As with all historical figures, the surviving documents: Primary documents, secondary documents, etc. Their biographies, as best as they can be pieced together.
These show, for example, that Davis, Wyld, Felkin and Papus were all medical doctors, which is how they supported themselves - their occult work happened “on the side,” as it were, as non-profit work performed due to genuine conviction. Olcott was a lawyer. Guaïta, a Marquis, was rich already, and didn’t need to work. Yeats, of course, was a writer (and a damned good one). Lévi, I believe, sold porcelain and old furniture.
Britten did, I believe, support herself at least in part through her occult work, first as a spiritualist medium and later as an occultist - but her fees must have been very modest indeed, for the records show that at the time of her death, her collected remaining belongings were valued at less than 200 pounds.
Randolph, too, died desperately poor, as did Davidson. Probably Péladan, too (not sure - I can look it up, if you’d like).
Don’t know how Annie Besant supported herself, exactly, but everything we know about her life paints her as a born rebel / true believer / idealistic firebrand. First woman in Britain to advocate birth control, for chrissakes. Organised strikes and boycotts, helped the wee little children (think coal mines), etc. From her early days as a socialist, feminist and, yes, atheist (“until humans develop a faculty by which God can be perceived, then for practical purposes one must be an atheist”); to her years in Theosophy and occultism; to her late battles for Indian independence from British rule, her life-long obsession was with progressive causes, in politics and religion alike.
Greed wasn’t quite her thing. And that goes for the lot of them.
Dang, coulda sworn I had the word “primarily” in there! 
Point being: The surviving documents make clear that even if those cases when the person did indeed love notoriety, gaining notoriety was not the primary motivation.
To take the most extreme example: Crowley loved, loved, loved notoriety. But had that been his prime motivation, he would, most likely, have spent his days in the capitals of Europe, where he could revel in that notoriety. Trekking through rural China? His trips to Ceylon, and Egypt, and beyond? Marks, I think, of the man’s insatiable craving for new things - an even greater craving than that for notoriety, one more central to his personality, and a far better explanation for what ultimately made him tick.
He needed new things, for the things he had been born with, he didn’t like. Like Annie Besant and Emma Hardinge Britten before him, he loathed the oppressive, life-denying, no-fun, one-coloured-Lego strain of Anglican Christianity in which he had been brought up, and so desperately tried to escape it, to get away from it, to make himself as different as possible from “them” - all for the higher purpose of carving out a new way of life. His craving for notoriety, then, is, at best, secondary to his craving for strange new freedoms: A common craving in his day and age, among occultists and non-occultists alike.
