If you are a member of a specific community, do yourself a big favor. Consider alternative media. You probably will do your community a great service by putting one up because you will share the latest and greatest news. You will give people a platform to share their views and opinions. You would also enable community members to strengthen their bonds with each other.
Oftentimes, communities are spread out throughout the world. They’re spread out in terms of income. They’re spread out in terms of educational attainment. There are just many different walls that separate them.
It would be great for people who share a specific community. Whether it’s an interest in a specific car, toys, anime, sexual orientation, certain religious practices, certain beliefs, it doesn’t matter. When you have this common space, all those artificial barriers start dissolving. Sounds awesome, right? Sounds inspiring. Well, they are.
However, the problem is there is one factor getting in the way. It’s called money. Sure, you have all these amazing dreams and visions of putting up this amazing platform to serve your community. The problem is the bottom line still has to be met. Somebody still has to pay for hosting, somebody still has to pay for the writer, somebody still has to pay for the photos and to ensure that, on a large scale, the project is worth more than the bother.
I know that raising the topic of profit is quite unwelcome. It’s like farting at a party. However, it’s there. It has to be confronted. It has to be dealt with.
The good news is putting up an alternative media site is no longer as big of a sacrifice as it was before. In fact, it’s no sacrifice at all if you know what you’re doing. It can be quite lucrative.
You have to understand alternative media means specific communities. If you are able to find advertisers that are desperate to reach those communities, you will be able to bank all day every day. Here are just some monetization ideas for alternative media site.
One, you can sell press release mentions. You can sell ad placements. You can sell branded advertising. You can sell e-mail collection and on and on it goes. The key here is to develop a fine-tuned, laser-targeted, community-centered platform, and then everybody who has an interest in that population group will beat a path to your door.
Keep the first things first. Focusing on the money is like putting the cart before the horse. Focus on delivering the goods first and everything else will follow. That’s how you make money with an alternative media site in the age of social media. That’s how you push back. That’s how you make an impact.
If you look at YouTube and you see these channels that only have 5- to 10,000 members, it’s very easy to just be dismissive. It’s very easy to say, “Well, their market is too small. How can they make money?”, but all that gets blown away when you click on their Patreon link and it turns out that they’re making $25,000 a month! Funny how that works, right? It’s all about community targeting.
If you are locked into your community, people would know that you care, and then people would step up and give you what you need to continue serving them. In other words, people wouldn’t care what you know until and unless they are convinced that you care. That’s the bottom line.