How to Sell Your Podcast for a Profit | Anjel B. Hartwell

Most podcasters never consider selling their show, even when it’s the right next step. But, perhaps, it’s time for you to start exploring selling your podcast! In this episode, Anjel B. Hartwell explains exactly how a podcast is real intellectual property you can package, transfer, and make a win-win for you and the buyer. Get ready to understand the process, protect your value, and make a smart exit when the time is right!

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Personal Story of Selling a Podcast
01:26 Deciding to Sell and the Power of Creative Assets
02:20 The Importance of Selling Skills in Business
03:19 Introducing the SHELL Framework for Selling
04:15 Step 1: Stand Your Ground and Own Your Value
06:13 Step 2: Hold Space and Be Patient
08:07 Step 3: Educate and Evaluate the Buyer
11:02 Ensuring Fair Value and Love in the Sale
12:27 Love What You Sell and Evolve When Needed
14:19 Let Go and Trust Divine Timing
15:17 Lessons Learned and Final Thoughts

Takeaways

You can sell anything you create, including a podcast.
Standing your ground and owning your value is crucial.
Hold space and be patient during sales conversations.
Evaluate and educate to ensure a good fit.
Love what you sell to transmit positive energy.
Let go and trust divine timing in sales.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/388

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Transcript

You can sell anything, even a podcast show. It was March 11th, 2020, and I was at the New Media Summit. A couple of days prior, we had been told that the whole country was being shut down because of Corona. And we were in this little beautiful bubble of an event out in California that was produced by Steve Olscher called the New Media Summit.

I was one of the icons of influence at the event. And the premise of the event was that people would come who wanted to pitch podcast hosts in order to get on their show. After the event was done, we had a mastermind group that Steve facilitated for all of the people who had been selected as icons. And one of the icons who was there was a show host for somebody else's show. And this guy, he was sitting at our mastermind table and he was saying, I just want to serve men. I just want to serve men.

I want to help them to be on purpose. And he was hosting a real estate show at the time. Now at that time, I had two shows, the Men on Purpose podcast and Wickedly Smart Women podcast. And I had come to the point in my production of Men on Purpose where I felt like I was really complete with the process of producing the show. And I had made that decision in December of the prior year, December of 2019. I was like, I feel like I'm done.

And I had a big enough bank of episodes that I was still airing episodes well into March. So I'm sitting there at this table listening and all of a sudden the idea popped into my head. See if this guy would be interested in buying your show. And so I approached him at the break and we had a little conversation and he said, my God, you are the answer to my prayers.

And we went through the process over a couple of month period of me getting everything ready, all the assets ready to transfer over to him. We met several times and there were certain things that he was interested in that made the show of value to him. And so I'm here to say to you that anything that you can create, you can sell. A podcast is intellectual property, just like a course or a book or anything else you can create out of your imagination.

What I really want to help you with today though, is this whole idea of selling. We exchange money in our world through the act of selling. So if you are interested in finding out how you can monetize better, what you really need to be focused on is your ability to sell better and to even know or have the awareness that selling is a skill set that you must cultivate if you want to actually receive money.

Now there are at least a dozen different ways that you can monetize your podcast, which I have a list of somewhere. And most of those ways require you to ask. In fact, all of those ways require you to ask for money. To ask for money, even if you're asking for donations, you still have to ask. And asking for money can be a real challenge for so many people. So what I want to share with you today is a five-step framework

that I use and that I share with my clients, many of whom have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in their businesses, many of whom invest at least five figures to work with me to help them with monetization strategy and communication strategy. And it's all about how you approach selling and understanding that to be able to exchange money powerfully and easily,

and gracefully and joyfully in your business and in your world, you need to be the one who is focused on how you are showing up. So I use the letters S-H-E-L-L to help you to come out of your shell so that you can sell. So here's how we're gonna go through this. If you'd like to write down the letters S-H-E-L-L, that might be helpful for you. Not of course, if you are driving.

And so we're going to start by helping you to understand the S, which is you need to stand your ground and own your greatness. Stand your ground and own your greatness. So while I was in this event and this idea popped into my mind, maybe he'd be interested in buying the show. I could have just dismissed it. I could have said to myself, my God, that's

Nobody's ever sold a podcast before. What are you thinking? I could have minimized this inspiration, but instead I was in a place in my own journey where number one, I had already made the decision that I was really ready to put this show on hiatus. And number two, I was in a place where I was coming out of a four year journey of recovering from a near death experience.

And so I was financially in a place where I could have used the extra money. And so I needed to really stand in my power and stand behind the value of my brand and own that my brand and my podcast had value and could be exchanged in the marketplace. So the first step for you is to stand in your value and stand in the value of your brand or your offer and

own it. The second step is the H and the H is all about holding space. So when I approached this guy and I said, Hey, are you interested? Then it was up to me to hold open the doorway for him, to hold the space for him to process what I was saying. And a lot of times when people are in a selling conversation, the person who's attempting to make the sale

fills the space with too much talking, rather than leaving the space open for the listener to process the offer and to make the internal decisions about whether or not they're interested in finding out about more. And it's about walking in partnership with whoever you're working with. It's not about you chasing them. Like, I didn't chase him.

I didn't, you know, go after him. I didn't say, need to buy my podcast. I didn't say that at all. I went with curiosity and then I held the space. And as I was holding the space for him to process in his own mind, the offer that I was making to him, I could see, I could see his eyes were going and I could see his mind was going and I could see his brain almost on fire. And I had to wait. I had to wait.

I had to hold the space open for him to make his move. And his next move was, my God, I have been praying for this. This is exactly what I've been praying for. He wanted to help men. He wanted to help men be on purpose. And my show happened to be named Men On Purpose Podcast. It was literally like divinely ordained.

