So, you have an online business: how do you monetize it? That’s the big question and something that a lot of people have trouble answering. Yes, it is possible to monetize your online business, and people have done it. But there is also a lot of stuff that gets said online that really doesn’t work or even make sense.
So, what should you be doing to monetize? Here’s our two cents:
Asking For Fan Support
Top of the list of priorities should be to ask for fan support, especially if you’re early in the game. During the initial phase, getting people to “buy you a coffee” is a great way to earn a few extra dollars while you set everything else up.
Asking for fan support wasn’t really possible in the past, but new systems are emerging all the time. You can take payments to an account and get paid weekly. It’s entirely up to you.
Use A Freemium Model With Upsells
Another approach is to do what many of the top YouTubers do and offer a freemium model with upsells. These are handy when you want to draw people in and show what you do without them having to take the risk and pay you.
Freemium models usually achieve 10% conversions (to fully paying customers), so they can be highly effective. Think of them as your entryway product and something you invest in to ensure that you get a core group of fee-paying customers.
Establish Online Courses And Workshops
Another approach is to follow the crowd and establish online courses and workshops. These can be highly effective if you have a large audience looking for educational assistance. Cramming courses or courses for specific lines of work can be enormously helpful for people just starting out.
The more you can be the niche offering in a market, the more likely people will be to pick you over someone else. So, for example, if you can offer people in-depth advice on how to start their engineering careers, you’ll immediately be doing better than a generic careers professional.
Choose A Monetization Platform
The real shortcut to monetization is to choose a platform that does it for you. These allow you to start collecting payments from the get-go, without having to do any of the background banking work yourself.
Good examples of this include sites like Fanfix, which keep growing in popularity. These platforms essentially act like the middleman, allowing creators to quickly set up their accounts and start generating income as soon as their audiences begin paying them.
Add Physical Products
Adding physical products is another approach you could take. Again, these days, it is easy to sell these via online stores, Shopify or Etsy.
If you’re an entertainment creator, then selling merch is often the best option. People love buying branded goods, like t-shirts, so focus on these (and don’t try to reinvent the wheel).
By contrast, if you operate an educational creative channel and there are related products you could include, use these instead. This way, your content becomes the gateway to the purchase and gives the customer the confidence they need to go ahead and make the sale.
Use Affiliate Marketing
If you can’t sell the products directly or indirectly, you can use affiliate marketing. This approach means you get paid a commission for every sale you make.
Just ensure you choose affiliate programs that make sense for your audience. Amazon is great for generic creators, but you might want to work with companies you believe in, or that have products you actually use, to get the results that you’re now sharing with others.
Subscription Models
You can also invest in subscription models as a way to monetize an online business. However, how you do this varies.
Software creators usually try to tie their output to a SaaS product, simply because they tend to make a lot of money over time. Another approach is to use subscription boxes (although this will require additional work on your part).
The data show that recurring revenue models usually increase lifetime spending among customers by 100% to 200%, which is why they are so popular. If you’re not using them already, start!
Sell Digital Products
Finally, you can sell digital products. These have zero marginal cost to produce and can scale infinitely if you get them right.
Selling digital products isn’t easy, though, because of the level of competition in the market. Because of this, you’ll want to know ahead of time whether there is any demand for them.
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