If you are going to consistently create great content, it will be important to the business that you are monetising your content marketing channels effectively. The trick to content marketing is to constantly be putting real value into your content. While making your readers or your viewers or your listeners see your value at the same time. It is quite easy to get caught up in the trap of giving. Then when you turn around and ask for a sale, people get confused and they might get a little angry because they just thought of you as a teacher this whole time. But there are a few smart ways of getting around this.
First of all, according to research done by the content marketing institute, in almost all your content you ever put out, you want to drop casual mentions that you know so much about this because you do this for a living right; you do this for clients. You do this for customers, and you get paid to do it. Tell stories about how you helped a client get a result through the method you’re talking about or just make real casual mentions. This is going to prime people to think of you as a working expert in your field, that they could potentially hire themselves. You should be doing this no matter what kind of content you’re making.
Monetising Your Content Marketing Channels – Different Types of Content
Let’s get a little more specific about how you can monetize the different types of content, starting with written articles. What I like to do here is simply end each and every article with a standard call to action, to take that next step with you. So this can be just a templated section block that you add to your blogpost template so it’s just always there at the end of all of them. Alternatively, you can integrate it into the text of your article if you’d rather make it more and more tailored to what that specific subject is. You can also simply link to your service pages where it makes sense within the body of your article.
For example, if your article is all about how to train a puppy and then you happen to offer puppy training as a service, you’d probably want to take the text new puppy training and then link to that service page where you lay out all the details of your paid puppy training service. Love them or hate them, you can also add in an exit intent pop-up to your blog posts where whenever the browser detects that they’re mousing back toward the back button, you hit them up with your paid offer. Some people do find these annoying, but they do work and they they were about to leave anyway, so why not just come out and ask for the sale at that point, nothing to lose.
Okay, so what about monetizing a podcast? This one’s actually pretty easy, you just drop in the line this episode is brought to you by, and then you lay out exactly what you offer and why they want it. So you want to end that spot with a clear call to action, sending them to a specific landing page that’s on your website where they can get more details and either purchase or hop on a call with you.
I do recommend putting out your first episodes completely ad-free so that just gets people to really binge on your content and get to know you as an expert before you ever ask for anything in return. Then after those episodes you want to play around with putting your ad read toward the beginning, in some episodes or maybe sometimes right in the middle of your content. You could also add it to the end to mix it up. This makes it less predictable where it’s going to show up in any given episode.
Now lets consider monetizing your video content. You can definitely push people back to your website to buy from you, but if you’re really trying to build your following on YouTube, there’s a trick to getting this right. Like I said earlier, watch time is the key metric when it comes to YouTube. You want to reach as many people as possible early on and need YouTube to help you in providing the exposure you need. So in three out of four videos.
I don’t want you to send people anywhere except to watch another one of your videos. This is going to keep your watch time high and you’re much better off building a much bigger audience that you then get to push back to your website. We then target one out of four videos to promote your service or include a call to action to redirect them to your website.
If you want to have a conversation with someone in our team to get additional ideas on monetising your content marketing channels, feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
