YouTube Throws Its Hat into the Podcast Ring

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Well, it’s finally happened after months, maybe years of speculation and parsing words and finding leaked, 

Slide decks. YouTube has thrown its hat into the podcasting ring. This week is podcast movement, and earlier in the week, YouTube quietly rolled out their podcasting interface where you can go to [youtube.com/podcast]. 

Now, if you’ve been following me on social media, you’ll know that I’ve been hitting video podcasts hard from telling followers to get permission to record and release video, to how to convert audio to video. I’ve been preaching the good word of YouTube getting in on the podcast action.

Today, I am going to talk about with you, I’m gonna tell you the best way for you to get your podcast on YouTube. How you should organize it and how you can make money on YouTube. And we’ll round out the day with some helpful tools. But first, let’s get into the introduction.

Hello! And welcome to Make Money Podcasting, where I teach you how to make your first $10,000 with your podcast. On this show, you’ll learn tried and true methods to increase your revenue and turn your podcast from a money pit into a money maker.

Hi! I’m your host, Joe Casabona. And my podcasts have been making money from day one without a lot of downloads. I’ll share everything I know with you here on Make Money Podcasting presented by Podcast Liftoff and Nexcess.

Joe Casabona: All right. So we’re going to break this episode up into a few different sections. First is setting up your channel, then it’s making money, then advice, then helpful tools.

I’d also recommend that you follow me on YouTube over at [podcastliftoff.com/youtube]. I’ll be putting up tutorials there on how to make the most out of your podcast and YouTube and showing some of this process. So I’d strongly recommend that. But this is Make Money Podcasting so we’re gonna focus on the money aspect the most.

So first, let’s start with the setup if you don’t have a channel with your podcast’s name which is what some people do. And even if you do, you should. This is YouTube’s recommendation. So you should follow this basically to the letter.  

Create a playlist that is exactly the name of your podcast that includes a list of all full episodes. So this is only the full episodes. This is basically recreating your podcast feed that shows up in podcast players. So with this show, I have a playlist on YouTube on the podcast liftoff channel called Make Money Podcasting and it has all of these episodes. They are in reverse chronological order because they are episodic. If you had a serial podcast where order matters, you might release them in chronological order from the day they came out. So keep that in mind.

Now, over on my other show, How I Built It, that has its own dedicated YouTube channel but not a playlist. So something I’m going to have to do or have my VA do is to create a playlist called How I Built It or How I Built It Episodes probably How I Built It and then have episodes in the title or in the description. And then add basically all of the episodes from that channel to the playlist.  This is important. This is what YouTube recommends probably because Google has like a podcasting engine where they can figure out podcasts. Like you don’t have to submit your podcast to Google. And they’re using that same engine probably to identify  podcasts on YouTube. 

Now, I will say I have a piece, as I record this. It’s not out yet. But I’ll try to make them kind of launch at the same time. So I’ll link to this piece that I wrote for the podcast host where I dig deeper into how YouTube podcast works, how everything’s organized, and what YouTube considers a podcast. So I would strongly recommend that. 

And then  I get into some of the monetization stuff, which I’ll talk about here as well. But I recommend that piece because it’s like the news, it’s news based. And it kind of looks at the facts. So they’re just set up for your main episodes. 

You should also have a playlist dedicated to clips from the show. I think this is again, going to be more important, right? Cause clips are shorter. They are engaging, truth be told. I am recording this video as well. I don’t know what I’m going to. I’m going to experiment a little bit here. But I’ll probably release clips of me talking so I got to remember to look at the camera when I’m making a point that I really want to make. But that’s something else to consider. And then you should also have maybe some behind-the-scenes videos and things like that for your podcast. Maybe in a separate playlist or the clips playlist. 

So that’s the setup. We’ll talk about kind of what to do moving forward in a little bit. But I do wan to get to the making money aspect of it, right? 

So the biggest benefit here of YouTube getting into podcasts and your podcast being on YouTube is that you can leverage all of YouTube’s built-in monetization strategies. And in that leaked slide deck from March, they talk about getting into audio-only, ads. And so, you know, there’s like a lot of talk about dynamic ads. I haven’t done an episode on that because I’m not, I want to make sure I really understand it before I try to do an explainer. But Basically, that’s what YouTube does for videos, right? Their dynamic ads. You don’t get to choose them. YouTube sells them and then serves them based on your audience and who the advertiser wants to target. Whereas with dynamic ads, you have a little bit more control over what gets inserted though not totally. But with YouTube, YouTubers make a lot of money off while some YouTubers make a lot of money off of those ads.

