The 2 most common ways to monetize your content

And how to determine which is right for you

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Monetization is one of the most common topics among content creators.

How do you make money from your content?

Whether you’re building a side project or a full-time business, this is a question you’re likely pondering.

There are many different ways to indirectly monetize your content, which I’ll dive deeper on in another issue.

Today, I want to briefly cover the two most common ways to monetize your content and a few things to think about for each.

Those two ways are:

  • Advertisements

  • Subscriptions

Let’s talk a bit about each.

1) Advertisements

This is the most popular digital media business model.

How it works is simple:

  • You create valuable content for your audience

  • Over time, your audience grows to a sizable amount

  • Advertisers then pay you to put their ads in front of your audience

TV commercials. Magazine prints. Podcast sponsors. Website ads. Newsletter sponsors.

All of these are forms of advertisements.

Your content is free for your audience to consume, and in return you integrate ads into your content to make money.

A few things to think about related to ads:

What is my target “demographic?”

This will impact what kind of advertisers are interested in your content.

  • Men 40 years or older

  • Female executives

  • Stay-at-home parents

Your audience demographic could be anything.

Who would sponsor my content?

As you’re building an audience, it’s helpful to think about the type of business partner who would be interested in your content.

Tech companies? Financial companies? Outdoors and adventure companies?

It’ll probably be a blend, but you want to have some idea of who your ideal partners are.

Do I have the stamina for the ad game?

Advertisements are generally based on “impressions” — ie. how many people view your content.

To make significant money, that requires you to produce a lot of content and produce it consistently.

It’s a volume game and one that never ends …

Unless you come up with another way of making money.

That brings us to subscriptions.

2) Subscriptions

This is the other most popular digital media business model.

Your audience values the content you create so much that they pay you directly for it.

Netflix. Spotify. Cable. Wall Street Journal. Amazon Prime.

These are all subscription business models.

The beauty of the subscription model is you don’t need to rely on advertisements.

This means you can focus entirely on delivering what your audience wants, and not on generating impressions.

The difficult part of a subscription model is there’s an abundance of FREE content on the internet.

To get an audience to pay you consistently for content, you need to have some additional value add.

Examples:

  • Original content

  • Proprietary information

  • Content bundled with a service

  • Novel insights that can’t be found elsewhere

A few things to think about related to subscriptions:

Why would someone pay for this?

This is the most important question.

If it’s not abundantly clear why someone would pay, you probably are not providing enough value for a subscription model.

Who would pay for this?

This is related to your audience demographic.

The more clear you are on who would pay for your content, the easier it’ll be to identify why they would pay for it (hint: you’re solving some problem for them).

What would make this feel like a bargain?

You want your subscription price to feel like a bargain.

That way, your readers are happy to renew month after month (or year after year) and are also more likely to recommend your content to others.

Strive to deliver what feels like 5-10x the value of what you’re charging, and you’re likely to have a healthy content subscription business.

Action Item

Spend a few minutes defining the following:

  • What role you want monetization to play in your audience journey (it’s fine if you don’t want to directly monetize your content)

  • Which primary method best fits you - ads or subscriptions

  • What you need to do to build towards your monetization goals

    • For ads, that means generating a sizable audience

    • For subscriptions, that means providing unique value 

We’ll do a follow-up post soon on other ways to indirectly monetize your content.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.

Was this simple primer helpful?

What questions or challenges related to monetization do you have?

Previous Issues

If you missed them, here are a few previous issues of The Daily Creator you may enjoy:

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