Podcaster Beware: Companies Want to Take Advantage of You!

So you're a podcaster looking to monetize, and all of a sudden out of nowhere you get an email offering a sponsorship for your podcast. It seems too good to be true. Is it? We'll talk about it right after this.Hi there. Welcome to Podcast Monetization Secrets. My name is Christy Haussler and thank you so much for joining me today. I am so glad you're here because that tells me that you are actively looking for ways to monetize your podcast, and I couldn't be happier about that. I feel like podcasters have gotten the short end of the stick and more ofyou deserve to be paid for the value that you're providing to the world. And I'm on a mission to help as many of you do that in a way that brings value to your life as possible. You've been giving value, you've been providing content at a pretty high cost to yourself. It's time, it's energy, it's money.There's plenty of other things that you could be doing with your time, and because you are choosing to serve some community that you've chosen, Then I believe you deserve to get value back, and the more you serve, the more value you should get. So it should be a very natural exchange. And many times as podcasters, we haven't really figured out how to engineer getting that value back out of our podcast.And that's what I'm here to help you with today. Most of you know if you've been here very long at all. I have a podcast production company called Team Podcast, and that's where I initially started after I started my podcast in 2012. I launched my company end of December, 2013. Really didn't get my first clients till early 2014.And so I've, during that time worked up with over 360 podcasts and many of them wanted to monetize through various ways and I. Even though I don't tell everyone that's podcast sponsorship is a great way to monetize. Cause it's actually the hardest way to monetize. I do work with podcasters to do sponsorships and I manage ads and relationships and that sort of thing with their sponsors and their ads.And so I'm pretty well tied into what's going on in the sponsor space. So I wanted to do a. Update for you today, and I'm gonna be naming names because there are some people right now that I feel like are, I'm just gonna call it preying on the ignorance of some podcasters and if you go into this understanding all the facts and you still decide it's the best decision for you, then that is absolutely fine, But what I don't want you to do is get stuck in something that you don't want to do. And so today I'm gonna talk to you about. A situation that's been happening with a certain company where they are targeting podcasters who probably have not yet gotten heavy into the sponsorship space yet. And what's happening is you'll get an email, and I don't know if you're aware, but once you have an RSS feed or you have your podcast on Apple, Apple requires you to have an email, like even a public contact email within your RSS feed.And so people can use services and software and programs and that sort of thing to pull email addresses in from your RSS feed, and then they can solicit you with cold email. Now, don't get me wrong, you can always. Unsubscribe or block them or whatever. But that's what happens. So it doesn't take long before you, when you're a podcaster, before you start seeing Chartable and other podcast related services begin to send you these emails.And it's not because they found your podcast and found it interesting, but they've just scraped all of the emails. The api, the directory in Apple, and they're contacting you with the email that you have listed for your RSS feed. So that's what's happening. That's what's going on. And there's a particular company right now, I've had them approach several of my podcast clients and I've watched some of the negotiations go back and forth.And so I wanted to just clue you into what's