6 Smart Ways to Diversify Your Income as a Content Creator

With over 12 years of travel content creation under her belt, Travelista Editor Jessica Ruth Gibson shares her insider knowledge on ways to diversify your income as a content creator – along with the smartest platforms to do so. 

1. Join Affiliate Networks

Let’s start with a basic definition of affiliates – this is when a creator makes a percentage commission when generating sales on products for other brands. This is usually tracked and measured via formatted web links known as ‘affiliate links’. The good thing about affiliate links is that they don’t impact the end user or the price they pay for any product. For example, if you booked a hotel via this booking.com link, Travelista would make a commission on that booking, but this is paid by the hotel as thanks for the referral. You, as the user, would pay exactly the same price and have the exact same booking experience. It’s that seamless.

You don’t need a blog or content website to use affiliates (they can also be shared on social media). But in terms of establishing affiliates as a passive income strategy, having a website with a good flow of organic traffic is best. 

When I first started blogging, affiliate networks were clunky and the opposite of user friendly. All that has changed now, with usability, human connection and smart AI being at the forefront of a good affiliate network. Many affiliate platforms now offer widgets that you can use to beautifully display selected products on your website. 

If, like Travelista, your content is based around travel, my top affiliate network recommendation is Stay22, which has helped Travelista to increase its  affiliate income by over 50% since joining in 2024. 

If you are interested in signing up, you can use our Stay 22 Travelista referral which will unlock an extra $100 bonus. 

2. Host Group Trips for your Community

Another great way to add an additional income stream to your content creation business is to consider hosting group trips for your community. Whether your community is based around travel, food, fitness, wellbeing, or something entirely different – hosting group trips is a great way to build your community, providing your members with an in-person opportunity to connect with yourself and your brand. As the host, you’d get to choose the dates, destination and an itinerary that you feel  would best appeal to your audience. It’s a great idea to run polls and surveys to gauge travel preferences. 

Piecing these trips together without the involvement of a third party tour operator is an insurance nightmare (trust me, I’ve looked into it). But the great news is that there are some brilliant tour operators who are dedicated to supporting content creators and community leaders to design, launch and host their own trip. They take care of all the logistics of the trip, whilst it’s your job to promote it to your community and sell the places. Creators make money from hosting these trips as they apply a variable profit margin to each booking. I have recently  learned that creators have earned between $4,000 – $15,000 per trip with TourHero. Some creators have even made $80k+

TourHero is a leading and trusted social travel platform in this space. Reasons why I like the sound of TourHero; 

• Over 80 worldwide destinations to choose from with vetted and trusted experiences in each of them
• No rigid itineraries – as the host you get to tailor the trip to tour audience 
• A personalised booking platform, keeping the whole booking journey on brand 
• Your audience is offered secure payment plans to help spread the cost 

Before deciding on a group trip tour operator, it’s always a good idea to read reviews from other creators. Read TourHero reviews and decide for yourself.

3. Display Advertising on your site

If you have a website, getting to grips with display advertising for your website can be one of the most lucrative things you do for your business. You may well be seeing display ads within this article as you read it. This allows us to write and publish free content for you, the user, as it is monetised by display advertising. After the initial set up process, display advertising becomes an entirely passive income stream. In short, the more traffic your site receives, the more money you make. As the publisher, you are in control of the ad density and the ad placement on your site, so there is a good element of control still. It’s also a great motivator to work on increasing  your website traffic with articles that perform well organically on Google search rankings.  

In order to introduce display ads to your website, you need a display ad partner. This partner acts as an intermediate between you and the advertiser, and is key to your success and display advertising strategy. The industry leader in display advertising, which is often seen as the ‘holy grail’ to online publishers is Mediavine. Its the holy grail because you can only get accepted onto the Mediavine platform with a minimum of 50,000 monthly page views. But once accepted, you can be earning good money from the off. 

If your site is not there yet in terms of traffic, Monumetric is a brilliant alternative to Mediavine and accepts publishers with 10,000 monthly page views as a minimum. Monumentric is allowing smaller publishers to still benefit from display advertising and plays a supportive role in helping you to reach your traffic and display advertising income goals. 

If you post videos on a YouTube channel, TikTok or Facebook, you could also stand to make a passive monthly income from advertising being played before your content is streamed. 

4. Design, Launch and Sell Digital Products

Digital products is another great way for content creators to open up an additional income stream. Like many other options, the initial set up requires time and work. You’d need to create a quality product (or a suite of products) that offers your audience with a solution they are looking for.  A few of the best options for content creators include; 

• Tutorials or online courses 
• Digital guides  
• Templates
• e-books 

In terms of figuring out what type of digital product to create, think about where your expertise lies. How can you offer a solution to your audiences particular pain points? Canva is a great platform to help design beautiful digital products. The free version offers a lot but the paid-for Pro version will help you take things to that next level. Here at Travelista we use the pro version of Canva on an almost-daily basis. Once you have your digital product(s) ready I’d recommend checking out Stan as the top platform to list, sell and take payment for your digital products. 

5. Sell Merchandise or Physical Products

Selling physical products is an area I haven’t explored as a digital publisher and content creator, but never say never. I have seen many friends take this route and have some incredible sales results as a result of designing their own products and apps. For example, my friend and fellow creator Amelia has designed and launched her own travel-inspired adult colouring book called Doglet and Froglet. The colouring book is inspired by her son and her dog, so there is a lovely  personal story behind the product. 

The products you create depend on your own interests and audience. If you have an idea for a product that you know your audience would love and benefit from, why not run with that idea? 

Selling physical products do require a greater financial investment (compared to digital products) but print-on-demand merchandise is also an option, but lower risk would also result in lower profit margins. There are a lot of platforms that make it easy to create branded merchandise options such as Merchery. If you wanted to create something very specific and bespoke, you could also manufacture a product at the source to ensure it is 100% unique to your brand. In terms of an affordable platform to sell your products on (with seamless website integration) Shopify is your top choice. 

6. Grow Your Email List

As well as an additional way to connect with your audience and share content with them, Building an email list is a great way to pull all of your income streams together.  With an active email list of subscribers you could;

• Communicate with your most engaged audience members, direct to their inbox
• Provide them with value and extra content 
• Opportunity to drive additional traffic to your website 
• Opportunity to include affiliate links to physical products 
• Opportunity to include links to your own digital or physical products 

At Travelista, we use and love Flodesk to design our emails and manage our subscriber lists. It’s a beautiful design-led platform that is incredibly user friendly. It offers a huge amount of customisable templates that look incredibly slick and professional, without the need for a graphic designer.

You can get 50% your first year with Flodesk using our referral link  

To Conclude

There is so much strategy that lies beneath the surface of content creation and and community management, most of which is totally invisible to the end user. Because it’s all so discreet, it can feel impossible and overwhelming to being to understand it. So I hope this article can act as a good springboard and provide inspiration to fellow and aspiring content creators. Why not pick one of the 6 income streams that you are not currently utilising and invest some time into setting one up this year? 

My final piece of advice to content creators is to remain as authentic and unique as you can possibly be. Although it’s tempting to follow the crowds, you won’t grow your content creation business by being like everyone else. You will grow it by being your unique self and by creating content that is inspiring, honest and relatable to your audience. 

jessica ruth gibson

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