Make money from publishing your digital media online

Introduction

Step by Step guide for turning your videos,stories and images into cash

What you'll need

By Jim Grady and T.K. Flowers Founders of the citizen journalism site www.Babelation.com [2]

Everyone wants to make more money. Everyone has a story to tell. Why not combine the two and make money on the Internet from your stories?

Introduction:

The fastest growing segment of the online information market is user-generated content, now referred to as digital media content. User-generated digital media content is the powerful marketing force that has spurred the growth of several start-ups like YouTube and Facebook. These Internet businesses have gone from zero to multi billion-dollar values in less than four years.

The mission of this article is to outline how producers of digital media content, including bloggers, writers, vloggers etc. can, by self-publishing their own content online, harness the powerful social-marketing force of digital content to build their own virtually unlimited lifetime income streams.

Digital Media Content

Digital media content is any and all content that is produced, stored, transmitted, saved and/or distributed through or on a computer or digital device and the Internet. It includes, but is not limited to written opinions, articles, videos, photographs, Podcasts, audio recordings, software, games and messages.

Digital Media Distribution What������s wrong with this picture? Current Online media distribution and why you do not make money.

MySpace, Flikr and YouTube helped pioneer the online user-generated digital content creation and distribution platform. All had different reasons behind their foundation, but the underlying force generating their explosive usage is the same; it is the power to publish, transmit and distribute personal digital content. These pioneers are all great companies, provide great value to consumers and are now worth millions of dollars; they are worth millions of dollars because of your digital content. Digital media content draws hundreds of millions of visitors to sites daily. Advertisers then bid to place ads targeted toward their large volume of unique visitors. Google, the most profitable of ad-supported Internet companies, uses ad bidding in online searching to create gross revenues of $15 billion a year. The Internet ad market is estimated close to $20 billion a year and expected to double within seven years.

During its infancy, research laboratories, universities and government sectors had posted huge amounts of research-related material on the Internet. These initially content- rich sites drew people to the Internet and got them started posting their own content on the first Web sites. Once the Web spawned millions of sites, the average, everyday user of the Internet faced the daunting challenge of finding specific information, which led to the creation of listing services like Yahoo and then search engines like Google. Everything Yahoo lists and everything Google searches is someone������s digital content. Then social platforms like MySpace and YouTube came along and changed the Internet's trend from mainly publishing corporate/entity/business content to that of users������ personal content. Social media companies are now valued in the billions of dollars, but 99 percent of all personal content producers are not receiving a single cent from the billions of dollars being spent to advertise directly to its market. Why do producers of digital media content receive little to no compensation? To answer that question, it is important to understand the history of social media companies.

YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia were not initially set-up to create any revenue streams. So when they actually started turning a profit, it was based on these companies generating income to pay back investors or to increase market value. Basically, these companies are growing exponentially by billions of dollars a year solely through the FREE content of their users. This begs the question: in what other creative market do media content generators get zero reward while the distributor gets 100 percent? The answer to that question is none! In the music industry, hundreds of people became multimillionaires through their songs. Film, TV, print, radio, music and publishing markets all pay handsome rewards for good content. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, is worth more than a billion dollars thanks to her wizard fantasy books. So what is your content worth? We will show you how to make money from self-publishing your digital media content online.

Self-Publishing: The Solution������Content Producers������ as the center of new media distribution.

The premise of this article is to outline how self-publishing digital content can be a powerful new shift in the online information market and to illustrate how citizen journalists can profit from this new trend. Our definition of self-publishing is when the content producer is responsible for the production, publishing, distribution and monetization of their own digital content. Our assertion is that the content producer must take control of every aspect of their digital content in order to profit from it and create a lifelong stream of income.

How Content Makes Money

Google is the most profitable Internet-based company. Google������s secret is simple; it uses other people������s digital content. Google searches and indexes Web sites all over the Internet and makes them findable for users. Google then sells advertising that is associated with keywords contained in the users search. Marketers pay Google for specific keywords in a search associated with their ad campaigns.

Social Media, User-generated Content and Advertising

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr are the leading platforms in their target markets for user-generated content. These sites billion dollar values in a few short years for two reasons; they have large member audiences and enormous amounts of user-generated content.

The Audience and Digital Content TV programming is developed for and dependent upon segmented audiences. There are specific TV markets that drive content an example audience are those that love to observe how the legal system works, so there are several variations of Law and Order. For aspiring celebrities, American Idol. Good content attracts great audiences, and advertisers pay billions of dollars to target them. Another prime example is the Super Bowl, where advertisers will pay $1 million to $2 million for a 30-second commercial to be viewed by an audience of 100 million.

