Are you a creative soul with a knack for producing content that has the potential to go viral?
Have you been struggling to turn your passion into a profitable business?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, then this article is for you.
Being a content creator isn’t just about writing, designing, or producing videos. It’s about producing high-quality content that resonates with your audience and builds their trust in you as an authority in your niche. But how do you make money from that?
In this article, we’ll explore the art of monetizing your content creation skills, and give you valuable tips on how to attract brands and businesses to sponsor you or sign brand deals with them.
But first, let’s clear up some confusion around the term “content creator”. We’re not talking about people who create content as part of their day job. We’re specifically referring to writers, graphic designers, video producers, podcast hosts, and bloggers who have turned their content creation into a business that generates income.
So, if you’re ready to take your content creation game to the next level, keep reading to discover the secrets of making money as a content creator.
What Is a Content Creator?
A content creator is an individual who researches, plans, and creates inspiring, entertaining, or educational content for a particular audience through different digital mediums.
The content they create can be inspirational, educational, or entertaining. They use digital mediums like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and many more to showcase their content.
Now that you know who a content creator is, let’s see how one can make money as a content creator.
8 Steps on How to Make Money as A Content Creator
1. Create High-Quality, Beautiful Content
More and more people are viewing videos on their mobile devices every day, making it vital for content creators to offer high-quality, HD videos. By paying attention to your content creation process and making sure your audience’s viewing experience is quality from start to finish, you’ll be sure not only to make money as a content creator but also that you retain viewers.
If people stop coming back for more content from you, why would anyone else pay for it? After all, nobody wants to watch low-quality content.
Your passion may lie in niche comedy or sports documentaries, but if you want people to support your passion by watching what you create, it has to look good!
How do you make money by creating high-quality content?
Here is the catch, most of the social media platforms can now be monetized when you have more followers, more engagement with your content, and more viewership.
And for you to build huge followership, you have to make your content appealing and valuable to your audience. This would attract a lot of followers and your followership will begin to grow in no time for you to start monetizing.
Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and many others allow creators to monetize their audience.
2. Start Your Own Website
Hosting your own website is an obvious way to make money with content, but it’s not always an easy path. That’s because your site will require quite a bit of upkeep and maintenance, which often translates into additional work that you’ll need to find.
Building followership on someone’s platform is not always a recommended practice because you can be banned from the platform whenever you go against its policy. You can also be in a disadvantaged place when the platform crashes. So it is always advisable to build your personal digital space where you have much control there and have a way of capturing all data on your audience in one place.
A website is one of the platforms that will allow you to build a following, capture their data, and make money from your audience by selling your services to them or charging them for access to your premium content.
To maximize your chances of success, I recommend combining content creation with affiliate marketing; you can sign up with affiliate networks like ClickBank, ShareASale, Impact, or CJ Affiliate.
If you’re willing to put in some time (and possibly some money), starting your website could be a great side business idea for you. You could also use your site as a place to build up your brand so that people are more likely to buy products from you (and who knows—you might even turn it into something bigger).
You can use website-building platforms like:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Squarespace
- And many others.
If you are not comfortable with tech stuff, you can hire some of the best website developers from Fiverr to build a website for you at a moderate price based on your choice.
3. Start Your Blog
Blogging is another way content creators can make money with their content creation skills.
A blog is a platform created on website-building platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. WordPress is the popular platform amongst them.
WordPress has a free version that provides you with domain and hosting but the domain comes with the WordPress domain extension (.wordpress.com). but to appear professional, I recommend creators to buy their personal domains from GoDaddy, Namecheap, and other domain selling platforms.
To make money as a blogger, you need to offer something worth paying for. That could be anything from recipes to tech tutorials—whatever your niche is, just make sure that what you create helps others solve problems they didn’t know they had.
If no one wants what you’re creating, then no one will pay for it. Now all that’s left is putting in some effort and learning how to market yourself online!
