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Travis:
Today on five minute Mondays, you'll learn how to create and sell podcast merge without turning your garage into a warehouse. Welcome to five minute Mondays where we bring in the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you are new here, consider subscribing. Now you've caught us in the middle of a nine part series if you're new to the podcast, all about monetization. So we're going over the pros and the cons of each of the currently popular strategies to help you decide which, if any of them are right for your podcast. And today we're gonna talk about how to sell podcast merge. Now the concept of selling t-shirts, coffee mugs, hoodies and stickers has been popular for quite a while. Specifically with bands. If you've ever gone to a rock concert and you walk out into the area immediately outside the seating area, you have all these booths of t-shirts you can buy. And then as you tubers started looking for alternative income streams because ad sense really isn't a great way to make a living. They started turning to merge as well. They would feature products in their videos and then give their fans away to purchase them. So you can sell merge for your podcast, just like those rock bands and you tubers. And in this episode we'll cover what kind of Mertz you should create and then how to utilize print on demand services to fulfill orders. So number one, what merge should you create for your podcast? Well, it could be as easy as just slapping your podcast logo or name on a shirt hat or mug. You can totally do that. But if you really want your products to sell, then it pays to consider what your listeners would actually want to buy. And a really good example of this from our bus rock community is Robyn Karen Bauer socks from the major league venting podcast cause they have a podcast about equestrian sporting events. And they know that many of their listeners travel to these events often spending hours outside. So when they decided to create some merge for their podcast, they went look baseball caps and those baseball caps did so well that their most popular hats sold out. So think about your listeners. Think about what they would actually use on a daily basis. What would they appreciate? What would the be excited about? Are they students, professors or stay at home moms? Well make a cool coffee mug cause there's a good chance they drink coffee. Do they work at a startup company with a casual dress coat, then make a graphic tee shirt? Are they artistic creative types? Well then you can design a cool iPhone case. So all that to say be intentional about the products that you create. You can just whip something together and throw it up on a website. But if you really want to use merge as an opportunity to develop a tighter relationship with your audience and be really intentional and think about what they would actually want. And then the second thing to understand about merchants, you want to use print on demand services. So in the past, if you wanted to sell physical products, used to have to work directly with the manufacturer, order in bulk and then fulfill every order and return yourself. But now there are services like Printful that handle all of that for you. And we like Printful at Buzzsprout because it has a wide range of products that you can use and choose from. And it's pretty easy to set up your own personal store. You just choose the products that you like, set your sales price, and then they will show you how much profit you would make from each sale. And then if you want to go one step further, you can pick up a custom domain like my podcast, shop.com to make it easy to remember. And then in wherever you set up your domain, you forward all of your traffic directly to your Printful store. So you don't have to remember printful.com/ 24 36 whatever, right? So if you're interested in using a service like Printful to do a print on demand, shipping and fulfillment, I love to link in the show notes that describes how their process works and even greater detail. And that will apply to any print on demand service that you use. And Hey, don't forget to make yourself something nice in the process, just as a little reward for sticking with it. And continuing to podcast. Now, in next week's episode, you're gonna learn how to package your knowledge and expertise and offer coaching services to people who want to learn from you. But that's it for today. Hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on YouTube, or you can subscribe to the five minute Mondays podcast in your favorite app, squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. And I left a link in the show notes to our recent blog post that covers monetization strategies. If you want to peak ahead and see what's coming up on future episodes, and if there's something that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can click the link in the show notes to submit your question. Thanks for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.