The lifeblood of your content creation business - Money

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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.

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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.

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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:




Let's connect on Hive, Lbry or on Publish0x

My free e-mail course: The 100'000 satoshis a week strategy



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35 comments
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Realy good post-
19.661 HP
(25.110 HP)-how much upvote to give

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Thanks a lot for your comment. I took the liberty to look at your wallet to answer your question.

If we look only at your staked Hive (HP), you need to have at least 100 HP to get these curation rewards. On the other hand when I look at your hive engine wallet, I see that you have a lot of staked CTP tokens. In this respect you should concentrate your upvotes to posts that carry the #ctp tag or that show on ctptalk.com. You will earn quite a lot of curation rewards if you upvote such posts.

From Hiveblocks I see that you upvote around 3 to 5 posts a day using less than 100% per upvote. You are missing out quite a lot of potential there. Try to give at least 10 upvotes per day on posts carrying the ctp tag to maximise your curation rewards. Like that you can earn much more curation rewards in ctp tokens. As a nice side effect you will make authors happy if you give them these upvotes.

Hope this was understandable ;-)

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Thanks for value infos.I am still new in this...How about resteem posting-i do that like 3 a day mostly

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I remember how I struggled to understand everything at the beginning. It can be daunting. Don't give up :-).

You are free to resteem any post that you want. However you can't earn anything with resteeming posts. You will simply feature the posts in your own blog.

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Excellent post, Achim. Very informative. I have been tracking some of these stats, but I will be putting several of these strategies into practice beginning today. Thank you for sharing your knowledge of how this all works.

I do have a question for you. You mentioned "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." I am not sure which tag you are referring to. Can you give an example or two of "the correct tag"?

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Thanks a lot for your comment. I've started to write an answer to your question but it became so long that I decided to make a video about it :-). It's currently uploading to 3speak and I will add the link to it here once it's online.

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Excellent post as always, Achim! Money management is an important "skill" that we should develop and learn about... We have to know how much can we spend, and that should be less or the same as we earn... (not usually the case... lol...)

You have pointed out some of the major earning opportunities on Hive, but there are a lot more... earn by playing games, leasing HP, selling digital products, art... But, you would need a couple of hours to list all them... :)

Good job!



Made in Canva

@thisisawesome Moderator


This post is AWESOME!

It will therefore get a manual 100% upvote from @thisisawesome (will be done today), for the Awesome Daily Highlights in category CTPtalk, we give out 1 such vote in that category per day, plus 4 more in other categories, and your post will also be featured in today's Awesome Daily Curation report for more visibility.

The goal of this project is to "highlight Awesome Content, and growing the Hive ecosystem and the CTPtalk tribe by rewarding it".


Source

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(Edited)

I tried to stay close to the earning possibilities related to content creation but of course there are plenty of other earning possibilities, starting with games :-).

I believe that in any online business, people always expect to earn a lot at a later stage and they start their journey by making a lot of expenses. They believe that with the tools the success will come automatically. Unfortunately this is not true and the only solution for success is hard work. For these people the dammage has already been done. They spent their money and they won't see it again.

That's why I believe that the money side of this business is extremely important even for beginners. While looking at the numbers they can evaluate how much they can earn with this business and then see whether they have enough to cover some subscriptions or buy some tools.

Thanks a lot for your comment!

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(Edited)

Huh... Crypto is a dangerous minefield if you invest money in it... There are hundreds (or maybe thousands) of coins (projects) at the moment, and if someone doesn't know what it's doing, there is big % that it will lose or the majority of the money or everything...

And with the mentality, "I will buy XX coin, and it will earn me $10K every month after a year" doesn't help...

And I don't want to go into affiliate marketing upgrades, tools, traffic, etc... That's maybe even more dangerous than crypto :)

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There are hundreds (or maybe thousands) of coins (projects) at the moment, and if someone doesn't know what it's doing, there is big % that it will lose or the majority of the money or everything...

How many of these coins have real use cases? It makes me sometimes think of the Tulip crisis in Holland and the big financial buble that exploded there. Coins are great but without use cases, they are totally worthless.