The TV analogy has moved to the Internet, but in micro-fashion. When Google sells a keyword associated with a search, it has just sold a specific audience of one to a marketer. For that specific audience, Google can charge a fortune.

The Digital Rate Game:

What Google and other online ad servers do is auction the specific audience to the marketers at differing rates based on demographics and demand. For example, an American searching for expensive wine might cost more to target than someone from a Third-World country looking for a description of a tree. Online rates can vary based upon whether the user clicks on the ad (CPC, pay per click advertisement ) or just because the ad was viewed (CPM, cost per one thousand impressions). There are many variations of ads but we are using these two as examples. The ads are bought and sold on volume of 1,000 consumers seeing the ads. Ads run from one cent per thousand to as high $100 per thousand, with video ads normally getting the highest averages.

The Monetization Game

We recently attended a Blog conference with about 50 companies advertising on how to monetize your Blog. Our challenge and question is why stop at your Blog? Why not monetize all of your digital content? That������s exactly what the social media sites are doing; they are building advertising campaigns based around your social communications and digital content! So why not just do it yourself?

Monetizing Self Publishing

We all know that Web sites and other people are making money off of your content. So how do you go about making money and building income for yourself? In order to find out, we must look inside typical content sites, utilizing a news-based site as an example. We will call our news site Newsnewsnow.com

Newsnewsnow.com receives from Google or another ad server $5 per one thousand impressions per unique visitors on average, and has two such ads per page for a total of $10 CPM.

If 1 million people viewed a story on Newsnewsnow.com, then Newsnewsnow.com would gross $10,000. If the owner of the story had negotiated an agreement to share revenues from all of their content with Newsnewsnow.com before they published the story, say for instance at a 10% revenue share, then the content producer would earn $1,000. If that same story had 10 million views, the content owner could receive $10,000 under this scenario.

Now let������s look at videos, which carry higher advertising rates. Say a producer published a video at Newsnewsnow.com and it received a higher ad rate of $25 CPM; the producer could receive $2,500 or$25,000 using the same formula above. This may not seem like a lot, but read on:

Building Long-Term Income: Your Digital Assets

Receiving $2,500 from a video may not seem like much, but what if you had 100 videos or 500 articles, or 1,000 pictures/images. Getty makes hundreds of millions of dollars just supplying digital images. Let������s look at the same scenario above, but now using bulk numbers of content. We will use the news video here to make it easier to see and explain.

In two months, content producer ABZ has produced 100 news videos and published them at Newsnewsnow.com. Newsnewsnow.com is receiving $25 per 1,000 views (CPM) per video. ABZ������s digital video assets would generate revenue as follows:

1: ABZ������s 100 videos are each getting an average of 10,000 monthly views. This would equal 1 million views for all of ABZ������s content, which, if ABZ has a 10% revenue share, would generate $2,500 in monthly gross revenue.

2: ABZ������s videos average 100,000 views each month at the same rate, ABZ generates $25,000 a month in revenue.

3: ABZ������S videos average 1 million views in a month, ABZ would generate $250,000 in monthly revenue.

Side note: There are many videos on YouTube each month that generate 1 million views or more

Lets add Text and images to ABZ������s revenues.

Digital Images

ABZ publishes 1,000 images with each receiving 1,000 views a month equaling 1,000,000 unique image views a month at a rate 1/5 of above stated rates for videos. The images would generate about $500 a month.

Text/Image /Articles

ABZ has 500 published text articles, each receiving 2,000 unique views per month, equaling 1 million unique views. Text articles receive twice the rate of standalone images and would generate $1,000 a month.

ABZ������s portfolio of video, text articles and images *100 videos=$2500 *Images=$500 *Text articles=$1,000 The totaling of each group of Content with 1 million unique views equal $4,000 a month in revenue.

Future Trend/The Multimedia Informative:

We believe there will be a growing trend to integrate text, images and video into a single online multimedia presentation that we call Informatives. Integrated Informatives will be a powerful new class of storytelling media.

Where Self-Publishers Go To Make Money/The Rise of Revenue-Sharing User Generated Publishing Portals:

Social media sites like MySpace and YouTube were the first phase of user-generated content; the next phase is publishing portals that enable content producers to publish digital content and also share revenues.

We outline three such Revenue-Sharing Portals

A new phase of portals is beginning to come to market that will help the content producers immensely, and change the dynamics of Digital Content markets. We term these Revenue Sharing Publishing portals. These portals will share revenue generated by content with the content producers. Below are three Revenue Sharing Publishing Portals

(A) Associated Content.Com

Associated Content acts like an article submission directory but with the added feature of paying commissions to content producers; below is the business description found on their website.

