Fortunately, there are several options you can implement immediately when it comes to generating revenue with your podcast. If advertising campaigns seem too involved, there’s no need to worry. There are plenty of monetization options that don’t require in-depth marketing know-how.

In this article, we’ll review five ways to monetize your website. We’ll also take a look at some podcast specific web site themes that can help make monetization easier. If you’re ready, let’s dive right in!

Why Now is The Right Time to Monetize Your Podcast

There really is no better time than now to initiate a monetization plan for your podcast. In fact, recent research has highlighted now as a ‘watershed’ moment for the medium. Podcasts are seeing roughly 90 million listeners a month. This signals its crossover into the mainstream. According to Daniel J. Lewis, from The Audacity to Podcast, there are now “More than 800,000 valid podcasts now available in Apple Podcasts”. This is clearly way beyond a “trending” topic, and with so many listeners, companies, podcasters, advertisers, acquisitions and more flowing in, there’s also a lot of money exchanging hands in this rapidly growing industry.

In terms of revenue, the podcast market is projected to see a 110 percent increase in revenue in 2020, from 2017, according to TechCrunch. Some of this increase has been fueled by Spotify’s acquisition of podcast creation platforms Gimlet and Anchor:

Anchor alone claims to be supporting 40 percent of all new podcasts, helped by their free podcast hosting service. All of this means there is really no time like the present to generate revenue with your podcast.

How to Make Sure Your Podcast is Ready to Generate Revenue

Before opening the floodgates, you’ll want to make sure your podcast is actually ready to be monetized. One way to do this is to make sure you’re publishing new episodes regularly, and can keep up the schedule you establish. This doesn’t mean you need to publish daily. It’s more important to establish a balanced approach that works for your brand and resources.

Another way to prepare your podcast for monetization is to assess your website’s theme and structure. The right theme can add a significant benefit to your website, especially when they are designed specifically for podcasts (like ours.) Using a podcast theme means you’ll have e-commerce tools like WooCommerce at the ready. Our themes also come bundled with the popular drag-and-drop page builder Elementor, to help you create a design meeting your exact requirements.

6 Ways to Generate Revenue With Your Podcast

There are a number of ways to go about turning your podcast into a moneymaker. Let’s look at six different options!

1. Treat Your Podcast as a Brand

To many podcasters, their podcast is only an audio format available on Apple Podcasts or other platforms. It’s important to realize that your podcast can become a brand, or be part of your existing brand. This would surely help you increase your audience, the engagement with your listeners, and improve your chances of really monetizing your podcast. This means you’ll definitely need to stay in touch with your audience via other mediums, such as social media, a website, blog or even a weekly newsletter.

Treating your podcast like a brand means you’ll need to pay more attention to some key details and maintain “control” over your brand. Let us explain what we mean by “Control” – it’s really easy to get tangled up with all the different podcast platforms and podcast hosts, and forget about the brand behind your podcast. When you podcast is only available through one or a few platforms, you can’t control your brand and identity.

This is why we strongly recommend all podcasters to create their own website, where you could control all the content, send links to listeners, share more types of media beyond just audio, and really take things up to the next level. It’s going to be really hard to monetize your podcast before you have a brand behind it. Once you start to establish a brand, you’ll also notice how easier the path to monetization becomes, as it would be much easier to land advertisers, sponsors, sell merchandise, and more.

2. Establish a Membership/Subscription/Donation-Based Podcast

Many podcasters use Patreon as a platform to enable them to charge you to set up a membership-based business. This means you can create a variety of membership tiers and invite listeners to support your podcast by becoming regular donors. You can also offer different incentives and packages for each tier. For example, you could have $10 and $15 a month memberships that include a t-shirt and premium content, respectively.

In terms of podcasting, Patreon actually has a specific platform for podcasters. This includes features designed to benefit the medium:

For example, you’ll be able to provide a special private RSS link to your paying supporters. Additionally, Patreon provides communication tools so you can stay directly connected to your fans and supporters. There’s a lot of flexibility in the platform and it’s easy to set up.

