Happy New Year! Welcome to Finance & Fury’s Say What Wednesday. It’s been pretty quiet on the question front, I’m guessing with everyone away over the holidays… so today will be a quick episode covering the number 1 question I got all of 2018 but never answered – Sponsorship.
I get one or two emails a week from companies looking to promote products/services and everyone I talk to asks me why I don’t advertise? Do I make any money from sponsorship?
The quick answer is no, and I never plan to.
- Preface – I don’t have anything against advertising. Lots of people now make their living from Youtube, Podcasts, etc. I think it is great. It’s the free market in action and allows people to make a living.
- Podcasting started as a little side project.
- I get bored pretty easily, so it was something to do nights/weekends. I enjoy doing this. Helping to educate people, talk about topics that don’t get covered very much.
- I get to learn as well. Thankfully the personal finance topics don’t need be researched (otherwise I wouldn’t be good at my job), but the topics on politics, economy, history, psychology, I research because I want to make sure I know what I am talking about.
- As a bonus, I don’t have to rant about this stuff to my friends/family – so I think they enjoy me doing it to.
Reasons I don’t want to do sponsorship.
- Never intended. I don’t need the income.
- This might seem hypocritical as this whole podcast aims to teach ways of increasing your income.
- I don’t intend to stop working – I’d have to start doing 3 podcasts a day to avoid going insane.
- Wouldn’t it help to boost income? Yes, but ironically money doesn’t factor into the motivation.
- Cost/Benefit – How much would I earn, versus all the other cons.
The cons:
- Don’t know the products/use them
- Get it with professional referrals – risk to give recommendations on things if they are bad, and I don’t want the client to have bad experience
- It discredits me if product is bad. Most requests for sponsorship are for financial companies/investments/platforms.
- There are strong regulations around adviser kickbacks and I don’t want to have any conflicts in advice
- What if the product tanks? This is also why you rarely hear me talk about specific investments; they might be good today, even tomorrow, but what about 1 year from now? People listen to these episodes at different times
- If I personally don’t really believe in the product it’s not right to promote something I myself don’t use.
- Corporate interests – My content then has to be ‘advertiser friendly’
- This used to be just naughty curse words, now it goes further and can restrict what you talk about
- I want carte blanche – I want to speak my mind. If you haven’t noticed, do bash on some things sometimes.
- It’s a slippery slope – it starts with small concessions, even self-censorship. Sponsors can control what you say.
- I don’t want to do it to you guys
- Personally don’t like sitting through other podcasts constantly plugging various products and companies.
- The whole point of this is to educate you guys and sponsorship wouldn’t help with that. This is why I scratched the intro – I don’t want to waste your time.
If you have any questions from Monday’s episode – what do you want to know to help achieve your goals? Or even how to get goals in place? Hit me up on the contact page 😊