mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

Content Creation is one of the fastest growing careers. With an access to a notepad, and a camera, practically anyone can relay their story to the world. There are as many content creation ideas as there are people, and some of the content creation ideas include lifestyle, careers, politics and governance, celebrities and entertainment, and even cleaning of cemeteries. So, how does content creation earn money for you? One, you must have a unique angle in which you cover issues. Just covering issues as the mainstream media does is not going to get you a lot of followers. For instance, why not cover inner city stories as the national media concentrates on national politics? As you get an audience for your stories, definitely brands will start coming as they want to partner with you. So, how do you ensure that you get the maximum value from brands that want to partner with you but at the same time, that you don’t lose yourself in your content creation journey?

As a first step, ensure that you don’t just splash ads in your content. Roll your ads around your content. That is have advertorials. That is ads that are related to your content. If for instance, you are doing content about college admissions, then there sure are colleges that are bound to advertise with you, and what’s more you could morph the ad around your content. Most people hate being sold to and that’s why splash on the face kind of ads just don’t work, and why you need advertorials. If you are doing content based on personal finance and building a savings and investment culture, then banks would want to approach you for your audience to open bank accounts. Having advertorials could make you charge premium amounts especially if you have high conversion rates. If you have content that highly converts then you don’t need millions as audience in order to convert, and that’s why sometimes, people with as few as 10,000 followers get boatloads of ad money while someone with millions of followers has very few ads on their content.

The mistake that most content creators make is they become mellow when they get the big corporate endorsements. And your audience can detect when you lose your authenticity. If possible, separate the content creation side from the ad business side, and then have a team of two or three that can bridge the divide. It’s just like the search engines or TV. The fact that you pay highly for an online ad does not mean that Google will suddenly put your web content at the top of the search engine rankings. Or the fact that a nondescript politician such as Marianne Williamson or Robert F Kennedy Jr paid for an ad by the millions does not mean that suddenly Fox News or CNN will suddenly put them as the top of their news bulletins, otherwise, they would lose their audiences. The beauty about advertorials is they naturally morph around the stories you are doing and therefore is a much subtle way of advertising than a splash in the face kind of advertising.