Besides Patreon, there are other alternatives. For example, you can create a WordPress website for your podcast and enable premium content or memberships on your website itself. This is the most “direct” method, as everything would be handled directly on your site and not on other platforms or marketplaces. There are free and premium WordPress plugins that would help you achieve this quite easily, like Restrict Content Pro, MemberPress, Easy Digital Downloads and more.

Lastly, in the past few months more new companies have emerged that help podcasters charge subscriptions in different ways. One example you can look at is Supercast.

Some hosting platforms also offer built-in monetization services. RSS.com, Anchor, Podbean and others include tools to help you monetize your podcast from within their hosting platform.

3. Advertising and Sponsorships

Another way you can monetize your podcast (and podcast website) is to offer advertising or sponsorship opportunities. Many podcasters choose to run a quick ad at the intro of their podcast and mention one or more sponsors in exchange for a fixed fee. It is also possible to insert ads dynamically throughout your podcast, and several companies already offer this method, although it can be a little less relevant for your audience at times. In addition to your podcast, you can create space on your podcast website that can be purchased for advertising, or accept sponsorships for on-air mentions. Podcast advertising has been called ‘an advertiser’s dream’ as it’s been found to be highly effective.

When it comes to podcast advertising there are three main spots in an episode where you’d typically offer sponsorship options:

• Pre-roll: This is at the very start of your show where you can drop in a line that says the podcast was sponsored by a company.
• Mid-roll: You may have listened to podcasts that use the mid-roll option, as this is when talk segues into a break or transition to a guest. You can then use the natural break to talk about a sponsored product.
• Post-roll: The very end of your podcast, sometimes called an ‘outro’, is another place where you can do a quick sponsor mention.

One way you can get started with advertising on your podcast is to use a podcast advertising network. While you will have to pay a fee or percentage to the brokers that manage these, it will be one less item you have to devote resources to, and the benefits could outweigh the negatives.

If you already have a decent amount of listeners, you can reach out to companies relevant for your podcast and see if they would be interested in sponsoring your future episodes. For example, if you run a successful podcast about coffee, reach out to your favorite cafe, or a coffee-machine manufacturer or brand. They would (usually) be happy to sponsor your podcast and reach an audience of targeted listeners.

4.  Sell Show-Related Merchandise

There are lots of options to help you create an e-commerce store for your show merchandise, without ever having to handle the physical product or manage the shipping logistics.

One way you can approach this is to use a print-on-demand service such as Teespring. This means product orders are printed only when someone puts in an order. You won’t have to purchase a stock of different items and deal with the leftover product.

One example of this kind of merchandise option is from Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience:

His Higher Primate e-commerce store offers up apparel and other products from the show. As your show gains followers, this is one way to continue to engage and build a community with your listeners. Not to mention, the more branded t-shirts you have walking around in the world, the more free advertising for your show!

Don’t limit yourself to to T-Shirts and socks, you can easily sell e-books, software, or any other products you may see fit for your brand. In fact, many businesses are creating a podcast to promote their own products or brand, so it’s really a two-way success!

Selling products would probably mean you’ll need to do it from your website. We recommend using WordPress. It’s probably the best platform that would allow you to have all of your episodes, your merch or products, a blog, subscription options and even more all on the same website!

In terms of eCommerce, WordPress works really great with WooCommerce – the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. You can also use Easy Digital Downloads to sell digital items, or connect your WordPress site to other eCommerce services.

Needless to say, all of our Podcast WordPress Themes work flawlessly with WooCommerce!

