Alex Nerney | Part 2 Blogging and Podcasting Monetization

Welcome to part 2 of my conversation with Alex Nerney! If you haven’t listened yet, check out part 1, here.

Alex Nerney is best known for his businesses Create and Go and Avacadu. Through these sites and his courses, he has generated over $100k per month. In this second part of our interview, we dive into the specifics of monetizing our services in our verticals of blogging and podcasting.

Passive Income

Alex has found that when it comes to passive income, It’s important to set your expectations from the beginning. If you just want to have a side hustle, you have to be realistic about how much that will bring in in revenue.

“If you want to continue working and build a business, you absolutely can do that, just don’t be disappointed when you’re not hitting that $10,000 a month stride almost immediately.”

His goal is to help you learn how to build a business. And this takes time. However, if you’re not seeing progress in the beginning, it can be hard to feel like what you are building is real. He recommends adding opportunities like coaching if you are an expert in something to help you immediately bring in income as you are building your business. The principle, “you get out what you put in” applies here.

“Something that we’ve noticed is that people who purchase the whole package or the more advanced courses, even if they are beginners, seem to do better overall.”

The Foundation: Perseverance

Over time, Alex has realized that they can give people these courses on Create and Go, but if users don’t have a good foundation and work ethic, they won’t be successful. Perseverance, time management, and a willingness to work hard are key.

Blogging Monetization

In our social media focused world, it may come as a surprise that Alex relies on social media minimally for his business success and blogging monetization.

While Pinterest and YouTube are valuable platforms for his business, his main focus is driving people to his website where they will purchase. On platforms like Instagram, it can be nearly impossible to get people to leave the platform and arrive on your site where conversions are actually made.

How Alex is Making Money:

Selling Courses: These courses are digital products and services that he and his team have created.

1. So far, he has created courses on all different parts of the blogging journey, weight loss, and yoga.
2. Some of these courses take a month for users to complete.
3. He estimates that he has created 50-100 hours of course content.
4. It takes serious commitment, attention to detail, and hard work to create these courses.

Podcasting Monetization

Ads and sponsorships are two of the main ways podcasters are monetizing their business today. Sponsors often look at podcast listenership and downloads in the first thirty days of releasing an episode to determine what they will pay for a spot on your podcast. A ballpark price range for a pre-roll or mid-roll spot (the preferred air time), can be anywhere between $20-$50 per 1,000 listeners.

However, if you and a brand have a common vision, downloads and listenership may not matter. For example, Jeff shares how he partnered with Cloudlifter on his Podcast Bytes podcast, and the numbers and metrics of his podcast were not a determining factor in their partnership because their vision aligned so well.

Indirect Monetization

While it’s important to look for hard numbers, the indirect monetization opportunities that result from having a podcast may carry even more weight than paid sponsorships and ads.

• Reviews
• Testimonies
• Site traffic
• Email/open rates
• Referrals
• Guesting
• Networking

All of these indirect results have a serious impact on conversion rates and help you reach your target audience.

Dan Misener’s CreativeLive course offers some concrete ways on how to grow your audience for greater podcast success.

The Process

When you’re starting a podcast, you have to treat it like a digital marketing campaign. Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media and Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers emphasize the importance of doing your research before creating your content or podcast in order to be successful.

1. Know your goal and what you want to accomplish.
2. Know who you are going to talk to, where you can reach them, and what they want to know.

If after answering these questions a podcast does make sense for you or your business, then, it’s time to focus on creating a quality podcast with these elements:

1. Publish with consistency and frequency.
2. Repurpose the content.
3. Create a strong CTA.
4. Factor in accessibility with transcripts.
5. Find more tips on creating and growing your podcast, here.

The podcasting space is evolving constantly, and the metrics and measurement of success are improving thanks to new innovations from the likes of Google making shows more discoverable, Simplecast developing ways to measure unique listener’s behavior, and Megaphone’s new targeted ads feature.