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Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in My Projects.

How I'm Pivoting My Content Creation For The Rest of the Year (Based on What I've Learned in 2025 So Far)

I want to monetize my content creation so I can create a self-reinforcing flywheel of growth. This also allows me to scale my income without it being tied to my time.

My freelancing consulting business is financially thriving, and I plan to continue doing it, but it's only half of my workday.

Now, I can work more hours and earn more money, but that additional income is reliant on my time.

The other half of each day is dedicated to content creation, but it's only making a small amount of money, so I want to change that. In 2023, I made a few hundred bucks. In 2024, I made around $2k, and in 2025 to date, I've already matched my 2024 amount. That means anything I do from here will build towards my goal of earning $100k in a year from content creation.

The ultimate goal is to invest that time into my content creation business so it returns more than working that extra hour would pay me.

So, for the past five months, I've been experimenting with different ways to accomplish my income goals on the content creation side of things and I want to share how I'm shifting my efforts into a more focused and integrated approach.

My simple conclusion is that the best way to monetize content creation is with YouTube ad earnings, digital products (mine and others), and virtual services.

With the services piece already mastered in my freelancing business, I've been focusing on the other two pillars. I've spent the last five months experimenting with the digital products and YouTube Monetization angles, getting a feel for my options.

At first, I leaned into the digital products, but then, when I fully understood the YouTube opportunity, I leaned into it heavily. I went from 68 subscribers to 270. YouTube ad monetization requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours, so I'm about a quarter of the way there.

But at this pace, it's probably going to take me a year (or longer) to get to monetization, which is longer than I was expecting. So, now I'm going to lean more heavily into the digital products, which also include affiliate marketing for digital products I love. And where I can, I'll tap into content sponsorships (more on that below) as well.

The main takeaway from my YouTubing so far is that I don't want to work for free over the next year to get monetized. So the way to solve this is by monetizing my content creation as I work towards that milestone with income-earning mechanisms.

I want to build these money-making machines anyway, so the best time to do it is now, when the YouTube ad income is far off. Then, when I get monetized, that income will be on top of what I've already built. 

Ultimately, I want to build an income-generating, self-sustaining content creation business to complement my freelancing business. Both of these businesses enable and empower the other in lessons learned, tactics to use, and even sponsorship opportunities (as I explain below).

This post is my way of planning out this pivot and also sharing it with you so you can pull out any ideas for your business journey.

Content Creation Sponsors

Recently, SafetyWing sponsored an episode of the Share Life podcast about digital nomadism. They sponsored a few of my blog posts in 2024 and agreed to sponsor the digital nomad episode of the podcast, which also went on YouTube.

As part of this package, I published pages on this site and Path of the Freelancer, created clips and reels, as well as sending out a dedicated email.

This was my second sponsored podcast episode of all time, last year getting one from Christian Life TV and Talking Bibles.

And I'm excited to share that one of my freelancing clients — Dominion Revenue Solutions — has agreed to a sponsorship package! After the founder heard what I was working on with YouTube, she wanted to help support me, so we've got a multi-video plan for that sponsorship.

All three of these sponsorship opportunities came from existing relationships. SafetyWing had sponsored my blogs before, Christian Life TV is run by a long-time friend, and Dominion Revenue Solutions is a freelancing client.

I emphasize relationships here because it's one of the principles from my book, Path of the Freelancer. It's always easiest to land opportunities with people we know and clients we already work with.

When someone trusts you and wants to be a part of what you're doing next, existing relationships are the smoothest way to build upon.

If you're reading this and are interested in sponsoring my future content, send me a message and let's talk. Right now, I'm in a mode where I'm doing as much as possible for the sponsor to get the most benefit from partnering with me.

Earning Income From Digital Products

Consider two scenarios.

  1. I publish a YouTube video and it gets 100 views. I'm not yet monetized, so I don't earn any income.
  1. I publish a YouTube video about my awesome freelancing invoicing system, and 2 of the 100 viewers sign up. I now earn $10/month as long as they use the system. That's $120 per year. That means that video earned me $120 (or more).

This benefit of option two is the core idea around creating valuable content that's connected to digital products. By creating videos around products that can earn income, it can drive income for me while I work towards getting monetized on YouTube.

These products could include ones I've created, like Path of the Freelancer, The Jump, and The Most Effective SEO Task course, as several examples.

It can also include affiliate programs where I earn a commission to promote software and systems that I love [like Harpoon (freelance accounting) and TimeCamp (time tracking)].

For me, going forward, I've put together a list of actions to work on for my products and my favorite affiliate partners.

Here's a quick rundown of these opportunities and some of the tasks on my list to complete.

My Digital Products

Books

    • Create four landing pages, one for each audience
    • Create banners for the 4 audiences, to promote to each audience
    • Package my programs into groups and update CTA purchasing options
    • Update program landing pages
    • Create videos from my existing freelancer blog posts, to help promote the book
    • Run ads to promote the book and programs based on the most successful content to date
    • Update the landing page
    • Add an option to buy the digital book directly from my online shopping cart
    • Update freebie signup benefits
    • Test ads
    • Finish book

Courses

Affiliate Partners

Continuing to Grow My YouTube Channel

While I won't be as aggressive at growing my YouTube channel, since it's taking longer than I expected, I will instead be more strategic in what videos I produce going forward. In practice, this means videos that have a direct or indirect income-generating pathway will get priority. Videos with the highest upside will follo,w and then any other videos I want to make will be underneath those.

Ultimately, the goal is to do videos that will have the best short-term benefit while continuing to move the channel towards ad monetization.

Here's how I'll focus my videos.

  • Create videos that can go big or are easy to make.
  • Create videos that can help me move projects forward or plan things (like this post).
  • Create videos giving clients advice
  • Create videos that promote my products or affiliate products and services.
  • For developing more content sponsorship opportunities, I'll create a podcast episode type and a sponsorship page.

Leveraging Platforms for Growth

YouTube and other social media platforms provide free promotion when content is published on their platforms.

The idea is to leverage that visibility on the platforms that give the most while creating content of value that can help grow my income. YouTube is the top option in this regard, but now that I'm pivoting, the other channels have some role to play as well.

And my website and blog will play a role as I continue to publish and update written content that is likely to help drive up more revenue.

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