Early Growth Hack Success - Podcast Show Notes Sponsorships

My intention for this post is to (1) have this community tear apart the strategy in case I have blinders, and (2) see if anyone else is testing something similar.

My startup client Vurbl (vurbl.com) has tasked me with building multiple link building and outreach strategies to both help early organic growth for our content marketing strategy, but also to build a solid list of early partners and beta subscribers. Tech is in the audio/podcasting space, so our target partners are audio creators, podcast producers/hosts, podcast networks, blogs and sites about audio and podcasting, etc...

Podcast sponsorships are still the wild west, with very little standards or CPM continuity. Plus, we don't have the budget for the top 100-200 podcasts.

We've begun doing outreach to small time podcasters. Think under 50 episodes, all time downloads below 5,000, but perhaps a decent social following and a website with decent domain authority.

My conversion rate on a show notes sponsorship offer is over 90%, the offers are averaging less than $50 per episode (typically just a single episode offer is made and the range has been $15 to $150 depending on the partner), and most podcasts are happy to plug Vurbl on their social channels and even in their podcast as a normal pre-roll or mid-roll read even if we just want the show notes sponsorship. We even publish podcast reviews for many of these partners directly on our site.

So to sum up, we're earning:

1. A backlink with varying anchor text to the site.
2. An early relationship with future partner for our beta release, launch strategy and early platform users.
3. Intros to other podcasters, audio creators, industry experts and podcast networks.
4. Shout outs on social media channels with links to our site.
5. In kind Pre-roll and mid-roll mentions that will live in the episodes forever.
6. Newsletter mentions that drive other audio creators to us to learn more and traffic to our site.

All of this keeps us well within our budget and moving towards our early goals.

What am I missing though? The backlinks have helped us grow our domain authority early but organic traffic is of course slow to start.

Should we be capitalizing on anything else with these early sponsorship deals?

Who else is optimizing their show notes as a potential sponsorship offering?