From Listeners to Fans: Crafting Content That Pays Off – PCI 396

Speaker 0 00:00:00 I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry.

Speaker 1 00:00:03 And I'm Mike Dell, VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry.

Speaker 0 00:00:07 At Blueberry, we offer premium podcasting, and today we'll expand on how you can create this premium content for your listeners.

Speaker 1 00:00:16 You are listening to Podcast Insider, hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcasting. With all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting, welcome, let's dive in. Creating exclusive content for paying podcast listeners is an excellent way to provide additional value and encourage more listeners to subscribe to your premium tiers. Did that sound like I read that

Speaker 0 00:00:51 ? It sounds like you know what you're talking about, that's for sure. Good.

Speaker 1 00:00:54 Yeah. Yeah. Premium content, there's a couple ways of doing it. Blueberry offers the, the, our premium podcasting right here on the dashboard, and then there's also ways you can do it with WordPress and Power Press. And of course Apple has their subscription service. It's not exclusively blueberry, but what's nice about the premium is you can offer your audience something special, either extra episodes or ad free content or early release, and there's a whole bunch of different ways and we're gonna talk about that kinda stuff.

Speaker 0 00:01:33 Yeah. Like you said, one of the most common ways for this is bonus episodes. So you've recorded something else, didn't think it was worthy of putting out to everyone, or you just think it's extra special. So you can offer additional episodes that are only available as your premium content to those people that are paying for this. You could do a deeper dive into a specific topic. You could interview a special guest or something completely different, just not available as your main feed.

Speaker 1 00:02:07 Yeah. A lot of, a lot of people I know that do this sort of thing do like more personal content. You get to know the hosts a little deeper stuff that they don't necessarily want out to the larger public. Mm-Hmm. Todd does something like that and, uh, for his audience at Geek News Central. But another, another thing is that early access that some premium subscribers really wanna get it before everybody else.

Speaker 0 00:02:33 I've, I've gotta say there's a couple shows that I will look at on Apple and I'll be like, oh, that sounds really cool. And then it's, it's only available to paying subscribers for the next three days. And I'm like, okay, I guess I, I guess I gotta pay up or shut up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:02:50 The, the early access again, is just one of those things that your Avid listeners will do.

Speaker 0 00:02:57 Another way that you can create premium content is ad-free listening. So a lot of the time if you are already monetizing all of your episodes on your main feed, this is a way that you can provide an ad-free experience for your subscribers. Generally, I think everyone can, can agree that that is a more enjoyable way to listen to an episode.

Speaker 1 00:03:17 . Yeah. Ad free. I I do actually pay for a couple of shows.

Speaker 0 00:03:22 Do you

Speaker 1 00:03:23 Ad free only because ads are becoming insidious to, to everything I'm doing and, and I don't mind ads if they're relevant and all that. And of course, next week we're gonna be talking about ad insertion technologies. They're not all bad. The the thing with certain shows is they do them badly and

Speaker 0 00:03:45 That's a very good point.

Speaker 1 00:03:47 And so I, and, but I really want the content, so I do pay up to get the ad free version. Mm-Hmm. . And another thing a lot of people do is extended episodes. And I do listen to a couple of those. I don't listen to the extended part, but I listen to shows that offer that where they'll do an hour of their show and then they'll continue on with an after show that you have to pay for on some other platform. Other things is if they have interviews in their show and they, they put out a version that has the edited interview and then they put out the uncut version of that interview as a premium and that

Speaker 0 00:04:25 It's like the director's cut that you used to get when you bought the DVD.

Speaker 1 00:04:28 Exactly. Same idea. And, and what's nice about that is you can hear the context a little better if you listen to the extended interview. Mm-Hmm. . And, and that gives value to people to want to sign up for your premium content.

Speaker 0 00:04:45 So similar to that is behind the scenes content, which I am usually interested in going back to that DVD analogies, I truly miss those behind the scenes clips that you used to get of, here's how we created this, here's the bloopers, here's when we decided to go this way, or just that creative process. I think it, I think my love of that stuff when I was a kid that was available with everything that I bought has really translated into, there is a reason I work somewhat in media and marketing and podcasting because it, it definitely gives me the same type of vibe.

Speaker 1 00:05:23 And another another thing a lot of people do is they'll do an exclusive question and answer session. And I, I can think of one of 'em that I signed up for that I pay for. Their ad free version also does this where on the platform that they're using for their ad free version, they also do live sessions and then record those and put that in as premium content. Yeah.

Speaker 0 00:05:45 Those can be fun. So

Speaker 1 00:05:46 Yeah, so it's a lot of fun to be able to interact with the podcast hosts or if you are the podcaster to interact with your audience. And so that's another thing you can throw on premium.

Speaker 0 00:05:57 Speaking about the interactive aspect, you can also do interactive content such as polls for like, maybe they can vote on an upco upcoming episode topic or a guest or give them a challenge. Something to do. I think this is pretty popular sometimes with people that like do Patreon. Mm-Hmm. , um, they kind of like give people scenarios. They're like, okay, kind of truth or dare we have to do this if we get so many people to say this. So that's, that's really a fun way for people to get involved too.

Speaker 1 00:06:27 One of the, one of the guys that I listened to, uh, said that if, if he gets a a thousand downloads of this, this episode, whatever it was that he would do, he would do a video wearing a particular T-shirt that he would not normally be wearing. Mm-Hmm. .

Speaker 0 00:06:44 It sounds like what guys do with Sports .

