Can you believe that some influencers have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on social media but haven’t monetized their audience at all?
Seriously, I’ve met a lot of different entrepreneurs that have massive followings with zero monetization strategies. While they might use paid Instagram shoutouts or sponsorships occasionally, that’s not a reliable business model to produce consistent income.
And if you are just starting to grow your social media, good luck even getting a paid shout out until you have 10-20,000 followers.
So what’s the alternative to monetizing your following?
Leveraging your skills and knowledge to create digital products, memberships sites, and high-level coaching to start making a consistent income. By packaging up your skills, you can learn from your audience, interact directly with them, build testimonials and so much more.
I talk about monetizing your following in this Youtube video.
How to Monetize Your Social Media Followers
After you put in all that work to put out great content and grow your following, the next phase is monetization. The great thing is that in today’s world, people are used to buying information products online. Especially when it comes to buying from people they already engage with on a daily basis.
And with engaging social media posts and videos, you’re constantly growing your know-like-trust factor on a daily basis (If you’re keeping an engaged audience on social media).
Then, once you do create a product or coaching service, you already have thousands of warm leads to start prospecting.
Start using these methods to generate consistent income and monetize your followers into an epic online business:
High-Value E-books
If you’re brand new to creating digital products, a high value, lower priced e-book might is a great way to get started. And don’t worry, if you’re not a writer, you can get these created relatively cheap using sites like Fiverr or Upwork.
Ebooks are a great way to show your expertise in a subject and deliver a ton of value to your audience. They’re a great first step to have in your value ladder and can also work as a bonus to an online course or add-on to your membership site.
The one problem with ebooks is that they aren’t a high income producing activity. You have to sell a lot of ebooks to make a significant stream of income each month. But one thing you can do is add upgrades like an extra video series or 1:1 call with you for a higher ticket product. This adds extra value to your audience and extra income to your business.
Digital Courses
The next step up from ebooks is creating digital courses, also known as e-courses. Courses are one of the best ways to monetize your following online. They let you package up your skills and knowledge into one resource that will help get your audience the desired result.
Courses are a win-win situation for your business and your audience. Not only do they help people succeed faster but they make it easy to scale your business. Once you create the product, all you have to do is get traffic to the sales page or webinar to convert viewers into customers. Unlike coaching, you can scale this exponentially and aren’t trading time for money.
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So how do you promote digital courses other than social media?
3 Ways to Promote a Digital Course
Online courses have a much higher price point than ebooks so it’s important that you have more than just a sales page or video sales letter to convert followers into buyers. Here are three methods to help promote your course:
1. Run a Webinar
Webinars are a great way to pre-sell your course and in my experience, they tend to convert at much higher rates than traditional sales pages. Expert digital marketer, Neil Patel agrees. According to Neil’s site, 2-3% tend to convert on sales pages while he’s seen as high as 22% conversions using webinars.
And with my company, Easy Webinar, we’ve made it super simple to start live and automated webinars. They allow you to provide more free value and then pitch your product or services at the end. Here are five ways to get webinar attendees if you haven’t created your email list yet.
2. Offer a Free Course
Another great way to promote your digital course is to offer a free email or video course on the same subject. Typically, I recommend a 3, 5 or 7-day series of videos or emails to offer 100% free to your audience. This gives them a reason to opt-in to your email list and show off your knowledge of the specific subject. At the end of the course, you can then give them the option to enroll in the full, paid version of the course.
3. Create an Affiliate Army
The last way to promote your online course is to get other people to pitch your course to their existing audience. This is a great method if you don’t have much of an email list and don’t want to spend a bunch of money on ads to get people to your webinar. With affiliates, you offer them 30-50% to promote the course.
Membership Sites
Another awesome way to monetize your following is to create a high-value membership site. One of my mentors, Lewis Howes, does this with his “Inner Circle” program. It’s $49 per month and has a library of resources, monthly calls, and helps build a community for like-minded entrepreneurs to collaborate.
Membership sites are also great for your business as they create recurring income. Once people began to pay the fixed cost, they begin to anticipate it, unlike ebooks and courses which are one-time income. As long as you’re providing a ton of value, people won’t want to leave your site.
Russell Brunson talks about the importance of a continuity program in his book, Dotcom secrets by saying “If you don’t have continuity, you don’t have a business.”
Online Coaching
The last way to monetize your following is to offer an online coaching program. Coaching is another one of the most lucrative ways to grow your income and create massive value for your followers.
The biggest pro of coaching is that it requires low start-up fees and can charge more than online courses as there is a closer relationship. The biggest con to online coaching is the time commitment. You’re trading your time for money, unlike digital courses, membership sites, and ebooks.
But, the income usually makes it worth it, plus you can help people create change at the deepest level. There are tons of ways to structure your online courses, here are the most popular:
Group Coaching
With group coaching, you can do weekly zoom calls with a small group to help answer questions and go over weekly lessons.
1:1 Coaching
One on one coaching is the most time intensive for you and should charge the most. These are usually done weekly or bi-weekly via zoom or phone calls.
Hybrid Coaching and Courses
Another great option is doing a hybrid of both online coaching and online courses. You can have students go through the course content on their own and review any questions or problems on a weekly basis.
Wrap Up
As you can tell, there is no shortage of ways to monetize your following. The biggest thing I’d recommend is to just start. At some point, you’ll probably want a version of all these but find the one that you think will help your audience the most and just go! People can’t give you money and learn from you if you don’t have a product to buy.
Remember, paid shoutouts aren’t a reliable source of income. Start packaging up your expertise into the right offer with courses, ebooks, membership sites, and coaching to create a real online business that will change lives.
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