Speaker 1: There are several ways in which a podcast can make money. In this video I want to talk about Patreon. Hi it's Mike from Casefile and Casefile Presents. On this channel I'm releasing videos on podcasting. If you enjoy the content you can hit the like button. What is Patreon? Patreon is a service that allows people to support their favorite artists and creators directly. By subscribing monthly you get to be a part of this sort of exclusive club. You get the various perks, the shoutouts, the bonus content and so on. In this video I want to answer a few questions. The first being how Patreon works for podcasters. Then as a podcaster should you look in starting a Patreon account and then I want to talk about how we've done it with Casefile. Well it's kind of simple. You open your Patreon account for free, then you select the tiers and the perks and then you promote your Patreon page. The tiers and perks are tied together. So let's say the lowest tier that people can subscribe to is a dollar per month and for that let's say you'll get your name featured on a website. And the highest tier let's say it's ten dollars a month and if you subscribe, if the people subscribe to that they can get shoutouts, bonus content, Q&As and so on. So really there's no rules. There are creators who offer only one tier and they're widely successful with that and others who offer a lot of different ones and still make it work. Patreon works especially well for podcasters because they offer private RSS feeds. And what does that mean? Well, if one of your perks is some kind of audio content, be it early release or ad-free content or bonus content, then the Patreon subscribers will get a private RSS feed. You can then copy that feed and paste it onto your podcasting app that you're using on your phone. Many allow that. What that means is that instead of going onto Patreon to listen to all that bonus content, you get your notifications within your podcasting app, like Apple or whatever, and you listen to all that bonus perks as you would to a regular podcast. Now it's important that the subscribers don't share their private RSS feeds outside with other people of course. Now on top of that, as you grow and develop your audience, Patreon can offer that recurring revenue stream which can be more stable than ad sales. I also find that people who support you on Patreon, they're your core fans, they're the top fans that really love your show and want to give you and support you with their hard-earned cash. And by doing so, they also offer insightful and honest feedback as opposed to social media or anonymous reviews which can attract trolling or more negativity. On Patreon there is much less of that. Now it kind of ties into the second question. I think Patreon is an amazing tool for a podcaster, for a show that wants to have that additional revenue stream as well as direct connection to listeners. Of course, big companies like Apple and Spotify are getting into that subscription business and I'll make a video on it in the future. But for now, Patreon is still sort of the platform of choice for many podcasters, for many creators. And because of all these perks that I mentioned, recurring revenue, honest feedback, the fact that you get people directly supporting your work is an amazing feeling. Of course, there is a time and place to do your Patreon. I mean, you don't want to do it straight away, especially when you're starting out with a podcast. First, you should get your show going, develop it, then develop the audience. And at least that's my opinion. When you feel that people want more, then you can look into doing Patreon, not when you've got like two episodes. Well, we haven't started our Patreon account until I think it was the second year of doing the show. Then by that time we had kind of established audience, we knew that people wanted a little bit more. But still, you know, we've experimented with tiers, we've experimented with perks over the years, and we still do to a degree. But we were lucky, without really promoting that Patreon account, we were lucky to develop that tiny community there of people who love the show and want to support us directly. Now we do offer bonus content, so we offer minisodes, we offer early release, and of course ad-free episode, as well as Q&A with the team, behind the scenes, that kind of stuff. And people seem to be enjoying that as well. So these are just few ideas that you can try out for your Patreon account, for your show. One of the things that I really love about Patreon is, especially with early release episodes, which we do weekly, so it's a weekly early release, we get comments from our Patreon listeners. And it happened, you know, quite a few times that we made changes to the episodes before the release on the main feed for the wider audience, because of Patreon comments. Or the Patreon listeners caught mistakes and errors that we missed, and we were able to fix them before releasing the episodes on the main feed of Casefile. And that's really, really helpful, and we're really grateful for that. So by that time you probably gathered that I'm super keen on Patreon, and incredibly satisfying, and we're incredibly grateful that so many people decide to support us directly through that platform. As I mentioned, there are other platforms that do similar thing, and we have big companies that are moving into the space with the subscriptions, the Spotify's, the Apple's. But for now, Patreon is still number one choice for podcasters who want to have that direct connections with the fans, and develop these extra revenue streams. What do you think? You can let me know in the comments below. But that's it for today, I'm Mike Mikis. If you enjoyed the content, you can check the rest of my channel. For now, hit like or subscribe, and I'll see you later.