Digital content is a vast array of goods and services that your business can create and offer to customers and clients. Some companies choose to give away that content for free, which is a great way to draw in new people, some businesses use digital content as a way to market themselves, and some businesses depend solely on digital content as their primary income stream.
However, you look at digital content, know that it is a way for your business to generate profit. And the best thing about digital content is that, once it’s created, it’s there, in perpetuity, to be marketed and sold.
In other words, if used wisely, the return on investment can be impressive.
But how do you make money from digital content? That’s been the big question since the early days of online business ventures. Whether you are an individual creator or a creator for a Fortune 500 company; whether you create with visual tools or programs with Node.js, JavaScript, or Python, you can make money with your content. Let’s find out how.
Focus on Relationships
The very first thing you must do (as with any bit of marketing you’ll handle in the modern age) is to focus on building relationships. It’s no longer about your business selling your brand to customers but about your business building connections with people. To successfully market any content in this digital era, you must change your way of thinking and place a prime focus on relationships.
Think about it this way: You should no longer be interested in a single transaction between your company and a customer, but ways you can build a lasting connection that will pay off long term. The relationship with your customers is your best investment.
Be Consistent
Next, comes consistency. This is especially true for written and video content. You cannot build an audience if you’re not creating and publishing content on a regular basis. Modern consumers get bored very fast. If your content isn’t constantly being updated, then its stale and stale content will have an adverse impact on your ability to keep and grow your audience.
To be consistent means to publish regularly and at the same time. So if you start publishing new content 2 or 3 times a week, make sure you’re doing it on the same days every week and at the same time. Don’t be sporadic and random with the publishing of this content, otherwise, audience members will learn very quickly they can’t count on you and will move on.
Offer Only Your Best
You might think this one is obvious but you’d be surprised at how many businesses created less-than-ideal digital content. This is especially true within the realm of audio and video and happens primarily because a company might not have the staff well-versed in creating digital or audio content.
You want to always be offering the absolute best digital content you can. Do not settle for anything less and give every piece of content every second it needs to be perfected. For the written word, make sure you employ an editor. For video, hire someone who not only knows how to shoot quality video but can edit as well. With audio, you need on-air talent with the skills to pull it off. Don’t just assume you can pull someone from marketing to create a podcast or video assets to be sold.
Types of Content to Consider
With those tips out of the way, let’s consider the types of digital content you can sell to a modern audience. You’ll be surprised at the number of formats you may not have considered.
Online Education
Education isn’t just for schools. You might sell a product that is complicated to use. You’ll want to offer manuals and some digital content to help your users with the basics of that product but when it comes to advanced usage, you might consider offering online coaching or courses that users can take to learn how to get even more out of it. Just make sure it doesn’t come off as your company trying to bilk users out of more money (which is why you offer basic and intermedia content for free).
Workshops
You might do monthly workshops that customers can sign up for that teach other types of skills. Say, for instance, you sell plugins for Apple’s Final Cut Pro X and you have plenty of free how-to content to show users how to work with the product. You might also offer workshops on the basics of video editing, lighting for film or vlogging, or how to get the best sound for videos.
Subscriptions
Consumers love a good subscription product. This is why meal prep businesses have popped up all over the place. If your company can come up with a plan to offer regular and exciting content that can be delivered via subscription, growth will happen.
Say, for instance, your Final Cut Pro X plugin business can generate cool plugins monthly. You might sell subscription bundles that deliver (at a discounted rate) regular plugins to subscribers every month.
Memberships
Consider the membership. This idea has been around for a very long time. You can create memberships that not only offer customers regular discounts but get them access to digital content not available to non-members.
For example, you offer paid workshops. With a membership, customers can choose a set number of workshops to attend for free each month. Get creative with this and it will pay off.
Conclusion
There’s really no ceiling on how to make money with digital content. The key, however, is being very creative in the content you generate, how you market it, and how you offer it to your customers. The time you spend building this digital content platform will be well worth the effort. And although you might not see big dividends at first, you should enjoy a slow, steady growth over time.
