Strategies to monetize your digital content without being invasive

In the new digital era, performing aggressive monetization strategies – closely linked to conventional marketing – is not a good option. User don’t want to be interrupted with promotional pop-ups while they are browsing a website or a digital publication. Today more than ever, attractive and non-intrusive publicity is the best option, especially on the Internet.

On the other hand, it is essential having a source of incomes to monetize our digital content and publications. But, how could we get it without asking our users for a big commitment that make them leave our website or app?

Today we explain 4 strategies to make our content profitable without being invasive.

1. Subscriptions

This is the most common model in online world. It consists in offering different digital contents in a free and limited edition. This way, if the user is interested in this content, he will want to be part of the community and subscript to enjoy the complete version.

This means a great advantage from both users and brand point of view, because they can “taste” the offered service with no cost and check if it is interesting enough, and we get a better segmentation of prospects.  

2. Freemium

In this case, we offer a free version with basic services together with other paid alternatives with completer services.

The key is offering good free service without spam or constant promotions to make users feel comfortable and encourage them to get the paid version in the future. But, be careful! An excellent free service could be a disadvantage because users’ needs could be satisfied. Therefore, they won’t pay more for extra services.

3. Monetize your digital content with sponsored content

In publications sector and editorial world, offering sponsored space to collaborators or advertisers can be a good solution. Did you know this is one of the main income sources of blogs?

This model is a good example of non-intrusive publicity because its format is almost identical to posts, so there will be a bigger percentage of users who will read it. Additionally, sponsors will be happy to be present in our publications and we will generate more incomes.

4. Small transactions

Also known as microtransactions, they consist in offering the possibility of paying small amounts of money (usually one figure value) to get specific services or content.

Audiovisual sector uses this model constantly offering the possibility of downloading songs, albums, podcasts…

This model also has microdonations where we don’t determine a fixed amount of money, but the user decides either if he wants to pay and how much.

With this 4 monetization models we can start to make our content digital profitable. We can choose just one of them, or diversifying our incomes with different monetization sources.

Remember that offering a free alternative is essential in all these models. This way, we will get prospects that may not buy our premium service, but they could invite other new users.