Transcript

The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP148

From The Money Mondays Podcast · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 36 min · 8,665 words · 114 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP148", an episode of The Money Mondays Podcast published December 1, 2025 (36 min, about 8,665 words). It mentions 16 people, works and ideas, including Travis Chapel, vertical farming, Guestio, podcast batching, Jeff Fenster.

What this episode is about

The main topic discusses innovative strategies for monetizing a podcast, emphasizing that success does not rely on having millions of views. Key points include the importance of open discussions about money, engaging audience interaction, and building genuine relationships within the podcasting community to foster growth and profitability.

Key takeaways

  • Time-efficient podcast: 37 minutes is perfect for workout warriors and roadsters alike, no awkward time crunch.
  • Breaking the silence: Talking money isn't rude; it's a necessary conversation, no more hush-hush.
  • Travis' twist: From potential pastor to podcast pro, he flipped faith to financial freedom.
  • Salesman to storyteller: Door-to-door slog led to the sweet sound of podcast success.
  • Podcasts pay: Spare-room side hustle morphs into financial bonanza, making millionaires out of mics.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Build Your Network, Money Mondays, Travis Chapel
  2. – 10:00: dynamic ad insertion
  3. – 15:00: vertical farming, Guestio, Podcast Junkie, Travis Makes Friends
  4. – 20:00: podcast batching
  5. – 35:00: Guestio, Travis Chapel
  6. – 36:28: Travis Chapel

Notable quotes from "The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP148"

  • Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. As you guys know, these episodes are under 40 minutes for your.
    about Money Mondays · at
  • All the time because I love what he's doing. I love what he's built. So, what we're going to do is have Travis Chapel give a quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money.
    about Travis Chapel · at
  • Exactly. So, so yeah, so I got into it for that reason and then I started my show is called Build Your Network because I basically was starting my network from scratch at the time.
    about Build Your Network · at
  • Core metric was what is your average downloads per episode through 30 days of release. Now, with dynamic ad insertion, that matters a little bit less. They just want to know…
    about dynamic ad insertion · at
  • But then a few years back, he got into this weird vertical farming niche. Have you heard of this space? Vertical farming.
    about vertical farming · at
  • That. Yeah, this was basically right around the time where I decided to sell Guestio, which was my software company. and it was not like a massive win for us, you know what I…
    about Guestio · at
  • Author and a psychologist. I love that I can do that. So, that's like we keep this over here. That's Travis Makes Friends. I do whatever I want on that show.
    about Travis Makes Friends · at
  • So, are you doing what's called podcast batching? Are you doing like absolutely 10, 20 episodes and then boom, live and die on batching, bro. Yeah, there's no way. That's like my number.
    about podcast batching · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Sponsors

Full transcript with timestamps

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. As you guys know, these episodes are under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. So, this episode will be between 33 and 37 minutes for you today. Now, the reason this podcast is doing so well is we have a 93% listenrough rate and you guys supporting liking commenting subscribing. We obviously always need that. This is not a podcast filled with ads or commercials. This podcast is designed for you to actually listen to it, share with your friends, and have important discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. I think you have to talk about it. And I think

that with the success of the podcast, it's showing that people are actually, you know, engaging with it, showing it to their friends and family. And I get to hear all these stories of what's happening because people are finally being blunt about money because it's part of your normal life for your medical bills, your health, your food, utilities, rent, car payment. Those are all not evil things. They're just part of your daily life and you need money to do those things. All right, without further ado, we're going to dive into our first guest who I've known for years. We've been at events together.

We've done masterminds together. We've done podcasts together and been a person in in my circle. I send clients to him all the time because I love what he's doing. I love what he's built. So, what we're going to do is have Travis Chapel give a quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money.

Sure, Matt. So, quick two-minute bio. Um, grew up thinking I was going to be a pastor. Got my unacredited degree in Bible and church ministries in college. Grew up it was sort of um cultish. I call it more like a bubble now these days. It's the easiest way I can explain it to people. But thought I was going to be a ministry. grew up, did an internship in college, realized I did not want to do that, and uh couldn't really find work as an, you know, unacredited Bible degree holder. You there's not a lot of employers that are lining up, offering jobs.

