Relying on Google Adsense alone is not a sustainable way to make money from your website or YouTube Channel. This calls for more innovative ways of generating revenue online. I researched this topic to help creatives understand how to make money online.

Here is the process you can follow to make money online and get passive income from your ideas and skills.

1) Publish quality content that is relevant and useful to a particular audience

3) Ensure your online community is highly engaged.

Understand your audience well to know what resonates with them – this is the key to creating engagement and retention. As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, will tell you, obsessing over your customers is critical. Studying how users interact with your content helps inform the content strategy. It’s important to understand that every customer wants to feel you understand their needs and that they can relate to your brand. Encourage your users to comment on the content by creating an excellent commenting feature. A good example is the New York Times that has made an experience that emphasises community engagement on their website.

4) Create some premium content that users can pay to access.

You may have some free content to ensure your audience is engaged. Put some of your best content behind a payment platform to help you generate revenue.

5) Ensure you have an easy payment option on your website

Making it easy for users to pay for content can make a massive difference in your monetisation strategy. You can do this by ensuring you have various payment methods such as Paypal, VISA, Mastercard and even mobile payments. Make it easier for users to pay for content.

6) Micro-payments can also help people pay for only the piece of content they need instead of paying for everything.

Providing easy/seamless payment options increases subscription.

7) Build partnerships with advertisers

With a big community consuming your content, it is easy to convince advertisers to place ads on your website. Reach out directly to advertisers and PR agencies and showcase your website traffic stats.

8) Activate Affiliate Marketing

Amazon has one of the most profitable affiliate marketing programs in the world. Signup for an account with Amazon Affiliate. This will help you make money through commissions when users coming from your website purchase products on the Amazon website. Remember that this is not a get rich quick scheme. You have to have a ton of traffic on your website and a sizeable social media following. Here are the policies you must comply with to qualify for Amazon Affiliate program.

The process of how to make money online for Kenyan content creators is this: Content → Audience → Community → Monetize

The most important lesson learnt from the big challenge of monetisation is this; what you monetise is the relationship and trust you have with your audience. If you have managed to build a vast, loyal audience, and earned their trust, then the question of how to monetise becomes less complicated. The Internet is the biggest accelerator of opportunity ever invented- but it rewards only the best. You have to be exceptionally good at what you do because you compete with the best in the world.

Here is a summary of the research:  How to make money online for content creators [pdf].

By Francis Waithaka – Founder and CEO Digital 4 Africa