Today’s lecture featured a presentation from Trevor Battye, another SFU professor, about marketing and monetization. Topics included examples of work and talks from Peter Thiel, Seth Goblin, and Steve Jobs. I loved his book and content suggestions from these individuals as I find them to be very refined and inspirational, based on my minimal research on them thus far.
In my opinion, the most interesting discussion was Trevor’s focus on encouraging us to think about how our audience can pay us – whether it be through subscriptions, crowdfunding (through websites like Kickstarter and FrontFundr), advertisements, or other kinds of investors and events. As a freelance video editor, I’ve felt passionate, yet confused, about how to appropriately charge others as per my offers, or their proposals. After the lecture, I asked Trevor, “what kinds of things should I consider when I give people prices for my work?”, to which he gave very wonderful advice. Not only did he state the obvious, “consider how much time you’re putting in”, but he also went into detail to describing how to things will change as I gain more experience and work on different projects. For example, as expected, lots of creators charge more for their work if they’re more experienced, or consider if you are able to create a bundle or contract with someone that you work with regularly. Another key consideration is: what is your competition like? Are you one-of-a-kind or is it very saturated in your niche? With these considerations, you will be able to create reasonable offers that are worth both your time and the time of the buyers, while learning and making iterations along the way.
Furthermore, he allowed students to volunteer their websites for review so he could, in the moment, recommend ways to monetize their content. For example, he suggested to a tattoo designer to create stickers, then suggested to a musician to start music classes. It was really intriguing to see real applications of monetization and how they can be tailored for different niches.
That said, I really appreciated today’s lecture as it connected directly to the things I was panicking about just the night before – will I be able to monetize my work enough to make a living?