AFFILIATE MARKETING
How This 30-Year-Old Grew His Financial Planning Tool to $6k/Month WITHOUT Marketing or SEO

Kyle Nolan got the entrepreneurial bug early on in life. That spirit, together with the discovery of the Financial Independence movement and unsatisfactory search for a financial planning tool, led him to start his current side hustle, ProjectionLab.
For about 2 years, he has been working nights and weekends to develop this financial planning tool all by himself. Currently, he’s bringing in $6k per month and building a small but loyal community of dedicated users. And the adventure has only just begun.
Keep reading to find out:
- What happened when he discovered the FI movement
- How ProjectionLab works
- How he grew it without marketing it
- How growth in sales has evolved over time
- How much time he spends on his business
- His thoughts on SEO
- Which resources and tools he recommends
- His biggest challenge
- His greatest accomplishment
- His main mistake
- His advice for other entrepreneurs
Meet Kyle Nolan
Hey, I’m Kyle. I’m a software engineer from Boston who likes scuba diving, fishing, reading, and hiking… well, last I checked, at least. For the past two years, I’ve spent most of my free time bootstrapping ProjectionLab to $6k MRR as a side project and solo developer.
I just turned 30 this year, and ever since I was a kid, I’ve been passionate about making things. In elementary school, I remember learning excel to create a (terrible) trading card game and sell packs to other kids in the neighborhood. In middle school, I started coding video games, and since then I’ve always had a personal project or two on the side.
Nothing matches that feeling of taking something that’s just an idea in your head and manifesting it in the real world. It will always feel a little like magic. And with side projects, it’s refreshing and liberating to have full creative control, no stand-up meetings, no sprint retrospectives, no changing requirements, and no funding to worry about
ProjectionLab started as one of these creative outlets. I didn’t even have monetization in mind at the beginning.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve accumulated a pretty colossal graveyard of video games and personal projects. However, as people signed up for PL and feedback poured in, it became clear that this was destined for a different fate!
Having a growing and supportive community of users is really energizing, and even though my work is still scoped to nights and weekends while it’s a side project, I’m more than happy to devote those hours because it really doesn’t feel like work.
Why He Created ProjectionLab
Before I discovered the financial independence movement, I often grappled with the feeling that there should be more to life than working until you’re too old to enjoy it.
Does sacrificing the best hours of the best days of your best years to meetings, briefings, and bureaucracy really add up to your best life?
I’ve witnessed how lifestyle inflation, bad planning, and unforeseen events can keep people trapped in that pattern forever. So when I discovered the books and blogs of FI community legends like J.L Collins, Pete Adeney, Morgan Housel, and Grant Sabatier, I realized that I needed to start actually taking control of my financial future. I wanted to know that someday I could have the freedom to be my best self all the time, not just when I’d saved up enough PTO for a vacation.
Theory is nice, but I wanted a hands-on and visual way to map out all the options and explore the trade-offs between different life plans. So, I went looking for a good long-term planning and forecasting tool. Something modern, fluid, nuanced, and actually fun to use.
But somehow, that search for the perfect financial planning tool spiraled out of control… before I knew it, I was building a new one instead.
And after a couple of thousand hours of coding over the past two years of nights and weekends, I created ProjectionLab.
You can create beautiful financial plans with a level of nuance and flexibility that exceeds the standard online retirement calculators, run Monte Carlo simulations, backtest on historical data, review detailed analytics for estimated taxes, plan how to live life on your terms, and with any luck, reduce anxiety around your finances.
There’s a free sandbox if you want to see how it works quickly, it does not ask to link your financial accounts, you don’t have to create an account to try it, it works pretty well for international scenarios, and it respects your data.
As a solo dev building a fairly complex software solution as a side project, I’ve had a product-first approach by necessity, and it took several months just to create the MVP.
There were a grand total of 0 paid users when I posted it to Hacker News on a whim. I closed the tab, expecting that to go nowhere, and then came back an hour later to discover my email inbox was blowing up. I was astonished that the post had made the front page and more than a dozen people had signed up for premium.
Everyone always talks about how incredible it feels to make your first dollar on the internet… and in my experience, they’re right!
The fact that the MVP was actually a hit with the famously critical HN community lit a fire under me, and I doubled down on building out the app and adding everything people wanted to see.
Sometime in the following weeks, it reached 100 paid users, and organic/ word-of-mouth spread, coupled with the occasional post to places like r/SideProject, gradually propelled it into the low hundreds.
Since then, my pattern has been: to spend basically all my time with my head in the sand developing cool new features, occasionally picking it up to create a post somewhere like Reddit or HN, and also nurturing a community of users who love the tool.
I know the “spend all my time on development” part contradicts much of the conventional SaaS business advice. Still, this may be one of those rare cases where a laser focus on the product before marketing has been a good thing overall.
By scaling up the user base gradually, I’ve been able to avoid drowning in support requests and preserve the free time I’ve needed to re-architect and redesign the product several times before arriving at the more polished solution it is today.
Over the past few months, I was lucky enough to have some unexpected developments help to spread the word even more and close the remaining distance from ~750 paid users to the 1k mark:By scaling up the user base gradually, I’ve been able to avoid drowning in support requests and preserve the free time I’ve needed to re-architect and redesign the product several times before arriving at the more polished solution it is today.
– Pete Adeney (a.k.a. Mr. Money Mustache) gave PL a shout-out on Twitter

