There are millions of digital marketers worldwide who are experiencing the downturn brought on by the global Coronavirus outbreak.
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The pandemic has caused a devastating drop in organic traffic in most industries, and because of this, many digital marketers are finding it hard to make money in their respective niches.
However, while organic traffic is down in most industries, it’s skyrocketing in others.
According to a recent study, those in the news, food, and healthcare industries, as well as businesses in the financial space are experiencing unprecedented levels of web traffic.
This opens up countless opportunities for digital marketers to make money during this time.
But it also means that you may have to adjust the type of content, products, and services that you offer to account for new consumer tastes during this pandemic.
In this article, you will discover smart advice about how to earn money from digital marketing so you can stay afloat financially in this current economic crisis.
But first:
Identify All Your Skills
Your first step is to look into your chest of skills and draw out everything that can help you make money right now.
This can be any type of skill including:
- Content creation
- Web design
- Copywriting, editing, or proofreading
- Creating how-to videos
- Video editing
- Social media marketing or management
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing
- …the list goes on!
During a pandemic like the one we’re facing today, many businesses tend to reduce their financial expenses by cutting their product marketing budgets.
However, smart businesses capitalize on situations like these by employing digital marketers to help them increase their traffic and leverage their websites to grow their business.
If you are equipped with relevant digital marketing skills, offering your services will help you keep a consistent flow of income.
Make a note of your non-digital marketing skills as well.
You can also benefit from your other skills even if they are not relevant to digital marketing.
For instance, I have a friend who has an e-commerce website that sells luxury handbags. She also happens to be a health nut, and when her site traffic ran dry, she created a course on Udemy focused on helping people keep fit while at home.
She then used her digital marketing skills to market her course to a massive audience of people looking for ways to stay fit while stuck at home and has since made thousands of dollars.
The bottom line is that anyone can make money online even in the midst of all this.
No matter what you did in the past or what you do now, there’s always an option you can choose that will align with your skills and passions.
Once you’ve identified your skills, you have a few options available to you:
- Sell your services
- Package and sell your knowledge
- Drive commission sales
1. Pitch Yourself
One of the best things you can do to start making money quickly is to leverage your skills.
As previously mentioned, businesses are looking for more affordable ways to market their products, and if you have the skills to boost their online presence and help them get more customers, they’ll pay to get the results they need.
For instance, if content creation is one of your skills, you might look at job boards like ProBlogger to find businesses willing to pay you for your blog writing skills. Once you connect with potential clients, you can send your application with links to some of your best previous work.
Alternatively, you can do a quick Google search to find remote opportunities in your field.
Say you specialize in social media management, look for websites that might benefit from your services, find the relevant contact on their website or Linkedin, and pitch yourself directly to them.
This type of cold pitching isn’t something that many people enjoy, but it can be a source of consistent income that will help you mitigate the money crisis that most digital marketers have been thrust into.
To help yourself stand out and increase the chances of attracting well-paying customers, you can set up a content or web development website where you can offer the following services:
- Website designing
- Content creation
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Social media management
- Social media marketing
- Blogging Services
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing
- SMS marketing
- App-based marketing
The trick here is to get proactive. There are countless businesses out there in need of your skills. Find them and show them what they stand to gain by hiring you, and you’ll have a steady stream of income before long.
2. Package Your Skills into a Course
A lot of people are using this pandemic to do many of the tasks they have always wanted to get done but never found the time.
If you have specialized skills or talents that you can share, consider creating and selling an online course. There’s a market for everything from cheesemaking to computer coding, and everything in-between.
With no clear timeframe as to when this global crisis will end, many people are turning to the internet for stuff like:
- Continuing their education
- Enhancing their skills
- Starting an online business
- Learning how to get fit
- Ideas for dating at home
- Dealing with stress and anxiety
- Finding easy ways to eat healthily
- Discovering effective skincare routines
- Learning how to achieve their money goals
- …and so on.
These are just a few of the things people want to do while they are stuck at home, and packaging your knowledge in these and other areas where people are willing to pay for your services offers a great way to make money right now.
You can use an online course platform like Teachable to build, promote, and sell your digital training.
Teachable has experienced phenomenal growth in recent months. The learning platform reports that over 100 of their creators have reached the $1 million sales mark since the pandemic began.
As a digital marketer, you can carve out your own slice of that pie by sharing your knowledge of building and growing businesses online.
Consider Doing Online Workshops
If you don’t have the time or resources required to create a high-quality online course, you could do an online workshop instead.
Tori Dunlap from Her First 100k, had massive success when she and her friend sold 150 spots to their digital workshop ‘How to make money online’ in early March. At $97 per slot, you can see how this can turn into a nice source of income for anyone with knowledge or skills to share.
