Being a content creator can pay your bills whilst providing you with a fulfilling career. It is essential to know how to diversify your income. Yes there are prerequisites to think about when working on monetizing your blog such as:
- a regular cadence of your unique content
- clear themes that you focus on
- a niche demographic that you’re targeting and speaking to
and of course … - proactivity in nurturing your community and promoting your content
There are traditional methods of income generation for influencers such as affiliate monetization and brand partnerships. However given the volatility of the market, it’s becoming increasingly apparent the need to diversify your income streams.
Why is it important to diversify your income?
The above tried and tested revenue streams do have the potential to generate substantial revenue however none of these streams are entirely in your control. This essentially means that your growth as an influencer is determined by parameters to which aren’t in your remit. To diversify your income puts you in good stead to maximise your growth potential in an ever-increasingly dynamic consumer world. Yes, this includes finding opportunities to carve out your OWN revenue….but as a preliminary step, it means ways to focus on revenue-generating that is the most efficient for you.
How to begin to diversify your income streams?
First, you want to assess which income streams you rely on for consistent revenue. You then want to assess the ratio of each income stream in your annual revenue. The next step would be then to allocate a calculation of time and effort in generating that revenue/stream. This could be in regards to how long it takes for you to create and promote content to generate your commissions, how long it takes for you to create and publish partnership content, and how much effort it takes to grow your traffic on-site to build ad revenue.
If you can get granular, do it. Try to associate each revenue steam with the amount of time it takes for you to generate a dollar. This might be tricky at first. That’s ok, but at the very least at least you’re thinking about it.
Here’s what you’ll learn from this:
- How much effort does it take to generate my income?
What you’ll ask after this:
- Are there ways to generate more revenue for each stream?
- Should I be leaning in on a different revenue stream than the one I focus on the most based on efficiency?
- Does the effort vs income capability match my long term goals?
- How much effort does it take to generate my income?
- how much control do you have over the revenue of your existing revenue streams?
- Do you control the volume of commissions, brand partnerships etc?
It’s worthwhile pushing for revenue where you can establish further control and are passive.
Passive income Opportunities
Although you do not fully own the commissions for advertising, it makes sense to find ways to generate revenue that does not directly require you to create new content in order to get paid. Making sure you have more passive income streams might open up opportunities to unlock revenue in less controlled environments – such as launching your OWN solutions to your audience.
What are some passive income streams you can consider?
- Sell Advertising Space
If your blog gets a decent amount of page views every month and has a good following, you may want to consider selling advertising spaces to other bloggers and brands. Charge a monthly fee for advertising space on your sidebar or between your blog posts. You could also have add-ons for your advertising packages, where people pay more to be featured in your blog posts or social media tweets. - Sign up to Ads
Speaking of advertising on your blog, you may also want to consider signing up to an ad platform such as Google Adsense, Mediavine or Adthrive (the latter two have pageview requirements before being admitted). Being smart about placement and making sure you’re also focussing on promotional activity alongside your social (hello SEO) will help you generate ad revenue whilst you proactively work on generating income elsewhere.
Carve out your own revenue
The next step at income diversification is looking at carving out your own non-third-party-controlled revenue.
You have a community and your content prowess. These are major building blocks to create a successful brand. When we look at how consumers interact with brands we see consumers wanting a more intuitive and closer process between maker and user. By creating revenue streams that don’t include a third party you put yourself in control to create a more intuitive product that speaks to your followers’ needs. So why not make this your bread and butter?
Creating your own products and offerings needn’t be a tall task. Have a read of our Blogger Business Guide on ideas on how other innovative content creators have used their platforms to diversity their income even further.
Take this as a means for ideation and build from there to scalably build your revenue and begin to diversify your income. [/mepr-show]