– Rob Berger (the author of Retire Before Mom and Dad) created a video review.
– Cody Berman and Justin Taylor, who run The FI Show, asked me to come on their podcast.
How Much Money Kyle is Making
ProjectionLab just crossed $6k MRR.

It took about 22 months to reach $6K MRR
→ 9 months to get to $1,000
→ 4 months to get to $2,000
→ 7 months to get to $5,000
→ 2 months to get to $6,000
Here’s a look at how the paid user base has grown over time:

How Many Hours a Week Kyle Spends on his Business
For now, I am building ProjectionLab as a side project. The breakdown for an average week looks something like:
Weeknights: 8pm to midnight
Weekends: ~10 hrs per day
So, around 40 hrs per week in total, on top of a full-time job.
I guess now is the part where you go “Oh, okay, so this guy just has no life.”
Well, side projects certainly have their pros and cons. The best part is the risk reduction. If you were to leap to full-time right away instead, I bet that liberating feeling of having complete creative control gets overpowered pretty quickly when it hits you that “this better work.”
But the worst thing about side projects is that they force you to sacrifice more of your most precious non-renewable resource: time.
The hard truth is that burning the candle at both ends means you rarely have time for everything you want to do in life. Something has to give. For me, that was playing video games.
I still carve out the time to exercise daily and try to do at least one fun social thing per week, but I also used to have a group that would play games regularly. That was my favorite way to stay in touch over long distances.
But the math just didn’t work while trying to bootstrap a complex technical project on the side. Some day in the future though, maybe I will come out of video game retirement and rejoin the squad.
Kyle’s Top Marketing Strategy
After validating the idea with PL version 1.0, the main thrust of my efforts has simply been to make the product so dang good that, eventually, people in this space can’t help but take notice. Maybe that’s finally working a little bit.
His View on SEO
I’ve barely thought about SEO and have no discernable content strategy. So yeah… you could say there’s plenty of room for improvement on the marketing side.
The primary focus has been to invest my extremely limited time in a way that (hopefully) manufactures some luck and exposure as a byproduct of creating a standout software solution.
But even though PL has been steadily growing over the past couple of years, I always remind myself that a mediocre product with great marketing often beats a great product with poor marketing. So at some point, I need to think more seriously about creating a reliable and sustainable long-term growth engine.
His Email List
I have an email list with a couple of thousand members, but one of my mistakes was implementing the “subscribe to newsletter” option late in the game. That should have been a part of the app since day one, not added a year late!
Kyle’s Favorite Resources
For those who have an interest in financial independence, here are a few of my favorites:
- The Simple Path to Wealth, by J.L. Collins
- The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel
- Retire Before Mom and Dad, by Rob Berger
- Financial Freedom, by Grant Sabatier
Or, if you’re an indie developer looking to create your own app, here’s a tech stack that has served me well: Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Paddle, Firebase, and GCP.
His Top 3 Tools
Using a modern, component-based web development framework with a good material UI library (in my case Vue.js and Vuetify) has enabled me to rapidly build engaging and responsive interfaces that users actually enjoy spending time in.
I chose Paddle for my subscriptions and billing platform, and so far, that’s been smooth sailing.
Initially, Stripe lured me in with their excellent UX and developer APIs. But as a solo dev with serious time constraints, I wanted a full merchant of record solution that would handle all the complexities of collecting and remitting sales tax, VAT, etc. So at the end of the day, Paddle was the easy choice.
I also used Changemap to create a free public roadmap where anyone can suggest new features and vote. I set up a Discord server which has steadily been growing into a thriving community where people can ask questions, give feedback on the latest features in early access, and chat about personal finance and other topics with folks who share similar interests.
His Biggest Challenge
Given limited time, how to decide what to build and what not to build.
I always have a notional roadmap in my head, and it’s always being revised and rearranged based on:
- What is the community asking for right now? What topics keep coming up again and again in Discord/email?
- What are the most upvoted features on the public roadmap?
- What did I originally think I would be doing next?
- What do I actually **feel** like doing next? What would I be most energized and inspired to work on?
As I toss all the ideas around, I’ll usually try to add weights to them based on:
- Estimated level of effort/time required
- Chance to delight existing users and keep them around
- The prospect of spurring new growth
- Opportunity to reduce technical debt
- Feature “coolness factor”
- Chance to further differentiate from other products
- Opportunity to build new skills and knowledge
His Greatest Accomplishment
The simple ability to stick with projects long enough to finish them, release them into the world, and give them a chance to grow.
It’s common among developers to start lots of projects, but ship very few. It’s easy to get halfway done, run into some edge cases, and then just move on to the next shiny idea or technology.
But you won’t hit any of the larger entrepreneurial milestones if you can’t commit to a vision long enough to get something out the door.
What He Wishes He Knew When He Started
I wish I had known about the importance, and compounding effect, of building an audience.
You can have the best product in the world, but it won’t go anywhere if you can’t get enough eyeballs on it.
You want to start building a following and a user community as soon as possible.
Kyle’s Biggest Mistake
For a few months during the middle of my journey with PL, I was working on a major overhaul and putting in an unsustainable number of hours. Time is a zero-sum game, and I was letting sleep and exercise take the hit… and my vitals started to reflect that.
Beyond all the tips and tricks, you need to take care of yourself first and foremost.
Launching and growing a small startup requires consistency and persistence. And luck. And a bunch of other things.
But the point is: it’s a marathon. So only burn the candle at both ends when there’s a tactical reason. And always make time to exercise! What’s the point of working towards a better future if you might not be around to enjoy it?
His Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
If you’re just starting your own journey or contemplating a new project, here’s a small piece of advice from my experience so far:
Try to find a problem you understand deeply and truly care about solving, and build something that you’ll actually be a user of.
There are often more hurdles on the path to finishing and launching a project than you can predict going in; but if you really have that desire to see and enjoy the final product yourself, you can use that to help power through some of the obstacles.
It’s a lot easier to pursue an idea with persistence when you’re working on something you love and that you personally can’t wait to use.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Revolutionising affiliate marketing in the era of influencers, ET BrandEquity