So, I did door [snorts] to door sales for about five years, six years, uh, just to pay the bills, figure things out. Um, pretty quickly realized I didn't want to do that with the rest of my life either. So, kind of back to square one, back to basically trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, doing the work of like a 14-year-old, except for I was like 22 and I had a wife and I had a mortgage. So, I jumped into podcast. It was the first time I listened to podcasts. It was the first time I see information elsewhere and really started falling in love with the medium. Fast forward a little bit, started my own podcast, hired a coach, joined a mastermind,

and then that was eight years and500 episodes ago. And so in the meantime, basically anything inside of the podcast space, we've done podcast consulting, courses coaching communities

events, retreats around the world, things like that. But then also a software company and an agency helping people get booked on podcast. So we've sort of touched basically every piece of the every piece of the puzzle now. Yeah. Why why have you dedicated so much time, energy, money, and passion into the podcast industry?

It was really relationships to be honest with you. Like when I first jumped in, it was like I was trying to figure out a way to make money but without being tied to a physical place, right? Like door to door sales was an underrated industry in my opinion. You make a lot of money doing it and you can do it on your own time. It's 100 100% commission for the most part. But I basically got to the point where I was like, I have to physically be here to make money and that sucks. So, um, so podcasting originally was just kind of like, "Oh, I didn't realize people made money with this." And I started following a couple people, a couple mutual friends of ours, and at the time was like, "This dude made how much just podcasting from like a spare bedroom in his house." And, you know, my my buddy John Lee Doom is doing it in Puerto Rico, just from a spare bedroom, making a million and a half bucks a year just podcasting.

I was like, that's not a bad gig. You know, they quickly realized that it's not that easy to do, which is why it's uh, you know, there's a bare making money. Yes.

Yeah. Exactly. Out of 5.4 before my podcast. Exactly. So, uh, so yeah, so I I I got into it for that reason and then I started my show is called Build Your Network because I basically was starting my network from scratch at the time. Like I said, I grew up kind of in a bubble cult type deal. So when I left that world, I was legitimately starting from scratch in terms of the people that I knew. I had no business being in business. Didn't know anybody who was doing business at the time. Didn't grow up with anybody who was in business or had a parent who was in business. And so, um, I was like, if I want to figure out how to this entrepreneurship path, I should probably like meet somebody who's done it, you know what I mean? So, started doing three interviews a week when I first started, all with the purpose of like figuring out how people were connecting with each other. And then it and then like two years into the

sort of experiment, I started realizing because people would ask me, you know, because I do I do appearances on other podcasts and because my topic was networking and relationships, people started asking me like, "Well, Travis, what's your number one networking tip?" you know, and I would always give them some abstract answer like, well, you got to give more than you take and it's all about value and it's all about, you know, delay and gratification. It's the long term, which is all true, but when I really thought about it, the practical answer to the question was like

my podcast. Like 100% hands down. Like I would not know any of the people that I know if it weren't for the fact that I had I had an excuse. I had a Trojan horse. I I had a reason to sit down with people who I admired or respected or at least wanted to know more from. Uh and then the podcast sort of became that like launchpad that grew into just this network that kept expanding into new relationships and new worlds which has taken me like entrepreneurship to podcasting to even like comedy and television and athletes and entertainment like all these different worlds that I've be able to get a glimpse into just because I had a reason to talk to people. So the relationships is what's kept me going over the years for sure.

So on the make money side, you know, we covered these three core topics. Make money, invest money, give away to charity. On the make money side, how can someone out there that starts their podcast make any money from the podcast? [sighs]

It [snorts] really it really depends on what you're willing to do. So if you are somebody who only exclusively wants to make money from building an audience and having sponsorships, the road is going to be much longer for you. Just bottom line. Is it possible? Yes. And people do it all the time, but it's just a longer road. It's more difficult because you have to have a strong audience size, you know, like if you really like if you want if you want meaningful sponsorship revenue, you really need to be at like 5 to 10,000 downloads an episode. Now, it's gotten a little bit more democratized over the years because when I first started, they looked at it, they basically paid you on a 30-day time period from the episode of being being released. So, they wanted to know the core metric was um what is what is your average downloads per episode through 30 days of release. Now, with dynamic ad insertion, that matters a little bit

less. They just want to know how many total impressions you can serve to them over a month. And that could be a episode you released six years ago that you can dynamically insert an ad into because 62 people are going to check that out this month and accidentally listen to it before realizing it was done six years ago. So, you can serve ads across your entire library. So, it's a little bit easier just because you can pump out more volume and get more impressions and sell more impressions. But, either way, it's it's sort of it's sort of a long road. The other way to do it, especially for people listening to this podcast who I'd assume are mostly entrepreneurs or at least entrepreneurial

y is to use it as a foundation for building a business because there's there's two ways to build the business. One is you start with the product. The second one is to start with the audience. And so if you're starting with a product, you're going to do a similar process. You're going to have to go talk to people, figure out if they want the product, if it's a good product, if if this product actually solves the problem, or if they have to tweak it, test it, get a new version of it, whatever. The other side is more like you care about a topic or you care about a person and then you create content around this topic solving this per this problem for this person and then you serve that content out over 6 months, 8 months, 9 months, a year and then you get to know that audience as much as you possibly can and you ask them what they need and then you build what they need and sell it back to them because they

already told you that's what they need. So for me, like coming from door to door sales to doing like podcast selling was like the biggest stark contrast you could possibly imagine because I'm going from like knock knock, hey, you didn't expect me to be here. Sign this contract to like you've listened to my podcast for 6 months. I jumped on a call with you 3 months ago. You you know everything I talk about.

