Eight Ways to Monetize Yourself

Discover how you can monetize yourself with these eight methods.

You have value.

That value may live in your head, through all of the knowledge and expertise you’ve gained in your field over the years. Or it may come from your work ethic and your willingness to try new things (and get others to try them, too). Either way, you have value, and there are people out there who are willing to pay for that value.

Your challenge?

You don’t know how to monetize yourself and sell your skills, which means you’re not yet part of the 36% of Americans who class themselves as “independent workers.” Platforms like BlurBay can help by giving you a platform to set up your own pay-per-view streaming page. Sound interesting?

Keep reading to discover how you can monetize yourself and become truly independent in the way you work.

Method 1 – Build a Masterclass and Monetize Yourself

Let’s return to this idea of you having a ton of information floating around in your head.

That’s something you can monetize – what you know may be something that other people don’t know, and those people are often willing to pay for you to teach them. Enter the masterclass. The idea behind masterclasses is that it’s a “do-it-for-yourself” online product. In other words, you’re the teacher who provides the expertise that helps somebody else go out and do something that they’re currently struggling to do, all via instructional and inspirational videos.

As for the subject of your masterclass, it all comes down to what you know. If you’re a personal trainer, you have tons of information about nutrition, technique, and fitness regimes in your head. That information becomes the crux of videos that you create (and charge for) that others who may not be able to engage you in person can still use for themselves. And best of all, you don’t need to know how to build a website to share those videos. Services like BlurBay can host your videos without you needing to build a website, including handling the pay-to-view streaming capabilities that drive revenue, so you just focus on making your videos and developing ways to monetize yourself.

Method 2 – Inspire People With Your “Transformation Statement”

You don’t just have knowledge in your head. You have a story to tell the world, and that story is the root of something that serial entrepreneur Sunny Lenarduzzi calls your “transformation statement.”

She highlights that statement as being key to monetizing yourself because it’s what you use to tell your clients how they can change their lives. And why does it work? Because you have first-hand experience that shows it works.

In Lenarduzzi’s case, her transformation statement is about evolving from a burnt-out solopreneur to somebody who can create eight-figure scalable businesses. Her clients want an eight-figure business. So, they’re going to see her statement and think, “She’s the one for me.”

What’s your statement, then?

Start with your story. What are the hurdles you’ve overcome to get to where you are, and how does that experience apply to the people to whom you will market yourself? Odds are, there are people out there facing the same hurdles, and your transformation statement shows them you’re the person who can help them to make the jump.

Method 3 – Try House Hacking

If you can’t monetize yourself and what’s in your mind, monetize the most valuable asset you own – your home.

House hacking is all about turning your home into a source of income, with the most obvious method being to get set up on Airbnb. CNBC reports that the average Airbnb host makes $924 per month from renting out a spare room to guests, which is a nice supplemental income. That figure can explode into thousands of dollars monthly if you have an entire home to rent or several spare rooms.

There are costs, of course. You need to maintain the living spaces your guests use and may end up paying for anything they break. But it’s ideal as a low-effort way to monetize yourself (or what you own), and you can deactivate your listing at any time if it’s not for you.

Method 4 – How to Monetize Yourself by Branding Yourself

We live in a world where every individual is just a Google search away.

That goes for you, too, but the odds are that a Google search for your name generates results that have nothing to do with you. Monetizing yourself means changing that scenario.

Start with a website, which you can build for free using providers like BlurBay, so people who look you up have something to land on. Prop that up with a strong LinkedIn profile (more chance of it appearing in results) and consider using an internet reputation management company to generate content on other websites that link back to your name and the business you’ve created.

The goal is to take control of your brand. You can write your own narrative through your website and supporting content, so the business you create is what people see when they research you.

Method 5 – Help People Develop

There are four things that most people want to develop – health, wealth, happiness, and relationships.

You may not be an expert in all of those things.

That’s okay, because your prospective clients may not need help developing all four. What’s important here is that you recognize that not everything you show people necessarily has to do with teaching skills to help them earn more. Coming back to the personal trainer (PT) example from earlier, a PT understands health better than most, even if they don’t understand wealth. Ask yourself which of the four pillars you understand better than most.

The answer is what you can monetize and sell to others.

Method 6 – Offer Personalized Training and Sell Your Skills

Masterclasses are effective at getting your training in front of an audience, especially once you learn how to monetize yourself, your streams, and videos. But not everybody wants something as impersonal as a video. They want face-to-face training with somebody who’s going to dedicate in-person time to helping them succeed.

Do you have the time to spare?

Combine that with your knowledge, and you can monetize yourself by offering personalized training. Of course, the training you offer will vary based on your expertise and what your clients need. But even in an increasingly remote-oriented world, about two-thirds of people still prefer to receive in-person training.

Here’s an idea – create a masterclass of pay-per-stream videos while offering personalized training to those who need it. That’s two ways to monetize yourself in one service.

Method 7 – Build Strategic Partnerships

Monetizing yourself doesn’t necessarily mean monetizing yourself.

That sounds confusing, right?

Let’s explain. If you don’t feel that you have any marketable skills or knowledge that you could turn into a course or masterclass, and you don’t own property, you still have one thing – the ability to sell.

That’s where strategic partnerships come in. Sometimes called affiliate marketing, strategic partnerships see you teaming up with a company that has something to sell, with you doing the selling for them. You get a cut from every sale and you have the chance to learn about what your partner does, making you an expert in that subject.

What does that mean?

You can use strategic partnerships to develop the expertise that you then go on and sell through masterclasses and courses. Think of this as a foundational method where you’re not technically monetizing yourself, but you’re building yourself up (and earning some income) until you’re ready to monetize with other methods.

Method 8 – Monetize Your Time

There’s one thing everybody has, but few people utilize – spare time.

That doesn’t mean the time you spend with your family (or on yourself). That’s time that’s essential for recharging your batteries. Rather, it means time that you’re sort of spending, but not really.

Your commute, for example. Right now, that’s just time you spend getting to and from work. You could monetize that time by handling a couple of food deliveries via DoorDash or a similar app. It’s “spare” time you’re already spending on traveling anyway, so why not use it to make a little money?

Another example – your lunch breaks at work.

Try packing a quick side gig into the time that you don’t spend eating. Again, deliveries are an option here, but you could also do something more fun, like spending 30 minutes walking dogs for people in the neighborhood.

You won’t build a full business out of any of these little side gigs. But they can be nice little earners to make use of the time you’re already spending, just not in a money-driven way.

You Are Money, So Make the Most of You

Today’s online world gives you more chances to monetize yourself than you’ve ever had before.

Start with what you know. How can you turn all the knowledge floating around in your head into something that helps other people? Find an answer to that question and you have the foundations of a business selling courses or delivering masterclasses for which people pay their hard-earned.

If selling your expertise isn’t an option, making better use of your time or resources is. Renting out rooms, running deliveries during your commute, and even using your selling skills to help partners are all great ways to monetize who you are and what you have.

Finally, you need a place to showcase your most valuable asset – you. You need to learn how to monetize yourself and sell your skills.

You don’t even need a website to showcase that asset (though having sites as supporting tools helps) when you use a tool like BlurBay. If you go down the masterclass route, BlurBay is the perfect place to upload your videos because it provides a space, controlled by you, to upload your training and get paid for it.