I have a Podcast Fast Pass client who liked podbean.com but was slightly constrained by the design limitations. He wanted full control of his site, and podbean has some limitations. The nice thing that podbean did for them is it was a way to sell premium content.
The solution? We obtained our own web host (I like hostgator, great price, and great support, or if you’re on a budget try my hosting solution at www.coolerwebsites.com – phenomenal price, with ok service ) and put wordpress on it. Now he has complete control. But what about the premium content?
We are going to use premiumcast.com Originally I thought of just unpublishing his back episodes, and copying and pasting it into premiumcast. Then you lose the google juice (as these episodes would no longer show up on the site). So I looked at what podbean did. They left the post the but restricted the listener (so the google juice was there, the content was not).
You can pull this off by replacing the media file (audio in this case) with a “you can hear this episode along with the entire back catalogue by becoming a premium subscriber, click the button below and become a premium member today” audio file. On that same blog post, have a sign up button from premiumcast. The great thing about premiumcast is the visitor never leaves your site. They sign up at your site, and never know what service your using.
The question we are pondering about selling back issues is should you offer a one time payment for all of them, or offer one episode a week for a monthly fee. The useful thing is in premiumcast you could create both and allow the visitor to choose (one feed with a time release, and one with immediate delivery).
The one tip I can provide is if you originally signed up with podbean, you are going to need to redirect the iTunes feed. You can do this by going into podbean, and under the iTunes settings put <itunes:new-feed-url>the rss to your new blog or feedburner</itunes:new-feed-url> in the box labeled “additional feed entity.”
So what do you think is a better way to go, a one time fee for all back episodes (say 50 bucks) or a monthly fee of $5 bucks for 4 episodes?
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