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Now You Can Monetize Your Content Marketing On the Platforms You’re Already Using

Content creators everywhere know the struggle.

You spend hours carefully creating content before releasing it onto various online platforms. Fingers firmly crossed, you then sit back and hope that in the long run, your content will move the needle and lead to an increase in sales.

The financial pay-off from your hard work takes weeks, sometimes months, to come to fruition.

This places a lot of pressure on online business entrepreneurs, especially if they are under time constraints when flipping a website or gearing up to sell an online business.

The good news is, recent shifts in the creator economy give creators more opportunities to earn money on their content.

Here’s what you need to know about the new content monetization options available to you.

New Ways Platforms Are Allowing You to Monetize Your Content

Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a growing number of people willing to pay a premium to support content creators.

As online communities become a more integral part of building a successful brand, more and more platforms are jumping into the fray and allowing content creators to monetize their work through different types of content.

Let’s dive in and explore which platforms are offering online business owners and writers a space to share their written content with the world and take home more than just comments and likes in return.

Facebook

At their recent Facebook Communities Summit, Meta announced a series of new features in a bid to lure more content creators and social media influencers to the platform.

Many of the features are focused on building communities and strengthening consumer engagement. This includes features like group customization options, and community chats and awards.

As far as content creation is concerned, perhaps the most relevant of the new features is the ability to monetize your Facebook groups through the use of:

• Fundraisers: Group admins can create community fundraisers. This is a great way to offset the costs of running the group or to cover the costs of your Facebook ads.
• Groups shops: You can now set up an ecommerce store within each group to sell merchandise to community members.
• Paid Memberships: You can now charge subscription fees for access to special subgroups where members can, for example, access exclusive content or coaching.

The fees that business owners will need to pay for the use of these features will be minimal.

Over and above applicable taxes, there will be a small fee for payment processing on Fundraisers. The fees on payments processed through group shops will be waived until June 2022, and Meta has announced that they will not be taking a cut of commissions earned through group subscription fees.

These new Facebook features offer online business owners new ways to diversify their revenue streams.

Affiliate sites could offer exclusive how-to courses, and ecommerce businesses could build communities of like-minded consumers who could grow into brand ambassadors. Businesses with strong brand identities can create merch stores to further increase their brand awareness.

There are over 1.8 billion active group members on Facebook so this is a monetization opportunity that you don’t want to miss out on!

Newsletters

Newsletters have been around for a long time but over the last year or two, they’ve really come into their own.

Forward-thinking business owners have capitalized on the newsletters’ ability to create and foster communities, transforming them into a powerful source of revenue. Newsletters used to exist to simply support existing communities but now, newsletters are the community.

This rise in popularity has piqued the interest of social media powerhouses, with Twitter purchasing Revue and Facebook launching their own subscription newsletter platform, Bulletin.

Twitter purchases Revue

At first glance, Twitter, with its infamous character limitation on tweets, may not seem like the right partner for a long-form newsletter service, but according to Forbes, Twitter is targeting a specific demographic of users with this acquisition.

Many writers and publishers have amassed a large following on Twitter. Newsletters allow these creators to improve communication with their audience.

This new feature offers a wealth of opportunities to Amazon KDP owners, and even content site owners, giving them a chance to better connect with their readers and reinforce brand loyalty.

Subscription-based newsletters also offer entrepreneurs another form of steady income, which may help to offset seasonality for some businesses.

For those with existing audiences on Twitter, it’ll be a sweet treat to monetize something you already have but were unable to capitalize on before.

Meta launches Bulletin

Like Substack and Revue, Bulletin puts content creators in the driver’s seat by allowing them to choose their own newsletter subscription prices.

Most importantly, the content creator maintains ownership over their list of subscribers and can therefore bring those subscribers over to competing social media platforms if they wish.

Bulletin allows content creators to form a deeper relationship with their Facebook audience by enabling creators to post their newsletters to Facebook pages and create subscriber-only groups and chat rooms.

Aware that they were a little late to the party, Meta announced that they will not take a cut of any revenue that writers earn from their newsletters.

This strategy, along with signing well-known authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Tan France, and Erin Andrews up to the platform will likely allow Bulletin to remain competitive with Substack and Revue.