So the third thing that you want to do in any kind of a selling conversation, whether it's one-to-one, like this example that I'm using, or one-to-many, where you're speaking maybe from a stage or from a platform, a virtual platform, where you are intending to support the listeners, to be able to move towards you, to say, yes, yes, yes, to what you're offering, is what we need to do is we need to...

educate and evaluate. So that's what the E stands for. So in a one-on-one situation, it's a little bit easier because you're evaluating whether or not this person is even capable, right? You as the person who is selling, you need to think about, am I even talking to somebody who is capable of making this purchase? So I kind of knew that he was capable of making the purchase because I had already spent some time with him over the course of the week.

I had already heard some of the things that he talked about that he was up to, that he was doing during our mastermind. So I was already in evaluation mode. The education side of it was really about me talking to him about what the qualities were of the show and the brand that I had available to sell. And some of the things that he was interested in were accessing my Rolodex.

He was interested, of course, in the name more than anything, because it was a powerful name and it was really aligned with his intentions. He was also interested in hearing about the fact that the show had ranking, that it was ranked in the top 40, I think, in marketing internationally. So there were things that I had to bring to the table. I had to educate him and help him to understand the value that the show was bringing to him.

the value that the brand was bringing to him. And simultaneously, I needed to evaluate not only his readiness and capability of buying, but also I wanted to evaluate, because it was my baby, right, whether this was the right person, whether he had the right character, whether my listeners all around the world were going to be served, whether my Rolodex of men that I was going to be hooking him up with were going to be served.

by making this deal. And so I was in this evaluation and he was also in evaluation. I was in educating as well. And educating, evaluating, educating, evaluating, educating and evaluating. When you're in a selling situation, you want to be doing a lot of that because sometimes in your evaluation process, you will discover, this isn't really a fit at all.

And then you might want to back off from the process. If you haven't made the offer yet, you might not want to make the offer at all. And if you have made the offer, you might want to say, yeah, I've thought about it and I'm going to withdraw my offer. So you really want to spend time in this evaluation and education section of the selling process. This is really the meat of the selling process so that you really feel good about the deal that's being made.

At the end of the day, you want to feel good that you are getting fair value in exchange financially and they're getting the value that is fair for them in terms of visibility or whatever it is that you're selling. Like in my case, I'm using the example of the podcast. So, you know, I felt really good about the value that I was delivering to him. Anybody who's starting at the beginning, it would take a long time to have 163 episodes and be downloading in 97 countries and be ranking.

and all of those things. And so he was paying to shorten his curve, right? He also was actually paying for my SOPs. So he didn't have to figure out how to do all the stuff himself. So he was very interested in my SOPs, so much so that he wanted to know, you know, I put my coffee mug with tea on the right-hand side of my desk and I check my microphone and I make sure that Zoom is recording and like,

All of those step-by-step things were really valuable to him. So the last two letters in our come out of your shells so you can sell process here in our five step formula are both L's. And the first L is you need to really love, love, love, love, love whatever it is that you're selling. If you're not madly in love with what you're selling,

then you need to go back to the drawing board and either figure out an offer that you can feel really, really in love with, or figure out something else that you might need to be doing. Maybe you need to be doing something completely different than what you're doing in terms of what you're offering or how your business model is set up. And I want people to know that

you know, a lot of people start out in their business and they're feeling really great and they're really loving what they're offering. And then they discover it's not so fun. And there's no shame in stopping and starting something else. There's no shame in evolving. There's no shame in completing whatever it is that you're ready to complete. Like in my case, in this example I'm using, I was ready to be complete with the Men on Purpose podcast.

So there's no shame in being done with something. And when you're offering something, you want to be filled with enthusiasm. You want to be filled with the love that you have for this, whatever this thing is that you're offering, so that the love energy is being transmitted in the conversation. So that you are helping the other person to also receive the inspiration to be in a state of love as they're making the decision.

to make the exchange. The last letter in my little come out of your shell so you can sell formula is to let go and let the divine work things out. You know, if he had said no, I would have had to, you know, like go back to the drawing board. But I had the idea at that point. I had the idea that I could sell it, right? So just getting the idea was valuable. He, of course, said yes, thankfully.

And we moved into the process of making the deal and transferring the assets and all the other things. And there were some stumbling blocks. I will admit there were some stumbling blocks after we got the deal down on paper. And when we were going through the transition process, we ran into some things that maybe if I had done a better job evaluating in the first place, we might have been able to avoid those stumbling blocks. So not

every single deal is going to go as smooth as butter melting on hot toast. Although we would like that to happen, right? We would love to have the butter melting on hot toast kind of situation. In this case, we did not have that. ran into some stumbling blocks and we did run into some challenges and we ended up having to part ways, part way through the process that we had agreed that we were going to do. Now he did get all the assets,

We did do the whole transfer of the assets and the brand over to him, but there were extra things that were written into the deal that were written into the deal with my intention that it was going to make it even easier for him to actually monetize more quickly and leverage the brand more thoroughly. And he decided that he didn't want that. And so we ended up having to part ways partway through that process. And so it was a learning experience for me for sure. Right.

to go back into my own framework and be even better at evaluating. So I'm here to say to you that you can sell anything, even a podcast show. And it's important for you to make sure that you are standing your ground, owning your greatness, holding the space, evaluating and educating, loving whatever it is that you're selling, and then letting go and letting the divine take over when you get to the end.

of offering the deal. And as a result of going through the deal process, you actually will have something else that could even be sellable too. Like I now know that I can consult with people to help them sell their show and to go through the entire process because I've been through it. So remember, when you come out of your shell, you can sell anything.