I make a pretty reliable, a hundred bucks a month off of YouTube ads for my other channel. But having those ads baked in or having those ads as part of the platform makes your job a little bit easier, right? Because you can start monetizing without having to sell ads. And YouTube is already very proficient at that. So this is something that can really benefit a podcaster who doesn’t wanna sell their own ads or isn’t super keen on reaching out to sponsors. Or it could be an additional revenue stream. Right? I have videos where I have the ads turned on, but the video is also sponsored by my own like baked in sponsor.

So There’s that too.  You know, this episode is sponsored. My How I Built It is sponsored.  But if I could turn on, you know, the preroll, it’s not really, it’s like pre-video and post video ads or even have banner ads. Right? I turn off banner ads on my main channel because I don’t want them to get in the way of the actual content. But if it’s just a video, right, maybe I have the overlay. There are a lot of things to think about here. A lot of opportunities for making money on YouTube.  And I will say before I get into the rest of these, that at the time of this recording, YouTube has a couple of requirements. You need a thousand subscribers and you need 4,000 watch hours. I don’t know if that’s going to change for podcasters. Because theoretically, you get no watch hours, right?  It’s an audio-only medium. I don’t know how they’re going to count, watch, you know? I don’t know a lot of that stuff. It’s still pretty early days. 

As I record this, I believe the head of podcasting at YouTube is going to speak at the Podcast Movement on Thursday. So I’m recording before he speaks. if I need to do a follow-up episode, I’ll tack that on to next week’s episode. It’s there’s a lot of stuff up in the air right now, because all we really know is that YouTube has rolled out a podcast page. But those are, as it stands now, that’s how you monetize on YouTube. You need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to monetize it all. But ads are the most common way.

There is also memberships. YouTube has built-in memberships where people can just pay with a pay button and sign up for a subscription right there. And this allows you to make video “members only”. It allows you to do live streams for members only. And so it could be a really good and easy value add where you don’t have to necessarily set up a private podcast or figure that out. You can just upload additional videos for your members to YouTube and mark them as member-only videos.

There are also Super Chats, Super Stickers, and Thanks which is like static videos. Super Chats and Super Stickers are generally available on like live streams and videos that are premiered. So people can basically do it in real-time while watching the video. The Thanks functionality can happen on any video at any time, but these are all direct donations.

So again, maybe you want to live stream like a raw version of your podcast before it’s edited. Relay FM does this, right? They live stream their audio, but then they release an edited version later. So, if you want to enable Super Chats and Super Stickers, right? Maybe you can do something similar where you’ve got the camera going and you’re recording your podcast episode as if you’re just recording, but you’re live streaming it as well.

So that’s another, that’s the third avenue, right? So live stream your podcast recordings. This could be a good value add for your current audience. It could also be a member’s only thing. Right? 

So there are a couple of ways you want to include or want to do it. I think you’ll get the most appeal at least in the beginning, probably from live streaming it, and then you could still like cross-stream to twitch or something like that.

So those are the three main ways to make money directly with YouTube’s platform. You have ads, you have a membership, you have Super Chats, Super Stickers, and Thanks. As far as I know, there’s no other way or maybe it’s just that I haven’t unlocked that other way. But I think I checked and I think that’s everything. And you can find out kind of where you are. I have an…I’m sorry, I haven’t unlocked my membership yet. But, there’s also shopping, right? So you can list merch, you can connect a store and list merch, which again, if you have like t-shirts for your podcast, then maybe it’s worth listing the merch there. Right. So, definitely, something to consider with YouTube. There are a lot of platform monetization opportunities that you could take advantage of as a podcaster.  So with that, let’s take a break and hear from our sponsor. And then when I come back, I’ll give you some advice and helpful tools for getting your show, for moving forward with your show on YouTube.

Sponsor: This and every episode of Make Money Podcasting is brought to you by Store Builder from Nexcess.

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Joe Casabona: Okay. Let’s talk about advice for what you should do moving forward. Right? I have podcast episodes since 2016. Getting good audio was a nightmare back then. Getting a good video seemed near impossible. So I know what you’re thinking with your back catalog. Let’s not focus on the back catalog for right now. Let’s talk about the kind of moving forward. 

