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- THE AUDIENCE MONETISATION PLAYBOOK
THE AUDIENCE MONETISATION PLAYBOOK
Unlock the true value of your audience with this step-by-step guide for turning followers into revenue.
Niall Ratcliffe
January 26, 2025
In partnership with
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BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY
Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky to meet some very cool people. But very few times have I been shocked like I was this week.
Because this week someone with a MASSIVE social media community came by our office. I’m talking 200,000+ followers across platforms.
This wasn’t a personal brand following or some fake followers they’d paid for, this was a community they’d built from the ground up. Truly incredible. But after we’d spent the first 20 minutes chatting about how they’d built the community, they said something that left me in shock…
They were making less than £50,000 a year.
In my head, I was thinking:
They were caking it.
Maybe they’d hired a team?
That they were sitting on a gold mine.
But the truth is, they were sat on a pot of gold and hadn’t figured out how to crack it open.
100,000s of people at their fingertips, yet no real way to monetise it. Wild.
So, we rolled up our sleeves and mapped out a monetisation plan for them. By the time they left, we’d built a clear strategy to help them unlock the real potential of their audience.
And today, I’m going to share that plan with you.
In 2025, it is easier than ever to build a following, but monetising it is another story. This plan will show you exactly how to do just that.
Here’s my audience monetisation playbook:
Step 1: Understand What An Audience Is
The biggest mistake you can make while growing a following is not understanding what an audience is.
It’s not a bunch of randomers.
It’s not just a number on a screen.
It’s not just people who see your content.
It’s a group of people with a shared interest.
Sometimes that interest is a sport, a message, an activity, or even just a person. But no matter what, every single audience that has ever been has been a group of people with a shared interest.
Once you understand that, you can start to understand just how valuable an audience can be. Because when you have a bunch of people who want one thing… you’ve got demand.
And demand is where the monetisation starts.
(CONTEXT: In the case of the person who came into the office, their audience’s shared interest was they were people looking for jobs.)
Step 2: Own The Audience
Most audiences are built on social media—by far the easiest place to grow a following. But it comes with one huge flaw: it’s not really your audience.
The platform can delete your account.
The algorithm can bury your content.
Trends can shift and your followers may abandon the platform.
Our friend who came into the office had built their entire audience on social media. And while that gave them visibility, it left them with very little control.
The solution? Own the audience.
The best way to do that is by building a newsletter. When people subscribe, they’re opting in to hear from you directly. You control the list, not an algorithm or platform. And unlike social media followers, an owned audience is ten times more valuable.
But there is an issue with newsletters too… nobody wants to subscribe to another newsletter.
Step 3: Create Entry Points
Most of us are already drowning in emails and no one needs another newsletter in their inbox. So, if our friend wanted people to actually join their newsletter they needed to give people a no-brainer reason to join.
Our suggestion: Create no-brainer entry points.
These are essentially lead magnets that contain something genuinely useful that appeals to their specific audience. In this case—seen as how the audience is job seekers—you want to create lead magnets like:
A Social Media CV Template
A 7-step Job Interview Checklist
Cheat Sheet for Common Job Interview Questions
All you need to do is promote the lead magnets to your audience and slowly but surely they will flow over to the newsletter.
The result? Not just a larger newsletter, but a more engaged, high-quality audience - because through creating these “resources” you provide more value to them also.
Step 4: The Evergreen Entry Point
I love a no-brainer entry point more than anyone, but constantly churning out a new lead magnet every single week is tough. That’s where the evergreen entry point comes in.
An evergreen entry point is simply an “entry point” that you can promote all of the time and people will constantly trickle through.
My favourite type of evergreen entry point: an assessment.
For our friends following, an employability assessment would be perfect here.
All they’d need to do is:
A) Set up the assessment on a platform like ScoreApp.
B) Define the key questions that assess someone’s employability.
C) Share the link regularly on social channels, bio, or website.
And they’d have a constant trickle of people to their newsletter.
But there’s another massive benefit of an assessment entry point - it exposes a problem. Because once you hear that you didn’t score high on the employability assessment, that’s something you need to fix.
