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An Overview of Content Monetization in Recent Times
Content Marketing

An Overview of Content Monetization in Recent Times

By Mainak Biswas June 12, 2015 - 3,673 views

Whether you run a blog or a business website, monetizing your site to make some extra money is always beneficial for your business. Investments in content marketing are transforming business models; however, part of the investments often goes unmonetized, especially when it fails to generate highly qualified lead volume and purchases. So, to combat the spoilage of content marketing assets, content monetization is an effective method to quickly increase production efforts to repeat the content marketing cycle.

Monetization of Content

Since creation of each piece of content is time-effective, there is a finite and objective cost for a content marketing strategy. Content monetization entails learning new ways to distribute and market content. This is done to reach potential buyers and leads that offer a large number of engaged users who are ready to buy premium digital content.

Before we proceed to the steps towards monetizing your content, your first priority should be to create high-quality content that people will love to read…

Finding the Right Membership Sites

The key to getting a great membership site is by understanding the right concept of membership. Membership sites ask users to create an account and pay membership fees before they can access pages of the website. People need to see the value of paying for the content. Members need to feel that they’re gaining high-value information, access to the director of the sites and networking opportunities with other members.

The 3 Important Models for Paid Content

Subscription

It is users’ subscription to your membership site for a monthly or annual fee.

Transaction

Individual content involving reports, audio or video downloads or training programs are sold separately.

Metered

This model allows users to read some of your content before they decide to pay for the full access.

Lifetime Membership Strategies to Follow

  • Users need to pay for in-depth content
  • Ask for membership ‘sign-in’ to continue reading
  • Open a members-only forum and offer perks
  • Create information products, books and course for a fee

Direct Advertising of Your Content

Direct advertising is easy to set up and removes the middlemen. You as a publisher get full incentive for your service. Besides, you can also offer almost any type of ad formats for the advertisers including:

  • Banner
  • RSS Ads
  • Site Reviews
  • Text Links
  • Audio Video Ads
  • Newsletter Ads

Through direct advertising, you can accept multiple flexible payment options without any chance of losing the deal. This not only opens the door for consistent streams of income from the advertisers but also increases the probability of getting more advertising deals through referrals. A blog that acquires consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds its credibility and is considered as an authority in its niche.

Create Content to Sale

The key to selling content is to provide high-quality content…

  • Decide on the topic idea. Research and find the topic your followers are interested in. To do this, you can test your idea and produce short versions of your final idea to test responses.
  • Post titles in social media and check the responses.
  • Check responses through blog posts and do a guesswork regarding the acceptance of the subject matter.
  • Send emails to your list of members and ask them to fill a survey. The survey should contain as few questions as possible.
  • E-books, audio-video downloads or special reports are inexpensive and easy to digest.
  • Highly premium content such as instructional materials, worksheets, ad resources, seminars or audio and video materials often offer personalized solutions.
  • If you’re active on social media and say for instance, you’re active in Pinterest, you can create original graphics of your content that can be pinned in Pinterest board. The pictures will link to your content, which will bring more traffic to your sales funnel.

Consider Affiliate Marketing

A good way to monetize your articles is to start with affiliate marketing, guiding readers to a product or service in exchange for a charge on the sale. However, the product that you sell must be relevant to the topic you produce. Here are a few quick steps to monetize your blog through affiliate marketing:

Place affiliate ads and encourage visitors to click on the ads and then either sign up, register or make a purchase before you get paid for the action. The more relevant the ad is to your content, the higher the likelihood that visitors will click on your ads and perform the required actions.

Consider affiliate aggregator service such as VigLink, which will automatically monetize the links on your site. In addition to this, VigLink can also optionally insert new relevant links, which optimizes both the user experiences and revenue.

Look for Sponsorship

If you have enough traffic for your blog, you may find sponsors for your website/blog. Sponsors are organizations that pay a monthly fee for the space ads they place on your website because the majority of your audience is among their target groups. You may promote your sponsors in whatever way you can.

How to Find the Sponsors?

  • Check other blogs that have similar target audience as your own website
  • Find the advertisings and sponsors on other sites in your niche
  • Make a list of companies that specializes in your niche and their products & services must align to the topics you produce for your content

How to Make Sponsors Find You?

  • Create a sales page and place a link in your sidebar. This page should explain your different sponsorship prices, packages and payment methods. The sponsorship packages should have a ‘buy now’, ‘order’ or ‘make payment’ link at the end. Also, detail the benefits that sponsors will get.
  • Give details of the traffic statistics and demographic information to help potential sponsors evaluate the value of sponsoring your website.
  • The sponsors should be able to see the number of unique visitors, subscribers and page views.
  • People are more likely to respond if they know the terms of sponsorship, the payment methods and your contact details.

For an enhanced content monetization, you need to be constantly updating your content, re-launch, repost across various platforms and build new products & formats that will compound your audience and revenue.

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