9 Powerful Ways To Monetize Your Digital Content That Work [Ep. 91]
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By Jessie Festa. This episode on monetizing content is sponsored by Ahrefs and contains affiliate links to trusted partners!
Wondering how to monetize your digital content?
Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be going over nine creative content monetization strategies that work!
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:
- A powerful framework for creating profitable content that also helps your audience
- 9 digital content monetization strategy examples that work
- How to create a profitable content plan for your blog, email, social media & beyond
- How to monetize your blog posts & earn consistent passive income
- And more!
In short, if you’re looking to understand how to monetize your content across your digital touchpoints, you won’t want to miss this!
How To Monetize Digital Content [Podcast Episode Audio]
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Invite: Free Content Planning Workshop
Want to learn how to create a profitable plan? Make sure to grab your seat in my free workshop: How To Create A Profitable Content Plan In 3 Steps.
By the end of our hour together, you’ll understand how to:
•Overcome myths related to monetizing a blog that may be holding you back
•Strategically choose a niche with high traffic & earning potential
•Create an SEO-friendly site structure to help your blog posts rank in search results
•Craft a strategic content plan that leads to increased traffic & income
•Find keywords you can actually rank for
•Increase your passive affiliate income through your content
•And more!
Bonus: Those who stay until the end will get a copy of my “41 Clever Ways To Monetize Your Travel Blog (With Examples) PDF!” This is a fan-favorite for those who want to monetize quicker!
Click here to grab your free seat in the workshop.
Improve Your Digital Content Monetization With These Helpful Tools
Along with Ahrefs, which can help you optimize your profitable content to get seen in search results, a few of the many tools that can help you monetize a content website include:
Travelpayouts can help you increase your travel affiliate income. Code “JESSIE” gets new Travelpayouts users a $25 bonus on their first payout.
Teachable makes it easy to sell digital products like courses, memberships, coaching, and digital downloads and to set up sales funnels.
CountdownHero helps you create urgency within your sales funnels through countdown timers and limited-time offers.
Kit helps you grow, nurture, and monetize your email list. They also have features that make it easy to sell digital products and set up profitable sales funnels.
Mediavine is the full service digital advertising agency I’ve used on my own website to monetize my content with display ads since 2018.
Markable can help you monetize your Instagram and other social media platforms.
9 Powerful Content Monetization Strategies [Episode Transcript]
One important thing to realize as blogger:
Writing in itself does not lead to income.
Yes, your content can be profitable; but for that to happen, you need a strategy.
Luckily, there are many ways to monetize content, which is exactly what I’ll be covering below. By the end, you’ll understand some of the best ways to monetize a website or blog.
🎉 Also, don’t forget to grab access to my FREE 3-Step Profitable Content Plan workshop. Learn how to make money writing online content and truly get compensated for your work!
Content monetization meaning
When we talk about the monetization of content, specifically digital content, we’re discussing how to earn money from our creations.
This could be things like blog posts, social media posts, YouTube videos, emails, or digital products.
Along with there being different types of content you make money from, there are also different monetization strategies for websites that can be implemented.
Framework for monetizing digital content
Let’s kick off our strategy on how to monetize online content with a framework. This will help us better understand how monetization works, especially if you also want to offer value to your audience.
To create profitable content as a blogger, you’ll want to:
- Know who you help and how—which is essentially your mission statement
- Understand your audience’s problems and pain points
- Create solutions to those problems and pain points—which is where your content comes into play
The other piece of this—and it’s the piece that I think many bloggers forget about—is that you actually have to implement revenue streams.
As I mentioned, your content won’t monetize itself, and it won’t suddenly bring you profits the more you post. You need to be strategic with this, which is exactly what this guide will help you do.
Now that you understand the logic, let’s dive into the profitable content strategies.
These strategies were written with blog content in mind, but most if not all can be adapted if you’re curious about how to monetize your content on social media, YouTube, podcasts, email, and more.
Idea #1: Optimize your content for affiliate links
I’ve talked before about ways to promote your affiliate links, and a great place to begin is your blog posts (though you can certainly monetize your freebies and social posts too).
When it comes to how to monetize your site with affiliate marketing, I recommend having an affiliate program for all of your regular purchase actions.
For travel blog affiliate marketing, this might include things like accommodation, tours, travel insurance, airport transfers, luggage, and SIM cards.
As you audit old content and create new blog posts, don’t just sprinkle these links in. Really think about your unique audience and what type of guidance they come to you for.
For instance, as a solo female travel blogger, I know my audience worries about safety, so I also share my favorite travel safety essentials—with affiliate links.
If you help people enjoy outdoor adventure, you might recommend your favorite campsites and rustic lodges over a 5-star hotel in NYC.
Now, when it comes to affiliate content, you also want to attract buyers. And you do this by creating content that is optimized for buyer-intent keywords that attract people with their credit card in hand, ready to make a purchase.
Going back to someone who blogs about outdoor adventure, this might mean writing a guide to the “best hiking backpacks for petite women” or “AllTrails vs Gaia GPS: Which is better?”
