15 Ways To Make Money as a Creator On The Internet

The growth in the creator economy in the recent few years has invented various ways for creators to make money online. The key to building a business as a creator is by having an engaged community around your niche + your USP.

Content creators on the Internet can monetize their skills, audience, and influence in 100s of ways. In this blog, I have collected the 15 proven methods to make money online as a creator.

Before we jump to the list of 15 creator monetization methods, let’s look at how big the creator/passion economy is.

Creator Economy Size

Since the beginning of 2020, more than $850 million has been invested in various creator-focused startups around the world. And the estimated market size of the creator economy is ~$104 billion in 2021.

With the accelerated adoption of digital-first experience, 5G Internet, and growing mobile Internet users around the world, this industry is bound to grow. Many notable evangelists of the creator economy have made data-backed optimistic estimates that “eventually everyone will be in creator economy” and “creator economy is the future of work”.

And if you are a content creator, then this is the best time for you to start monetization seriously. Monetizing i.e. earning online as a creator is dubbed as the hardest thing for the creators in their career. But we believe that it is not hard. Given the right tools and effort, a creator at any stage can start earning online.

15 ways to earn online as a creator

1. Online courses

Platforms that are synonymous with online courses: Udemy and Skillshare are around for the last 10 years. Building an online course is a proven monetization path for creators who are video first, have some knowledge to share that needs a learning curve and isn’t easily available online.

The pros of building your own courses are:

• It is a one-time effort
• It has the potential to keep making you money for as long as your topic is relevant
• You can price your courses based on the analysis of how much is your audience is ready to pay for your content or by pricing it at a competitive price in the market.
• You can also keep updating your course videos to keep them relevant with time.

GoSocial’s creator stack offers a comprehensive solution to running online courses (live or recorded). Other platforms for exclusively building courses are Udemy and Skillshare.

2. Live online classes

Slowly, the recorded online courses are becoming obsolete because of the cohort-based online classes. Most creators and educators nowadays like to create a mix of recorded and live experiences. This has two major benefits, for the live experience the buyers are ready to pay a higher price and they also get to interact with the instructor in real-time.

Though there are many solutions for online courses, it is not the same for hosting live online classes. The creators usually add the element of the assignment, work review, feedback to their students through live classes. And send pre-recorded content and reading material in between the live sessions to make it more engaging.

GoSocial’s creator studio will support this in the future where we make it super easy to start an online cohort-based course.

3. Live online workshops (events)

The latest accelerated trend in creator monetization is online workshops. Creators who used to host experiential sessions to the team and interact with others in an offline setting took their workshops to the Internet. Creators have invented unique propositions such as they ship a DIY Kit to the attendees for the workshop and take the participants through a hands-on process during their workshops.

The pros for live online workshops:

• It stands out in the crowded market of courses.
• It offers an interactive setup for the audience to participate in.
• It allows creators to charge a premium.

GoSocial has built the complete experience for creators to host online workshops.

The benefit of hosting your workshops on GoSocial is that the platform takes care of listing your workshop, payments, and the interface from which creator and participants can join. All that within one platform.

Creators who host their workshops on their own usually create whatsapp group, collect payment through UPI apps, and host their workshop on zoom or google meet. GoSocial combines all these into one seamless experience. The biggest con of hosting online workshop with a host of different tools is that it makes the experience difficult for your audience.

Want to host your next workshop on GoSocial? Click here to join GoSocial’s creator community and get in touch with our community manager to host your online workshop.

4. Building paid communities

For creators, building a community of their true fans is the most crucial part of monetization.

The difference between followers and community

• Followers is your audience and it is a one-to-many network.
• You broadcast to your followers and they rarely participate in your process.
• But a community is a many-to-many network where people engage themselves as well.
• Creators with highly engaged communities have the leverage to create parts of their online community paid.

If a community has a premium/members-only part, then only members have access to chat, collaboration, premium content, early access to content, and a chance of getting involved with the creator in content ideation and creation.

There are 100s of use cases for creators to put a paywall on parts of their community. GoSocial allows anyone to launch paid online communities.

5. Paid newsletter

Every creator has his/her own expertise. And a newsletter can be a great way of sharing your knowledge and research every now and then. Launching your newsletter and growing has a compounding effect and with each new subscriber, you gain a good size of the audience who wants to listen to you.

In newsletters, the most effective practice is to publish some newsletters for free and make some paid. The one that is special and needs extra effort has a value that your audience would like to pay you for. You can start your newsletter using Medium or Substack.

GoSocial creator stack will also include the newsletter feature. On GoSocial, you’ll be able to send emails to all your community members.

6. Support from fans

Tipping and monetary support from fans are used by a lot of YouTubers and Twitch streamers. They do it through Patreon or using the built-in features on YouTube and Twitch. There are dedicated platforms like BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, Kickstarter, and Patreon to collect tips and monetary support from fans.

