The essential formula for monetizing your content

I’m knee-deep in creating my presentation for RevUP this week – about how modern publishers monetize content – and I’ve been thinking about this formula as the foundation for it all:

A Simple Formula For Content Monetization:

How valuable your audience is.

+ How much influence you have on your audience.

+ How set up you are operationally to market and sell.

= How successful you’ll be

How valuable your audience is one of the most important questions. I once did a project with a company that reached and served 25,000 oncologists. The business was thriving.

Why? Oncologists are hard to reach. There are riches in niches – if you can attract the decision-makers, keep them over time, and prove that they’re valuable.

It’s a matter of how uniquely good your content is at addressing their pain points. And with a niche audience, you can go really deep into specific problems.

The more niche you go, the more chance you have at creating something special.

How much influence do you have on your audience? Do they need you? Do they trust you?

Influence is the result of showing up for them reliably and solving those pain points over time.

Once you’ve earned that influence, you can expand it – by surrounding them with products that serve their needs.

When I worked at a niche B2B publication, audience members would call us if they didn’t get our newsletter. They needed us, they trusted us, and they missed us when we weren’t there.

With that foundation, we were able to expand the brand’s influence: We launched new content products that required registration. We launched new research products and events. All were successful, because we had already built a foundation of trust with our audience.

How set up you are operationally to capitalize on your influence is sometimes overlooked but critical.

I see a lot of associations and publishers that aren’t set up to monetize their audiences, though they have the first 2 parts of the formula right.

When that happens, it’s a matter of adding structure to a sale: Do you have products that match your client’s needs? Is the pricing in line with market expectations? Can your sales team articulate its value?

But it works in other places too. I spend a lot of time talking to marketers who feel frustrated that they can’t turn interested audiences into buyers because they can’t capture their data or sync it with a CRM. On top of that, some of their sales teams don’t get what they’re doing or why it’s important.

In all of these cases, the teams are doing the hardest parts right – the first part of the formula – and falling down when it comes to closing the deal.

If you’re falling down at any point on this formula – don’t worry. First of all, it’s hard to get every part of this right.

Second of all, and maybe most importantly, don’t be intimidated by finding the solution. The keys to this formula are: Focus, responsiveness and structure. It helps to think about installing these systems as efforts in discipline vs. strokes of creative genius.

Does this formula resonate with you?

KRYSTLE KOPACZ CEO, Revmade krystle@revmade.com

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P.S. We had a blast sharing our thoughts on audience centricity at our client’s corporate retreat this week in DC. If you’re looking for ways to uncover and orient around your audience’s needs, respond here or hit us up on LinkedIn.