by Paul Colligan

Most people take their podcast content, attach it to a single RSS feed, and hope for profits from ad insertion or lead generation. It’s the model that 99 percent of podcast­ers follow. While some will do well by it, they’re all leaving serious money on the table. I mentioned “expansion” in this column in the last issue, and I’ll provide some concrete options here.

Watch a movie on PBS and you’ll notice something funny at the end of the program: They’ll offer the option to pur­chase the show that people just watched for free. Yes, friends, some people will pay for what they could get for free.

Take a look at www.Kunaki.com. This great company will produce CDs and DVDs in full four-color glory for just $1.60 per unit (and with no minimum order). Go ahead and make CDs or DVDs of your podcast content and sell them to your audience. You’ll be surprised how many will buy. Consider options like “extended editions” or “director’s com­mentaries.” You’ll be amazed at the op­tions you might come up with. Does this work? Go ahead: look up “Ask A Ninja” at Netflix or Google and see how many people are paying $1.99 for episodes they can get for free.

Want to get out of the business of filling landfills with plastic? Why not just charge for your content directly and pocket the money you would have put into the pressings? At the Podcast Part­nership, we built PremiumCast.com to let podcasters sell their content directly to their consumers. And we aren’t the only ones out there. Products like Show Taxi (www.showtaxi.com) and Subscribe Cast (www.subscribecast.com) do the same thing. Does this model work? Ask Cornelius Fitcher of the Project Manage­ment Prepcast: he sells access to his podcast at $40 per person (many times – each and every day of the week).

How about taking your content and getting it transcribed and placed into book form? With print-on-demand services like www.LuLu.com (or, heck, the local Kinkos), there’s no reason why a year of episodes couldn’t be the content for a top-selling book.

Did I mention that my book The Busi­ness Podcasting Bible came from tran­scripts of a series of teleseminars I did with my coauthor, Alex Mandossian? Why not think about content expansion with the very act of content creation? With services like www.PhoneAndWebcast.com you can stream a telephone call to 2,000 users at the same time (while keeping them all at your site). If you don’t need to own the entire branding process, services like www.Talkshoe.com and www.NowLive.com will let you host a show with nothing more than a telephone.

Some people like the idea of being there “live.” You gotta record your content at some point; why not invite others to attend?

So now you can perform an event for a live audience, let people participate at the time and place of their choosing via pod­cast, charge for the content via a CD or premium content delivery, and sell a book or manual made from the transcripts.

See where I’m going here? See how you’ve just expanded one media option into multiple choices? Can you see the options for profit here? Now that you have a teleseminar, podcast, physical and premium content, and printed-word media empire, consider expansion again.

Maybe you can charge a fee for access to the live recording. Some people want to be there when the “magic” happens, and at the very least, participate in the product creation process. PhoneAndWebcast.com not only lets you stream to 2,000 people at once – you also have 200 phone lines that you can use. Consider the options.

A few issues back I talked about Ad­Sense and blogs (see Blogger & Podcaster, June 2007, page 13). Do that right and the checks from the San Francisco Bay Area can be more significant than any­thing you’d get from an ad insertion order that others work so hard for. Where can you get great content to put around Ad­Sense ads? Consider getting transcripts of the same podcast content you already got people to pay for. Heck, pay for the transcripts with the money earned from selling the content on CD. Finance one profitable channel with another.

People consume content in many different ways – a live teleseminar, a streaming webcast, a time-shifted podcast, a physical CD or DVD, a book or magazine, or a Web site with ads.

With an audience as diverse at that, you might consider live events or high-level training. I’m talking about big-ticket items here.

Next year my Podcast Secrets class (www.Podcast-Secrets.com) will see hun­dreds of people paying very, very good money to learn how to use their pod­casts to reach the very audiences (and profits) they’ve dreamed of. They’ll sign up because my content has expanded to all of these different media formats.

And it’s all done on purpose.

And that is what media consumption expansion is all about.

Paul Colligan (www.PaulColligan.com) can be reached at paul@blog­gerandpodcaster.com.