Can You Make it on Donations?

Today I go through some numbers to give you an informed idea if you want to use “donations” as your primary form of having the podcast pay for itself. Last month I urged listeners to help me celbrate my 45th birthday and chip in on a Kindle from Amazon.com I used a service at chipin.com to show the progress. I was shooting for $300 and I got $170 Please note I am not complaining. I love the Kindle and becuase of my listeners I could afford one. I’m just a stat freak and took notes during the whole thing.

Here are some stats:

I promoted this on many of my podcasts including Building a Better Dave, Weekly Web Tools, Logical Weight Loss, and the Musicians Cooler and in February I had around 9,505 downloads. 53% of that was the Logical Weight Loss podcast. The School of Podcasting represented 26%. 14% was from the Musicians Cooler. Weekly Web Tools accounted for 523 downloads, and building a better Dave had 128 listeners for the one episode I put out.

Who looked at the site to possibly donate?

Logical Weight Loss represented 81% of the clicks
School of Podcasting sent 9%
Twitter represented 8% of the clicks
Building a Better Dave represented 2% of the clicks

When you look at all the downloads and divide it by the number of people who actually donated it turns out to be .24% (not 2.4 that’s .24). So if you had 1000 people, and you wanted them to donate $1, you would end up with $240.  Does donations represent audience connection? Would love your feedback on that. It’s not fair in some ways. Times are tough, and there are much better things to donate to (Haiti, New Orleans, etc).

Playing in Traffic Part II

I tried to start a podcast with tie in from magazines to feed me content. In the end they didn’t jump in. I started the Jillian Michaels Podcast becuase she is very famous. She used to have a radio program that people were looking for, and I am filling that gap. I am still passionate about that topic (health, Jillian Michaels), and the other thing I like about Jillian is she has many products (all available with an affiliate program).

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