Every day radio stations across the country are leaving A LOT of money on the table.  Every day that goes by, and radio stations don’t make these simple changes, they lose money they will never get back. Here is the problem, and solution.

While radio goes through the difficult times of both cutting costs, trying to increase revenue in the traditional manner, and become a part of the radio digital monetization move, some things get overlooked.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, in my opinion, it is very important to try to learn from people who have been doing what you are trying to do.  Everyone is in business to make money.  There are times it may be wise to get out of your comfort zone and seek out people that can help you, and see if maybe you might be missing something.  That is the reason I have spent over two years learning internet marketing and social media, and now coach people on how to profit from internet monetization.  There are a lot of ways for radio to make money in the digital space.  It is a business unto itself.  Everyone in the industry knows what radio is trying to do.  That is one reason many radio products and services providers are trying to find ways to get radio companies to buy their new product or service that will be the “latest” great thing in radio digital monetization.

In my conversations with radio management, I am surprised at the price structure for things like banner ads “above the fold” on page one of their website.  They have a price they like to get, but they will take a much lower price for a week if they can’t sell that space.  Let’s say you are in a good sized market, and you can get $500 for the banner for the week.  Almost every GM I talked with would be happy with that.  Here is the number that almost nobody in radio knows, and they are blown away every time I tell them.  For the average, not great, but just average internet marketer, the metric is $1 per month income per email address.  That is the average. If you have 20,000 names on your email list, you should be making a minimum of $20,000 a month off of your list.  For a decent, or even pretty good internet marketer, that number is substantially higher.  It can go as high as $8 or more per month per email address, depending on their niche. When they hear that number, every GM I have talked to has asked, “How do I do that?” It doesn’t take a genius to see they are missing the boat.  I know internet marketers with over 500,000 email addresses.  If you know how to do it right, you can do some great things for your audience, and tighten the bond with them.  There is one big difference between internet markets and radio.  Internet marketers have to go out and market like crazy to build their list.  And they have to create content to try to get people to “follow them.” Radio has a giant advantage, and we don’t use it at all. We already have “followers”, and all we do is create content.  Internet marketers would love to have what we have.  Believe me; they would use it to make a fortune, and their “list” would go from fans, to rabid fans. You cannot just send out an email blast and expect to make money, or build a relationship. However, if you know how to use email marketing properly, you can do some great things for your audience, and your radio station. In addition, you will tighten the bond with them.

This is where almost everyone comes up short in radio digital monetization.  When you start to see the possibilities of what you can do, and how you can do it, you can begin to separate yourself from your competition.  You start to understand why it is important to capture email addresses, and it doesn’t matter where those people live.  The key is to add value to your audience. You have to do it in a way that enhances your listener’s lives.  When you have the ability to email your audience, and communicate with them in a way you just can’t do over the air, you have another revenue stream, and you stand out from the pack.

If you want to know how to do this, and make more money for your company, leave a comment.  It will remain anonymous, as you can tell from the articles.  Thank you.

While I have had the recent opportunity to step back and take an objective view of radio, and the topic of radio digital monetization, some things I see make me laugh, but frankly, a lot of things make me laugh.  As I mentioned earlier in this series, I happened to be on LinkedIn not long ago.  Because I coach people on digital monetization for their business,  and the importance of keeping all of their social media information up to date, it seemed hypocritical for me to get behind.  I was on my site, and there happened to be a lot of comments radio people were making, such as “radio has got to embrace digital”, and “if we do not create a radio digital monetization model, we are going to be left behind.” This was only a couple of months ago.  It seemed like they had just been to a three day conference on digital and the death of radio, and someone was trying to sell their latest digital product and scared these guys with their sales pitch. That is probably a good thing, especially if those scared are actually in a position to do something about it.  There are many areas of radio digital monetization, but I will stick with continuing on the topic of the undervalued importance of email addresses.

One thing I have said to the management I have spoken with is that they don’t seem to understand the value of email  addresses, and do very little to try to capture them.  I always hear these two things when I ask about the process of capturing listeners email addresses, 1) we always get their email address when they win a contest, and 2) we get it when they sign up to listen to our streaming audio.  Big deal!  I’m surprised at how many people with responsibilities are so defensive when I ask that question.  There are so many reasons why you need to capture as many email addresses as you can.  Why not ask why should you be doing it, and how can you do it better?

Here are just a very select few reasons why email addresses are important.  Right now, if you are a radio station in a decent sized market, you have apps your listeners can put on their phones so they can easily listen to you.  I contend that radio is where cable TV was in the early days.  The smart people that understand how they can exploit that will stay ahead of their competitors, especially in sales, which at the end of the day, is very important to the bean counter and suit crowd, and could save your job.  Ted Turner realized early on that he could take his crappy little TV station in Atlanta, put it on cable, and get more eyeballs watching, enabling him to make a lot more money selling Gilligan’s Island reruns nationally than he could locally.  Right now, most radio stations stream, so you can listen to almost any station you want on your smart phone, not to mention on your computer.  WTBS Atlanta, and WGN Chicago are both Superstations  that are on most cable and satellite providers.  With apps on phones, and browsers easier to navigate on those phones, anyone can pretty much listen to any radio station.  A smart few may become Superstations. I am not saying blow up your local station content, but rather internet radio (our cable TV) is obviously a big part of the future of radio, and radio monetization.  Why not embrace it, and profit from it?  Even if you won’t get Arbitron ratings from people outside of your survey area, it will still be very important. There is no reason you can’t make them a fan, which makes them not only another person talking up your station, someone you get credit for listening to your stream, but also someone you can turn into a customer.  Why does that matter? It is another very important piece of the radio digital monetization model.  As the stream audience ratings become more sophisticated, and important, you will ahead of the curve, and an innovator, not a follower.

