Getting monetized seems to be the dream of most content creators these days. Almost all the big platforms are offering it. The problem is that in order for it to be profitable by itself, you have to invest years of work creating content on the platform that you’re not getting paid for by the platform. Then when you do start getting paid by them, it’s well below what would be minimum wage in a country that doesn’t even legally have one. You’re making a mere fraction of the money that they’re making from your being there.
The only way to make this even remotely a balanced situation is to use them to advertise your business or your site with your ads and/or sponsors.
The best way to make money from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or anywhere else, is to use them to advertise. Having some content there or linked there conveniently for your readers and viewers who use the platform is a good thing. It means they will have easier access to you.
There are three basic steps to get started. Starting on this base, you will create a sort of a network that will do most of the advertising work for you. You’ll basically make money while you sleep, and whenever you wake up every day, you’ll just need to answer questions, fill orders, and/or provide the services people paid for.
Step 1: Have your own website.
This is a must. If you don’t know how to build one, then hire someone to build one for you. You can hire me if you like, or hire someone else you like better. If you want to do it on your own, it will be helpful to learn HTML first. If you don’t then you can try picking your way through a host that has a block editor, but you won’t really know how to set things up properly if you don’t know how a site should be structured.
It is worth it to hire someone who knows what they are doing because your website is like your public face. If you don’t have one then everyone running a real business knows that you aren’t a serious professional who is with the times. If your site has missing parts or links leading to nowhere, menu items leading to any “lorem”, or is otherwise non professional, this makes you look too arrogant in thinking you could do it all yourself without the adequate training, and were too cheap or broke to hire a webmaster.
Lacking a website can also make you look like a fool who is waiting for the platform to promote you instead of promoting yourself. The platform is not going to promote you. In fact, if you are not specifically producing entertainment for “white” Americans, it may stifle you in favor of content that does.
Step 2: Create a brand around each of your niches.
Once you have one site stabilized, build another. You should be working multiple streams of income anyway. Each niche category of your streams should have its own website. This keeps things organized and avoids boring your viewers with topics they aren’t that interested in.
Your sites should connect to one another for reasons we’ll go deeper into later in this article. Each should however, stand on its own and have its own on site shopping cart or payment ability. It might seem easier to centralize things, but this can cause a distraction. The more steps between seeing a product or service and sending a payment, the less likely it is that the payment will happen.
So let’s say you make jewelry of a few different styles: some old fashioned retro 70’s, some classic or plain, and some based on anime characters. The classic can go either way, but the retro 70’s style and the anime are too different from one another to match. So you need one site with the 70’s that you can set up to have that look and theme, and another with the anime.
You can have both on the same site if you have no choice, but there should clearly be differing sections with different looks so that each is “streamlined”. If you also run a business selling handmade Hungarian sweets, that should have its own site.
Give each area of business or distinct style or topic you cover its own space so that things aren’t jumbled, and potential buyers aren’t confused.
Step 3: Create communities and content around each of your brands.
This is where the platforms can be useful. Each of your niches or income streams should have a related community. This could be a forum on your site, a page and/or a group on a major platform that has communities, or both. If you have a blog with commenting, this can serve as a kind of community, but you need to make sure to invite commentary on the posts where you would like to see discussion.
Generating discussion is sometimes difficult, and it may be tempting to “bait” people into it, but be careful about this. Sometimes inviting discussion can mean inviting spam or other inauthentic activity. The big worry these days is fake outrage posters promoting hate based political groups or politicians.
In the next article on this topic, I will explain a little more about why these three basic steps are important. There are some things that you may not know about how things work on the internet that go deeper than algorithms and “web karma”.