5. Create Premium or Restricted Content

We discussed membership and subscription above, but this approach might take a little extra effort on your part but can be an effective incentive for listeners who already love your show. If you’re not sure what kind of premium content you might be able to produce, there are several options, including:

• Recording extra material with special guests that only paying members can access
• Live streaming or providing video recordings of your podcast sessions to subscribers for a monthly fee
• Creating an ‘early access’ membership
• Offering ad-free content
• Creating a private podcast and charge for being among the listeners/community

Combining this with other options on this list is one way to create a more comprehensive monetization strategy. You can enable those options either as a one-time purchase or subscription-based.

6. Use Affiliate Links to Generate Revenue

Affiliate revenue is already successful on the internet for decades. If you don’t want to create or sell your own products, there are affiliate programs you can use to generate revenue with your podcast. For example, one of the most popular affiliate programs is the Audible Creator program:

This is a simple option where you can offer an Audible trial to your listeners with a custom URL. For every free trial initiated with your link, you’ll get $15.  Many podcast hosting services also offer affiliate programs as well. Just remember, it’s a good practice to disclose affiliates to your listeners so they don’t feel mislead. You can always add affiliate links either during your show, on the shownotes, or via your website.

Conclusion

When you take into consideration that advertising during podcasts is actually approved by 78% of listeners, you can proceed with confidence that introducing a monetization plan won’t necessarily alienate your listeners. As such, pressing on with any number of strategies could be great for your listeners, cashflow, and more.

There are several options when it comes to generating revenue with your podcast. Let’s recap what we covered in this article:

1. Create a brand for your podcast.
2. Setting Up a Subscription-based revenue stream
3. Offering advertising and sponsorship opportunities.
4. Sell show-related merchandise.
5. Create ‘Premium-only’ content.
6. Use affiliate links.

There are many more ways for monetizing your podcast. We recommend to stick to the one you find most relevant to you and your podcast. You can also be creative and create new revenue streams.

Regardless of how you decide to generate revenue with your podcast, we have all the podcast-related WordPress themes and resources you need. Check out our many podcast-friendly themes and pricing!

The post 5 Ways to Monetize Your Podcast and Create Revenues appeared first on SecondLineThemes.

When getting the “Bundled outdated copies of WooCommerce template files”, make sure not to panic. That sounds more confusing than you might think, and a solution isn’t that complicated to achieve – let’s see what causes this error, and how we can easily fix it:

Fix WooCommerce 3 Bundled Outdated Copies of WooCommerce Template Files

Origin of the Error and How To Fix It – Why does this error occur?
Well, this error can theoretically occur whenever a new version of WooCommerce is released and you manually or automatically update the WooCommerce plugin. In your custom theme, there might be some WooCommerce templates that are overriding the original WooCommerce files, and as you can assume, once people start modifying files, each update carries a slight risk that something will be broken.

Generally speaking, having an outdated versions of WooCommerce template files won’t affect the plugin’s performance. However, this can cause display errors, lack of new features etc.
The old template files that are modified by the developers of your theme need to be updated accordingly.

How to Fix WooCommerce 3 Bundled Outdated Copies

The solution depends on which templates are outdated, but the procedure of fixing this error is always the same. You have to change the WooCommerce files within your theme with the updated ones.

To find out which files are outdated, navigate to Admin -> WooCommerce -> System Status. Once you see which template files have issues, write these down, and open your theme’s folder via FTP or on your hosting File Manager.

(Side note – it is a good idea to create a child theme. This would keep the original Theme files from being affected if you make a mistake. If you already have a child theme — that’s great! But if you don’t, please see our tutorial first, and then come back to continue with the fix.)

Since there are many files that may be outdated, we will proceed with an example. Let’s say that the following template files are outdated:
theme-name/woocommerce/pagination.php
theme-name/woocommerce/form-shipping.php

You can simply Fix WooCommerce 3 Bundled Outdated Copies errors by checking which updates were applied to these specific files on the official WooCommerce Github repository.

