When you have a website, create videos on Youtube, write books or post great photographs you automatically have some kind of content that people likely want to see. In order to put whatever type of content you have to use in order to earn money off the internet, you need to find or know about at least one of the ways of content monetization listed below.
So let’s get fight into it and list the five best ways there are to put your web content to use.
Write Blog Posts People Want to Read
As much of today’s Web and all the rage around it historically has developed from Web Logs, “Blogs” or what’s nowadays called blogging, it seems like a good idea to put this method here first.
Blog post publication or blogging is also the easiest way to start content production because it is the one requiring the least amount of (and investment in) equipment. A computer able to fire up a web browser will do, and it would be unlikely to assume that anyone today — especially among readers having found this post here — would not have that.
Your blog posts can be about any topic, but will of course be about something you care and are knowledgeable about. Literally, from hamster breeding, to model railroading or mountain biking or traveling exotic destinations — these blog posts can be any of these, and a lot more. It’s important that they are worthwhile for your readers, have bit-sized length and hopefully are structured in a way people can easily access and navigate your content as well as follow your train of thought.
To make these blog-post based types of content usable for monetization, you will need to add in links to things that you or others are selling. These can be anything from your own stuff, membership websites, books you’re trying to sell, dog-walking services you offer or anything in between, or it could be anything for sale at third-party websites which you are an affiliate for so you receive a commission in case visitors that can be tracked back to you and your website buy something off them. Common examples would be links like this one https://www.shutterstock.com/g/marquixHD?rid=2853577&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ctrbreferral-link directing your visitors to images for sale on the Shutterstock website, or one that promotes a book available from Amazon for which the affiliate link could look like this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1717228585/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=mm-com-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1717228585&linkId=754af4ec68db653e8062d7d5501aa7d1.
Beautify Links and Add Extra Features
Now, in order to make these links look better (particularly than the first one that’s got a long and ugly tail that includes all kinds of settings as well as the referral or affiliate ID), you may want to work on them a little more. One way would be using shortlink generators like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. Another one would be using Amazon’s own shortlink generator that compresses their very long ones into something like https://amzn.to/2UUH5bg for better usability.
An even better way though would be using your own link list that redirects visitors to whatever target you desire with a link on your own website’s domain name, looking something like this http://markmage.com/try/earn-with-webtalk/
Tools for Proper Link Management
On top of being more visually pleasing, links of the latter type also provide insights for you into how often they have been visited or clicked upon. This is a feature you normally only get from paid-for redirect or shortlink services like bit.ly. The most important feature of these beautified re-directs is the ability to easily manage or update these links though. Imagine that the seller you link to changes their link structure or that some item is no longer available and/or replaced by a newer model with a new stock-keeping-unit or SKU number, you normally would have to search the Web for all your old affiliate links in order to update them if you want them to continue working and bring you income. A unified location, on your own website and under your own control at that, would allow you to simply change that forwarding link in one place just once, for all your many instances of these affiliate mentions to automatically be updated and point to the new target URL.
A great example for achieving this would be running your website on WordPress or any other content management system that allows the use of Plugins (specialized modules, often made by third parties developing for Joomla, Magento, WordPress or even centrally-hosted platforms like Shopify and others) that take care of these very functions and extra features. A useful one that I can honestly recommend for this purpose would be Easy Affiliate Links for WordPress. This is a FREE plugin for WordPress that I like (and I don’t receive any commissions for but I simply want to share here)! Give this one a try so you know what we are talking about when it comes to content monetization.
Also do note that the consdierations for blog posts and text content of this kind are applicable to the other types of content, from videos, to books and web or e-learning courses as well. These other content types will be talked about in the upcoming segments of this series (to be published soon — subscribe to my mailing list for notifications or come back and check this space manually).