And I don't want to go into affiliate marketing upgrades, tools, traffic, etc... That's maybe even more dangerous than crypto :)

It's very easy to spend a lot of money for these tools and they come often in a kind of subscription that forces us to pay every month... Not exactly thing for a business.

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How many of these coins have real use cases? It makes me sometimes think of the Tulip crisis in Holland and the big financial buble that exploded there. Coins are great but without use cases, they are totally worthless.

Yeah, the question about the use case of coins was something that I was talking about in my video about my Hive purchase... I think that that would be the "filter" for good and bad coins in the next run... which is coming...

I didn't hear about Tulip crisis... Can you just give me an insight?

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I didn't hear about Tulip crisis... Can you just give me an insight?

It's the mother of all financial bubbles:

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You nailed it . Hive can be used very effectively to promote business and give you money for promoting your own business.

It is amazing aspect that is hidden from view of many.

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If you use hive correctly it can ideed become a very interesting promotional tool.

Thanks a lot for your comment!

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A lot of people never see the curation rewards coming their way because their HP is <100/150
They give up not knowing that they should work towards reaching the 100/150 mark.
A very important point indeed.

Another interesting thing you mention is putting the vote time at about 4-5 minutes that reminds me of the good old steemit days when there used to be a 15 min vote threshold for the author.
So any votes coming to the post in those 15 min meant all rewards go to the author.
Any idea if any such time threshold exists today on hive/steem?
or it has been done away with?

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Thanks a lot for your comment my friend.

It is true that small users are simply not aware of what curation rewards are and they often give up before they see it happenening. Or as you said they set their upvotes in a manner that prevents them from getting these rewards.

There is this same threshold now as it was on hive and it is at 5 minutes. If you put upvotes at 4 minutes, you loose a bit reward but you gain because your votes are before all the others.

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Dear @achim03 I feel we need to follow these essential details to be making some money. I feel every new user should be aware of these facts as well.

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You're a magician, nice explanation and yeah control and properly calculation would give you profit in the long run.

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Thanks a lot for your kind comment!

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Your posts are really valuable reading.
It is true, it is no use running a business if the money are running out faster than they come in.

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Thanks a lot for your kind feed-back.

The problem is often that people have no clue about what they are earning and what they are spending. I've seen very few people in online businesses that knew how much they were making. Only if you have control over your number you will know whether your business generates enough income to fund an e-mail software or other subscriptions.

I believe it's a good plan to grow organically in this business. First we try to make some profit and when we have some profit we can reinvest it in order to scale our business.

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It is very important to keep good accounting in your business to see profits when making your income and expenditure comparison chart to if you have knowledge of how much you spend and how much comes in and how much you can spend and that way you can see if your actions are helping you to develop your business or not. and as far as creating content there are two actions reward for authorship and reward for healing, is very relative as fences creating content you have several opportunities that the whales vote you and fence increasing your income, and in the same way you can correct what you do wrong in order to continue earning more, if you upload a quality publication can have its positive reward, Thanks friend for such good work

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Keeping track of what we earn is the only parameter that we can really control. As you said we don't know how much we will earn with our posts and our curation. So if we keep track well, we can find an average income that will allow us to know how much we earn with this business and what kind of investments we can make.

Thanks a lot for your comment!

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When I usually read a post that talk about author rewards and curation rewards, I don't see they talk about how to keep track of your earnings. It's a business. And when you have the information about what's actually going on, you can do what works better.

Thank you @achim03 for sharing this. Looking forward to reading your next post.

Posted Using LeoFinance

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I think that keeping track of your results is the best way to improve ourselves. Otherwise we just base our decisions on subjective feelings that are strongly influenced by our mood and the daily situation we live in.

Thanks a lot for your comment!

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Hello friend, I hope you are well.

Thank you for always sharing useful and valuable content for the community.

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Thanks a lot for your kind comment my friend!

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Thanks to your posts I started looking more closely at my curation rewards.

I was earning nicely in tribe tokens, but the hive rewards were not that great.

I now see the percentage going up almost daily and I will keep upvoting at 100% for quite a bit longer.

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That's great man. This is such an important aspect of upvoting and so many people don't know about it.

Thanks a lot for your comment and the reblog!

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You’re welcome, more people need to know these things indeed. They’re missing out on the easiest income that you can get on hive.

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