How To Make Money Creating Amazing Content

10 min readNov 30, 2021

7 Secrets to Getting Paid For What You Know

Making money by creating content is as old as the earliest printing presses. Today, instead of newspapers or magazines, content creators use blogs, YouTube channels, or podcasts. But the basic business model is exactly the same as it was in Ben Franklin’s days.

Think about a newspaper. You know, for example, that newspapers don’t make much money from the price of subscriptions. Actually, newspapers make most of their money from advertising.

The same thing is true of television and radio shows. TV networks produce shows that they think will get a ton of viewers. And ratings are critical. Why…? Because advertisers will pay more per 30-second ad slot if more people are watching.

After all… You didn’t think the real purpose of Gilligan’s Island was to get people to laugh… did you?

See also:

Creating Content For Fun And Profit

In today’s world of content creation, you have 3 primary types of content to choose from.

A. A Blog

A blog has been the content creators’ medium of choice for the past decade and a half. Blogs are powerful, and a known commodity. Lots of plugins and options are available to promote and monetize your blog.

However, a text-only blog faces increasing competition for search engine ranking and promotion.

B. Video

Right now, video is king as far as creating content goes. The typical example of this is having a YouTube channel. Others have been successful with a Facebook page hosting Live videos streams.

Search engines and social media channels rank video far higher than text only. And, video offers the richest multimedia options to help your video go viral. YouTube even provides mechanisms for clickable links, either as part of the video itself, or in the video description.

However, there’s really only one primary option for advertising to monetize your content.

YouTube is a closed ecosystem. Everything that’s involved with being a YouTuber takes place within the YouTube system. That means that the YouTube ad system is the only monetization option available. Your audience, promotion, and monetization all take place within the closed YouTube framework. An even bigger risk is that YouTube owns the channel, and can turn your content off.

C. A Podcast

Podcasting is a somewhat recent contender in the content creation arena. Podcasts have been around for over a decade. However, the ability to monetize a podcast is much more recent.

Podcasts are popular with listeners who spend time commuting. People subscribe to a podcast on their mobile devices. Their podcast app automatically downloads each new episode as it’s available. And, listening to the podcast is completely hands-free and eyes-free, so it’s ideal to listen to while driving or waiting on public transportation.

Podcasts have a lot in common with radio programs. The podcast medium is totally and completely audio. You have no options for any kind of clickable links that make it easy for listeners to buy stuff.

So advertising within podcasts tends to take the form of sponsorships, in much the same way as radio programs have sponsorship commercials. The listener has to leave the podcast and take some kind of action to spend money (i.e. call a phone number, send an SMS text with a code, or possibly visit a short, easy-to-remember URL).

Until recently, each podcaster had to negotiate and manage sponsorships manually, all on their own.

However, in contrast to the closed system of YouTube, podcasting is an open system. Many different podcast hosting providers exist. And some of these hosting providers have various levels of sponsorship support built in.

D. A Hybrid

Many people who are most successful at creating content have adopted a hybrid approach. For example, they may have both a blog and a YouTube channel. They record videos that are capable of standing on their own, but then they embed the videos in their blog with some additional text-based resources. This leverages the strengths of both platforms.

So…

Here are 7 powerful steps to get started the right way in making money creating content.

1. Identify Your Audience BEFORE Creating Content

The barriers to entry for becoming a content creator have nearly vanished in the last 20 years or so. But with that being the case, there’s lots more competition, and that competition is global.

Think about it… Not terribly long ago, people had just a few options for getting content. They had three major television networks, a handful of local radio stations, and perhaps two newspapers in their city. And, they might subscribe to several national magazines.

Not a lot of competition, but each of these media had significant barriers to entry.

Today, content consumers have millions of blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts to choose from.

So, you have to find a way to make your content stand out.

The best way to do this is to tightly define your niche.

The process of defining your niche isn’t difficult, but it is critical. I’ve written a lot about this in a previous post, so I’ll let you read more about it here:

2. Gather Your Audience

Once you’ve defined your target audience, you need to gather them to you. When you defined your niche, you also documented where your target audience congregates. In today’s world, that will typically be somewhere on social media.

This may take the form of groups (on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest) or hashtags (on Twitter or Instagram). These are just two examples.

Now that you know where they congregate, you need to be active there, as well. In particular, you create your own profile on that social media platform and begin participating in the conversation. In the process, you grow your own followers on that platform.

Here’s the thing… Many new content creators take the approach to “build it, and they will come.” Well….. that doesn’t really work.

Let’s look at YouTube as an example. It’s all well and good to think that YouTube will help viewers find your videos. After all, YouTube is a powerful search engine. But that’s traffic that’s entirely out of your control.

When you have a social media audience and you promote your content to that audience, this becomes traffic you control. So building a social media audience that’s separate from your content platform is a key step.

Even better than traffic that you control is traffic that you own. The only source of traffic that you own is your own email list. So, while you build your social media audience, you also work to build your email list.

3. Questions And Problems = Headlines

As part of identifying your niche, one of the steps was to engage with your target audience and to listen. By doing this, you discovered that your target audience has questions that they want answers to and problems that they want to solve. These questions and problems are the foundation for every piece of content that you will create.

You use these questions and problems to create headlines. The headline will be the most important part of every piece of content that you create. After all, the headline is what convinces someone to want to read, watch, or listen to your content.