If your online business has a Facebook page with a healthy amount of followers, creating a newsletter on Bulletin is a great way to build a monetized newsletter within the platform your community already communes and thrives in.

Quora

In a bid to make sharing knowledge and content more financially sustainable for creators, Quora has announced two new subscription features.

The first feature is called Quora+, an exclusive subscription-based product. The more subscribers that view a creator’s piece of content, the greater proportion of revenue that particular creator will earn.

Creators can also use a dynamic paywall, which allows free-users access to paid content if they’re likely to convert to a paid subscription.

If you want to avoid the hassle of deciding who can and can’t view your content, Quora has created an adaptive paywall, where machine learning technology decides whether to allow free access to paid content on a case-by-case basis.

The goal is to use artificial intelligence to help content creators strike a balance between limiting their content through subscriptions and growing their audience through greater content exposure.

Quora’s second new offering allows content creators to set up a personalized publication page called a Space, where readers can subscribe to your content.

Your Space is a private page where you can offer coaching, educational courses, or early access to content on a subscription basis. The creator of a Space can choose whatever subscription price they choose, with Quora taking a 5% cut of the revenues.

Many online businesses use Quora to increase their brand awareness and enhance their authority within their specific niche. According to their CEO, Adam D’Angelo, Quora attracts 300M unique visitors per month, so there is certainly the potential for content creators to earn a healthy amount of revenue while increasing their product exposure!

How you can use these new features to your advantage

You don’t have to use expensive influencer marketing or be a prolific author to take advantage of these new ways of monetizing your content.

If you create high-quality content for your online business and know how to boost your content through SEO optimization, then this is a great opportunity for you to cash in.

Whether you’re sharing video content, podcasts, infographics, or repurposing content from your blog, you can leverage the different functionalities of these platforms to craft a custom user experience for your audience.

All of the other existing benefits of marketing your content on social media remain the same. You can increase your product awareness, reinforce the trustworthiness of your brand, and make a name for yourself as an authority in your niche.

The added benefit of these new platforms and features is that now you can get more instant ROI for your marketing campaigns!

Build valuable consumer communities

The private, subscription-based groups that Facebook and Quora are offering give entrepreneurs a platform to form deeper connections with their customers and increase their conversion rates.

Private, monetized groups will be filled with only the most loyal brand ambassadors, with the fees likely keeping most of your competitors at bay.

This provides you, as a business owner, with a safe space to do A/B testing, collect consumer feedback, and announce product launches away from the prying eyes of your competition. You can also monitor in-group discussions to get a better idea of your target audience’s behaviors, buying journey, and pain points.

This feedback can help you make more informed business decisions and optimize your content marketing strategy. It can also save you money in the long run, decreasing the risks of failed product launches or not finding the right product-market fit.

Diversify your revenue

While the income from these new monetized platforms is unlikely to be significant, it does offer business owners a way to diversify their income streams.

This revenue can help to subsidize the cost of paid advertising and the time spent creating customized content for different social media apps. It can also provide a level of financial protection when unexpected search engine algorithm changes affect your ad revenue and put a dent in your profits.

For entrepreneurs who run seasonal businesses, these new monetization methods can help provide an additional source of income during the quiet months.

Our Two Cents

It seems social media platforms are becoming increasingly aware of the symbiotic relationship they share with content creators and online business owners.

The more entrepreneurs can scale their businesses and hold audience attention on social media, the more time people will spend engaging with each social media platform, benefiting both parties.

TikTok is also getting in on the action, and recently announced its partnership with Shopify, allowing Shopify sellers to create video marketing ads through TikTok.

Quora has announced that it is reinvesting the money it makes from ads into building its content-monetizing infrastructure, indicating that more exciting changes may soon be in the works.

In October 2021, Youtube reduced the subscriber minimum for their Creator Community and have plans to reduce it even further in the future. Will Youtube be the next platform to include community-based monetization?

With competition so fierce between the social media powerhouses, only time will tell what innovative new content-monetizing features will be released next year.

With more changes on the way, content creators should keep in mind that the early bird catches the worm.

Incorporating these new features in your digital marketing plans, and leveraging them to create a memorable content experience sooner rather than later will help you capitalize on these new platforms before they become saturated.