You know exactly how I solve this problem for you. and you've told me on a phone call that this would be a solution that you would like to see for this problem and now I've built that solution. Would you like it? Right?

And it's like well barrier to sell is a lot le a lot lower in that context than it was when I was doing doortodoor. So there's there's there's two ways to do it. It's like you you you to to build to make money from the podcast. You build an audience and you monetize your sponsorships and and affiliate stuff or you build your own products and services. This one is a lot more um immediate and a lot more a lot more profit on the table to be able to do that one. But it also requires you to do something that maybe you didn't intend on doing when you started a podcast, which is build a business and not everybody wants to do that. So, it's sort of like a take your pick.

What are your thoughts about some podcasters that are making it Patreon style where or some actually using Patreon and actually getting paid monthly subscription for like a VIP or exclusive part of their podcast.

Yeah, totally fine. It's just again you need volume, you know. So, I've I've never really done that before because like you need a lot of volume to be able to make because I mean you're selling a Patreon membership at five bucks a month, nine bucks a month or something. So, it's like if you don't have a million people in your audience because like you know only five to 10% are going to take you up on that. You know, you need a hefty subscriber base to make any real money doing that. So, the majority of people that's it's it's an option.

It's not the best option though, you know, but I have some friends that make six figures a month in Patreon.

So, but they just they also have 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube. So, you know what I mean? Like they they make a lot of money from sponsorships and they make a lot of money from Patreon, too. So, it is it's a model. It's just it's less within your control, I guess, is what I'm really trying to say, cuz it's difficult to acquire those types of listeners and that type of a fan base with paid spend. You just kind of have to rely on organic engine.

What about the affiliate model? What about someone bringing up products on their podcast and saying, "Hey, go use this brand.com or this company.com or this company and here's my code."

Yeah. Again, it's okay. Um, but the majority of those are just going to be really low ticket. So again, if you don't have a massive audience where that revenue is going to explode or you're not in a niche that has really expensive stuff to sell, then you're going to find it's kind of an uphill battle, right? So I'll give you two examples. I had a buddy, he started, his name is Harry. He's a good friend of mine. He started a uh podcast back in the day on podcasts called Podcast Junkie. And it was just him talking to podcasters.

But then a few years back, he got into this weird vertical farming niche. Have you heard of this space? Vertical farming.

So he starts his podcast on vertical farming. Less than I I would assume I would assume less than 500 downloads an episode. Very very niche audience. But it's an expensive hobby. So to build your own vertical farming system in your house, there's a ton of education. It's very high trust. And then when you do make a purchase, the people who manufacture those things are they're they're higher ticket items. So I had a buddy who got into that space. His second season, he pre-sold sponsors for, booked all of his sponsor spots up, made $80,000 on sponsorship revenue for a podcast with less than 500 downloads an episode for a season. The one of the one of the companies that was sponsoring flew him out to Dubai for this like international vertical farming conference, which didn't know that existed, right? But yeah, so flown out to this place. He's he's he told me when he came back, he was like, "Bro, I was

like a celebrity there. Like everybody that was at the conference listened to my podcast." So it was basically like all 700 people, you know what I mean, that ever listen to a show were internationally at this Dubai conference for vertical farming. But it's like you you you have a show like that, it's like there's really niche advertisers that are probably going to be better off spending their money with you than they're going to be buying random traffic from Google or Meta to send traffic to this high ticket item that requires a lot of trust in order to be able to to deliver that item, right? So that's one another buddy of mine started an audio file podcast. So, you made money off of uh he made pretty good money off of affiliate stuff because he's selling you you sell a $30,000 speaker,

right? You're going to make a decent affiliate commission. You know what I mean?

Um another buddy of mine does um um he he had a background in neuroscience. So, he does like a brain health podcast or something like that or or you YouTube channel

started doing uh tech reviews for like any sort of neuro feedback devices and things like that. Again, expensive purchases. So he'll make, you know, 15 20 grand a month doing as a mixture between sponsors and affiliate deals. But that's why I say like if you're going to do affiliate stuff, it it works. It's just most people are stuck to like Audible subscriptions and it's like you make it four bucks, you know, you better have a lot of people buying that for four bucks.