Once you do this, you’ll have to see if there weren’t massive changes to the WooCommerce functionality on the problematic templates, and then update your files. It is important to manually update the version number on the top of your file. This would ensure the WooCommerce 3 Bundled Outdated Copies message disappears.

Wrapping Up

To sum up – the best way to fix the WooCommerce 3+ “Bundled outdated copies of WooCommerce template files” error in case you have a premium theme is to update the theme itself. This should ensure everything is up to date in regards to your theme as well, as long as the theme developer has patched the theme.

What if your theme cannot be updated, or you’re using a custom theme? Well, try to find out which template files are problematic and manually update them.

The post Fix WooCommerce 3 Bundled Outdated Copies appeared first on SecondLineThemes.

WooCommerce doesn’t provide an option to Disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon from the header or navigation. In this article, we will discover a very quick and easy workaround by adding a few lines of custom CSS. This technique will help you to hide/remove other elements from your website as well. FYI, you don’t really need to know how to code to do this. Let’s get started!

We’ll need to do 2 things here:
1. Inspect/find the cart icon via your browser’s inspector
2. Apply a custom CSS rule to hide the cart icon

If you are using one of our WordPress Podcast Themes, you can find additional settings through the “Appearance > Customize” screen.

How to Disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon in Your Code

Browsers make it pretty easy to inspect and manipulate elements in the DOM. What is the DOM? Well, it stands for Document Object Model, but in layman’s terms, it is a hierarchical representation of every element on the website in a tree-like form.

Browsers allow us to review the entire structure of a web page including all elements and their properties. But in this case, we want to select a specific element — the cart icon. Let’s see how we can do this in Safari and Google Chrome without searching for it manually in the Element Inspector.
In Safari, you should have the Developer tools enabled first.

The steps to disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon

1. Open your website, and once it is fully loaded, right-click anywhere on it, and select Inspect Element.
3. On the right side, you’ll see an icon that looks like a sniper scope, however iIf you hover it, it will say Start Element Inspection. If more convenient, you can also press Shift + Cmd + C. Once this icon is active, you will notice as soon as you move your mouse over some section or element on the website, the browser starts to highlight those elements.
4. With the Element Inspection active, find the WooCommerce cart icon in the header, and click on it. Once you do this, the browser will automatically find the icon element in the DOM tree.
5. From here, we can easily see what CSS classes are associated with the WooCommerce cart icon, and modify them later in our WordPress admin panel. If you take a closer look at the highlighted element, you will see that it has a class called header_cart. And on the right side, you can see all the CSS properties applied to it.

In Chrome, the process is pretty much the same. The only difference, is that to find the cart icon element, you will need to click on the arrow icon on the very left called Chrome Element Inspector (as opposed to Safari’s Start Element Inspection option).

Now we know how to track down any element on our website, and see stuff like CSS properties and HTML attributes related to it.

Custom CSS to Disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon

We found out that the WooCommerce icon has a class called header_cart. Now all we need to do, is add a single line of CSS to that class. Generally, you can find the Custom CSS option in Appearance -> Theme Options. In the Custom CSS text area in your theme’s options, you will need to add:

.header_cart { display: none; }

Click Save Changes, and reload your website. The icon should be gone. If it is still there, try:

.header_cart { display: none !important; }

Next, if the icon is still there, the browser might have cached CSS and JS files from your website. These files are called static files. You will need to empty the cache manually in the browser settings, and reload again to see the custom CSS you wrote take effect.

Special Case

Sometimes, when the second solution doesn’t work, or you can’t seem to Disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon while using smaller browser sizes, there might be some CSS queries overwriting the properties of this class. You will need to use the Element inspector, and find those queries. Here’s an example:

@media (max-width: 767px) {…}

To modify this query, in the Custom CSS field, add the following lines (bellow the first .header_cart line):

@media (max-width: 767px) {
		.header_cart { display: none; }
	}

If you need a savvy WordPress developer to help you out, please consider Hiring an Expert.

