The Art of Earning: Key Factors That Boost Monetisation for Digital Creators and Communities
A lot of creators have started monetising their content from their audience through direct payments or with the help of tools like patreon, gumroad, teachable, podia, steady etc. One key motivation for creators is to increase predictability in revenue, which is significantly better when you have a recurring subscription revenue as against relying solely on ads. There is an added advantage here — creators incentivised for direct payment from their audience can be expected to work towards more authentic and useful content compared to creators incentivised for views, which promotes a clickbait culture.
So far, this seems to be a good thing, direct monetisation for creators should result in more creators coming in to create more useful and authentic content, and less useful/clickbait content should get pushed out of the system.
However, direct monetisation is typically offered by creators using extra content paywalled for subscribers. As a member of the audience, this proposition sometimes leaves me in a no-man’s land. I’ll explain what I mean by that.
Let’s say I really value a creator and I regularly engage with their content. I’m already getting a fair amount of value from their content which is why I’m investing my time and repeating the behaviour. Moreover, let’s say I’m consuming this content on youtube, the platform makes me feel that the content is supposed to be free. When the creator promises extra content, I don’t have a missing piece where it fits and I don’t see why I value this content differently. If majority of your audience feels like this, a very small percentage of your audience might end up paying, which is concerning as it means that only creators with really large audience base can manage significant subscription revenue. This isn’t good for new or niche creators with smaller audience base.
For them, I recommend a deeper monetisation approach. The depth is in terms of priming a higher the percentage of your audience base to pay for your content.The approach is based on my experiences of working with creators.
Here’s the formula in essence, rest of the post will elaborate on it.
Differentiated content + Social inspiration + Goal driven content journeys = Successful monetisation
Step 1: Differentiated content
After working with multiple creators, I take differentiated content as the starting point. Your content could be catering to a niche or it may be authentic even to masses, but without content differentiation, one can’t sow the seeds for an engaged audience.
Now, let me make it clear that I’m not attempting to dehumanize the relationship between creators and people who engage with their content, by using the word ‘engaged audience’. I’m simply trying to explore and articulate what I think works. Engaged audience, is the way of saying that a lot of people care enough about your content to give you their attention on a regular basis.
Step 2: A private community
Once you have an engaged audience, the next step isn’t to directly start selling. Instead, what I see works best is to create a private community. Why, you ask? It seems that not every member of your engaged audience will utilise your content to the maximum, on their own. Through a private community, which could be a closed facebook/telegram group or something similar, members will see how others are experiencing your content and getting benefitted from it. This gives people new ideas and more motivation to actually use your content in their daily lives. Also, it adds social proof to your credibility of you as a creator. This also deepens their connection with you as a creator. This makes sure that a larger percentage of your audience is primed to the idea that your content is making an impact on the lives of real people.
Step 3: Goal driven journeys
This is the final step in this approach. The idea is to further help your audience, whom you have managed to engage and inspire. The way you can do that is by taking away confusion and bringing in a sense of purpose through aligning their content journeys with goals. If you are a guitar teacher — the journey could be around mastering certain scales. If you’re teaching for GMAT preparation — the journey could be a one month study plan to improve scores in a particular area.
The idea is to create a ‘definite’ change in the lives of your audience, that could result through a ‘time-bound’ effort. Once they’re interested in that change, and they know how much time do they need to invest in it— your content is of much higher value to them. Some creators take a step further and add their personal time in these journeys by adding a layer of service on content (which leads to increase in the perceived value). This proposition is what your audience is most likely to pay for.
I hope that these thoughts will give new ideas to creators. Please feel free to comment, if you have any suggestion/feedback, or send me a DM on twitter.