How to make money blogging:
- Sell your courses on your blog
- Offer paid membership subscription on your blog
- Add banner ads on your blog from ad agencies like Adsense, Ezoic, etc.
- Charge for sponsored content
- Make use of affiliate products on your blog
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves influencers recommending brands and products to their audience for them to take a particular action.
When you build an audience on social media and you become an influencer in your niche, brands will approach you with a deal to endorse their products to your audience. You can charge them based on whatever terms you have.
A lot of celebrities are making fortunes with this type of marketing and as a content creator, you can leverage this to make money for yourself.
To start your journey as an influencer:
- You need to pick a niche
- Select the social media platforms you want to build an audience on
- Create your social media profiles
- Define your audience
- Start creating and posting valuable content
- Be consistent
- Engage with your audience
5. Utilize social media for marketing
One of your primary goals as a content creator is getting your name out there, and social media is an invaluable tool for that.
Whether you’re promoting yourself on Twitter or Facebook, or uploading videos to YouTube, social media can get you up and running on all fronts.
Most content creators leverage social media to build their audience and later sell their services and products to their audience.
Social media marketing can be a powerful marketing platform for you as a content creator.
You must first build your audience and later recommend products and services to them.
Most content creators on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter are making money from the audience they’ve built on these platforms.
Make sure you are building the right audience from these platforms to make it easy to monetize your audience when the time comes for you to do so.
You can even make money off of content creation with programs like Affiliate marketing.
6. Consulting
If you like helping people with your skills as a content creator, but don’t want to create a course, you can start a consulting service based on your niche and charge people who opt-in for your consulting services.
This will be time-consuming, but it pays very well as you get to charge your clients per hour.
As a consultant, you can help nurture upcoming content creators, review their profiles, create a strategy for them, and many more. The opportunities are endless and you get to decide your hourly rate.
With this approach, you can make money as a content creator without creating content.
7. Participate in affiliate marketing
I cannot mention money-making methods for content creators without making mention of affiliate marketing.
This is a good option for content creators who want to make money with their opinions.
It is also an easy way to learn how to create your products. You can sell digital or physical products through affiliate marketing.
As a content creator with a huge following on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms, affiliate marketing can serve as a source of money-making venture for you. You will be making money by recommending products and services to your audience.
Before recommending any products to your audience, you must make sure that they are good products and will bring value to your audience.
To get started with affiliate marketing, sign up for an account with ClickBank, ShareASale, Impact, or CJ Affiliate Amazon). They will give you a link that directs customers to purchase products related to what you’re promoting. When someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission from that sale—at no cost to your readers!
8. Look into brand sponsorships
Many brands are vying for your target market’s attention. Having a large and engaged audience makes this even more important.
Brands are aware that you as a content creator, have more loyal audience who are willing to jump on any products you recommend so once they leverage your influence, they are going to make more sales.
Almost 60% of advertisers consider in-stream advertising – similar to sponsorship – to be the most valuable method for promoting their products.
Because brands are very certain that they are going to make a lot of sales and profit when they leverage brand sponsorships, they are willing to pay more money to creators.
All you have to do is to make sure you mention the brand’s name and what they do when sharing valuable information with your audience.
Conclusion On How to Make Money as A Content Creator
As a content creator, you can make money through selling and recommending people’s products, branded sponsorship, influencer marketing, blogging, social media marketing, consulting, podcasting, vlogging, and many more. You have to be creative in your approach.
You can select the strategy you want to use and work around it.
Are you a content creator?
Are you making money as a content creator?
Share with us the strategy you are using to make money as a content creator.
You can still make money online without any skills, you just need the right knowledge and guidance.
Don’t forget to share this article with your connections on social media.
Disclosure: There may be affiliate links in this article, which may provide me with compensation should you decide to purchase a paid plan. Any products I recommend are those I’ve personally tested and used. This site is not designed to give financial advice and is for educational purposes only.