Affiliate marketing spends in India are estimated to be Rs 2500 crore in FY 2023, constituting eight percent of the overall digital marketing spend, according to the State of Digital Marketing in India report. Despite the popularity of affiliate marketing, the model presents its own challenges, such as onboarding and managing affiliates, high commission fees, and vulnerability to fraudulent and malicious practices.
During a discussion at DigiPlus Fest 2023, marketers explored the evolving landscape of affiliate marketing and strategies to optimise return on investment (RoI). The session featured Nishant Jaiswal, VP – marketing, Zupee; Sachin Vashishtha, chief marketing officer, Paisabazaar, and was chaired by Saumya Jain, ETBrandEquity.com.
Essentially, affiliate marketing involves incentivizing affiliates with a commission or payout to drive a business action, such as a click or purchase. The practice began with blogs, websites, and email but has since expanded to include social media and e-commerce platforms.
Vashishtha observed that while affiliate marketing was one of the most profitable and RoI-positive ways for online businesses to grow, it didn’t take long for bad actors to leverage it for fraud. Affiliates with malicious intent began generating traffic for brands using any means necessary to earn a commission.
The practice started losing its appeal until the explosion of the creator economy and the rise of influencers. Additionally, improvements in technology and the emergence of attribution models like multi-touch attribution or view-through attribution started bringing transparency into the affiliate marketing model.
Jaiswal remarked that affiliate marketing in India is still nascent compared to global platforms, where many end publishers are not directly accessible to advertisers. He said, “With technology, many fraud-related concerns like click hijacking, app install hijacking, and click spam can be controlled by your mobile measurement partner (MMP) or attribution partner.”
However, despite technological advancements, brands still run the risk of being visible in an unsafe environment due to the way affiliate marketing models are structured. While advertisers primarily engage with larger affiliate networks, campaigns might be outsourced to smaller publishers, networks, and individuals, making it challenging to map where conversions are coming from. Additionally, smaller publishers or creators may create clickbait content or reach out to irrelevant audiences simply to drive traffic or act with malicious intent, harming the brand’s reputation.
Vashishtha stated, “You can go back to the affiliate network and ban the publisher, but it is still very difficult to work with the ecosystem the way it is now. We prefer to work with large publishers or content creators directly.”
By working directly with publishers or creators, brands can see how content gets created and deployed to generate conversions. Jaiswal suggested that brands could share a high volume of assets with affiliates directly to test their effectiveness and ensure that the brand positioning and messaging remain consistent.
While it is not entirely avoidable to discourage malicious activity, Jaiswal opined that assigning realistic key performance indicators (KPIs) while designing the campaign can automatically rule out any fraud from the equation. He said, “Marketers could leverage a combination of hard KPIs and soft KPIs, where soft KPIs can be click-to-conversion rate, sign-up-to-purchase rate, and hard KPIs could be cost-to-purchase or cost-to-sign-up.”
Affiliate marketing has its fair share of challenges; however, the ecosystem is continuously evolving. With new technologies like AI, affiliate marketing initiatives will become sharper and more targeted.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
First, AI came for Sports Illustrated. Soon, it will want to give you sports betting advice
Real Sports Bar and Grill in Toronto on Nov. 24, 2016.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
When Sports Illustrated was outed last week for its alleged use of generative AI to create online articles – and, even worse, for topping them with fake bylines and AI author headshots – readers of the legendary glossy were appalled and disappointed at how the mighty had fallen.
But there was one element of the story that largely got lost amid the outrage, and it hints at an even darker prospect of what lies ahead for sports media and fans.
The SI pieces in question were product reviews: Inoffensive rankings of say, seven brands of volleyballs, which included links to Amazon that a reader could click on if they suddenly felt the urge to take up the sport. So, not only was the editorial copy generated by fake people, it was actually fake editorial copy. It was real advertising.