For sure. So it's a model, but you are podcast machine. You know, you're putting out a lot of podcasts yourself every single week. You're obviously helping other people their podcasts. like talk us through the volume game. Like I'm only one episode a week. Sometimes I do a double episode, so it's two 30-minute episodes combined.

Yeah. Um but I'm only at one episode a week and sometimes I'll like sporadically do like a random Friday. I'll put out a special special edition episode if something's going on in the world, right? Like I'll rush out an episode.

But man, I got tired just thinking about it. And I'm I'm a pretty busy guy and I hear you talk about doing multiple episodes a day. Walk us through that. Yeah, this was basically um right around the time where I decided to um sell Guestio, which was my software company. Um and it was not like a massive win for us, you know what I mean? So, I was like, "Okay, well, we got to go kind of go back to the drawing board and figure out what's next." And we were accidentally making some decent money with sponsorships. Like before, before I never thought about it, we just never did sponsors. It was always we build our own products and services. We sell our own stuff. And then um last year just kind of like snuck up on me a little bit. Like I looked at it at the end of the year, I was like, "Oh, we made like six grand last month on sponsorships. Like that's not great.

That's not bad." You know what I mean? That keeps the lights on type of thing. Pays for my producer and things like that.

I wonder what would happen if we like really spent time trying to do this cuz we're releasing like three episodes a week at the time.

So January, I just basically decided why don't we split off the shows cuz I was having trouble with my shows. Like one of them I wanted to just be like whatever I want to talk about I want to talk about. But it's an objectively terrible strategy for growth. like talking about whatever you want to talk about. Then you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody. However, I love doing it. So, it's like I don't want to stop doing that. And I love that I can talk to a Navy Seal and then a professional athlete and then a billionaire and then a bestselling author and a psychologist. I love that I can do that. So, that's like we keep this over here. That's Travis Makes Friends. I do whatever I want on that show.

But for for this one, it was like I constantly had all my business friends hitting me up about coming on the podcast and I was like, "We don't really talk about business anymore, but I do like talking about business." So, we basically just decided that at that time if we're going to do a volume game, let's do the one that I know I can play and win, which is I can have unlimited conversations about business because I have no shortage of friends who are in that space now that I've been doing it for a long time. So, we decided, let's do daily episodes because there's two ways to increase your total monthly impressions that you can sell if you're going to get more sponsors. One is increase listeners, obviously.

Second one is increase volume is like fastest way to double your downloads, double your release schedule. You know what I mean? So we went from three a week to one a day.

Wow. So uh so since February 1st, I want to say or maybe the last week in January of 25, we we've been doing one a day [snorts] and that was working and it was like well we got we got sponsors. We started making you know

you know 15 20,000 bucks a month or something like that in sponsors. And I was like, "Okay, well, this is turning into like some decent decent income."

So, so like August time time frame, I'm having a conversation with my buddy who runs workshops for Hermosi.

Yep. And uh we're talking and all he loves talking business. All he does all day is look at businesses and help them. So, he was talking to me through the podcast and he was just like, "Well, what if you just like doubled your releases again?" I was like, "What are you talking about, dude? I'm releasing one a day. This is like

Yeah. Right. But I started thinking more about it and I was like, I wonder if I could do that, you know. So starting September, so it's been three full months now, we started doing two a day. So now we do an interview every day and a solo show every day.

But the the thing that's been sort of the magic of the back end is like we also my my team because we've been able to increase on sponsorship revenue, we've also been able to increase on releases on social which has been massive. So now like before I think we're putting out like we weren't we weren't doing a low volume before but probably maybe 50 posts a month between like all of our social platforms or something. So it wasn't like a small a number but it wasn't a massive number but now we're probably over [snorts] 200 a month that we're posting on on socials. And that by itself is in the last like 6 months we've probably gotten 40 million views or something like that across all of our social channels and like just the clips of the podcast and stuff. So, it was like this volume there's there's something to this volume thing, you know what I mean?