The post Disable the WooCommerce Cart Icon appeared first on SecondLineThemes.

WooCommerce can be a little tricky when dealing with the WordPress sidebar positioning and display. If you’re looking for a way to disable the WooCommerce sidebar, and make your Woocommerce pages full-width, get ready to do some tweaking! We will cover the right and wrong ways to disable or remove the sidebar from your Woo Pages, and make your shop look awesome! But first, let’s see how you can enable the sidebar, in case you messed something up.

Using one of our Themes?

If you are using one of our Podcast Themes, for example the Tusant WordPress Theme, you can easily change the WooCommerce settings in the page you use as the shop page under the “Page Options” panel. Also, you’ll find a bunch of additional settings in the “Appearance > Customize” screen.

Enabling the Sidebar

The WordPress sidebar should be active by default. If not, you might need to go to Dashboard → Appearance → Widgets, and add some widgets to the sidebar to make it visible. WooCommerce comes with custom widgets that you can select called “Show Overview Page” and “Single Product Page”. Just drag & drop them in your sidebar, and they should appear in your store.
Also, you might need to go to the page in question, and select a template with a sidebar. This can happen when you have a Shop page that’s using a full-width template (without a sidebar).

Disable the WooCommerce Sidebar

There are a couple of different options you could use to disable the WooCommerce sidebar. We’ll go over all the options and show you how to disable the WooCommerce sidebar on your own:

The “Wrong” Way

There’s a good chance you read somewhere that the easiest way to remove the sidebar is to use the following lines of CSS:

.single-product .sidebar {
		display: none !important;
	},

or even something like:

.woocommerce #sidebar {
		display: none;
	}

The first snippet will hide the sidebar from your single product pages, while the second will hide it altogether on every WooCommerce page on your WordPress website. But the trick here, is that even though you won’t see the sidebar, it will still be rendered and take up space in your template. This is because CSS can’t stop an element from being rendered – it can just hide it. Also, this would not necessarily work for all themes, and if you’re using a custom theme it may not work properly so make sure to double check that.

The Right Way to Disable the WooCommerce Sidebar

To properly disable the WooCommerce sidebar, we’ll need to write some PHP code, and manually change what WordPress should render on the front-end. Here are a couple of solutions:

1. Disabling Sidebar Using a WordPress Hook (Recommended Method)

This is the best solution, and it is considered to be the “WordPress way” of doing things. Navigate to your theme’s functions.php file, and write the following code:

function disable_woo_commerce_sidebar() {
	remove_action( 'woocommerce_sidebar', 'woocommerce_get_sidebar', 10); 
}
add_action('init', 'disable_woo_commerce_sidebar');

2. Disabling Sidebar in a Custom Template that Displays WooCommerce Products Alongside Regular WordPress Posts

You can use the is_woocommerce() function to detect whether the current page that’s being accessed is a WooCommerce template or not. The function will return true if it is a Woo page, and false otherwise. So in our theme’s sidebar.php, we could write:

	if ( !is_woocommerce() ) {
		get_sidebar();
	}

Using this logic, we can easily determine what type of page the user is accessing, and based on that, we can call the function that renders the sidebar. So let’s say that you open a product page (which is a WooCommerce template). Then the expression within the if statement will return false, and the sidebar function won’t be called – meaning the sidebar won’t be rendered.
How does the !is_woocommerce() return false? Well, the is_woocommerce() function will return true, and the ! (not) operator will convert the “true” into the opposite value, which is false.

3. Disabling Sidebar in a WooCommerce Template

Navigate to woocommerce/templates/shop, and open up the sidebar.php file. Here, you need to comment out everything in the sidebar.php file using /* at the very top, and */ at the very bottom of the file. Save it, and see if it worked on the front-end.

If you need a savvy WordPress developer to help you out, please consider Hiring an Expert.

The post Enable and Disable the WooCommerce Sidebar appeared first on SecondLineThemes.