I’ve observed over the last 20 years persons in my small slice of the web who have successfully gone out on their own or at least augmented their income by monetizing their passion. Podcasters, authors, photographers, artists and even people who create fun creative projects and earn a decent wage on Kickstarter with fun niche projects.
Truthfully, I don’t know where to start. How do you find your 1000 true fans? I have 50 readers a day on this blog. I have 13,000 subscribers on YouTube and that’s it. How can I earn a living creating content? I think there’s 3 things that are necessary to earn even a dollar creating on the web and I don’t think talent is one of them.
First, a focus on regular contributions investing in the publication that is you. Writing or publishing something daily and in tech, getting on Techmeme by breaking news or interviewing industry titans or investing time on investigative stories and providing good quality and accurate reporting. Maybe that takes talent but without talent, it takes a lot of time.
Second, covering one area of focus. The Times reporter who reviews new restaurants in the lower east side wouldn’t spend their Saturdays writing a column about a politician’s congressional campaign in Pennsylvania. They consistently cover a topic, build a reputation and brand and style along with the industry connections and they cover that topic diligently. It would be like iJustine starting a cooking channel. She covers consumer tech and has for 20 years.
Third, once you’ve built an audience and earned a relationship with them, you monetize their interest and trust in your work by offering a catalogue of content. Maybe your blog is free but your once-a-week newsletter is $10 and your podcast is an additional $5 a month and, once a year, you create a subscriber only show or physical good like a well crafted moleskin or wallpapers for their devices for an extra charge. You can do brand integrations (ads) with companies wanting to target your a audience to make even more money
I think about this blog a lot. I write what I want but I don’t have an audience because the topics are all over the place. The niche of people interested in the 15 different topics I cover doesn’t exist. Many long-time followers know that I used to have 7 different blogs and each had a great following and advertisers and it worked. I think that maybe I need to go that route again or at least start something new that focuses on just one topic (Apple, Motorcycles, Guns, Travel, Fatherhood, Photography, Videography, Beer, etc) which would just be one of my areas of interest and devote time to build up an audience but also offer a shameless clarity to readers that the intention is to make money and be honest about that with them. Create a YouTube channel and other social media accounts for it and just go all in with it. If it fails, I can just absorb all of that content into this blog in a few years and no loss of the writings created.
The truth is, I am starting to get bored again. I have always loved my day jobs but I need a side-thing. For a while, it was writing but also photography and YouTube and travel and for 3 years, real estate / property management and it’s been a year since I stopped doing that and I need something to keep busy. My mind is always working and I can’t just re-watch all of my movies again on Plex or find a new hobby (most recently, that’s been guns) because hobbies cost money, they don’t make money.
I think seeing what MG Siegler has done with Spyglass and seeing new kickstarters from Icon Factory and seeing more and more people go solo and make money on their own creating content, I’m jealous. I don’t want to quit my day job but as you can all see…thousands of blog posts and thousands of videos and thousands of photos over the last 20+ years and I’m still doing it. I’m making no money and yet here we are, publishing. I’m a creator and I can’t help it. Shouldn’t I be making some money doing it? My previous side-hustles all earned $25-$50K a year. At $5 a month, that would require having 400-800 people who subscribe. That’s an unfathomable number. I did publish a motorcycle newsletter for a year and had 5 paying subscribers which wouldn’t even cover the software I’d have to buy to run a site that collects money. I do think from day-one, I’d make it a paid product and just put everything behind a paywall. Maybe that’s the wrong approach but it just feels right even though I as a customer would never pay for a product I wasn’t already a fan of. Truthfully, I’m anti-subscription anyway and don’t pay for any of the content I consume but here I am proclaiming what I create is worth paying for. What a hypocrite!
I need to veg on this a bit more but maybe a site where I publish one thing every day that’s 500 words. Once a week, I publish an essay, a podcast and a video podcast. I commit to doing it for one year and see where we end up. At least I will have said I tried. We’d be talking about 400 posts and 50 podcasts. Is that long enough to build an audience? What about discovery. How would my work be discovered? It’s so hard to get started.
I value my time to little though that I guess I just get going and see how it goes?
Time to go explore what I use to get this off the ground. Ghost? WordPress.com? Memberful? Patreon?
Thanks for reading. I’m not sure where to take this now.