- You need a lot of management –you have to give the connection to any paying customer manually.
- Currently, most listeners don’t know how to get an RSS feed in regular podcast applications. You must manage them in the process. This is a tech support burden not only for you — mainly if you are not familiar with the app — but also a significant source of customer friction. You might well give up hearing your podcast only because it’s too hard for you.
- People can share the connection — why pay for the content if you can get your friend who paid to email you the relationship?
- If people want to stop paying, either change the RSS feed (and give customers a new email any time the former customer stops paying) or accept a non-paid customer still having access to your content. This also ensures that you must keep track of what payments bounce back frequently and be inconvenient to your paying customers.
- No help — if you do this yourself, and one of your audience has a technological problem, you will be their first and only calling port. You may not be able to find another to solve this problem.
The Outcome
This is undoubtedly a choice that can work for a few. Still, unless you are passionate about accounting and continuously keep an eye on lists of who pays and who doesn’t—and to help the technology. At the same time, your listeners face countless unforeseen issues, some controlled service is probably best for you. You lose in protection and ease of use what you gain in power.
3) Audio Files Emailing
Another choice for those of you who even set up an RSS feed with a regular podcast host is to create a payment processing system, as in choice two above, and then send copies of each audio filename to your listeners via email. This may be the ultimate of your own since all you need is a PayPal account and an email address. Still, you may imagine that there are more issues than more conventional methods of monetization of a podcast.
Pros
- You have power over it all yourself.
- There are no hosting charges to handle.
- It is comparatively easy to treat non-paid customers compared to choice two above — just do not send them the next file.
Cons
- You have to do it yourself, spend time and energy tracking each paying customer and sending each email.
- If you email files, you’ll likely quickly hit your email provider’s maximum storage allowance and have to pay for additional space. You have to pay for the storage of this service if you send links using a cloud service.
- The files can quickly be submitted to someone else without payment or uploading to torrent sites or the like.
- You’ll need to deal with things such as the mailboxes of your clients and emails that bounce back to you (with their big attachments). When a client has paid you for the following four series, but each time you contact him, it bounces, what are you doing? There are hard choices to make.
- You may not even receive your emails from your customers. Many major email providers mark all bulk email senders as spam, even if paid for that email.
- If your clients want to listen to their emails in their regular podcast applications, they’ll need to transfer the files into the app. If they’re dealing with their email on a desktop or on a laptop, like many people, they’ll need to transfer them from their computer to their phone first. This is difficult for many listeners and will present challenges to technology support.
- This way, files are hard to organize and refer to. Contrary to other approaches, it is not easy for hearers to have a structured podcast collection.
The Outcome
This really is just a choice if you are a total punishment glutton. You might find it to work for yourself – if you just enjoy dealing with angry emails from customers who do not have their reports, creating tabletops and offering unpaid technical support, and even selling customers to you –customers who can be understandably reluctant to spend money on a DIY-seeming organization.
4) Podcast Networking
Many big media companies began to assemble their own paid podcast deals with some of the prominent names with premium, subscriber-only podcasts. These have so far restricted public participation, although they are actively supported by some huge corporations. One of these networks could be Netflix for Podcasts, which they are all supported too.
Pros
- It’s all done for you. You just make yourself the podcast, and the network does the rest.
- Highly supported —large entertainment organizations spend large amounts of money on these networks.
Cons
- Usually, invite —unless you already have a big name, either with a hit podcast or with any other name recognition, this will probably not be an option.
- The customer needs to install a specific app. This is an option here and is very minor in the great scheme of things, but it should be noted.
- Limit your audience-most people are subscribing to only one of these podcast networks, just like Netflix or Hulu, but not both. Your audience would be determined not by how much people you like, but how much they like the overall offering of your network.
The Outcome
This is probably a decent alternative if you are already reasonably well known – say if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of social media followed. In those circumstances, you may be able to get a reasonable deal with one of the networks, which may be a possible way forward. But for the average podcaster who wants to monetize their podcast, this seems unlikely to be useful.
