How to Monetize Your Audience in 2024: Top 7 Ways for Content Creators

What’s up, guys? Keely here with ClickBank!

I want to talk to you today about monetizing your content creator journey. I’ve been making content on the internet consistently since about 2016. I tried blogging for a while, and really loved it, and slowly became a small content creator on social media.

I wanted to earn money for the work I was doing as a content creator and I dug into some of the best ways for how to monetize your audience!

Defining Your Personal Brand

It’s been quite a journey to discover my personal brand, what I want out of my content as a content creator, and how I want to engage my audience. It took a lot of research, hard work, and dedication, but once I got that stuff dialed in, I felt like it was finally time to dig into how I could begin to monetize my audience as a content creator in 2024!

For me personally, I am a certified yoga instructor who frequently does outdoor activities from surfing to rock climbing and anything in between. All of the content that I create revolves around that, and I figured there HAD to be a good way to monetize my adventures and the things I love to do. I might as well, right?! 

A lot of my time as a content creator is spent creating reels about my outdoor adventures, like hiking, climbing, traveling, and running.

I wanted to find a way to work with brands that aligned with my values as a content creator and as a personal brand. With all sorts of options out there for monetizing your audience, like sponsorships, affiliate marketing, ambassadorships, and more, I needed to know what would be the best option for someone like me to earn money online as a side hustle. 

If you’re a content creator trying to break through that barrier to make money with your content, I feel you. I’ve been there, and I’m here to help! If you’re looking for different ways to monetize your social media audience, we’re gonna break down seven different ways to do so!

I’ll even give you some examples of how I did this or might do this. Let’s get into it! 

How to Monetize Your Social Media Platforms

Like I mentioned, there’s a ton of different ways out there to monetize your audience and the information can get a bit convoluted. With so many different ways to be able to monetize, you have to be able to assess what will work the best for you and your brand as a content creator or influencer. 

I found what I considered to be the top 7 ways to monetize your social media platforms, and I’ll break them down, including what the monetization process is, how it works, and what the benefits and downfalls of each of them are!

1) Affiliate Marketing

The first way to start monetizing your social media audience is through affiliate marketing. There’s thousands upon thousands of companies and brands that are looking for regular people like me and you to help market their brand, and they’ll pay you a good commission for it!

This is probably my personal favorite when it comes to monetizing on social media. Honestly, it’s easy, it’s free, and it’s low risk. Affiliate marketing is such a great way to get started with monetizing your content.

I don’t have a HUGE following, but I have enough of a loyal following within my niche that I earn commissions each month just by sharing affiliate links and products. The commission payout from affiliate marketing is definitely the most sizable compared to other programs too, which is awesome.

My niche is in the outdoors, fitness, health world. I am an affiliate for an outdoor gear brand and I share photos and videos where I’m using their products. I have my affiliate link shared in the content, plus always in my bio. From there, it’s as easy as telling people how awesome the products are and how they can get ahold of them.

Getting started with affiliate marketing is a breeze too! If you’re a content creator already, you likely already have a niche and a small audience of people within that niche. If you don’t know what your niche is yet, we have a great video that breaks down several popular niches you might want to check out as a content creator.

Once you’ve got your niche sorted, and a dedicated audience, it’s all down to picking the products you want to sell and the platforms you want to promote on. You can establish your affiliate promotions into your content calendar weekly and go from there!

For more information on this, I wrote all about how to make reels and shorts for affiliate marketing on social media, including how to create a content calendar for your content!

Of course, with all monetization programs, there are pitfalls to affiliate marketing as well. For me, the biggest pitfall I’ve found is that most affiliate programs only pay out after you’ve earned a certain amount. While this can be obnoxious, most programs have a low payout threshold (for example, ClickBank’s is just $10!) – so as long as you do your research, you can find good affiliate marketing opportunities that allow you to start collecting paychecks quickly.

Plus, if you have enough of a loyal audience that’s willing to pay for the products you’re promoting, this won’t really be an issue! I’d definitely recommend the ClickBank platform for affiliates. They’ve got lots of different options, depending on what your niche is, and they make it super easy to promote!

2) Ambassadorships 

Another great way to earn money from your content is with ambassadorships. I’ve dabbled in this one a lot too and really enjoy it.

The commissions are good, and it’s easy to get people to convert. For instance, I work with a swimsuit company, so when people use my code at checkout, they get 15% off their purchase, and I get a 10% commission. It’s a great and easy way to monetize your audience. It’s usually pretty easy to promote, too.

I’ll add a link in my bio, mention the swimsuits in a few posts, and with my high-quality content, I’m able to earn money from people using my link or my code. The downside to ambassadorships is usually the commission rate. Commission rates can be low, depending on the brand you work with, so if this is something that’s important to you, it might be better to look into other options.

I also do ambassadorships for a few brands, so even with lower commission rates, the total earnings are still beneficial once you add them all up. 

3) Sponsorship

The next way to monetize your audience is through sponsored posts and videos. This is when a brand pays you a small fee to talk about their brand or product in a post on your social media.

I see a lot of micro or nano influencers on my feed that are sharing things like skincare products from a specific brand. They’ll talk about why they like it, how they use it, and where you can buy it. They get me all the time because it’s real people talking about things they like and why I might like it too.