Um, especially now with all the platforms rewarding each individual piece of content and not your total follower count in terms of, you know, one thing could take off and go parabolic. Just only makes sense to me. It's like, well, all we have to really do is decrease the amount of time in between those parabolic videos, which if you're posting 20 times a month could take you six months to find the outlier video. If you're posting 180 times a month, it could take you one month to find the outlier video. You know what I mean? Then you just double down on what's working. So the volume game has sort of been a blessing in both of those senses because we have no shortage of content to clip and post and share. So we have sort of like the social media podcast aspect of it with the backend long form content for people who really want to listen to the long form. So like our overall audience hasn't necessarily

increased that much in the last like six months. It's just the fact that we're releasing two a day now. So it's difficult to it's difficult to lose when you're doing that much volume, you know. So, are you doing what's called podcast batching? Are you doing like absolutely 10, 20 episodes and then boom,

live and die on batching, bro. Yeah, there's no way. That's like my number one piece of advice to people is like the reason you're not keeping up with consistency is because you don't have a batch of episodes. It's like if we stopped releasing right now, we would be good for the next five weeks probably at two a day.

At two a day, right? So, that's like 70 episodes in the can, done, prepared, ready to go. The video I'm posting today at 5:00 is about podcast batching.

Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's literally what we do. So, like um I'll go I'll just I'll basically go through sprints, you know what I mean? So, like I'll do um like a week a month where I'll just do like 40 pieces of content, but that's it for like the whole month, you know what I mean? So, it's now gotten down to sort of a science because I know I can crank out eight interviews in a day and I know I like my the thing that the thing that's really helped recently to be honest with you, the lynch pin for us has been my producer.

So, my producer Eric is a content fiend himself and he's got his own he's got his own YouTube channel, his own podcast that does really well that he started actually with me um probably 5 years ago and it's it's doing really well now, but he's my full-time producer at this point. So, literally when we do a batch of recordings, like I don't have to show up with any research done beforehand, any prep, anything. He knows my stuff so well and he knows the content algorithm so well that basically we'll jump on for like 3 hours and we'll record like eight episodes in three hours. But he just has like topic, question, [snorts] clip to react to and then we just go and then we just we say welcome to the show and then we do 20 minutes, stop recording, start recording again, welcome to the show, we do another one.

So, we just knock out seven or eight at a time, but he also acts as my co-host. So, we have some good rep part, some good bounce off of each other. Um, which is sort of leading us into wonder if we could do this for other people because the producer thing has been a massive piece of the success. And for people who are like running businesses and busy, that's the number one barrier is like we we were doing podcast production before for people, but we would never get content. It's like they paid me 15 grand to help them launch a [snorts] podcast or something,

some of them a lot more than that, and then never send us an episode to edit. It's my

just like we would shoot him an email once a week. Once a week. Hey, hey, hey. Just nothing. We never got anything back.

So, the producer thing I think is a really big a really big uh hack to have somebody do that for you.

That's actually my next question. So, you teed it up perfectly. There's 5.4 million podcasts in growing,

but the vast majority of them never make more than 10 episodes. That's the famous stat right?

Yep. Why do you think that is? Yep. Uh that's a massive part. Batching. Um they they can't keep up with the consistency. um for the release schedule and there's no commitment. It's just always like uh I think I could do a podcast and they release two episodes and it's like nothing happened. Their life didn't change so they just quit

and they don't want to call their friends anymore to come on the episode. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's just a lack of content, a lack of consistency and a lack of commitment. It's like it's it's not it's not difficult. It's it's sort of that old trope. You know what I mean? It's it's simple but it's not easy. So how do you make it easier for yourself? That's the question that I always try to ask myself is like if it were easy, what would it look like? And I was like, well, it would probably look like creating an entire month of content in a day so that I can go back to all the other things that demand my time.

But if you if you do it like on a weekly basis, it's just more difficult to keep up with it because then it's like, ah, I got to release tomorrow and then and then your quality dips. So that's what I tell people is like you want consistent quality content with context.

So release as much content as you possibly can without sacrificing any of those things. Context being you're not just talking about random stuff. You're talking about the stuff that's for your audience. Quality meaning that you're not just putting out an episode for the sake of putting out an episode that you know it's actually something that's going to be meaningful or valuable for the people listening and then consistency something that you can keep up with. So consistent quality content with context. If you do that over and over and over and over and over again you will build an audience. I don't know how big it will be like I like the you know results may vary but results will come. It's just a matter of what metrics are you really measuring your success by.

So when someone wants to book someone big for their podcast you've had everyone from Shaquille O'Neal to business legends etc. How does someone celebritywise like how do they go get someone big for their podcast? [snorts]

Real celebrities is tough and you know this being in this space a bunch real real celebrities are really tough to nail down. Um so I'll start with more

like that's the nice thing about it man is like you don't have to start with Shaquille O'Neal and and if you think that's who you have to start with you'll never start because he's never going to say yes. You know what I'm saying? without paying muchig an absor an exorbitant amount of money. Like people think people

and again you you you know this I'm preaching to the choir on this but like we've had plenty of people that come to us and be like hey can you get us some A-listers? It's like we can but I don't know I don't know if you want to pay you know $200,000 to sit down with this person for 25 minutes on a Zoom call.