That’s when you swoop in to fix it…
Step 5: Highlight Common Problems, Sell Simple Solutions
Here’s where the true power of the employability assessment comes in: it doesn’t just engage your audience and funnel them into the newsletter—it highlights a problem they didn’t realise they had.
You no longer have an audience with a shared interest, you have an audience with a common problem.
This is the perfect opportunity to provide them with a simple solution. In this case, that would look like:
Affiliate Marketing:
Recommend a trusted upskilling course that can help them improve their score. Partner with the course provider and earn a commission (e.g. 20%) for every sale.Create Your Own Course:
Build a course tailored to improving employability. The beauty here is that it’s a natural progression—they’ve already recognised the problem, and now you’re offering the solution.
This process takes your audience from passive followers to customers, they go from:
Problem aware: They see where they’re lacking.
Solution aware: They understand how to fix it.
Action: They buy the course and become a customer
You’re no longer the page/person they follow on social media, you’re the person who solves a specific problem for them.
Now you’re in the money.
Step 6: Sell Their Attention
By this point, our friend had a solid foundation—a newsletter full of job seekers, solutions to their problems, and a clear value to offer. But there was still another simple way to monetise this audience: sell their attention.
The reality is, when you’ve got a niche audience that’s engaged, businesses want in. And for them, with a community of job seekers, it’s a no-brainer.
Here’s what we suggested:
Newsletter Ads: Companies offering tools or services for job seekers (think CV-building tools or online courses) would love to advertise in their newsletter. It’s an easy sell because the audience is exactly who they want to reach.
Job Board: Why not turn part of the newsletter into a mini job board? Companies looking to hire social media talent could pay to promote their roles directly to their subscribers. It’s relevant, useful, and another stream of revenue.
Both ideas take advantage of the trust he’s built with their audience and generate steady income without a ton of extra effort.
The best part? It’s not just good for them—it’s good for the community too. By curating the right ads and job opportunities, he’s actually providing more value to their audience while getting paid for it.
Step 7: Exclusive & Private
At this point, you could sit back and just scale up the options I mentioned above. But the only thing better than revenue is recurring revenue and it’s always a good idea to integrate that into the business.
In our friends’ case, with a highly engaged audience AND their new newsletter, an option for a paid or exclusive part of the community is a no-brainer.
The simplest way to do this: create a paid newsletter.
2 options when going down this route:
Affordable: Charge £1 a week and offer exclusive tips, tools, or insights tailored to job seekers. It’s accessible and creates a low barrier for people to say “yes.”
Premium: If they wanted to go high-end, they could offer something transformational—like deep-dive career coaching or masterclasses—and charge £1,000 a year for it.
For simplicity, we suggested starting with the £1-a-week model. They could use the free newsletter to promote the paid version, showing readers the extra value they’d get for a tiny investment.
And for their audience, it’s a no-brainer. They already trust them, and they knows their pain points better than anyone else. The result? A steady, recurring revenue stream for them, and even more value for their community.
It’s the ultimate win-win.
(OPTIONAL) STEP 8: Scale with an Agency Model
Looking a little further down the line, if you want to make the big bucks you always have an option to scale up with an agency model.
For our friend with their community of job seekers, we laid out two potential paths:
Sell Attention to Businesses (B2B):
They could create an agency that connects companies to their audience. For example, this could mean offering recruitment services—matching job seekers to companies—or creating advertising opportunities where brands can promote themselves to their highly targeted audience.Solve the Audience’s Problem (B2C):
The other option? Build a service that directly solves the shared challenges their audience faces. Job seekers often struggle with things like CV building, interview prep, or upskilling.
This isn’t a small step—it’s a serious move toward turning a community into a business powerhouse. But if executed well, it can take revenue to a completely different level while delivering massive value to both businesses and their audience.
🌱 THE GREENHOUSE
Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:
TL;DR
Step 1: Understand audience
Step 2: Own them
Step 3: Create entry points
Step 4: Use evergreen assessments
Step 5: Sell solutions
Step 6: Monetise with ads
Step 7: Add MRR
Step 8 (Optional): Scale with an agency
Now that is how you monetise an audience.
Hopefully, you found this useful, if you did… why not share this with a friend?
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
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