By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

The time has come for you to make money online doing what you love. Getting paid to provide a service, entertainment or news isn’t shameful. No matter what people have been saying for years, free is not a way to make a living.

For the first 4 years of my internet career I was paid by people to make websites, media players, presentations, the whole ball of wax. Then in 2004 podcasting came along with all of its beguiling attributes. The most appealing of which were low production costs and even lower cost for the audience. So low in fact that the podcasts  they consumed cost them less a cent!

In the five years since I began podcasting I’ve watched the community grow to video, to streaming and the changing of the mainstream media landscape. It has been a great run. But it isn’t sustainable. The time to get paid is now.

I’m not only saying that it is time for podcasters but anyone producing content online that doesn’t want to be forced to create ancillary types of revenue streams to maintain production of their love. Your passion shouldn’t be a loss leader!

The example that I would like to use is my own. It’s simple and I think you’ll get some value from me sharing this.

Three months ago I decided that my wife and I should pick our podcast back up and start cranking out shows. Our podcast, Croncast, had been dormant for the previous 3 months since our move to New York City. We both wanted to start the show up again and wanted to figure out how to generate revenue from our work.

So like any business person, I did the math on production costs, time invested and internet hosting fees. I took a look back at the previous work, 5 years worth and then ran the numbers.

We had produced 534 episodes at an average of 30 minutes apiece and the server/bandwidth alone cost $200 a month. I had paid $12,000 in server fees alone. During this time the episodes flowed freely and we took donations that totaled roughly $1,000. Holy cow! That is a lot of red.

We decided that if we were going to move forward and startup the podcast again that it was going to have to go behind a paywall of some type. The thought of producing our show and giving it away to then sell merchandise or affiliate relationships was about as appealing as paying another $12,000 out of my pocket for server fees. Why should we spend our time dealing with t-shirt vendors, shipping or coming up with ebooks? We shouldn’t and neither should you – unless t-shirts are your thing. Time should be spent crafting the main product, for us, our show.

Once we made the decision that we were going to go paid for our show we needed software to make the sale and ability to consume the shows as similar to getting a regular free podcast as possible. I spent the last 3 months making that happen.

I was fortunate to have put my skills to use in creating some custom software for quite a few projects that when aggregated together could create an easy checkout and subscription system. I worked on the system in my spare time when not working here at Tech Startups.

After a total of 6 months of not producing a single podcast for our now dispersing audience we were prepared with a landing page that offered pricing for packages, links to make payment and a method to download the podcasts quickly without additional software.

It has been 2 weeks since we launched the system and I thought that by sharing real numbers I would be able to let you know that you can make money online. People are ready to pay for the content that they enjoy. It is time to get paid or forever hold your peace.

Package	Cost	#Sold	Recurring Revenue Per Unit	Annual Recurring Revenue
Monthly	$4.49	25	$112.25	$1,347.00
Quarterly	$12.49	38	$474.62	$1,898.48
Annually	$48.49	19	$921.31	$921.31
One Time	$199.99	5		Total
				$4,166.79

These numbers don’t account for attrition over the coming year or forecast new audience acquisitions during that time either. I will run those numbers once we have more data.

Each episode starts at a base price of $.37 and as the packages get larger in price the cost per episode is discounted gradually. The One Time fee, which we call “Cool for Life” is what we consider and market at a “patronage” level. These are the audience members that we look to for guaranteed support.

Patrons will also receive special offers and discounts if we do provide merchandise in the future. We will, but now because of this recurring revenue the funds to create this merchandise won’t be coming out of our pockets. The audience has invested in our show. They placed their faith in us to deliver. The audience made a choice that our once free episodes have a real value.

We love producing our podcast and cranking them out at a rate of 3 episodes per week. We know our audience likes to receive 3 episodes per week and enjoys an hour and a half of our story telling. Collectively, we’re finding a balance that is sustainable.

For yourself, the first thing you will need to do is decide which of your passion plays satisfies you the most. Then plug that passion into a product that you can deliver while you sleep – figuratively and literally. Chances are that if you’re doing it the right way you’ll be blazing a trail of some kind that requires custom solutions in both business model, distribution and software.

Anyone that tells you that it is easy or there’s no need to reinvent the wheel hasn’t studied the landscape hard enough to realize there isn’t one any longer. The only thing that remains true is that online you need to make the process easy, payments easy and follow standard user experience. All of which are hard work.

In the end, you will succeed. Even if you don’t find a way to make your online business sustainable a first time or second or third, you’ll have the experience to know what didn’t work. You’ll have stuck your neck out when others were telling you not to.

You should be proud of your work and be paid to produce it!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Could the End of Free Be Near? (guidewiregroup.com)
• Painful Ways To Make Money Out Of ‘Free’. (thenextweb.com)
• How Leo Laporte Makes $1.5 Million Per Year from Podcasting (johnchow.com)

Tags: croncast , make money online , make money online podcasting , mass media , New York City , paid rss subscription , Podcast , Podcasting , Streaming Media