How To Increase and Diversify Your Content Income (in 3 Steps)

Stop relying on a single stream of income. Build many instead.

Relying on one source of income is a risky choice for a content creator. You can never know if a job online will keep working indefinitely. And sometimes, you don’t even control part of your job as the platform where you are writing, for example.

So if you want to thrive in the content creation game and secure your future, you need to increase and diversify your content income. And you can do it in three simple steps.

1 — Create a short-term source of reliable income.

The first source of income is the hardest one to create because you usually start from ground zero. But this will also become the content that will help people recognize you. So you need to take good care of it.

The best example of this kind of income is daily or weekly content like writing articles or making videos. So you will work on this type of content almost every day.

Your goal is to make a short-term and reliable income that stabilizes your monthly revenue and creates a basis that allows you to build other projects. So try to find the best content formula for your audience, and use it to generate reliable returns.

The best type of content should generate short-term results between one or two weeks. But that doesn’t mean it will stop generating passive income afterward.

Also, this should be the most generic type of content possible. And everybody should be able to consume it even without following you.

2 — Build medium-term projects.

While working on your short-term source of income, you should also build medium and long-term projects to sell periodically for significant revenues. If you are a writer, you could write an e-book, for example. Or, if you are a video maker, you can record a video course on one of your target topics and sell it to your audience.

But even if this type of content is more complex to make, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily have a broader reach. On the contrary, only a portion of your audience will invest in it.

However, it has the potential to grow your audience if you can publish it on multiple platforms like KDP for e-books or Udemy for videos. If you make valuable content, you can build a two-way promotion:

• In your daily articles/videos, you can promote your e-book or your course and increase your income.
• From your e-book or course, you can link people to your daily content, grow your audience and feed your short-term income source.

Also, well-researched projects help you build authority and reputation. For example, if you write a valuable e-book about content creation, people will associate you with that topic. And the next time they have a problem with their blog, they will search for you. So you need to work on your daily source of income and foresee those problems to provide as many answers as possible.

3 — Collect information for long-term projects.

While building your perfect double-sided revenue system, you can even create a long-term project like a newsletter.

This project requires more working time and constant promotion, but it pays higher returns. Also, differently from the other two, a newsletter can bring you many advantages:

a. Increase of short/medium-term income.

The first advantage of writing a newsletter is that it helps you promote your other projects. So it increases your sources of income.

A newsletter doesn’t only give followers more content to consume, but it makes them connect with you on a deeper level. And you will have multiple chances to convince or remind them to check your content on other platforms.

b. Boost the loyalty of the public.

Writing a newsletter allows you to share bits of your private life easier. When creating content for a vast public, you will try to protect yourself from criticism and haters.

But only your closest followers will subscribe to your newsletter, so you can share with them more details of your life and build stronger connections. Therefore, they will be more willing to invest in your content and support your work.

c. Prevent data loss.

If someday one of the platforms you use to publish your work closes, you can contact some of your closest followers and announce to them where you will continue your work if you have a newsletter.

Accessing their mailing box is like calling them on the phone, so you won’t risk losing years and years of work. So you can reboot your projects faster.

d. Create private revenue systems

Also, a direct connection with your followers can make you build private revenue systems where external platforms don’t take part of your income.

For example, if you publish videos on YouTube, the platform will take around 50% of your revenue. But if you send your videos directly to your followers for a 1$ monthly subscription, you won’t lose anything.

Final Thoughts

You only need three steps to increase and diversify your content income.

First, build a short-term project that helps you stabilize your minimum revenue with a stable monthly income. Then, you can work on a medium-term project that allows you to reach a broader audience and build authority. And last, you can create a long-term project, better if private, to build loyalty among your audience and provide even more personalized content.

And with these three steps, you can increase and diversify your content. So even if some of these streams will fail someday, you can continue living from the other two until you build others.

This is how to increase and diversify your content income.

Cover photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash.