Ahhh here it is. It’s here. I wanna know why the over 500K people on insta are wasting time there, are they making anything out of it? Besides fake internet points?
How do we monetize social media, personal blogs, random twitter accounts, wordpress, YouTube channels and all the rest?
I saw a girl on a beach and her ad is about FB advertising and how she made a FB ad algorithm that cured 3rd world poverty, so much so, that she strolls the beaches of L.A with her sandals in hand soaking up the sun with heavy gold coins in her pocket because she made it all from social media. And I saw this on a solitaire app when I play it on the tube because Candy Crush burns my battery too fast.
How the hell does it all happen? Who is The Fat Jewish and how are guys like him and Ryan Reynolds all making their own gin and vodka brands and milking it all up?
Ok enough questions, let’s get some answers.
Let’s monetize it all! I’ve thought about a few ways to do this. Half of this blog was drafted here months ago before I even knew what CoronaVirus was. Then I got back to this, and thought about the poor small businesses or individuals who can’t get work whilst this is all happening and decided to give it another bash…
MONETIZE = One time when I was sleepy in my brother’s car and also just thinking about 16 diff things and my bro used the word monetized and I was like “what? what does monetize mean?” Because he does SEO and obviously the SEO’ers out there surely know lots about monetization. He said monetize means how you make money out of it.
One idea for how to do this, was to do a bunch of googling and research to see what comes up. One was to do a nice “5 helpful hints to help you monetize your social media” and another idea was to do like a list with ten blogs from bloggers who blog about money making blogs. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to do it my own way and make an overly simplified version of how I’d do it if I care enough, had enough motivation, time on my hands, and overall enthusiasm to do it all. So…here goes.
Open up a word doc or Google doc and make a list of what you can blog and rant about enough. I’m talking tons of content, something you can blog in your sleep. What do you know inside out? The whole entire script to Titanic?
If you were on a discussion panel in front of 300 people, what would that panel be about? Or if you had to do a Ted Talk, a podcast, or host a webinar…Find your own area of expertise and focus on that (for now)…It doesn’t hurt to have a few other ideas on the back-burner though.
How are we gonna make some money out of it all?
Step 1. So remember that thing that you can blog and rant about a lot? We’re gonna start a wordpress blog, all social media channels, a medium, a quora, a LinkedIn showcase page (and a group), Fiverr themed, literally all digital marketing under the sun themed with whatever your speciality content is. Goal one is to build up enough content for an ebook.
Step 2. Outreach. Exposure. Sponsorship. One girl I follow has about 70k followers now. She lives in England and posts pretty Photoshopped pics all covered in seasonal flowers and pink lattes made from Ostrich milk. She does sponsorship posts usually by Boohoo and other simplified clothing brands where she essentially gets a personalized discount tag thingy so it’s like “millennialgenie25” so you’d get 25% off your BooHoo clothing.
Then supposedly she’s got a tracking link where they use CRMs and KPIs to follow on through. They showcase it all by modeling the clothes and making outfits. Usually they end up making a 1 min video with an organized rail of clothes that make up 6 outfits and speedy changing turns it into a rather easy to watch video when you’re leisurely scrolling. She gets some commission for every link and transaction using her code and BOOM, she has monetized social media using influencer marketing.
Step 3 – Teach Something. We can all teach something. We all speak a language. We can all draw a daffodil (either digitally or on a paper sketch)… we can advise people with guidelines on how to fix something, advise on personal issues, share knowledge on what we read about in High School…Teaching is one of the most rewarding things you can do. I do free tutorials, consultations and video chats literally on what I am writing about. Take out the word FREE, go into bigger depths, share more detail and tips and tricks to your fan club, and voila, we are selling.
Step 4 – SHOPIFY! FIVERR! AND SELL SELL SELL!
Pinterest now has a buy button. Facebook and Insta have ads just designated for products. It’s all money in and money out. The internet is a giant marketplace for everything that you can dream about selling. Try Etsy, make a WIX, explore doing your own webinars and think about your own expertise. What YOU are good at, your very own USP, your creativity that is unique to you. We’ve already got a giant pot of delish content to sell…now it’s time to get creative and open up a lemonade stand and sell sell sell.
Step 5: There is no step 5. There’s another 500 steps and 500 ways to sell and monetize and turn something digital into real money that can pay your bills, buy your groceries and treat your mum to lunch. At a time like this, where we are having to really explore our depths and experiment working from home, now is a good-a-time as any to get started.
It’s very competitive marketing… doing anything digital. Everything is under a microscope from competitors and scrutinized by our own imaginations looking for error over opportunity. My first suggestion before taking things seriously, would be to set up a phantom gmail account, make a free wordpress and just experiment with it all.
Lots of luck to you all, I hope this is the beginnning of your new adventures.
Millennial Genie 