I have a client right now for my agency. I'm booking talent for their podcast. Yeah.

They literally went out and raised capital because they wanted to household name celebrities. I'm like, I can get them, but but it's 100K here, 250K here, 50K here.

Yes, I'll work some favors for 30K and 50K, but like the big names are 100K, 200K, 300K, sometimes more.

That's right. And they're gambling. They believe that they can build a big brand, which I I do as well. And you'll see me post about them soon.

But it's working and it's really good talent and it's a really cool different type of podcast. But like

it's a model, you know what I mean? It's just a difficult model to Yeah. And enact. They knew in advance because they had a big deal to make them financial revenue from it. But like I've helped other podcasts and

sometimes they do it for vanity. Yep. They want Shaquille O'Neal for I'm just using him as an example. They want him for six figures because they look up to him or they love him or they grew up watching him. And that's okay too.

What's interesting I like is if you can get someone big early, doesn't have to be that big, but get someone big early that's who you leverage to get other guests. If you look at the email, the opening email when someone messages you and you guys listening probably got it a lot. Let's say people are trying to get you on as a guest. It says, "I've had Gary V and Bradley and Shaq or whoever the people are." And they say that that's how they lead the conversation because it breaks down the barrier.

Instant credibility. Exactly. Yeah. That's what I tell people. It's like you want to uh you want to punch in the face in credibility. When I like when I'm reaching out to people, I want to punch in the face. It's like I I don't want them. If you're trying to get big guests on your show, you have to eliminate all obstacles to them saying no to you.

And the fastest way to do that is by leveraging a name that they already know, like, and trust.

Mark Cuban and Shaq. Okay. Well, why would they say no? If it's worth their time, it's probably worth my time because that's that's really that's really the the thing that I that I noticed was that massively successful people don't necessarily care how big your audience is. They just care that they're not wasting their time. That's it. That's the most important metric for them for anybody that's successful is they know how valuable their time is.

So they want to know that they're not going to waste their time. Well, how do I help make sure that they know that they're not going to waste their time. Well, massive audience is one of those things that contributes to that obviously in a large way. If you're Dary CEO, if you're Jimmy Fallon, if you're Conan O'Brien, it's like you get basically any guest in the world on your show. Joe Rogan, any guest in the world that you want because you're have a massive audience, massive distribution. And that by definition makes it not a waste of their time.

Sure. But there's other factors that go into that which and one of those things is is this person going to treat my time the way that I want my time treated? Are they going to ask good questions? Are they going to be an engaged host? Are we going to be able to pull content from this that we can use in other, you know, parts of our business or whatever. So, there's multiple ways to answer that question without having a massive audience. And the bunch of the people that came on my show came on way before they should have. You know what I mean? Like they said yes.

so many people that were just surprising to me that when they said yes, I was like,

they said yes because of you, your name, or and because of the fact that you had other bigname guests,

big bigname guests, I think, is a is a huge reason. Uh because I also would try to get like testimonials from bigname guests who enjoyed the conversation because that's your job as a host too, right? Is like once getting the yes is the first step, but if you don't want to fritter away this amazing relationship, you have to have a good conversation. You have to actually be a good host. like you cuz people never people will never remember what you say but they'll always remember how you make them feel. So when you have somebody in studio or you're have somebody on a Zoom call or whatever, you have to try to do your dead level best to make it the best possible experience for that person that they can imagine so that in the future they might be willing to say yes a lot faster or they might be willing to make an introduction to somebody else or they might be willing to even give me a testimonial that I can use and reach out

for other people that says like you will not be wasting your time if you spend 90 minutes with Travis. You know what I mean? because we got we got to some stuff that was really really good. So I always try to strive for how do we make this an amazing conversation.

So let's talk about the outliers. We've seen Caller Daddy, the Kelsey brothers, etc. get these like hundred million dollar deals and oftent times I'll forward them to you cuz I'm like whoa.

How did this like rapper from 15 years ago just get 20 million deal like nine weeks into his podcast? Like

what are your thoughts about these outlier deals? And what does all that money for? Does it go to the person or does that go to like marketing and what are they doing with it?

Yeah. So, good news, bad news on that. Good news is that as soon as that Joe Rogan deal hit a few years ago, it basically set a number on something that before had not been set

$200 million. Yeah. Right. Exactly. It was basically like what are podcasts worth? Who knows? And then Spotify was like it's worth a quart billion dollars. Stock went up like a billion dollars that day.

Right. objectively a great move for them. Um, but then with some of the other ones, it's like

they just got massive distribution really really quickly. You know, the Bobby Aloughs and the um and um and Call Daddy, that whole thing. Like

they just got massive audiences and sometimes you sometimes you get lucky. It's a the thing in like in content creation and podcasting is like you could work till you're blue in the face, but like there's always a little bit of a mixture of kind of alchemy, timing, luck that just makes some of these shows just go parabolic. I mean, even the Kelsey brothers is like they would not see not have seen a percentage of the success that they've seen had it not been right around the time that Travis Kelce was getting huge because he was dating Taylor Swift,

right? It's like well they leveraged that very very well and fast. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And they just publicly saying, "We want a $100 million deal." And then

right 12 days later, somebody was like, "Okay, you're right." Well, because like the the bottom line is like the companies want the attention. That's what Gary Vee has been preaching for the last 15 years is we're seeing happen in real time now where it's just like where the attention goes, the money is going to follow.

So if these massive creators have these massive audiences, somebody's going to want that attention. you know, whether it's Amazon with acquiring Wy or Spotify acquiring Gimlet, like those were a couple of the big moves that we saw early on. These were podcast networks. Like Wy was a network, Gimlet was a network and they would incubate and create their own original content and then they sold to these massive tech platforms who had the huge budgets and wanted the attention in their tech. So now I think it's just more of a matter of can you get a piece of that attention and uh what are you going to do with the attention when you get it? Are you going to create something that's on your own?

Are you going to sell the IP to a big company? Is that part of the deal? Like, are is the IP part of the deal? Do they own rights to your name, image, likeness? Do they own the rights to your show or they're just doing distribution and you have like a fee, like a split with them for sponsorship revenue? Uh, but when the shows are being acquired though, I think the majority of that goes to the creator. Uh, but I also think that those companies are spending a pretty penny in advertising those shows and making sure they're squeezing the lemon and getting every drop of juice they can out of it, you know? So when it comes to investing side, let's not talk about investing in businesses.

What about investing into a podcast? Someone wants to start a podcast. What does it take for them? How much money do they need? 2 grand, 10 grand, 20 grand? Like what does it take to start a podcast from the from the jump?

Sure. So the answer is almost nothing. Like I when I started my podcast, I have a picture somewhere. I could probably pull it up if I had enough time, but I have a picture somewhere of my first ever studio setup, which was basically an upside down laundry basket in my closet with my laptop on top and a $50 USB microphone plugged into my laptop. That was it. So, I was all in for equipment and setup and the whole thing for 60 bucks. So, you can start with that. Here's what I've sort of noticed in terms of the entrepreneurship world anyway. The more legit you can make your setup these days, the better off it'll be for your long-term goals as a business owner. And this might not be the case if you're starting a sports podcast with your buddies and you and none of you have a bunch of extra income to dump into it. Like that is a little bit of a different barrier to entry, but for an entrepreneur who's got a seven

figure, eight figure, nine figure business and they want to get into this space, like spend some money and make an amazing setup inside of your inside of your office or something like that. um which is exactly what we've helped some like um a mutual friend Jeff Fster.

Yep. When we we did some consulting with them and and helped them get their podcast up. We did the first year year and a half of production for them and we were consulting them on like hey you know we should put a studio space and we walked into the office and I was like okay well you have this office it's not being used. What if we just like put some things on the wall? You know probably like 10 15 grand we'll be in and out. Then I came back like three weeks later and they built like a quarter million dollar studio

in the middle of their office. And I was like, I guess that's what happens when you own a construction company as well. You can build whatever you want.

But I talked to Jeff recently about it. I was like, what what have you seen happen from this? And he was like, bro, it's unbelievable just like the volume of people that we've been able to bring through the office just cuz we have an excuse to put them in studio and make them look awesome and like talk about their business and talk about how cool they are. They come in, they see all the stuff that we're up to and now we're doing business together. It's like you can easily track multi6 figures and some of these people seven figures, eight figures to just relationships that were formed because you had an excuse to bring somebody into your office. That's why I call it the Trojan horse. It's the excuse to get past the gatekeeper. You know, it's it's much more difficult to reach out in a cold LinkedIn DM to somebody you want to do business with to say, "Hey, let's jump on a sales call.

You know, I have some processes that are going to blow your mind." It's like, "Yeah, you and the 43,000 other people that DM'd me on LinkedIn this year."