And by the way, you can use Ahrefs to find these keywords. They actually have a built-in “Keywords Explorer” tool that helps you discover thousands of great keyword ideas, analyze their ranking difficulty, and calculate their traffic potential.
The feature also now includes AI Assistant to help you generate new keyword and topic ideas in just a few clicks to help you streamline this process.
Now, getting back to the affiliate strategy, you don’t need to make every single blog post optimized for buyer intent— that honestly might make your website feel overly salesy; however, having every 4th or 5th post be buyer intent can help you really create profitable content.
Idea #2: Create products and services
One of the most profitable types of content you can create is your own products. Product monetization might include:
- Digital products like eBooks or online courses
- Physical products like clothing or packing cubes
- Services like consulting, itinerary planning, or tours
- Recurring revenue products like paid newsletters or memberships
Personally, I really love digital products, as you can create them once–and update as needed–and then sell them on autopilot.
Keep in mind, you want to come up with product ideas that are an extension of your blog brand and mission statement.
This will not only make them more relevant to your audience but will also make them easier to promote.
Idea #3: Use your blog posts as a sales funnel gateway
There are many ways to do this. What is important to remember is that your blog posts are attracting people who are seeking answers to a specific question.
While each of your blog posts should answer the question it promises to, you can also include a content upgrade or an opt-in freebie that can help your readers take action faster and easier—while also growing your email list.
Going back to the outdoor adventure blog, in a post on Backcountry Camping for Beginners, you might invite readers to grab your Essential Backcountry Camping Checklist. This is your opt-in freebie, so to get this, they’ll need to subscribe to your email list.
You can set up your freebie so that once they subscribe, they’re automatically taken to a thank you page with a special limited-time offer— 50% off your Camping Cookbook, but only if they purchase in the next 20 minutes. This type of offer is called a tripwire funnel.
You can stop here or build on to the funnel by creating an automated email welcome sequence that ends with a pitch—maybe to your Backcountry Camping for Beginners course.
See how it’s all cohesive, and you’re continuing to help your audience solve their problem of not knowing how to plan for a backcountry camping trip?
There are other things you can do to build out this funnel too, from order bumps and checkout upsells to downsells in your automation; but, we’ll keep it simple for now.
I just really want you to get a sense of how you can use your blog content to be the gateway for this type of profitable sales funnel for your digital products.
Idea #4: Use your blog posts to build & monetize an email list
If you’re wondering how to monetize your audience, setting up a sales funnel isn’t the only way to monetize your email list.
Honestly, your email list can help you reach pretty much any goal you have:
- Growing your traffic
- Building relationships with your readers
- Working with brands
- Increasing your affiliate income
- Increasing sales of your products
The beauty of your list is it is the perfect place to nurture your community and build that know, like, and trust factor with your readers through valuable and engaging email content.
The thing to realize here is it’s important to give at least three times more than you ask.
You can share your amazing free content, provide insider tips, and let them in on helpful strategies—and then you might send an email promoting your own product or that of an affiliate that allows for email promotion.
With an outdoor adventure blog, this might mean promoting REI’s Annual Anniversary Sale or a review of Hipcamp—with an affiliate link.
Or, you might let your subscribers know that, for a limited time, your Backcountry Camping for Beginners course is on sale or that they can get special bonuses when they purchase. This is similar to a product launch event.
Idea #5: Launch content-based community events
Community-based events are great because not only do they help your audience achieve something, but they can typically help you grow your email list and income. A few powerful ideas for this include:
With both of these options, you want to pinpoint:
- Your monetization goal for the event—such as increasing sales of your digital product or referrals to a certain affiliate
- What event topic would attract people who would benefit from taking the action you want them to take
Once you know this, you can map out the content so that you’re helping your audience and empowering them with knowledge, and also warming them up for your pitch so that you can monetize the content.
Idea #6: Host paid community events
Along with hosting free challenges and webinars, you can host paid ones.
With this, the event itself is the profitable content—vs having the event be a primer or gateway to the profitable content.
Something neat with these types of events is that you can host them live and then set them up to sell on autopilot as an evergreen offering.
Idea #7: Work with sponsors
The way this typically works is a sponsor will pay you to create content that promotes them.
Not to sound repetitive, but when it comes to creating sponsored content, it’s important to keep your audience in mind. What sponsors would they be interested in?
This will help you:
- Keep your content aligned with your mission—so that you’re not writing about dog food or baby strollers when your blog is about solo travel
- It will also help you more easily pitch and land paid brand collaborations—even with a small audience, as the alignment between your audience and the brand will be the selling point of working together
So that blogger running the outdoor adventure website might pitch brands like Patagonia, Cotopaxi, or North Face, letting them know that their blog audience is the same one these brands are trying to get in front of it, so it’s a win-win!
Idea #8: Create shoppable social media content
Let’s talk about social media for a minute, as so many of us leave money on the table.
While you don’t want to make every social post feel like a buying guide, you can absolutely create a social media content calendar that includes shares optimized for selling your products or products from affiliates that allow for social promotion.
