Tips to Grow and Monetize Your Online Business from Womanista

Womanista is a women’s lifestyle brand that encourages and empowers women to be their best selves through daily inspiration about style, family, health, living, entertainment and travel. Womanista.com started in 2012 as founder Cassie M. Kelley’s personal blog and has since transitioned into a digital media platform with a reach in the millions of users per month. In conjunction with this impressive growth, they have also found ways to monetize their online platform.

We are thrilled that founder Cassie M. Kelley and GM & Executive Editor Megen DiSanto will be sharing their knowledge at this year’s Summit in Charleston (April 27-29). In anticipation of their presentation, we asked them to share three tips for growing and monetizing your business online.

Womanist founder, Cassie M. Kelley (photo: Skip Hopkins) and GM + Executive Editor Megen DiSanto

Three Tips to Grow and Monetize Your Online Business

Advertising. With the kind of traffic Womanista receives on a daily basis, advertising is our greatest income generator. There is a constant balance between creating dynamic content and placing ads that aren’t intrusive, but intrinsically pay the bills. The user experience is of utmost importance to us, so our ad teams and editorial teams are constantly seeking solutions that work best for our platform, our readers, and that will also generate the best rate of ad dollars. 

Affiliate linking. We work with a company called “reward style” for our affiliate program. It’s a really simplified way for retailers to quantify the traffic you send them from your website, and then pay you a commission based on your “sales”. We use affiliate links in our editorial pieces, but our editorial is always authentic to our brand.

Sponsored Posts. We use “sponsored” pieces occasionally in our editorial, but we honestly turn down a lot more than we feature. It’s more important for us to remain authentic and on-brand for our users than to feature a product or system just based on earnings. I think that cycle only gets better as you continue to grow – your user becomes more invested in your aesthetic and trusts your brand, which then leads to a more engaged consumer experience. Sponsored pieces on social media platforms are also a great way to earn income but again, it’s essential to keep them authentic to your brand voice.

Why do you want to come to The Southern C Summit?

As digital entrepreneurs, we are so excited to see and hear about all of the cool things that many of our favorite southerners are doing in the digital sphere at the moment. Attending the Summit is always really fun and informative. We can’t wait to share Womanista with everyone, too. There are so many new developments happening in our corner, we are looking forward to unveiling lots of dynamic elements to our site and giving everyone the scoop!

See Cassie and Megen in person and dive deeper into growing and monetizing your online business at The Southern C Summit, this April 27-29 in Charleston, SC. Tickets and more information here.