5) Crowdfunding Websites
Many podcasters have, over the last couple of years, started using sites such as Kickstarter, Patreon, and Drip to crowdfund their podcasts. This probably is one of all options discussed here, but it is still far from perfect and there are some serious concerns that you should take into account before deciding whether that is the right way to go.
Pros
These websites are generally well-known and may already have accounted for your customers.
Customer management is done for you — there’s no need to keep track of who is backing you, whose payments have been declined, and so on.
Cons
- Protection — As with most of the options as mentioned earlier, personal podcasts presented in this way rely on the public not to share files, which can quickly be sent to anyone else.
- Setup-none of these sites are genuinely optimized for paying podcasts. When you use them for purposes not intended, you will experience a variety of uncomfortable problems. For example, Kickstarter is intended to produce a single product, such as a CD or book, not a frequently recurring sound file. On the other hand, Patreon is for daily subscription purchases. Still, it is intended to encourage people to pay you for anything you already give away, and not encourage them to pay for your exclusive content.
- Delivery — although these websites handle payments and subscriptions for you, you still have to supply the files, which even includes either a private RSS feed or emailing the files to clients, leaving the majority of the same issues that we saw.
- Payment rebound – several of these services allow backers to register, download and cancel their subscription before the first payment is due. If you have two hundred or more archives at your disposal, would you like someone to download them all and keep them without paying a penny?
The Outcome
This is probably a better choice for the average podcaster than any of the other decisions we discussed, but also has some disadvantages. There has yet been no proof that crowdfunding has a viable long-term future as an income stream on which to rely.
6) “Soundwise”
We finally come to Soundwise, the newest and most exciting of these choices. It is a one-stop solution that allows you to directly sell your paid podcasts, audiobooks, audio courses and other audio programs without worrying about the technological and administrative information. You can sell individual episodes – which is not an option for any of the above options – and sell subscriptions to your whole podcast and offer free episodes for your audience to send.
Pros
- Listen to devices —listeners will listen to several devices as they sign up. You do not have to move files between your phone and tablet; the files are all on your Sound-wise account.
- Access additional content – PDFs, text files, photographs and so on – from the same program they use to hear your audios.
- Listeners’ network-the listeners will connect and build a community and inspire interaction with each other.
- Analytics — In sound, you can track and analyze the details of the podcast episodes and tell what segments of your audience are the most popular.
- Protection – Since it’s a standalone app, listeners have no direct access to audio files, so they can’t send it to anyone. You can be sure that anyone who listens to your paid podcast episodes paid you for it.
- Flexibility – listeners can pay for one episode without subscribing, and offer various subscription packages for different audiences. In addition to selling subscriptions for each podcast version, you can sell subscriptions for multiple bundles. If, for example, you were making a podcast for people who work in IT, you might also sell a subscription in the entire podcast but also sell bundles for people who are more interested in episodes such as web design or computer security.
- Technical support —Soundwise provides the listeners with full tech support, so you do not have to think about it.
- Discoverability –Even if Soundwise does not promote your listeners, it enables your own podcasts and audiobooks, and you can find your content easily by searching the Soundwise app.
- As with a crowdfunding platform, customer service is done for you. You don’t have to contend with late subscriptions and rebound payments.
- Complete control —unlike crowdfunding sites like Patreon, only if you really have paid for them can users get your produced podcast.
Cons
The only thing about Soundwise is that it is a separate app that your listeners need to use. This is important for the above security elements — and usually, listeners are happy to install new apps if they get excellent service and unique content. The app offers an exclusive container for the public and creator of scope to connect, helping you create your community and keep your audience loyal.
The Outcome
Soundwise is the best choice for the regular podcaster of all the choices we have looked at. It enables you to monetize your podcasts without losing versatility and ease of use and to combine discoverability and protection in a way that is not possible with any of the other choices.
Hence, if African-Americans could understand these basics even as they consider sophisticated platforms provided to them to air their views about themselves, there is high tendency millionaires would surely be provided in a matter of short time as long as their consistency of unique production of pods. I believe this is the dream of Charlamagne Tha God for African Americans specifically and Joe Budden for women within the jurisdictions of America.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.