How do you actually make money from your content?
While creating content can be fun, at some point, we want to make it a business.
Fortunately, there are dozens of ways to monetize content, even boring ones:
- affiliate marketing
- selling digital products
- offering memberships
and more.
This guide will walk you through the best creator income strategies to find the right mix of income streams for your audience and stage of growth.
First Step: Clear your Doubts About Content Monetization
Clear your doubts about content monetization. They can refrain you from taking action or make you quit too early.
We’re living in the creator economy. Millions of people are turning their content, either blogs, YouTube channels, or podcasts, into thriving businesses.
Sure, free content is an unused asset. To grow sustainably, you need to monetize your content. This is a solution to turn your creativity into a scalable business without burning out.
Fortunately, thousands of companies are willing to pay you for your content.
Popular content creators like MrBeast started creating videos for fun, but now run multiple 8-figure businesses. However, learning how to monetize content, even for small creators with 1,000 subscribers, you can turn your content into a sustainable creator business model.
Popular Ways to Monetize Content
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to start making money. You promote products you already use and/or love, and earn a commission when your audience buys through your links.
See our guide to affiliate marketing for beginners.
You can start affiliate marketing without a website with social media content. However, an affiliate website optimized for conversion is one of the highest-value assets of a content marketer.
Start by choosing an affiliate niche and the best affiliate programs related to that topic to recommend within your content, aiming at solving your audience’s problems.
Learn how to do affiliate marketing as a business to sell products over and over to your audience.
Selling Print-on-Demand Products
You can sell your art online using print-on-demand platforms.
Arts like funny quotes or illustrations can be sold printed on t-shirts, caps, mugs, etc. But high-quality fine arts, with museum-like quality, can be sold on canvas using Giclée printing.
The good news is that you can start a print-on-demand online business for free.
There are two ways to sell P-O-D products online.
1st, you upload your designs to a marketplace. When the marketplace gets organic traffic and your design ranks, you get sales and get paid.
Second, you start an online store with a print-on-demand platform. You then promote your products. When you get sales, the platform prints and ships the product at a fixed price, and you keep the profit when you sell at a higher price.
No upfront cost is required, unless you upgrade for added features or to receive a discount that helps offset fees.
Selling Digital Products
Sell your content by packaging it into digital products. It’s a powerful creator income stream.
You can turn your knowledge into eBooks, templates, printables, or online courses. The beauty of digital products is that they scale easily. You build them once and sell them over and over again.
Also, there are platforms where you can start selling online for free:
- Kit is an email marketing platform for content creators. They have a free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers, one email autoresponder, unlimited emails, landing pages, and a checkout system to sell digital products online.
- Teachable is a platform to sell courses online. They have a free plan where you are limited to one course. Once you start getting sales, you can upgrade to a paid plan to save on fees.
Sponsorships & Brand Deals
Brands pay content creators for their influence.
If your content gets engagement, even with a small audience, you can monetize your content with brand deals.
One option is to learn to pitch brands by highlighting your audience demographics and engagement rates. Another option is to look for creator programs where brands pay fixed rates for content you create around their products.
Some programs, like Canva, pay you for creating content on a monthly basis.
Programmatic Display Ads
This is one of the easiest, and perhaps, fastest ways for content creators to make money online.
You keep your content free to access and add code for programmatic ads on strategic places on your website. Those codes are provided by ad networks that look to display ads to relevant content and a defined audience, as defined by advertisers.
Then you get paid by how many ad views your content gets, where the traffic is coming from, and what the topic of the content is. How much you get paid varies from page to page on a single website.
For some websites, you can expect $5-$30 per thousand visits. But some websites experience more than $100 per thousand visits (also called RPM, Revenue Per Mille visits).
Scale Content Monetization Over Time
The beauty of content monetization is that you can scale it over time.
Once you’ve established one revenue stream, you can diversify by adding another one. You can also improve the existing monetization method.
Your content can be evergreen assets that make money for a long time. So, adding new content will build on top of existing ones.
Building multiple streams of income makes your online business growth more stable and scalable. The key is aligning your business model with your content type and audience size. A beginner blogger might start with affiliate marketing, while a YouTuber with a lot of subscribers might start with sponsorships.
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