Digital tipping grew in popularity mostly because of creators who provide great value for free and in return some fans tip them to support their work.

7. Brand collaboration / Paid advertising

The oldest and still thriving method of creator monetization is brand collaboration. As long as there are brands looking to gain eyeballs and present their product to a bigger audience that they can’t easily reach, the influencer marketing industry will keep on growing.

Creators who have an audience starting from 5k followers or subscribers have the potential to land brand collaboration. At GoSocial, we did a live event on how to get your first brand collaboration with Vinita Varrier (That.Crazy.Doodle) and Shubhendra Vikram. We’ll bring more such live events (workshops) to help budding creators.

Paid advertising with creators works on the basis of your audience, your reach, your content niche, and what are the deliverables. As a creator, you should factor in all the tangible value add that you'd bring for the brand along with the cost of your own efforts.

8. Exclusive and premium content (info and entertainment)

Just like a paid newsletter where you create free content and put some of it behind a paywall. Exclusive/premium content also works the same way. You create great content and make it available for free and later release premium content behind a paywall.

The exclusive content may contain bloopers, behind the scenes of your process, and you involve your audience in your process by doing a live video call. For example, a youtube news channel called NewsLaundry does a weekly zoom call with its paid subscriber to give them more insightful news and hosts a discussion that is open for all to participate.

9. Selling unique physical products

Creators, especially artists, who make physical products and unique products that are not a commodity can monetize by setting up an online store. To start with, a lot of creators collect order inquiries, payments, addresses, and ship themselves.

To create your store, you can use Ecwid, Insta Mojo, RazorPay, etc. These platforms enable you to create your own e-commerce to sell online. The platform streamlines the collection of payment and address details. But as a creator, you should switch to this platform only when you have got a volume of orders that can’t be processed manually.

GoSocial creator stack will allow creators to put up their products for sale inside their community.

10. Selling digital products (ex: e-books, lightroom presets, NFTs, etc.)

All creators in their process of creating content end up creating digital products or content that has monetary value. It could be lightroom presets (for photo editors), e-books, digital art, NFTs of your work, etc. Illustrators and designers sell icon packs, illustrations, themes, etc. Photographers and video editors sell presets. Writers sell e-books.

Pros of selling digital goods:

• There’s no limit to digital goods
• You create them once and sell them forever
• The re-production comes at no extra cost.

11. Selling merchandise

Merchandise by celebrities, music labels/bands, and tv shows have been around since forever. But the Internet has given the power to launch the merch store and custom product store to every creator. Top YouTubers in the USA make millions of dollars in revenue every year through their merch stores.

As a creator, you can create merch that represents your unique positioning, use the content on designs that is synonymous with your brand, and sell products that your fans love. Selling merch is never on the forefront for any creator, and you should keep your merch store a part of your broader monetization strategy and not as the sole part of it.

12. Freelance work in their domain of expertise

Content creators can also work with brands as social media executives, content curators, or consultants. For example, a creator whose niche is makeup can work with cosmetic brands in planning their content strategy, giving feedback on their products, and as a brand ambassador for them.

This goes both ways when brands amplify creators who support their products and the creator works closely with the brand as the voice of their customers. We’ve seen this majorly play out in the tech-product review space. Where Youtubers know the user sentiment better and can tell the brand exactly what the customers expect from their products.

13. Working as a content creator for companies

Taking the freelance work to the next level, creators can join hands with brands that align with their content and audience. This allows creators the freedom to experiment with their content and work while getting a steady paycheck. This option is quite popular since there are many influencers who work as content heads or social media heads for a brand.

14. Barter collaborations

The gateway monetization method for creators in their journey is to do barter deals with brands. Recently in India, brands like Boat and Mivi (both into consumer audio gadgets) went heavy on barter collabs with content creators.

Here’s how it works:

• The brand reaches out to you
• They convey their expectations from a potential collaboration.
• The deliverables usually include that the creator will review the product and share it with its followers.
• In exchange, the brand provides you a couple of their products free of cost.

This entire process can also work the other way around. In that case, you are a creator who would be the one reaching out to the brand outlining what kind of collaboration you want to do and how it’ll benefit the brand.

Though this monetization isn’t the favorite of creators, it is the gateway to monetization where creators learn a lot about how monetization on the Internet works.

15. Mentoring budding content creators

A lot of established creators have turned mentors where they teach various skills that are required to become content creators.

This includes hosting paid one-on-one mentorship programs, creating cohort-based courses, recorded courses, and live classes.

Bonus for creators by GoSocial

GoSocial is building the complete stack for creators to build their online community, launch various paid offerings like live workshops, live classes, courses, paid membership, newsletters, and maybe more in the future.

We are also building a community of top super budding creators from India on our Slack. If you are a creator, influencer, or looking to get started in the creator space, you can join our slack community form this link: https://join.slack.com/t/gosocialcreators-club/shared_invite/zt-tc8i4qb5-RrRF9Bhk5dOBIBMfBu0Bqw