The practice of peppering editorial content with commercial links – known in the business as affiliate marketing – is a mainstay of Internet advertising, from movie reviews that direct readers to online ticketing sites, to podcasters and TikTok influencers giving out discount codes for listeners or viewers to buy merch from specific retailers.
But affiliate marketing has exploded in recent years in one notorious segment of the industry – sports betting, and its gush of ad dollars that are falling on a desperate media sector like rain on a parched prairie.
Affiliate sites that funnel new customers to online gambling operators are raking in the cash because of a quirk in that segment of the business – and they’re doing it on the backs of those new bettors.
In the spring of 2021, the Canadian sports media startup Playmaker Capital went public on the TSX Venture Exchange and quickly began scooping up digital properties with large followings that the company believed could be converted to bettors. When I interviewed Playmaker’s CEO, Jordan Gnat, shortly after shares began trading, he said he wanted to be in “the fan monetization business.”
There were tens of millions to monetize. The company began by buying soccer-focused sites in Latin America such as Bolavip, which targeted fans in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Central America and the United States, then expanded into the English-language North American market with the newsletter publisher and aggregator Yardbarker. Here in Canada it bought The Nation Network, which operates the hockey fantasy site, Daily Faceoff, and the Quebec-based La Poche Bleue.
But last month, Playmaker went from the hunter to the hunted when Better Collective, an affiliate-marketing giant based in Denmark that Gnat had cited to me as an inspiration for his company, gobbled it up for about $260-million.
The flurry of activity is partly because affiliate marketers who funnel customers to sportsbooks are an entirely different beast. They’re not just making one-time commissions, as they would if they were helping to sell concert tickets or tennis racquets or fly traps. Instead, they get a percentage of the sportsbook’s net revenue made from any new bettor.
“Net revenue” is another term for “total lifetime losses by a new bettor.”
Forget the pennies that digital ads are infamous for bringing in. If a site converts a reader or listener or viewer into a regular gambler – that is, a regular loser – the payday can be hundreds of dollars or more.
Here’s where it might occur to you that the incentives for a site to give you good betting advice might clash with that same site’s incentive to get you to sign up with a sports book and then lose a lot of money.
You would not be wrong.
In the social-media industry, there’s a saying that if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. In the world of affiliate marketing, you are the product – the one that’s being sold to the sportsbooks. But boy, are you paying for it.
An academic paper published in January, 2020, in International Gambling Studies titled Affiliate Marketing of Sports Betting – A Cause for Concern? points out that many sites aren’t transparent about their duelling allegiances. It also notes that “people assign greater levels of trust to expert advice during decision-making tasks involving financial risk. This may be a particular concern for those who are just beginning to gamble upon sport, as they may be more inclined to rely on expert advice on bet choice due to their lack of experience.” Newbies may be especially susceptible, given that affiliates position themselves as being on the side of the bettor, when in fact they’re being paid by the sportsbook.
Which brings us full circle back to where we started. Generative AI is notoriously bad at a lot of things, including getting facts straight. But it’s very good at sounding confident, even as it bluffs its way through life.
And it’s about to use its charms to lull you into thinking you can beat the house.
Last May, Lloyd Danzig, the managing partner at the New York-based venture-capital company Sharp Alpha Advisors, noted in a piece for Sports Business Journal that publishers doing affiliate marketing for sportsbooks, “will soon leverage generative AI to instantly create thousands of SEO-optimized articles that discuss the current day’s calendar of games, betting trends, stories to follow, and sportsbook promotions. Pregame previews, postgame summaries, and highlight reels can be created on command without the use of specialized software or manual oversight. Articles, sportsbook reviews, and odds comparison pieces can be generated for any audience, with a fraction of the effort required from human writers.”
Think we’re already swamped with sports betting content? You haven’t seen anything yet.
Après ChatGPT, le déluge.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
What Are the Duties of a Content Strategist?