In the next post, a number nobody in radio I bet nobody knows, and when they understand it, they should jump all over it.

Before I get to where I left off on my last post about radio monetization, I want to be clear. I LOVE RADIO!!! There is nothing I have ever done professionally that equates to being on the radio.  That doesn’t mean I love everything about radi0, I don’t.  Radio has changed my life in many ways, almost all good.  That being said, everyone knows radio can do things better.  I know I can do things better, and it will always be my goal to continue to learn and get better.  That is the reason I found mentors to teach me internet marketing,  so I could learn how to apply what they taught me to grow and increase audience loyalty.  There are reasons beyond the obvious that is important.  More on that later.

I know how thin people are stretched in today’s radio, and multi-tasking is a way of life.  While you hear people talk about radio monetization,  and embracing digital,  I sometimes wonder what they mean.  Sure, they want to make money, but do they even really know how, or know how much is being left on the table right now?  They look at what their company has decided is the big picture, be it selling banner ads,  the pre-roll, or whatever.  I think they miss some of the most important things, if not the most important thing, which gets me to where I left off on my last post.  Something I did not believe.

I was talking to a general manager about consulting them, and helping them improve their radio stations digital monetization.  He oversees a very respectable group of stations (I have talked to several group heads privately so no one will know this person).  He told me he was very involved in his stations websites.  I asked him to tell where listeners could give him their email.  He couldn’t find it on his own site!!  In addition, the only way he could capture an email address was if the listener won a contest, or they were: A) interested in giving them their email address, or B) could find the “Register Here” space.  Email addresses are one of the most important radio monetization elements a radio station can have.  The value of that email address is enormous for radio internet monetization.

We in radi0 sometimes believe we are more important than we are.  Sure, sometimes we do a great bit, or play a favorite song, or have a compelling news story.  However, after the listener hears that, no matter how good the tease is, when that segment is done, and they are at their destination, they are turning us off.  We have some, but very little influence over our audiences listening patterns.  That is why email addresses are so important.  If it is done properly, you can control how they interact with you, at least far more than ever before.  Just because you have collected some emails, and sent a few email blasts out, doesn’t mean you are communicating with your audience.  When radio realizes the power of having those email addresses, they will be stunned at how much money they left on the table.  If your competitors realize the power of email for radio digital monetization, you will have to scramble to try to keep up.  I will have much more about that in part 3 of  “Has Radio Embraced The Digital World for Monetization?”

This is my first post on my newly designed website.  We are still making changes to it, and I hope it will be a source of information on a variety of topics.  I thought I would lead off with Radio Digital Monetization.  It seems to be the topic in every media publication, the headline topic at many Broadcast Conferences, and the inspiration for many posts on LinkedIn.

During my time on the sideline (a very interesting story for another day), I wondered what I was going to do.  I enjoy trading a great deal, but radio has been a part of most of my adult life,  and I am not ready for it to be a part of my past.   I have always believed in what I call my three income theory, which I don’t think is revolutionary.  I think it is a good idea to have multiple streams of income, now more than ever.   I try to learn new skills all the time, it keeps your brain working, and you never know when that skill will come in handy.  I try to learn one new skill every three months.  Some require more time than others, so I do adjust accordingly.  It didn’t take Stephen Hawking to decipher that radio was going to be more and more a part of the internet and digital age.   I kept hearing radio people talk about embracing the digital space for monetization. So I decided to learn everything I could about the internet.  Not how to create software, but how to get people to pay attention, and do what you want them to do.  There is a lot of traffic on the internet, if you learn to control the traffic,  you control your ability to make money.   When I began trading, I started reading magazines, and taking some courses to learn information that I hoped would give me an edge.  It is not an accident that there are traders that make millions, if not billions.  And then there are traders that do nothing more than continue to “blow up” their accounts by making bad trades and not being smart enough to dump the losers right away.   You never hear about them again.  That is why I searched to find a very successful trader that could be my mentor and teach me how to trade like a professional.   Being a professional trader means you will lose money, nobody makes money on every trade.  But a good trader will, and does make money.   If you meet someone that says he/she never loses(see Lenny Dykstra)….run.  It doesn’t happen.  The good trader dumps the losers, and let’s the winners run.  It sounds easy, but ask anyone that has blown up their account.  It isn’t.  Of course, there is more to it than that, but that is the one rule almost every trader lives by.

When I decided to learn more about the internet, I originally did it because I thought it would help me when I went back on the air.  I thought the best people to learn from would be people that made money on the internet.  I figured they knew something most people don’t.  And they do.  You have to be careful, there are some less than ethical internet marketers out there. The thing I found out was not only do their customers dislike them, the good, honest, ethical internet marketers do as well.  It makes their job even harder.   I was fortunate to find someone who is both excellent, and ethical.  What I started to learn was, internet marketers would kill (not literally, but they would certainly maim) to have access to what we in radio have access to every day.  I immediately saw the opportunity for me not only to help my radio show, but to show radio how they could do things like internet marketers and it would be a game changer for them.  Radio digital monetization is in it’s infancy, despite what many in the business think.  I was shocked when I asked a general manager a simple question about his website. I will talk about that and more,  in my next post.