For instance, that outdoor adventure blogger might create a:
- video sharing how to make ramen on a Coleman Camping Stove
- review of the Lifestraw water filtration bottle
- round-up of their top 5 camp cooking essentials
From there, you can direct people to your link in bio to purchase. I’ve also seen creators use chatbot tools like ManyChat to automate sending affiliate links or lists on their Amazon Influencer Storefront.
Basically, the creator will say something like “Comment ‘camp cooking’ to get links to my essentials sent to your DMs”.
Before implementing a strategy like this, just make sure you’re abiding by Instagram’s current terms as well as your affiliate partner’s current terms.
There are also tools meant to help you monetize your social media content, like:
- Markable
- Benable
- LikeToKnowIt
- Amazon Influencer Storefront
Or, you can even share a link to a product sales page or blog post optimized for affiliates.
Now, I’ve also got a bonus tip here:
When possible, try to streamline your blogging workflow and simplify things by using content on multiple platforms.
For instance, you can pull tips from a blog post and turn them into individual social media shares, or you can embed a social video into a blog post to help increase dwell time and engagement on the post for SEO.
Idea #9: Monetize with ads
This revenue stream veers from the idea of solving problems and pain points for your audience, but it is a very good one to consider.
Personally, I’m a Mediavine publisher and can say it feels amazing to be truly compensated for the blog posts you work so hard on without having your voice influenced or compromised, as can sometimes happen if a piece of content is sponsored.
I know many bloggers are resistant to the idea of ads; but if you’re with a good ad network, you’ll have control over how many ads you feature and their placements.
Plus, the payout can be a full-time income on its own, depending on your stats.
What you earn will typically be based on Revenue per mille (RPM); as in, the estimated earnings per every 1000 impressions. I’m with Mediavine, and they calculate their RPM based on sessions instead of impressions.
Your RPM will change all the time and will vary based on numerous factors, like your audience or the format of your blog posts; however, just to give you an idea, I have two blogs with Mediavine, and one currently has an RPM of $27.76 and the other has an RPM of $36.31.
Personally, I wouldn’t run ads until you have the traffic to make substantial money from it. Resist the urge to throw Google Ads on your site when you’re a newbie, and instead grow your traffic until you can join a high-income network like Mediavine or Raptive.
Final thoughts on monetizing online content
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to create content that increases your blogging income.
I’d also like to thank our sponsor one last time, Ahrefs, for helping to make this episode possible. Remember, you can go to https://ahrefs.com/awt to get free access to Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which can help you improve your site’s SEO.
Before you go, don’t forget to grab access to the free profitable content plan workshop – which will teach you how to create a traffic-generating, income-growing content plan in 3 steps.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.
Happy blogging!
How To Monetize Content Creation FAQ
Now that we’ve gone over several clever website monetization strategies, let’s answer some frequently asked questions:
Q) How do content creators get paid?
Content creators get paid through various channels, including advertising revenue, subscriptions, donations, sponsorships, and the sale of merchandise or digital products.
Q) What does monetization mean?
Monetization refers to the process of earning revenue from an asset, service, or product, including digital content and online platforms.
Q) What does monetize your site mean?
To monetize your site means to implement strategies that allow you to earn money from your website’s traffic or content.
Q) What are the best ways to monetize your website?
The best ways to monetize your website include displaying ads, affiliate marketing, selling digital or physical products, offering subscription services, and hosting sponsored content.
Q) What is digital monetization?
Digital monetization involves generating revenue from digital assets, such as websites, apps, and online content, through various online revenue models.
Q) What does it mean to monetize?
To monetize means to convert something into money; in the context of digital content, it involves generating revenue from your content or online activities.
Q) What are the best monetization methods for bloggers?
The best monetization methods for bloggers include affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, advertisements, selling digital products or services, and subscription models like membership sites.
Q) What content monetization platform should I use?
The content monetization platform you should use depends on your content type and audience; popular platforms include WordPress.org, Patreon, YouTube, Substack, and affiliate networks like Amazon Associates.
Q) What monetization models exist for content creators?
Monetization models for content creators include advertising-based models, subscription models, transactional (pay-per-view or download) models, and donation-based models.
Q) How do you monetize your content on Instagram?
You can monetize your content on Instagram through sponsored content, affiliate marketing, selling products directly through Instagram Shopping, and earning from Instagram’s monetization features like Badges in Live.
Q) How do you monetize your content on YouTube?
You can monetize your content on YouTube by joining the YouTube Partner Program, which allows you to earn revenue through ads, channel memberships, Super Chat, and the sale of merchandise through your channel.
Monetize Your Content With These Helpful Past Episodes:
How To Make Money Travel Blogging With Online Courses
How To Grow Your YouTube Channel & Make Money
How To Grow & Monetize On Instagram As A Blogger
How To Create A Free Personality Quiz That Grows Your Email List & Income
How To Create An Email Course That Grows Your List & Income
How To Make A Resource Page That Grows Your Blogging Income
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