You’ve decided you want a career as a content strategist, and we’re here to help you reach your goal. A content strategist is a key player in determining the success of a brand’s content strategy, and it can be an exciting career path.
We discuss below the duties of a content strategist along with tips for becoming the most successful one you can be.
What Does a Content Strategist Do?
A content strategist brainstorms, plans, and executes the content strategy for a brand. This can be done either in a solo environment or with a content strategy team.
The material that’s crafted by content strategists for various social media platforms and other digital marketing efforts is designed with the objectives of the business in mind.
Understanding what content strategists do means we first need to understand content marketing.
Content marketing is a useful type of marketing that involves creating content designed to build interest in a brand’s products or services without explicitly promoting them.
Content strategists are content marketing experts.
For example, a content marketing strategy for a social media coach could involve a series of blog posts about why it’s so important to post on social media.

Now you can understand how a content marketing strategist engages in content marketing in the day-to-day execution of their job.
Content Strategist Job Description
Here is a sample content strategist job description:
The content strategist will develop a content strategy that meets key business objectives. They will reach the brand’s target audience through various marketing channels using their supreme content delivery skills.
The content strategist will use the organization’s content management system to oversee marketing campaigns across a variety of specific social media channels. In addition to content planning and content creation, content strategists will report on how their work met content strategy deliverables.
A typical content strategist salary ranges from $40,000-$80,000 based on location, experience, and the type of company you’re working for.
Here are a few examples of roles for the job title “content strategist” that illustrate a varying salary range based on location throughout the United States:


As you gain more experience and rise in seniority, you could become a senior content strategist or even advance into marketing leadership. It’s up to you where you want to take your career.
The Roles and Responsibilities of a Content Strategist
To add to the content strategist job description, we list the roles and responsibilities of a content strategist below.
The content strategist role varies on a day-to-day basis, but the overall tasks that need to be completed remain consistent. Content strategists will:
- Facilitate content planning sessions across a variety of editorial calendars and marketing channels.
- Perform a content audit of all existing content, evaluate its effectiveness, and update as necessary.
- Conduct extensive keyword research to guide the direction of the brand’s content creation.
- Pitch existing and prospective clients on their content creation ideas.
- Build target audience profiles to create content for.
- Understand the many ways future content can generate leads and be monetized.
- Stay informed on social media trends and changes in consumer behavior.
- Create content across various digital platforms and social media accounts.
- Oversee a marketing team and delegate tasks for ongoing and upcoming projects.
- Collaborate with other team members, like copywriters, UX/UI designers, editors, and more when creating online content.
- Analyze its successful content strategy and report back on its performance. A working knowledge of SEO reporting tools is crucial.
Who Does a Content Strategist Report To?
The content strategist will typically report to a manager in the marketing department. This could include a marketing manager, the vice president of marketing, or the marketing director.
However, keep in mind that every company is structured differently.
For example, a large corporation will be structured differently than a small start-up.
The content strategist role at a start-up might report directly to the CEO. Furthermore, a content strategist at a large corporation might report to the marketing manager.
Depending on how large the marketing team is, the content strategist might report to a more specialized person, like the digital content manager.