In YouTube, you need a catchy title. I’ve been talking about this for a long time. Don’t make your podcast episode just episode number, and guest name. Make it something interesting. I recorded an episode today with a guest where the title is going to be, “Do You Really Need Great Gear To Make Great Content?” Do I? I don’t know. That’s a question. It’s an open loop. It’s a little bit negative. Right? Because people think that that’s a good YouTube title. So I would recommend titling your episodes both on the podcast platform and on YouTube as something catchy and clickable custom thumbnail. Right? Oh, and the other thing here is right. If you wanna change it for YouTube, you can. Because you can experiment a little bit. YouTube is not checking in the RSS feed. This is the important thing. This is why they’re telling you to make a playlist because they’re not comparing. You’re not submitting your RSS feed to YouTube. They’re figuring it out that you’re a podcast and that they’re gonna surface you on the podcast page. So that’s, you can experiment with the titles on YouTube. If you want.

You should also probably have a custom thumbnail. This is not something I’m doing quite yet, because again, I knew this was coming and for some reason, I didn’t put it together that it was gonna happen the week of the podcast movement, even though it makes perfect sense.

I’m working with my assistant now to figure out a system that works for us. But custom thumbnail, if you don’t have a custom thumbnail right now, use your show artwork, right? Create a 1200 YouTube thumbnail-sized version of your artwork and use it. 

And then for recording, if you’re working with guests, ask them to record the video from here on out. This is where I’m going to say don’t use zoom. Don’t use zoom. Use Riverside, or something else. Riverside sponsored my podcast, my other podcast. But that’s what I use. And I’m a big fan. User oversight to capture video.

And again, at this point, I’m still experimenting. We still don’t know a lot. But it’s good to have those assets. So even if you don’t edit and release them as a full episode, it’s good to have those assets.

For your current back catalog, what I recommend is to create a video with the show’s thumbnail and put that up on YouTube. There are a few tools that can help you here. Fusion Cast is my favorite. It’s a Mac app that’s purpose-built for this. So you drop in your audio, you drop in your artwork, and then it creates a video. It’ll leave into like a Ken Burns, dissolve or transition or whatever zoom.

If you don’t have a Mac, Descript is a good way to do it. It’s not as easy as Fusion Cast, but it allows you to create something a little bit more dynamic. Because you can add like the waveform if you want. And so, Descript is free for a lot of people. It also connects directly to YouTube.

So those are two tools to do it manually. You’re probably going to have to do it manually for your back catalog. You can also automate going to YouTube. So there are two tools that I recommend. One is Castos. That’s my Podcast host. On there, I think their mid-tier plan they’ll automatically send your podcast episodes to a linked YouTube channel. So that makes things a lot easier. You can put them, you could put them in a playlist. So actually I already have all of my episodes in a playlist, so I don’t have to go back and do that, which is lovely.  Or if you don’t use Castos or another host that does this, you can check out Repurposed.io which connects services and kind of does the same thing. That’s what I was using for a while until I saw Castos. Until I moved to Castos and Castos handled it. 

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So those are four tools that can help you get your current catalog onto YouTube. But again, I think capturing the video at this point is going to be really important. 

That guy I talked to today, Dan Bennett, who’s going to be on my show in the near future says that he records his episodes and edits them in premier. And then he has the audio and the video. If that’s something that works for you and your process, great. That will work for my process for this show and for my other podcast WP Review, which is going to be called WP Creators for creators soon. But it doesn’t really work for How I Built It because I record those interviews pretty far in advance. I bake in the ad reads later and my editor edits the audio. So my options are kind of take that edited audio, and create clips with the video assets. I can do that. Or just kind of release that episode raw, unedited on the YouTube channel. But Castos is already kind of uploading for me. So I’ll probably use those assets for clips where it’s engaging content that gets people onto the channel and listening to podcasts. 

But I think it’s important to think about this because podcasting is not an audio or a visual medium necessarily. YouTube has taken steps in recent years to focus more on audio only. So I’m not saying you have a video podcast now. I’m saying if you have the video, it opens up another avenue for content,  potentially engaging content. But I think if you are using a tool like Castos or Repurpose.io, or even Fusion Cast, that’s fine. Just at this point, get your podcast on YouTube. That’s my recommendation.

But that’s it for this episode of Make Money Podcasting presented by Nexcess and Podcast Liftoff. If you liked this episode, give it a rating and review on Apple podcasts. I’d really appreciate that. I’m running a little experiment where I’m trying to climb the charts there. And from what I understand, ratings and reviews help. 

Thanks so much to our sponsoring, Nexcess. If you want to get all of the show notes, you can head over to [makemoneypod.com/207]. And that is for Episode 007 of season 02, so 207. 

And until next time. I’m Joe Casabona, and I can’t wait to see what you make.