Brands enlist content to drive awareness within their industry, acquire prospective clients by researching online, and use content to drive retention by assisting customers to succeed with their products or services. The challenge with a brand utilizing content is overcoming the hesitation associated with a prospect or customer seeing the content purely to drive revenue (which is what it’s for).
Your branded content will always be biased toward your brand, providing an opportunity in the marketplace for third-party sites that may be more balanced in the content they produce. Martech Zone is precisely this – while we promote some platforms and have disclosed relationships to encourage others, we strive to be vendor-agnostic overall. I’ve never really believed in the best solution for any business – most businesses have resource constraints and customized processes that require them to analyze their processes to find the best fit for them.
How Content Creators Monetize Their Work
A good friend contacted me this week and said that he had a relative who had a site that was getting significant traffic, and they wanted to see if there was a means of monetizing the audience. The short answer is yes… but I don’t believe most small publishers recognize the opportunity or how to maximize the profitability of their property.
I want to start with the pennies and work into the more significant opportunities. Keep in mind that this isn’t all about monetizing a blog. It could be any digital property – like a large email subscriber list, a large YouTube subscriber base, a podcast, or a digital publication.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): Many years ago, I watched a presentation at an event that referred to PPC as Webmaster Welfare. While it’s the most straightforward system to implement – just putting some scripts on your page, the pennies you make with each click yield the lowest. Some systems, like Google’s Adsense platform, are even intelligent enough to find and optimize your site by placing the ads without needing placeholders. There is an opportunity here to make money, but you must balance destroying your user experience (UX) if your site is virtually impossible to experience without ads everywhere.
- Custom Ad Networks: advertising networks often reach out to us because they’d love to have the ad inventory that a site this size could provide. I might jump at this opportunity if I were a general consumer site. The ads are rife with click-bait and terrible ads (I recently noticed a toe fungus ad on another site). I always turn these networks down because they often don’t have relevant advertisers complimentary to our content and audience. Am I giving up funds? Sure… but I continue to grow an incredible audience that is engaged and responsive to our advertising.
- Affiliate Ads: Some businesses operate affiliate programs or join centralized platforms. Affiliate advertising is typically a share of your site’s revenue by referring the visitor through a custom, trackable link. Be sure always to disclose using them in your content – not disclosing can violate federal regulations in the United States and beyond. I like these systems because I’m often writing about a particular topic – then I figure out they have an affiliate program I can apply for. Why wouldn’t I use an affiliate link instead of a direct link? One great feature of affiliate marketing is that you can continue to drive monthly referrals or leads with a single article. Here are some affiliate marketing networks:
- Direct Ads: Managing your own advertising inventory and optimizing your own pricing, you can utilize a marketplace platform to have a direct relationship with your advertisers. You can typically set flat monthly pricing, a cost per impression, or a cost per click on these platforms. These systems also allow you to back up advertisements with Google Adsense when no direct advertiser is available. You can use affiliate ads as a backup as well.
- Revenue Share: While many of the above platforms require you to manage them daily, some services have emerged to do this for you. I utilized Ezoic for quite some time, and it was an excellent platform. Unfortunately, I was repeatedly and falsely accused of faking impressions without any evidence of how or why. It could be that I have translated versions of the site that drive traffic internationally; I’m unsure why. They would halt payments each time, so I eventually left the platform rather than fighting them. This could be a great solution if you’re running a single site. They increased the monetization of my site up to 10x in some months.
- Native Advertising: There are marketplaces like Collaborator where brands can reach out to you to either write articles for them for your site or they can submit their own. The platform allows you to approve the content or not, so it’s a great way to ensure you maintain quality on your site. It’s a one-time payment for the article and you have control of the pricing (they recommend an amount based on your site’s authority and traffic).
- Paid Links: As your content gains search engine prominence, you will be targeted by SEO companies who wish to backlink through your site. They may flat-out ask you how much to place a link or tell you they want to write an article and are big fans of your site. They’re lying, and they’re putting you at risk. Getting paid for backlinks violates Search Engine’s terms of service and may violate federal regulations by not disclosing the monetary relationship.
