So you have worked hard to build your own personal brand.
Is there any way to turn that effort into a source of income?
Yes! Here my three favorite ways to monetize your brand:
1. Create and Sell Digital Downloads
Creating your own digital products is easier than you think. Those can be printable calendars, downloadable checklists or cheatsheets, or all-in-one tutorials walking one through solving various problems.
It is also much easier to set up your on-site shopping carts. There are multiple merchant services offering easy shopping cart integration for your business website.
Alongside creating your own products, you may also want to promote fellow experts’ products by combining your blogging routine with affiliate marketing. Doing so will help you diversify your marketing tactics beyond promoting your own stuff.
To take your own monetization strategy even further, you may want to set up Finteza to calculate your ROI and show your most effective sales funnels. Finteza’s new ecommerce section does all the math for you by estimating your expenses, identifying your most effective products and showing your daily revenue.
2. Set up a Video Course
I am a huge advocate of creating video courses in order to monetize your expertise, mainly because it is a powerful way to nurture relationships with your customers and build a community around your brand.
Another (anecdotal) benefit of authoring a video course is that it will automatically turn you into an expert. I had been in the SEO industry for 10 years prior to creating my own course but only once it was set up, I suddenly started receiving a flood of emails claiming I am an expert.
All in all, video courses are fun to create and promote. I highly recommend giving this method a try. It may seem intimidating but honestly it is easier than it seems:
- You can repurpose your existing articles by turning them into video scripts and recording yourself speaking using a free Zoom app
- You can create quick videos using tools like InVideo which can turn just about any text into videos:
There are several ways to set a video course up. The easiest one is using Udemy (that’s what I did too!). With Udemy, you don’t need any investment or technical knowledge. It is as simple as filling in the blanks and uploading your videos. It does limit your flexibility to what you can do or how you want to price your course. Another idea is to use one of these WordPress themes which was created for e-learning.
3. Become a Coach or a Trainer
As Covid-19 pandemic is forcing people and companies to switch to remote working, online education and self-improvement options are in higher demand these days.
Staying at home has one strong positive: We are all forced to re-evaluate our careers and find the ways to diversify our income sources.
This is where coaching and online training services come into play. I see more and more experts offer employee training services and personal coaching services.
Zoom training, time management training, agile marketing training, remote workplace management tips as well as helping businesses to create an SEO strategy to help them through digital transformation process – all of these are in high demand these days as organizations are trying to figure out effective remote employee management.
Text Optimizer is a great tool to figure out which questions people are asking in your niche. This is a great way to identify what to focus your training on and how to structure your course:
There are various tools to help you set this up. Here are my two favorite tools:
Let your clients schedule initial calls with you
Appointfix is an appointment scheduling app that will allow your clients to schedule time with you based on your (and their) busy schedules.
For free, it will manage event reminders, help you in client management, and let you embed the scheduling option right on your site for your site visitors to request online meetings with you.
The premium version of the tool helps in reporting, offers cross-device support and gives access to email templates.
Create dedicated rooms for group training and meetups
There are multiple online training solutions you can try but I currently prefer Uberconference for several reasons, mainly:
- It requires no third-party software installation (all you need is a Google Chrome browser) which makes it easy for clients to access your lessons
- It allows you to create rooms that are available 24/7, so your clients will be able to bookmark one link once to always be able to come to your class.
On top of that, those dedicated rooms are always open which make them perfect for community-driven lessons. Your clients will be able to arrange their own meetups without you to even have to show up. It is a great way to let your clients network and self-educate by revising your lessons, co-work on your assignments and discuss questions.
Conclusion
It’s a stressful time we are going through now but there are a lot of new opportunities as well. As many of us are losing jobs and sources of income, we need to start looking for and grabbing those opportunities.
There’s no stopping you from checking all of the above ways to monetize your personal brand.
There’s no reason to choose one!
You can mix and match, use one method to market another one and build your own sales funnels as you prefer. For example, you can create a free course and use it as a lead generation channel to sell your services to. This is a great way to ethically promote your brand by creating free content and further position yourself as an expert in the niche.
Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay
