Day 56: Monetizing with Products & Services 1

Today we're going to go over how you can create products and services to monetize your podcast. So we're going to start with understanding your audience.

Steps for Skill Mastery:

1. Review Your Ideal Avatar
2. Interview Your Ideal Avatar

Step 1: Review Your Ideal Avatar

Here is a brief overview of how to get started with products and services:

• Grow your audience
• Ask your audience their biggest struggle or pain point
• Listen to them
• Give them what they asked for and create a solution

Today we will focus on listening to our audience and asking them what their biggest struggle is.

Before we start asking our audience questions it is good to review what we already know about them so that we can ask more quality questions to get a full understanding of their life and the pain points they have.

Go back to when you described your ideal avatar and review some of the information we gathered about them.

Activity: Reflect

Answer the following questions about your ideal avatar:

• What are their biggest problems or struggles?
• What are their biggest fears?
• What are their biggest desires, dreams, and aspirations?
• Describe the current situation in their life.
• Describe the desired situation in their life.

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Now you have a solid foundation to start listening for key phrases from your audience about their pain points.

Listening to your audience gives you key insights into what their biggest struggles are, and it can help guide you down the right path to creating the most valuable products or services possible to solve those pain points.

You can begin listening to your audience by doing things like:

• Ask your audience questions
• Engage with them over email
• Ask questions on social media, or in an online community
• Encourage discussion in the comments of blogs and social media posts
• Connect on video calls for one on one sessions

It is through listening to your audience and doing things like asking questions, engaging and connecting that you’ll be able to start validating your ideas. As you start listening to your audience they will begin telling you some of their biggest pain points.

As you begin listening to your audience, start to record the themes you see recurring in their life and the things that your audience asks you for all the time.

Activity: Reflect

Answer the following questions about your ideal avatar:

• What are some questions or requests that keep coming up over and over again when my audience reaches out to me?
• What are some of the common themes that my audience gravitates towards in response to my content?
• What are some of the recurring struggles people are talking about in the online communities I’m a part of that are related to my business idea?

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By now you should see some common things occurring and some recurring themes arising from your audience. These are problems that your audience is having that you could make a product or service around to help solve their pain points.

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Activity: Create a List

Make a list of 15 recurring themes, struggles, or pain points you hear from your audience that you could create a solution for.

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Now let's interview our avatar to confirm these items on your list.

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Step 2: Interview Your Ideal Avatar

A hack that you can use to research and understand the pain points your audience has is by interviewing someone from you audience who would be an ideal customer for you.

This is a great value exchange for both parties because:

• You get to talk with your audience and discover their struggles
• They get to put themselves on a platform to share their story

Reach out to some of the biggest fans of your podcast and setup a time for you to interview a few people from your audience who would be ideal customers. I recommend getting 3-5 people for your interviews.

Below are some great questions to ask during your interviews.

Activity: Reflect

Setup interviews with your ideal avatar and ask the following questions:

• What is the hardest part about ________________ (recurring problem your audience has)?
• Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem…
• Why is this problem hard?
• What, if anything, have you done to try and solve this problem?
• What don't you love about the solutions you have already tried?

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Be sure write down any other additional notes that come up during your interviews

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.