From the way the internet has been growing in the last decade or so, it’s easy to start believing that anything to do with it will be losing its steam soon as many millions of gigabytes of content are created every hour.
This is not the case at all as experts believe that by 2020 the amount of content produced to be uploaded onto the internet will increase fivefold. If your idea is to take advantage of web monetization, this is both good and bad news.
It’s good news because it means that the internet will continue to be a lucrative source of online monetization and it is bad news because the content you produce is now competing against a lot more other content. As the number of people creating content grows, your content marketing initiatives are no longer competing with just other businesses in your niche; you’re now competing against every other person who is in the business of creating content.
As the competition grows, you start to notice that the investment you need to create your marketing content is also growing. This is particularly the case if you also want to enter the lucrative area of social media networks. With a bit of diligence, you can still make a profit from your content marketing initiative even with growing competition.
Take a Leaf from the Book of Media Houses
If you want to know how to monetize traffic, take a leaf from the way successful media companies conduct their business. This will help you to recoup some of the investment you pour into your content marketing initiatives.
Media houses use the size of their audience to determine the value of their content. For a content marketer, this means that you will need to find ways of ensuring the audience is ever growing. One of the most effective ways of growing an audience is to determine the content which is useful to your audience and ensuring that this audience is continually engaged.
Invite people to help you invite others to read. They would be able to do this well because they know their friends and family who would find the content you produce useful.
Don’t Sell
Most people thinking about how to monetize a blog make the mistake of thinking that this will be done by using such a blog to explicitly sell their products and services. This is a mistake. Many people don’t like someone trying to sell something to them. The most important objective of your content should be growing the relevant audience. The more people read your content, they more are likely to see your products.
Relevant content should be understood to mean materials produced with a specific audience in mind; dealing with the real problems and concerns of this audience. Hence, you would need to know who your target audience is and what their aspirations and fears are.
The idea is to make your content different from the other marketing material on the internet that fails to make an impact on the lives of the consumer.
Make Money from the Content Too
While you can use your content to sell your other products, you can also monetize your blog by making money from the content you produce. This means taking advantage of the fact that you have a big audience to expose to other businesses that could benefit from it.
If you want to understand the importance of having an audience that other people want to get access to, look at the New York Times and how it charges such high fees for advertising. They have the nerve to do this and people are willing to pay because they know the kind of audience that this publication can expose them to.
Conclusion
If anyone has ever said content is king, there is no better time than now to prove that this statement is true. However, in order to benefit from content in your marketing initiatives, you have to start thinking of yourself the way large media houses do; using content to create a following and then selling that following to recoup your expenses.