If you don’t have an audience to market your course or workshop to, you can simply use an e-learning marketplace like Skillshare or Udemy that comes with a ready-made market of eager students.
And remember, you can earn a living from what you do (what’s on your business card), and you can also make money from what you know.
This means that you can use this for any skill that you have. It doesn’t have to be about digital marketing only.
Some people are making money during the pandemic by offering $8 per month Pilates classes. Others are earning a healthy income teaching students how to make cheese boards!
You can get as creative as you want with your course or workshop. Teach what you know and then use your digital marketing skills to promote and sell your work.
3. Create a Money-Making Blog
Amid the worldwide lockdown, a new wave of content creators has emerged to cater to the needs of people everywhere who are stuck at home.
The ‘creator economy’ encompasses both professional creatives and first-time creators who are crafting content as strategic business plays.
If you have an area of expertise in one of the niches that are getting loads of traffic right now, creating a blog is a great way to share your advice on certain activities and make money.
You can create content in the form of blog posts, videos, and photography to share with an ever-growing audience online.
There are plenty of effective monetization strategies that you can use to start generating revenue from your blog, such as:
- Offering coaching/consulting services
- Offering relevant physical and digital products
- Launching virtual summits in your niche
- Generating revenue with sponsored posts and reviews
- Selling courses and ebooks
In short, pivot and focus on the topics that your audience is more interested in right now. This can be anything from easy recipes and staying fit, to keeping kids entertained, virtual travel, quarantine gift-giving guides, and so on.
This is how a lot of digital marketers, influencers, and freelancers have been making a living despite the downturn in ad spend, sponsored posts, and organic traffic in their respective niches.
4. Create Subscription-Based Memberships
If there’s one thing this creator economy has proven, it’s that content is an unstoppable force. With billions of people in lockdown, internet traffic has exploded, which makes it even easier to become visible online.
Creating premium content is a great way to share your knowledge with members of your audience who are willing to pay to discover information that can’t be easily found elsewhere.
There are tons of Patreon accounts popping up in every niche, and ‘only-fans’ content is exploding on social media.
If you already provide tons of free content, you could look into different ways of enhancing that offering. For instance, you might create how-to videos, courses, and guides and share them on YouTube.
YouTube has a low barrier to entry, and you can monetize the videos by password-protecting your content for paying viewers only or charge a subscription fee.
Take a page out of 19-year-old YouTuber, Matt Par’s book. He has amassed a million subscribers on YouTube and uses various monetization strategies to turn his traffic into a consistent income.
5. Drive Commission Sales
With most other business models like ad revenue and sponsored content drying up, marketers have to find ways to diversify, and driving commission sales is a tried and true method for making money in any economy.
You can do this in two ways: Affiliate Marketing, and Dropshipping.
Affiliate Marketing
Although the recent cuts to Amazon’s commission rates greatly affected a lot of businesses, affiliate marketing is still a great way to make money online for digital marketers.
You can refer customers to products like books, makeup, and other types of merchandise and get paid a commission for each sale made.
All you need to do is register with one or more affiliate networks and use your affiliate links to refer people to various products that they are searching for right now.
Depending on your chosen niche, there are many great affiliate marketing programs you can choose from, including:
- E-commerce Affiliate Programs (ShareASale, Amazon Associate, CJ Affiliate, etc.)
- Travel (Travelpayouts)
- Dating Affiliate Programs (Cupid Media, Match.com, Eharmony, etc.)
- Web Hosting Affiliate Programs (WPengine, Liquid Web, SiteGround, etc.)
- Educational Affiliate Programs (Coursera, Skillshare, Udemy, Teachable, etc.)
- Gaming Affiliate Programs (Razer, Logitech, Alienware, etc.)
- Online Marketing Tools Programs (GanttPro, PromoRepublic, etc.)
Online marketplaces like Amazon have experienced a huge increase in demand for various products due to the pandemic, and this presents marketers with the perfect opportunity to make money from these sales through affiliate marketing.
If you plan to use paid ads to promote your affiliate offers, you can easily build high converting landing pages and sales funnels using ClickFunnels. They provide a 14-day free trial, and have a huge selection of pre-built templates.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping is when the manufacturer carries the inventory and ships it to your customers on your behalf.
There are a lot of similarities between the two business models, but the main difference is that in dropshipping, you get to set your own prices for the products you sell and are responsible for marketing and customer support.
Conclusion
There you have it. Five effective ways to make money from digital marketing during this pandemic.
Instead of waiting and hoping that things will return to normal soon, use the information in this article to help you set up streams of income that will help you now and in the post-corona world.
What other methods are you using to make money from digital marketing right now? Let us know in the comments below!
