What is the most important aspect of a business? Is it the brand, the products or the customers? Of course they are all important but there is one factor that trumps everything else and it's the money...
I've been running an offline business for 10 years and I've learned that I can have the best product, the best brand and the best customers. If at the end of the year, I don't manage to make ends meet, I will risk all of the above. The best way to make sure that you can cover your costs and that you can earn something from a business is to make sure that you have your numbers always under control.
You need to know how much you earn
In the content creation business, your expenses might not be as visible as in another business. However there are some expenses nevertheless. You need a computer or a phone, an internet connection, maybe you have a subscription that you pay for having an e-mail list or maybe you have the hosting of your own website to pay. The biggest cost that you have however is measured in time and its the hours that you spend running this business.
In order to see whether you earn money or loose money with your content creation business, you need to keep track of what you earn and what you spend. Only if you know how much you earn, will you be able to measure if your actions are helping you towards developing your business or not.
There are two major income sources on Hive. Curation rewards and Author rewards. But don't forget that there is a quantity of other possibilities to make money with your content.
Author rewards
It's quite difficult to know for what price your product will sell. If you are lucky you will get upvotes of whales or from curation trails. As a general rule, the more engagement you can generate and the more relationships you have on the platform, the more chances you have to get value to your posts.
When you are new to the platform the rewards on your posts may fluctuate between 0.00 $ and 1.00 $. If you have a lot of relationships and you engage a lot, then you can expect to reach post values between 1.5 $ and 25 $.
There will always be a certain grey area that will make it difficult to predict future author rewards earnings but by building your brand, market your products and engaging, you will have returns on your posts.
Where can I find my author rewards?
I suggest that you check your author rewards every month or every week and you write them into a spreadsheet. You can find your author rewards on hivestats.io. You should see the average of your rewards growing over time. If it's not the case, you have to ask yourself what you are doing wrong and how you can improve it.
Find your author and curation rewards of the last 30 days on hivestats.io. Write them into your spreadsheet at least once a month.
Curation rewards
On the same website, you will also see the curation rewards that you generated over a week or a month. Write this data down as well. Write on you spreadsheet also the number of Hive Power that you have at a certain time. I would suggest that you write down all the numbers in USD and also in HIVE.
How much curation rewards are you making?
If you have less than 150 Hive Power on your account, it will be very difficult to generate any curation rewards at all. If you have more than 150 HP, you should always make sure that your upvote power corresponds to at least 100 HP. Otherwise your upvotes won't get above the threshold and you will simply not earn any curation rewards.
If you have 200 HP or less, always vote with 100% to guarantee that you earn some curation rewards.
If your account is bigger than 200 HP, you should be able to generate at least 8% curation rewards. If you don't manage to do that, you are missing out opportunities:
- Make sure that your account doesn't stay at 100% voting mana too often. A good trick is to use hive.vote and to put automatic upvotes for 10 authors that you like. Put these upvotes at 4 to 5 minutes and then put the setting that the upvotes are given only if your voting power is above 90%. Like that you will give automatic upvotes only when your voting power is idle and it leaves a lot of room for manual upvoting.
- I repeat it again, make sure that your upvote is worth at least 100 HP. If you have 500 HP and you upvote with 10%, you won't get any curation rewards!
- If you upvote comments and you are the only one giving an upvote, you won't get any curation rewards if your upvote is not worth at least 0.02 $.
- Don't upvote stuff that is older than 6 days.
Other income sources
Hive Engine Tokens
With every post, every comment and every upvote you can earn twice if you use hive-engine tokens correctly.
This is something that most people fail to realize. Not all the Hive Engine tokens are worth our time. However there are some out there that you should have. If you stake these tokens and you write posts and add the correct tag, or you upvote posts with this tag, you will earn author or curation rewards in this token.
You can look at your income from Hive Engine Tokens in hivestats.io. Write this income also into your spreadsheet because it can become quite interesting.
Check out your income from Hive-engine tokens on hivestats.io
External income sources
Every post is an opportunity to promote things. You can embed referral links to other programs, affiliate links to affiliate offers or maybe even a link to your own website or webshop.
All this represents an amazing potential that can be exploited. However you should always do things in the correct order:
- First build your brand and your business
- Attract your customers and keep them happy
- Make sure that you cover your costs
- Develop new income sources
Control your numbers and make your business grow
Only once you have total control of the numbers that you generate, will you be able to navigate your business and develop it. Take the habit to control your progress and define goals that you want to achieve. This will help you to look at what you are doing in a professional way and it will keep you motivated over time.
One aspect about money that we haven't looked at is the staking of Hive. What is the appropriate staking strategy for your business? This will be the topic of the next post in this series.
This post is part of a series in which I want to rise the awareness that content creation is a business. The previous posts:
- Content Creation is a Business and you are the CEO
- The most important part of your content creation business: YOU
- Your content – The core of your business
- Why your Content needs a nice Packaging
- How to Market your Content Creation Business
- How to keep your readers happy?
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