You know what I mean? but asking them to come through to your office to do a full hourong video recording of their life story with your, you know, multi6figure podcast studio is like, "Oh, sure. Whenever I'm in your neck of the woods, I'll pop over, sit down, have a conversation, you walk them through your office, and then if there's a way to do business together, there's probably going to be a way that you do business together."

So from So that's why I say like it can range wildly. If you're just like somebody who has no money and you're just starting out because you want to get started, you can get started for 50 bucks with a USB mic. He has some external audio.

Sure. Um if you want external video, just, you know, webcam that records in 1080p or something like that. You don't have to go crazy with it, but just a any sort of external audio is great and then some video aspect and then you're off to the races. You need a media host which is like 20 bucks a month or something like that or I think I think Ankor does it for free. So, uh even that side of it super super simple. Or you could go the other extreme which is investing multi6 figures in a studio set up in your office to have an excuse to bring people through and do like high level business development with those people

like the building we're in right now. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So last main question is about philanthropy.

Okay. And charity. Why do you think it's important for brands to have some type of charity component to their company whether it's for their clients, their customers, their vendors or their staff?

I think because first of all I I this is just a personal belief of mine. I personally believe that business owners and entrepreneurs have more ability to impact the world around them than say the government or even most nonprofits. Uh I it's it's harder for me just to like give money to nonprofits because I know how much they just waste

they waste so much of it, dude. It's like a penny of every dime you give to them is actually given to the cause that they say that they're all about. So for businesses to take more of an active approach, which like what you do with your even your homeless charity, it's like a 100% of the proceeds go to the thing that you're doing because you run a bunch of businesses, right? Like this is not what you do so you can get on the board somewhere so that you can have higher stat status in society so that you can raise money at this charity gala and then give yourself a fat salary and have a company car. It's like you give the money 100% to the thing that you're actually saying you're giving the money to. So I think I think if we're going to make the world a better place that entrepreneurs and business owners are the people who have the most leverage to be able to actually go out and do that thing because they have cash flow, they

have sources of income and ultimately every cause needs money. So got to have some sort of component that enables you to be able to give back in a little bit of a more efficient streamlined way.

All right. So where can people find you on social? Where can they find the company? Your whole world.

Yeah. Yeah. DM me Travis Chapel on Instagram is probably the best place to find me. I mean, you go to my website, travisch.com, but that's more just like a hub that you can see all the stuff that I'm up to. Um, but uh we yeah, we recently just sold guestio. Not as much doing the podcast, guest booking stuff anymore, but um doing a lot more stuff with done for you production, um producer placement, um you know, entrepreneurship communities, things like that. So, still working a lot on that front. So, Travis Chapel over on Instagram ShdM.

All right, guys. We appreciate you. Um, as you know, we've been running these things adree. I did do a sponsorship deal recently with GoHigh Level because I actually use them for years. They power my entire backend, my ecosystem, my world for my charities, my events, my businesses, my sites, my courses, my everything. So, I actually use GoHigh Level. I'm not going to be giving out like discount codes. I'm not running it like an ad, but they are sponsoring and I'm very happy to have them because I've always told you guys for the last two and a half years, I'm only going to do it with someone big like Wells Fargo, Cash App, like that where they're someone I actually use on a daily basis.

go high level fits that category. You guys liking, commenting, subscribing is super super important. No matter how big this podcast ever gets, I need you to do that because again, I'm spending a ton of money on this podcast to make it as big as I can to spread the message out there. So you out there going and talking to your friends, family, and followers about money is mission critical for us and the podcast. And you can literally help change people's lives. If you teach your friends how to save some money on their taxes, if you teach them how to pay their taxes better, if you teach them how to get rent versus lease, buy versus this, like them actually having these discussions, the butterfly effect is crazy what happens if they make more money on their job because now they know how to ask for a raise of their salaries because you talk them about money. Money is not the root of all evil. It's part of our daily

lives. So, I appreciate you guys. Make sure to check out Travis Chapel across social media and we'll see you guys next Monday here at the moneym.com.

Questions about this episode

What is "The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP148" about?

The main topic discusses innovative strategies for monetizing a podcast, emphasizing that success does not rely on having millions of views. Key points include the importance of open discussions about money, engaging audience interaction, and building genuine relationships within the podcasting community to foster growth and profitability.

What is mentioned in this The Money Mondays Podcast episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Travis Chapel, vertical farming, Guestio, podcast batching, Jeff Fenster, Kelce brothers. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The Real Way to Monetize a Podcast (Without Millions of Views) w/ Travis Chappell 🎙️ EP148"?

The episode runs 36 min; the transcript is about 8,665 words in 114 timestamped sections.

More from The Money Mondays Podcast

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated December 18, 2025.