Speaker 1 00:06:47 Yeah. Yeah. It was that kind of thing and, and it was pretty cool. Another thing is a member only communities and Patreon kind of does that. Mm-Hmm. , you could do this on a whole bunch of other places. Discord, you could have a Slack group, you could have a Mastodon, you could, any of that kind of stuff. And as a bonus for people that subscribed to your premium content, you could give them this more access to you and, and your topics and your co-hosts or whatever it is that you're gonna give them via those platforms.

Speaker 0 00:07:19 I think another cool thing is pretty, pretty common offering merchandise. So t-shirts, mugs, stickers, um, anything that people would wanna buy available only to your paying subscribers or you give them like a discount code for it. Like you get 10% off because you're already paying for these episodes. That type of stuff. Similar to that as also saying we have limited availability, so only offering it to the paying subscribers as of some version of it that's really simple but can be fun and seen as like a collector's item for some people.

Speaker 1 00:07:55 Yeah. We gotta try that at the trade shows. Have exclusive merch at the Yeah. Table anyway. Probably not special events. You can invite your subscribers to exclusive online or in-person events or live recordings, meet and greets workshops. Again, those q and as would be kind of a, a live event or a special event.

Speaker 0 00:08:19 Yeah. I feel like those kind of exploded during peak 20 20, 20 21 when no one could gather. That was, that was how a lot of people still engaged with their audience and kept the community going. So that one's easy

Speaker 1 00:08:33 For, for those of us that live on Zoom all the time, that may not be an incentive but

Speaker 0 00:08:38 Right.

Speaker 1 00:08:40 , but what the heck. I'm sure it would be cool.

Speaker 0 00:08:44 Yeah. And one of the last ones that we wanted to talk about was personalized messages and content. So this is what we've all heard before. So and so gets a shout out on this episode because they sent in this happy birthday, happy anniversary, something like that. Congrats. You graduated. People just like being, being heard. That one's easy, very easy.

Speaker 1 00:09:07 Very, you always love to hear your name on a podcast. Mm-Hmm. that, going back to that value for value thing we keep talking about. That's, that's one of the advantages of that too, is you people actually pay you a little bit of a coin to make a comment and a lot of podcasters that, that take boosts like that. So you could also put that into your premium content. Hey so and so he's a subscriber on our premium and he just had a birthday or whatever, something cool like that. Shout outs.

Speaker 0 00:09:39 Yeah. So those are all the ways that we think that people can create exclusive content. But Mike, since you are more behind the scenes with this, can you give a quick rundown of how someone can easily integrate premium podcasting into their publishing with Blueberry?

Speaker 1 00:09:58 Yeah, exactly. There's an add-on, I think it's 10 bucks a month. You can add blueberry premium and what that allows you to do is have a second feed that is going to have your premium content in it and people sign up at blueberry for that to pay you. And we give you most of the money. We take our cut just for providing the service and they have to put in a password and or an login and a password when they first subscribe to your show on most apps can take it, apple will do it, Spotify won't. But a lot of normal podcast apps will. And another thing you can do with Blueberry at the same time is you could sign up for an Apple premium, which we also integrate with. So when you go to make your episode, you put the, uh, public episode in one spot, you put the Apple Premium in another spot and you put uh, the blueberry premium and yet another spot and uh, and you can do it all in one post or you could have exclusive posts for Apple exclusive posts for public exclusive posts for the, for the premium and all that.

Speaker 1 00:11:06 And then like I said, there's another option. You can use a third party app or plugin on WordPress and do the same thing using our power press. You know, it's the same, but you have to manage all the payments and stuff yourself. With ours, we manage the payments for you, we manage the subscribers and, and all that. We give you the list of the subscribers of course, so you can communicate them with them for any of the extras that you throw in for people that subscribe that way. But yeah, we have uh, we have all the options so give us a call or, or shoot an email or whatever if you wanna get set up with that.

Speaker 0 00:11:43 Yeah. One of the reasons why we wanted to do this in the first place and make it a true offering is because we saw people being a little overwhelmed with having to manage it through whatever plugin or service they were using beforehand. And we figured people are already doing this, they're totally interested. This is definitely outside of the realm of just easy publishing of just, this is the standard. So we figured why not just include it in our service? Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:12:10 Do it. Doing a a a free podcast has a certain level of complication, but it's not as bad and this doesn't, our setup is super easy. You do it in the same post, the same mm-Hmm. interface, the same everything. And you don't have to worry about all the technical stuff 'cause we take care of that for you. And when I was talking about WordPress plugins, they're called membership plugins. MemberPress is one of the bigger ones, but there's a, a bunch of 'em out there and most of them are compatible with PowerPress.

Speaker 0 00:12:41 Yeah. In no way, shape or form is this a new concept. It's just becoming more popular. So yeah, figured why not?

Speaker 1 00:12:49 Definitely becoming more popular. Anyway, I think we got that just about covered

Speaker 0 00:12:54 I think. So if anyone has any questions about how they can create premium content or how to get started, they can just reach out to the support team, right? Yep.

Speaker 1 00:13:03 Yep. That's blueberry.com/support. But it's pretty self-explanatory on the site too. So just look for premium content or premium, what is it? Blueberry Premium. I think that's our official name for it. . And that's an add-on. You'll find that in the billing section. And if you sign up for hosting or if you're already a hosting customer.

Speaker 0 00:13:25 Thanks everyone.

Speaker 1 00:13:25 Keep podcasting. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes to check out our latest suite of services and learn how blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease. We couldn't afford the ease.