A lot of times, when you’re getting started doing sponsored posts, you have to do the work and the outreach to brands you want to work with and pitch them on working with you. It’s helpful to have a high-quality social media page with good content to showcase. Micro and nano influencers are actually really valuable to brands since smaller influencers often have better engagement rates from a loyal following. When pitching to a brand, influencers will usually create a small pitch deck that showcases their work, their audience, and some statistics from their page. A lot of brands WANT to work with smaller influencers like you, so once you take that step to showing off your brand to the right people, you can find lots of brands willing to pay you a rate for your posts.

The rate a brand will pay for a sponsored post like this usually depends on your following. If you’re a nano influencer, with a following from 500 to 10,000 followers, you can make around ten to one hundred dollars per post. It all depends on the brand!

4) AdSense

Next is YouTube adsense, the TikTok creator fund, or any platform where you earn money from the platform itself. This one is great if you’re a video content creator.

How this works is, once you’re a part of the platform’s paid fund, you can get paid per view on your video. It’s usually paid out every month, and the payouts can be anywhere from two to four cents per one-thousand views, or about twenty dollars to forty dollars per one-million views.

This one can be a bit more difficult to get into since getting that many views consistently takes a LOT of work. With YouTube adsense, the earnings are a bit higher, depending on your content. However, once you get there with views, It’s a decent way to earn some change. 

5) Digital Products

Another great way to monetize your audience is through digital products like ebooks or guides. If it were me, I might look into creating an ebook on how to begin your journey into the outdoors. Your digital product doesn’t have to be revolutionary, it just has to be able to bring value to your audience.

Since my audience is super into being active and being outdoors, I’d write and promote a guide to being outdoors as someone who wasn’t always into it. This is a really great way to continue to bring value to your audience and earn money as a content creator.

The only real downfall to this option is the initial difficulty. Where other monetization options are a bit easier to get into, this one takes a bit more work!

6) Professional Services

In this same vein, you can also offer professional services, such as coaching, itinerary building, or anything in between.

If it were me, I might offer beginner yoga coaching, or one-on-one coaching to help people who are in the fitness and health world, and need extra help. Just like the guides and ebooks, this one is a really great way to connect and bring value to your audience.

Same as digital product creation, offering professional services requires a skillset offering and a lot of time. This one is not as passive as some of the other online monetization options!

7) Digital Course

Finally, you can create a digital course. This could be anything you are passionate about and knowledgeable about. For me, I might create a mindfulness and meditation course.

This one does require a bit of work and a place to host your course. However, like our other options, it is also a great way to connect with your audience and provide value to their lives! 

What You Need to Know About Content Monetization

There’s a few things to take into account as you think about monetizing your content. The first, is discovering your niche, your audience, and who you are as a content creator.

Once you have that really dialed in, I would recommend doing a lot of research on the types of brands and products you want to promote related to your niche, what you’re comfortable creating for your content, and how you want to earn your money.

Do you want your monetization to be more of a side hustle, where you dedicate quite a bit of time to creating digital products, offering services and more? Or do you prefer something a bit more passive, where you add your links into your bio, create some content on your social media channels, and promote throughout your content creation in a natural and seamless way?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself and identify how you want to go about your content creation and audience monetization strategy. 

Another great thing to keep in mind is things like payout. How much do you want to earn from this? A few hundred dollars a month? A few thousand? Or more? Figuring this out will help inform your decision – there’s a huge difference in your total potential earnings when you monetize with AdSense versus affiliate marketing versus becoming a coach. 

In the end, you have to pick the combination of monetization strategies that are best for your content business.

How to Monetize as a Content Creator

So, if you’re a content creator and you’re looking to monetize your audience, you have several ways to go. However, HOW do you actually monetize? 

Really, the only step, once you’ve chosen the monetization strategies you want to focus on, is to create content. No matter what kind of content creator you are – a blogger, vlogger, social media influencer, podcaster, or anything in-between – you’re here because you create content. So be sure and create! 

This can come in the form of video content, podcast episodes, embedding blog links, whatever floats your boat. When it comes to creating content, this is personal to YOU!

For me, the content I create is typically in video form like reels on Instagram and videos on TikTok. I’ll show the products I’m promoting being used in my posts. For example, I promote some outdoor gear like backs and backpacks. I’ll show some video from a hike or climb I did and talk about the benefits of the bag in the caption.

I’ll have a call-to-action to get people to head to the link in my bio where they can get 15% off their first bag purchase, and that’s that! When it comes to creating content, I like to stay organized with it. I have a content calendar that I work from that helps me know what product I’m promoting, where I’m posting to, what the content is, and more. It’s really simple and so nice to have as a tool as a content creator. 

Posts like this one usually have pretty decent conversions and easily showcase the products I’m trying to promote with a simple call-to-action.

How to Monetize Your Audience Wrap-Up

Well… now it’s time to get out there and start earning money with your content! 

If you want to see more examples of people who began monetizing their audience, you can check out the story of Brett Boles, who went from high school teacher to full time content creator earning money online here! 

And if you want to take your own content creation and affiliate marketing to the next level, ClickBank’s official affiliate education platform Spark by ClickBank comes with two super in-depth courses on blogging and TikTok as an affiliate. Be sure to check those out inside Spark!

Well, that’s all, guys! Good luck, happy scaling, and we’ll see you next time!