- Influencer Marketing: If you’re a well-known individual in your industry, you may be sought out by influencer platforms and public relations companies to help pitch their products and services via articles, social media updates, webinars, public speeches, podcasts, and more. Influencer marketing can be pretty lucrative, but remember that it only lasts as long as you can influence sales – not just reach. And again, be sure to disclose those relationships. Unfortunately, this is another industry that’s rife with trust issues since many influencers don’t disclose their financial relationships. As an influencer, you may even get paid speaking opportunities as well!
- Partnerships: Developing programs with advertisers directly can drive far more revenue than the above opportunities. We often work with companies to develop ongoing campaigns that may include webinars, podcasts, infographics, whitepapers, and CTAs that we publish through the house ad slots. The advantage here is that we can maximize the impact on the advertiser and use every tool we have to drive value for the cost of the sponsorship.
- Direct Referrals: All methods thus far can be fixed or low pricing. Imagine sending a visitor to a site, and they purchase a $50,000 item, and you made $100 for displaying the call-to-action or $5 (or $0.05) for the click-through. If, instead, you negotiated a 15% commission for the purchase, you could have made $7,500 for that single purchase. Leadgen referrals are tricky because you need to track the lead through to the conversion, which typically requires a landing page with source reference that pushes the record to a CRM for conversion. If it’s a significant engagement, it may also take months to close, but it’s still worthwhile.
- Membership: Having levels of membership is quite fruitful for many content creators. There’s public content that’s shared with all, but more valuable clients are available behind paid memberships. When customers see value in the content they’re getting at no cost, getting them to subscribe for more useful content is possible. I have a lot of respect for content creators who can balance providing free content and membership services. I just have one membership, offering no ads.
- Sell Products: While advertising can produce some revenue and consulting can produce significant revenue, both are only there as long as the client is. This can be a roller coaster of ups and downs as advertisers, sponsors, and clients come and go. It’s why many publishers turn to selling their own products. As a content creator, you may want to develop a course or in-depth publication that your visitors purchase.
- Whitelabel Products: You’d be amazed at the number of software platforms, courses, products, and even services that you can brand as your own and sell directly to customers. Whitelabeling is a growing industry and can be lucrative if you’ve already got an audience in place that is interested in the products and services that are offered. Martech Zone has dabbled in this, but being vendor agnostic and selling a solution could be a conflict my audience doesn’t appreciate.
- Conferences: You’ve built an engaged audience that is receptive to your offerings… so why not develop world-class events that turn your avid audience into a raving community? Events offer much more significant opportunities to monetize your audience and drive substantial sponsorship opportunities. I believe this is the most lucrative revenue opportunity despite the investment needed. I’ve personally run a few events, and it’s just not my specialty so that you won’t see a Martech Zone conference anytime soon. I know I’m giving up some revenue by doing this, but I don’t enjoy the stress of running events.
- Consulting: As a content creator, you’ve built deep expertise in your area of focus. People are already seeking out your content, so there’s always the opportunity to drive revenue by personally working with businesses and individuals. Martech Zone has been a core to my agencies, driving millions of dollars in consultation revenue as companies seek to transform their businesses digitally. I’ve also helped research acquisitions, assisted platforms in enhancing their offerings, and even partnered in building solutions.
Sell It All!
More and more viable digital properties are being purchased outright by digital publishers. Purchasing your property enables buyers to increase their reach and get more network share for their advertisers. To do this, you need to grow your readership, retention, email subscription list, and organic search traffic. Buying traffic may be an option for you via search or social – as long as you retain a good portion of that traffic.
I’ve had a couple of companies come to me and speak about acquiring Martech Zone, and I’ve been impressed with the offers, but they didn’t seem worthwhile because of the amount of work I’ve done here. Perhaps that will change as I’m nearing retirement… for now, you’re stuck with me, though!