Understanding the marketing team structure of the company you want to apply for will help you understand where you fit in the organization.


Types of Companies Content Strategists Work For
Because every type of company can benefit from having a content strategy team, there are a variety of companies a content strategist could work for.
A few types of companies a content strategist could work for include:
Large Corporations:
Major recognizable brands need content strategists to maintain their position in the market as thought leaders.
Marketing Agencies:
Marketing agencies provide a wide range of services, and content marketing is just one of those services. A content marketer will help marketing agencies create engaging content as part of overall content strategies for clients.
Small Start-ups:
Content strategists are an important part of the business for small start-ups because they help attract new and existing customers.
Having content monetization skills can be especially important for start-ups as they run lean in the early days.
Content Agencies:
Content agencies are similar to marketing agencies. However, they provide a more niche service that’s specific to content marketing.
These types of agencies will need to hire teams of content strategists to serve their clients’ content marketing needs.
Freelance:
There is another option that’s entirely different from the employers we’ve discussed on this list. That alternative is freelancing.
A career as a freelancer means that you will be self-employed and responsible for obtaining your own clients, delivering the project, and billing the client.
While there is potentially more money to be made as a freelancer, it does also come with more risk.


What Skills Do You Need to Become a Content Strategist?
Becoming a successful content strategist requires a variety of soft skills and technical expertise. We break down the necessary skills in each category below.
Soft Skills
Here are a list of the soft skills you’ll need in your career as a content strategist:
Storytelling:
You will need to tell compelling stories to a variety of audiences as a content strategist. Whether it’s pitching ideas to clients or educating your audience, you will need to learn to relay information in an engaging way.
Creativity:
Ultimately, you’re creating content for your target audience to consume. This means that it needs to be engaging, exciting, and creative. Having creativity will help you put together the best content.
Communication:
As a content strategist, you are communicating every day. Whether it’s to your boss, other teams within the company, or your target audience, having top-notch communication skills will be very important.
Organization:
An aspiring content strategist needs to be very organized. They will be managing multiple campaigns simultaneously, so they need expert organizational skills to keep everything running smoothly.
Technical Skills
Beyond the very important soft skills you’ll need, there are a variety of technical skills that you’ll also need in your career as a content strategist.
Here are a few of them:
Writing:
Strong technical writing skills are one of the most important hard skills you’ll need. Being able to write high-quality long-form content will be a key component of your job.
Search Engine Optimization:
SEO is another one of the most important technical skills you will need to have in your career. You’ll need to understand how to perform keyword research with SEO research software, along with how to seamlessly incorporate these keywords into the text as part of the content creation process.
Social Media Platforms:
Having an understanding of the posting style of each of the different social media platforms will be helpful to your success as a content strategist.
Your long-form content will be shared with your audience in the form of social media campaigns. If you’re able to lend your knowledge when creating these campaigns, you will be able to provide more value for your team.
Monetization:
Part of the content strategist’s job is understanding how the content you’re creating can be monetized and earn your employer money.
Whether it’s incorporating banner ads or partnering with affiliates, you will need to be an expert in monetization methods for the content strategies you implement.