For example, your target audience may have the problem that their lead magnet isn’t helping them get very many email list subscribers. From that problem, you may create a headline, such as, “Your Lead Magnet SUCKS: How to Make It AWESOME!”

Headlines are also versatile. A given headline can work for any type of media: a blog post, a video, or a podcast.

Whenever you create a headline, make sure you use strong power words. You probably already know that we make decisions based on emotions, and then justify our decisions through logic. This means that your headlines need to pack an emotional punch, if you want people to first consume your content, then to like and share it.

You can use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to make sure every headline you write packs that emotional punch.

4. Creating Content That’s AWESOME!

Now, here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you want people to share your content with their friends, family, and social media audience, it must be AWESOME.

First, the content must be tightly focused to the specific niche you identified. There’s too much competition out there for you to try to produce general-purpose content.

Second, the content must draw the reader, viewer, or listener all the way through to the end. Many of the platforms, such as YouTube, penalize your content if viewers don’t watch all the way through. You need a way to entice the viewer or reader all the way to the end.

Fortunately, there’s a pattern that you can follow, called the listicle pattern. This is a pattern that the most viral YouTube videos typically follow. You can read more about this pattern in these two blog posts:

See also:

5. The Critical Call-To-Action

Now, here’s an important step that many people new to creating content often miss.

EVERY piece of content that you create must contain a call-to-action (CTA). A call-to-action is a very specific, very simple task that you want your viewer to take after consuming your content. Since you initially are trying to build your audience, the most valuable CTA relates to getting them back to view your next piece of content.

You want them to subscribe to your blog, YouTube channel, or podcast.

Here’s the thing… if your information was valuable, most people want to get more information from you. However, unless you prompt them to, most people won’t take that one step of clicking or tapping the Subscribe button. BUT… if you prompt them to, most people WILL.

The CTA can be pretty simple. For example, “Did you find this video helpful? If so, hit the Subscribe button below, so you get notified when I post my NEXT video.”

There are a couple of other things you can include in your CTA. The first are the two actions that help your content go viral. You can ask your viewer to like and share it. The second is to invite them to subscribe to your email newsletter.

6. Monetize Your Content

Now, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, or how many people read it, if you don’t actually make money from it. The whole purpose of the model of creating content is to be paid for your content. And, in the most traditional form of content creation, this is done by getting people to advertise inside your content.

Each media type has a different monetization approach. In most cases, the monetization requires a certain minimum level of traffic. Here’s the approach for each.

Blog

Advertising for text-based blogs is richer and more robust than for videos or podcasts. This is probably because blogs have been around a whole lot longer than either video or podcasts.

You sign up with an ad platform. Then, you simply add a snippet of code to your blog, which activates the display of the ads.

Here are some of the most popular ad platforms for bloggers.

YouTube

On YouTube, you really have only one option to monetize your video content. You join the YouTube Partner Program. At the time of this writing, your YouTube channel needs to be in good standing with the community guidelines and needs to have at least 10,000 views.

If so, then joining the Partner Program is a two-step process. First you need to apply and get approved for a Google AdSense account. AdSense is the base framework that powers advertising across all of Google’s properties, including YouTube.

Second, you apply for the YouTube Partner Program itself. If you meet all the criteria, the approval process usually takes just a couple of days. And, when it is, you have quite a bit of control over how to monetize each and every video you publish.

Be aware, however, that YouTube exerts a higher level of scrutiny over monetized videos to ensure that they conform to the Community Guidelines. So, you’ll need to be extra vigilant in the content that you include in each video.

Podcasts

The process of monetization varies with each of the podcast hosting platforms. Since this is the case, when you research which platform you will use to host your podcast, you will want to pay extra attention to the monetization features that are included in that platform. In some cases, these monetization features may make or break your decision on whether to select that platform.

Hybrid Monetization

In the real world, most content creators don’t limit themselves to simply displaying advertising in their content.

At the very least many content creators also become affiliate marketers. They become affiliates for products that relate to their content, and then provide links to these products in their content.

And, many content creators go all-in and create their own information products. They create their own courses that they sell to their audience.

Both these monetization strategies go well with the core strategy of creating content. But, they are their own subjects and disciplines, so study them carefully before adopting them.

7. Promote Your Content

In the end, your content doesn’t have much value if nobody sees it. For all that you can do to make your content friendly to search engines, traffic from search engines is entirely out of your control. Instead, you want to proactively promote your content.

This is one of the reasons that building your audience on a social media channel (other than your content channel) is so critical. You proactively promote your content to your audience on that channel. And, even better, you can promote your content more than once. Here’s a strategy you can follow.

For every piece of content that you produce, identify a handful of quotes that are memorable. Then, over the each of the next several days after you publish that content, post one of those quotes with a link back to your content. You’ll keep the social media channel happy, since each post is unique. You’ll also direct a continuous stream of traffic to that piece of content over several days.

You can also re-post older, evergreen content to keep interest high for your entire content channel. Simply change up your quotes a bit and post it with a link back to the older content.

Finally, you should be writing to your email list on a regular basis–typically once or twice a week. Include a link to one of your more meaty pieces of new content in every email newsletter you write.

And there you have 7 powerful steps to make money creating content.

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