While we understand that most of the people starting a podcast want to eventually monetize their efforts, there’s a large portion of the podcasting community that have no interest in ever making money from their podcast.
We recently chatted with author, dream coach, and podcaster Kate Volman about this very subject, and here’s what she had to say.
Podcasting for Fun is Perfectly O.K.
Everyone has their thing, and it’s about the intentionality. If it was my intention to have a podcast business, well, then yeah, I would look at things in a completely different way than I did when I started the Create for No Reason Podcast.
It would be a completely different strategy.
So, if anyone has a dream of being a full-time podcaster and earning a living from it, that’s awesome. And you can absolutely achieve that dream.
I have friends that do it for a living and they do very well. In fact, now they teach other people how to do it and they have courses and they really design their life around podcasting. They were very strategic about it.
At least for me, right now in my journey, I am not interested in that. For whatever reason, that totally could change a year from now. But for me, it’s more of an outlet that I use just to have fun and it brings me a lot of joy. It has also allowed me to meet some really interesting people.
I wrote a book this year called Do What You Love: A Guide to Living Your Creative Life Without Leaving Your Job, and it helped me with the practice of the creative process. Getting to show up and flesh out your ideas on a podcast is really cool because maybe sometimes I don’t feel like sitting down and writing, but I kind of want to riff on a specific topic.
The practice of having to get behind the microphone and share a specific message, it does a lot for me in the creation process. So that’s the purpose of my podcast. I want to share really great information. I really want to help people understand that getting back to the joy of creating, whether it’s a podcast, creating and publishing videos to YouTube, writing a book, or you want to do photography or art or painting or any of that stuff. You don’t have to earn a living doing it.
Just because you’re a really great painter doesn’t mean you have to sell everything that you create. That’s the message that I want to share. It’s just a very different outlook on it, right?
Making money from podcasting or just doing it for fun – neither one is good or bad, it just is.
So I think everyone has to be really clear on their answer to the question “What is your outcome? What is the goal that you’re really looking to do?”
Obviously, like any business, there’s no get rich quick scheme if you do want to make money from it. I don’t think anybody should think, “Hey, I’m going to start a business and within three months I’m going to be earning six figures, and it’s going to be this multimillion dollar business.”
It’s the same thing if you start a podcast. You have to go into it understanding that there are ways to monetize, but it’s a process and you have to kind of structure it and know what you’re getting yourself into.
If making money is your goal, podcasting is like any other business, and should be treated as such.
