How to Directly Monetize Content

Not only can content help to grow other areas of your business, it can be a revenue stream of its own.

Author

Joseph Vito DeLuca
June 20, 2024

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing how to leverage content to build a brand and sell products and services, but there is another largely untapped opportunity with content.

Content is its own product that can be sold to directly generate a new revenue stream for your business.

This is a popular means of making money within the individual creator economy, but there is also tremendous potential within the B2B world.

Let’s go through how you can do this and what kinds of content can be monetized.

When to Monetize Content

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for when to monetize. Still, for most companies, this step will come later in your content journey once you have an established audience, distribution channels and platforms.

After all, for most, content monetization will be a secondary goal.

All the brand equity and the sales pipeline you’ve already been building will fuel content monetization.

Content monetization is especially lucrative for companies with a service or advisory/consultant component so you aren’t always trading your time for money when offering your knowledge and expertise. In this case, it could be a savvy tactic to deploy content monetization earlier in your journey.

Just as I talked about when detailing how to extract content from within your organization and what content to produce, you likely have extremely valuable information within the walls (or more precisely file folders) of your organization and inside the minds of your colleagues.

This is information your audience is willing to pay for!

It’s likely you even have content that’s already been created that can be repurposed and monetized.

Now, let’s look at exactly what and how you can monetize your content.

Selling on “Existing Real Estate”

What you can monetize can be broken down into two categories. One of the categories is what I call “Existing Real Estate.”

These are places you already built in terms of having an established audience and infrastructure, meaning the time and effort to ROI should be relatively low.

Let’s look at specific examples to contextualize this.

Imagine your media site has become a go-to destination for your niche, so naturally people want to be a part of it and get their name and brand in front of your audience. Sell them the opportunity through sponsored articles!

You want to be careful not to cannibalize your content efforts with this one. As I previously covered, a great way to feed your content pipeline is by getting external experts involved by writing guest columns (without charging).

Therefore, reserve sponsored articles for those who want the opportunity to publish something a bit more sales-y (as opposed to the typical neutral content you should be publishing) and promote their product or company.

You can create two tiers when packaging this offer:

  1. Self-Serve: Your client creates the content, and your team only needs to edit and publish it. Low effort to revenue.

  2. Done For You: Your team collaborates with your client and creates the content for them. This is more effort but can be priced as a premium product.

Newsletter/Podcast Sponsorship

This one is straightforward. You’re publishing a weekly or monthly newsletter or podcast and built a solid subscriber base. Allow someone to be the headline sponsor of the work you’re doing anyway.

You can sell this based on exclusivity and offer a special rate for a 6 or 12-month commitment, locking in that all-important MRR (monthly recurring revenue).

Anywhere you’ve established an audience is a monetizable space! This includes your social media channels. Chances are being in B2B, LinkedIn will be your most valuable channel.

You can either sell these as individual posts or create multi-post packages.

You’ll want to mark these as sponsored posts to be completely transparent with your audience.

YouTube

I’ve included YouTube separate from other channels because of how seamlessly they’ve built-in content monetization via their ads network. In my opinion, there is no other creator platform that makes monetization so easy.

If you want to start earning ad revenue, your channel will need to have generated 4,000 hours of YouTube watch time over the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers.

If you are publishing video content and not publishing on YouTube, it’s worth the investment to start a channel.

Ad Space

Speaking of ads, run your own! Any of your Owned Media channels can be a space to sell ads!

There are countless formats and packages you can build to sell them too!

What’s worth noting with these examples is that you don’t need a huge audience to attract buyers and monetize. You're not selling based on quantity but on the quality and exclusivity of the niche audience you attract.

Building New

As the name suggests, these are monetization opportunities that will need to be built as opposed to leveraging “existing real estate.” This can include repackaging or creating new content or building new channels altogether.

While these initiatives will likely take more effort, they have tremendous upside and scalability.

Guides & Reports

Let’s start with this because it’s a simpler approach, and as I alluded to earlier, you might already have something on hand that can be repurposed and repackaged.

Think of this as premium long-form content that either educates your audience or provides first-party data and insights that cannot be found somewhere else.

Some examples are: ebooks, how-to guides, best practices or industry-related studies.

Worth noting here is it’s again important not to cannabalize your content marketing efforts. You’ll want to strike a balance between having free to download content with paid content.

Courses

You might be able to repurpose your ebooks or guides to create upsell opportunities for a course.

I especially like the idea of courses for organizations that offer an advisory on consultative service. You can take one-to-one engagements and infinitely scale them with this approach (and still upsell one-to-one consultations).

Courses can either be self-guided or don’t as cohorts where you teach a set number of students at a time.

Events (Offline and Online)

If we’re following the publisher's playbook, this is how most trade publications make the majority of their money.

The great thing about events is they can be scaled up or down and executed in a variety of ways.

For example, you can host a short webinar or do a full-scale in-person event with hundreds or thousands of attendees. The possibilities are endless.

Depending on the nature of the event, you can bake in a host of revenue streams: ticket sales, sponsorship, exhibiting spaces, etc.

My advice is to start small and grow over time.

Exclusive Content/Memberships

While I don’t recommend gating all of your content (again, don’t cannibalize your content marketing efforts!), you can make some of it exclusive to members/premium subscribers.

The subscription model is another great source of recurring revenue. Some examples are tiered newsletter subscriptions, gated articles or exclusive access to events.

Community

A trending growth tactic within B2B is community building. Professionals are looking for places to connect, build relationships and learn from others in their industry.

Why not provide the platform for your niche? It can be as simple as setting up a Discord or Slack or completely customizing your community space with tools such as Circle.

A great example in the B2B space is Dave Gerhardt’s Exit Five, dedicated on B2B marketing

I advise to start simple and small and scale over time and filling you’re community by first offering free access and monetize it over time.

As you can see, there are countless ways of monetizing content (I’m sure there are many more examples that can be added to what I provided here).

Although not a primary goal, it’s worth experimenting with a few monetization tactics and seeing if you can diversify your revenue.