Hello and welcome to Monetizing Your Contents as a Content Creator. I am Hammed Babatunde, project lead at AfricaHacks and a lover of technological tools that make life easy. I'm excited to be sharing this article with you. Please read through the information and I hope you are able to grab the details of what web monetization for Content Creators is all about.
Table Of Contents
- Overview of Web Monetization
- What is Web Monetization
- Platforms to Monetize your Website
- How to use an inter ledger Payment Pointer to Monetize your Content as a Content Creator
- Top Web Monetizers
- AfricaHacks Web Monetization Program for Content Creators and Project Builders
- Reference
Overview of Web Monetization
For years now, content writers have relied on traditional advertisement means of monetizing their content. Due to this, it can be a little bit overwhelming on choosing the best way to earn money from a website, blog post, or article. But once this issue has been solved, content writers can make revenues easily from their blog, website, or article.
As a content writer who is looking for ways to make money from your work, some of the questions that might likely pop into your mind might be the following:
- How to monetize your content and make money online?
- How long does it take to monetize your content?
- Should you monetize your content, article, or website with one specific website monetization strategy or a combination of website monetization strategies?
I will be guiding you through how you can solve these questions whenever you want to monetize your content.
How to monetize your content and make money online
Before you can dive into how to monetize your content as a content creator, you will need to understand what web monetization is all about. Wikipedia defines "Website monetization as the process of converting existing traffic being sent to a particular website into revenue."
There are numerous ways in which content creators make money from their work.
Some of them include:
- Display advertising
- Google Adsense
- Web push ads
- Affiliate marketing
- Membership site
- Sponsored content
- Donations
The examples stated above are still very much in use today but most of them can be annoying to users' attention. This is where web monetization comes in. Web monetization does not rely on advertising or stealing of user data and attention thus making it an alternative to payments or a way to make earnings.
I will be going through how to use an inter ledger payment pointer for web monetization as a content creator.
How to use an interledger Payment Pointer to Monetize your Content as a Content Creator
Before I fully dive into how to monetize your content, I will like to introduce a vital concept here. You must have been wondering what inter ledger is and it allows content creators to monetize their contents.
Interledger is a network of computers that enables the sending of value across independent payment networks. To be clear, Interledger is not a blockchain and there is no “Interledger token”. Interledger functions more like the Internet, in that it routes packets. Except that the packets also represent money instead of just carrying data. You can find out more about how it works on interledger.org.
Now that you have understood what inter ledger means, to monetize your content as a content writer using an Interledger payment pointer, follow the steps outline above:
- Register on coil as a content creator using the link: coil.com/creator-setup
Coil is a for-profit membership service that charges users $5.00 a month and streams micropayments to creators based on member attention. Coil uses the Interledger network to move money, allowing creators to work in any currency they like.
- The next thing is to get an inter ledger payment pointer. There are various wallet providers who provide this service but I will advise you to use uphold if you are in any African country. Sign up on uphold using this link: uphold.com/signup.
- The next step to get your payment pointer. You will be using your uphold account to get your payment pointer.
After you have logged into your uphold account, you will see the transact tab by the left. You will then need to select the from option which will bring various forms of options from which you want to fund your account.
Next up is to select inter ledger payment as the means by which you want to fund your account.
You will get a pop up that will require you to accept that you will verify your account with uphold before withdrawing your earnings.
Click on Accept.
After some seconds, you should be able to get your inter ledger payment pointer. You should see your payment pointer below although I hid my own because it is private to me. You should copy it and keep it. The payment pointer is unique to you which means anytime it is always the same and it does not change.
- Now that you have gotten your payment pointer, there are two things you can do with it. You can add it to your coil account and also to any of your article or blog posts.
A. To add it to your coil account, You'll do this by going to Settings on your Coil account, then visit "Payout" and add your payment pointer. If you got your payment pointer from Uphold, then you'll select Uphold.
B. To add the payment pointer to your blog post or article. You will need to log in to the place your article is being hosted. I will be using community.webmonetization.org blog as an example to explain this.
First, you will need to sign up/sign in into Web Monetization Community
Next up, Go to the extensions on your settings page and add your payment pointer to your Web Monetization settings.
After adding this, any article published on your account on Web Monetization Community will automatically have the payment pointer applied to it.
What if you are another blogging platform and you will like to apply it on any one of your articles hosted on the platform.
You will have to copy the HTML metatag above and add it to your article's HTML header meta tag. You will need to add your payment pointer where you have " add your payment pointer here"
Your content will start generating revenue for an indefinite time as long as you have added an inter ledger payment pointer to the HTML header meta tag of your content.
Top Web Monetizers
As a part of this guide, I decided to add some of the top web monetizers you can check out their work on web monetization.
- Uchi Uchibeke ( twitter )
- Akintunde Hack Sultan ( twitter )
- Chris Coylier ( twitter )
- Stefan Thomas ( twitter )
AfricaHacks Web Monetization Program for Content Creators and Product Builders
AfricaHacks Web Monetization Program for content creators and product Builders Cohort 1 just started on January 25th, 2021. You can still apply using this link
The program will enable product builders and content creators to learn how to monetize their content or products. There are a lot of free resources, benefits, and perks to be won. So ensure you sign up for the program if you want to learn about how you can leverage web monetization. check out this article for more information about the program.
Phew! That was a lot of information to take in. I hope you found the article worth reading. Using this article as a guide, you have monetized your blog post, article, or blog as a content creator.
Stay tuned for upcoming articles and insights to stay up to date on what is happening within this exciting, emerging industry. You can follow me on Twitter to follow my tweets on my journey across the tech world.
Reference and articles to check out
- https://dev.to/hacksultan/web-monetization-like-i-m-5-1418
- https://esse-dev.github.io/a-web-monetization-story/
- https://community.webmonetization.org/uchibeke/a-program-to-get-more-people-into-web-monetization-54j6
- https://www.audienceplay.com/blog/website-monetization/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization
- https://sendpulse.ng/support/glossary/website-monetization
- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-firefox-reality/
- https://coil.com/p/kenmelendez/Anatomy-of-a-Payment-Pointer/Yl5PL-Rlf
- https://interledger.org/
- https://community.webmonetization.org/erikad/how-to-create-a-payment-pointer-4joi
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