What Does it Mean to Monetize your Content Online?

My friend, Emily, loves crochet and shares her work online. After 18 months, she decided to teach people because many asked how to get started. Millions of people create content because it’s a passion, and you spend many years learning the skills required to become proficient.

She now teaches people for a living by selling an online course and hosting live streams in her membership community.

What does it mean to monetize your content?

There are so many ways you can monetize your content nowadays. The example given is just one way to make money from the content you create. Some creators teach and sell sponsorships or ads.

It’s essential to enjoy the content creation process and expect to learn new skills because monetizing needs to have an audience.

It’s impossible to make money in your first week or month; you need to be patient and not focus on content creation but look at ways to build an audience.

Let’s go through the common ways to monetize your content.

Place AdSense on your website

Signing up with Google AdSense is easy, and once you have placed the code on your website, you’re ready to make money. That said, your website will not be approved if you do not have an audience or unique, high-quality content.

Take a moment to read this article we wrote answering the question: Why is my site not approved for Google AdSense? That article will suggest ensuring your site gets endorsed, but it’ll take time.

Google will place the ads within your content. The topic will depend significantly on what the visitor has been searching for online and services or products based on published content. You receive revenue every time a visitor clicks on one of the ads, so you need an audience to make money.

Generate commission through affiliate sales

You can generate revenue by promoting services and products that you recommend to your audience.

The amount you can earn will depend on the commission percentage. We wrote a great guide on the best affiliate programs to check out first, as these offer a wide range of opportunities for you to make money online.

Sponsor opportunities

There are several ways that you can monetize your content through sponsorships. You could create a series of blog posts on a specific topic that a company will sponsor; you would promote the brand.

If you create videos for YouTube or publish a podcast, you can also use these channels to gain sponsors. We wrote a fantastic guide on reaching out to companies for sponsorship, a highly recommended read.

Selling digital products

My friend Emily created a PDF guide on how to get started with crochet.

It included the gear you need to buy and step-by-step instructions on starting to learn how to crochet for beginners. From this, she began to sell designs that beginners could use to create small items like teapot holders, hair scrunchie, and other easy-to-create crochet products.

Make sure that you check out our guide on the best platforms to sell digital products; it’s a must-read.

Start small with a PDF that helps people through a particular problem they have or teaches them a skill. Make sure it’s an easy win for the buyer so they want to buy other digital products you sell.

Creating an online course

After creating a digital product to help your audience learn a new skill, the next step is to create a course that will dig deeper into what you want to teach them.

So, taking teaching people how to crochet as an example, you might want to teach people how to create a quilt cover, as this is a much more significant challenge.

A course would cost more and include different forms of content like video, audio, and written. For the creator, it will take longer to create, but it can take your content creation business to a new level.

Make sure to read our guide on building an audience for selling courses because we go into a few strategies to help you.

Create a membership community

Finally, to monetize your content, you could create a membership community. You would charge your audience a monthly subscription fee that members pay to get access to you as the creator but to your digital products and courses.

Membership can be a great way to bring all your products together and add support within a forum or group where the members can network, learn from each other, and ask questions.

Hopefully, this article has helped answer your question: what does it mean to monetize your content? We have a newsletter for content creators sent out to subscribers every month, so please subscribe; it’s 100% free.