Tips for Becoming a Content Strategist
You know the skills you need to develop and what the job description entails. Now it’s time to discuss tips for optimizing your career in content marketing. Read our top 5 tips for becoming a content strategist below.
Prioritize Your Education
You will need to have the knowledge if you want to earn a job as a content strategist. This means that prioritizing your education should be at the top of your list.
While this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a bachelor’s degree, some employers might require you to have one. For example, if you want to work at a large corporation or a major brand where you work your way up to a leadership position, they might require a bachelor’s degree for those types of roles.
Examples of bachelor’s degrees that you could obtain include marketing, journalism, public relations, or communications.
Gain Professional Experience
After you’ve obtained the education, you want to add professional experience to your resume.
Professional experience can occur in many forms, including internships and paid positions. Learn from the other content strategists you’re working with as you contribute to content marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re working directly as a content strategist or something adjacent to this position, give it your best effort to learn as much as you can while also impressing your employer.
References from internships and entry-level jobs will be helpful to you in the future!
Start Networking
In addition to developing your skills, you’ll also want to start networking.
Networking with other professionals in the industry will be helpful for you when searching for jobs. Sometimes, jobs aren’t even posted on online job boards, and instead, companies ask for referrals from their existing employees.
Similarly, when employers are looking at a large stack of resumes, seeing a name they recognize makes the hiring process easier for them.
Also, remember that you’re networking with people of all experience levels, not just people who are more advanced than you in your career. The person that you’re taking a course with could one day be promoted to the marketing manager you’re applying to work for.
All this to say, conduct yourself professionally and courteously when networking.


Show Your Expertise Through Personal Projects
Even if you haven’t obtained that internship or first job yet, you can showcase your expertise through your personal projects.
Starting your own blog site, YouTube channel or newsletter will help you develop skills and gain hands-on experience.
Working on your own projects requires you to develop a content strategy, create content, and grow your audience.
How long does it take to make money from a blog? You will be able to answer this question for future employers based on firsthand knowledge.
You can then tell future employers about your expertise and the success of your marketing campaigns.


Always Continue Learning
Even though education was already a priority for you on your path toward being a content strategist, learning will always be important for furthering your career.
Whether it’s taking online courses, reading books, or listening to podcasts, find the learning method that feels right for you.
Courses are a great way to further your education as a content marketer. Here are two great courses to get you started:
The Affiliate Lab


The Affiliate Lab is an expert source on creating content optimized for SEO. This course contains more than 100 hours of training on how to conduct keyword research, select your niche, rank in search results, and more.
If you’re looking to improve the SEO rankings of your content, this course is for you. Niche Pursuits readers receive an exclusive discount of $200 off The Affiliate Lab course here.
Project 24
If you want to learn how to drive real results, Project 24 is the course for you. This will help teach you how to create the best possible content for a blog site or YouTube channel.
Its 27 online courses will teach you how to create and monetize content that’s been optimized for SEO.
The end goal of this course is to teach you how to generate passive income from your content marketing efforts. Check out our Income School Review to learn more about Project 24 and its founders.
No matter which course you choose based on your goals, what’s important is that you’re expanding your knowledge base to create results-driven content.
Your Career as a Content Strategist
Whether you work for a fast-paced marketing agency or an exciting brand, your career in digital content creation is sure to be an exciting one. We wish you the best of luck in your career as a content strategist!
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