Monetizing your Personal brand
Taking your content to the next level is as simple as creating paid for content. From subscription based blog posts/newsletters, private podcast feeds, online courses, and more. Here on medium for example you have your pay wall posts (although I’d suggest not doing that here).
There are plenty of ways to choose your endeavors.
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New Ways of Handling Digital Products
There are plenty of tools out there from Gumroad to Teachable, but what I prefer is actually Pensight.
This isn’t a sponsored post or anything, although that would be another way of generating an income from your personal brand content. I just find that their feature set is greater than the other competitors.
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Each digital product platform has their own cost/pricing ratio, features, and honestly reputability which I find to be important. Gumroad is popular, same with Podia, but between the cost or features I decided they weren’t worth the trouble. It is part of why some people avoid Substack for example because they take a whopping ten percent of your profits.
In the digital course space there are TONS of Learning Management Systems out there, and besides the college based ones like blackboard or canvas; I have tried them all.
The various Wordpress plugins, teachable, Thinkific, a trial for Kajabi, etc. I find that most of them are pretty good, and honestly if WP was a better platform for performance I might’ve stuck around, as I really liked Tutor LMS or MasterStudy.
Online courses aren’t the only way to be didactic in your paid for content though. There are also avenues of creating a community for your subscribers, which is something I am highly interested in myself once my following grows big enough. I already tried with Buddypress, Discord, and even Tribe.so (the latter wasn’t my favorite performance wise).
Although what I’d recommend now to people are:
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When you should start
As long as you’re not being scummy with your sponsored spots, your own merch, or anything like that; Then you can start as soon as you want. I have only a small number of free subscribers for example on my website, but I do have a paid option open to them if they are curious.
It is one of those things that many small creators fear the judgement or something along those lines. However if you are providing value often with your free content, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t offer more value through a paid option.
Keep things simple at first, and who knows it might be what kicks you off into being a full time creator.