Associated Content is a platform that enables everyone to publish their content in any format on any topic and then distributes that content to engaged audiences through its website and content partners. Those who contribute to Associated Content's ad-supported collection of original text, video, audio and images gain exposure and often earn cash for their participation. The amount of money you make at Associated Content is unlimited. All of the content you publish can earn you money via Performance Payments, which currently pays you a baseline PPM������ rate of $1.50 for every thousand page views your content receives. As you generate more page views and submit more content, your clout level rises - and your Performance Payments do too! Performance Payments allow you to earn unlimited cash from your text, video, slideshow and audio submissions long after they have been published. You earn money for every thousand-page views your content generates (PPM������ rate). The baseline PPM������ rate is currently $1.50 ������ meaning if you generate 30,000 page views, your paid $45.00 in Performance Payments. The more content you submit and more page views it generates, the higher your PPM������ rate gets.

(B) Babelation.com

Babelation is a user-generated news and information-focused portal. It is the creation of this article������s authors. Babelation was founded in order to fulfill the need for a portal that highlights and broadcasts, in real-time, user������generated news as well as supplying a platform for content producers to monetize their content. Babelation enables publishing of video, text and images alone and/or in combination. Babelation pays a varying monthly rate to content producers The minimum revenue share is 10% and can be as high as 25%. Babelation������s model differs from Associated Content in that the content producer receives the same percentage of revenue generated by their content even when higher rates are gained. Associated Content pays out the same rate for video/text and or image even if they gain a higher rate. Babelation, in some instances, would pay out a higher percentage to a content producer when it receives higher CPM rates, for instance, when a video would garner a higher rate than a text-based article. Babelation������s philosophy behind its percentage rates versus standardized rates enables it to offer more lucrative revenue return to content producers for their high demand content.

(c). Revver

Revver is a video-sharing platform. It is not focused in a single category, but is more diverse like YouTube, with the exception that Revver pays content producers a percentage of revenues ala Babelation; Revver limits content to just video.

Marketing Your Digital Content/How to Draw Traffic to your Content and Get Paid

All over the web, as outlined in this article, audiences and content must be drawn together. In order for you to make money from your digital content you must create marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your content wherever you have it published. The more traffic is directed toward your content, the more eyes are viewing it, which increases your revenue. Simply put, the more your content is viewed, the more money you make. We urge you, the content producer, to grab the bull by the horns and market your own content and not just rely on the publishing site������s traffic. Below are some methods for building profitable traffic sources to your content

Using Keywords

Keywords are the words people type into search engines like Google when they������re looking for something online. The search engines use the keywords to decide which web pages to deliver. Since search engines match content with keywords, they become crucial when trying to attract search engine results to your digital content. Content producers should use Keyword Tools to develop the title and the descriptive body of all digital content published. Once you have researched the best Keyword strategy for your content, post it within the best or as within as many Revenue Sharing Publishing portals as you like.

Using Bookmarking Services to market your content

Social book marking services������ primary function is to store bookmarked Website pages online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add them from anywhere. They enable you to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. Because of the ability for many people to see what others on the Net are bookmarking, the services themselves have been turned into powerful marketing tools for getting content noticed by users all over the worldwide web. Once you have posted your ������keyworded������ Digital Content on a Revenue Sharing Publishing Portal, you should immediately start a bookmarking campaign targeted at the bookmarked services sites that best fit your content. Do a little homework; different sites work well with varying categories of content. Your goal is to use keywords and bookmarking together to reach your target audience.

Article Directory Submissions

Article directories are websites that let anyone publish full or partial text articles. The major article directories have hundreds of thousands of users seeking content. Article directories also can be used to link back to full articles posted at revenue sharing portals. Articles increase traffic directly from their users and provide higher linking rates to your content as rated by Search engines, collectively drawing more traffic to your content.

In conclusion, there are many ways to skin this cat! You can start your own Web site and promote it. You can publish your content on MySpace, YouTube, Associated Content, Babelation or wherever. The bottom line is that you should be doing it all! Your goal should be to publish your content wherever and whenever you can. If you decide to publish your videos on Babelation and you have a MySpace account, you need to drive traffic from them to where you can make money! Shameless self-promoting is ok and welcomed at our site. You can and should put your own website or Blog address on everything you post! Eyeballs are the name of the game! The more eyes that see what you have to offer, the more money you make!

Steps

Create content,choose revenue sharing portal,use bookmarking service to market your content