3 Steps for Effective Content Monetization

Thought leaders, authors and speakers have more ways today than ever to monetize their work. There’s speaking, writing, consulting, developing tools, video based solutions, coaching—the opportunities for content monetization is growing rapidly thanks to technology and the global economy.

It can feel overwhelming. How do I master these new mediums? Everything is moving faster and faster than ever before. It seems like new tools, new social media platforms, and new audiences are popping up almost daily. Relax, it’s not as complicated as it may appear. The fact is there are three high level things you need to do in order to better leverage your work. By ensuring that your strategy touches each category at the appropriate levels and your tactics support that strategy, monetization becomes less overwhelming, allowing you to simplify what has become overly complex.

Awareness: Does your target market even know that you exist? In this phase we need to expose your targeted populations to your thinking. They need to know who you are, what your work can do, and why you are uniquely qualified to solve their problems. This is a no-sell zone. Its things like getting articles out to targeted populations—things like speaking to the associations and groups that your clients are connected to. Awareness means making sure your current, past, and future books get into the hands of the folks that can most benefit from what you do.

Engagement: Once you’ve achieved a level of awareness in your target market a subset of your audience will want to be more engaged with you and your content. This is where you need to provide them with a digital megaphone of sorts to amplify your message: content they can share, a manifesto they can rally around, short videos, fresh blog content, or smart infographics. It’s at this phase that readers have the opportunity to go deeper into your content in a choice of modalities. They are also probably starting to experiment with and see benefits from you content personally and professionally. Engagement takes creativity and thoughtfulness. Your audience has a lot of options and choices; to keep them engaged consistently, feed your followers a diet of high quality content and encourage them to share it with their friends, colleagues, co-workers and clients.

Activation: It’s at this phase that you can move readers from highly engaged followers to prospects and clients. While this may seem obvious in practice, authors and thought leaders are notoriously bad at this phase. They don’t like to sell, they get a bit squeamish at the thought of marketing. Let them know your capabilities. Be explicit, walk them through your offerings and solutions. Speak to the impact your content can have on their business. Give them a specific reason to reach out and learn more and transform the conversation from one with a highly engaged consumer to a possible buyer of your offerings.

Content monetization may seem overly simple but take a look at all of your activities and see how they map to awareness, engagement, and activation. You will most likely need to re-calibrate what you are doing a bit and reallocate resources into the right bucket for you and your business.