Once you’ve people on your email marketing list, it’s time to create a product to sell if you want to build a profitable blog. I talk about the ways to earn money as a blogger and content creator in the Ultimate Guide To Blogging. Along with tips to build your email list.
You will never magically make some money when you’re not selling anything. That rich business type of person that you’re waiting for to hand you a lot of money, will not come. Not if you have a small following anyways. So it’s time to take your own responsibility to monetize your blog.
I know it’s easier to just create something you would love to have – but that’s not a smart move, business wise.
As always, my favorite things to do is ‘reverse engineer’ things because it works.
First, I research what people want, which questions get asked over and over again and then I create a product that’s something that fits my niche and knowledge, to help the people that asked the questions in the first place.
Finding out what’s popular is a good start, but getting to know your audience is equally important.
If you know your ‘million dollar topic’ but not know your audience, you’re most likely still losing. You have to create your product for your ideal audience, so you can adjust the tone of voice, the level of knowledge and your marketing to your audience.
Create a product that your targeted audience will love. You do this, by using your market research as described before, what are they talking about and which questions do they ask?
Once you’ve established your topic, it’s time to start planning and creating. You can ‘repurpose’ the content you wrote to attract your ideal readers into a product to publish and sell something as quick as possible.
You need to choose a format for your product, and to do so I have a few recommendations that make it much easier to get started:
Podia: Podia is a great starter site that’s affordable and combined two things you need when you get started with selling products: a system that delivers and a way to talk to your audience, like a newsletter service. Podia combines these two because you can use it to send newsletters (and you pay a fixed fee – no matter the number of subscribers you collect!) and to deliver your product (by taking care of the payment part + automatically delivery). On top of all of this, you can also create a membership site. Check out my Podia review here.
But if you want more, make sure you check out Teachable.
Teachable: I use teachable for my courses and digital products. (Check out my Teachable tutorial hack to use it for free here)
Teachable allows you to create a simple membership site or course site by just ‘filling in the blanks’ and you can get started for free. It’s a great way to see if you like creating something while trying it for free. You can make serious money by selling a membership or selling a course, you’re closer to a million than you think:
So that’s not too far-fetched, right? But there are other options as we discussed before, you can also opt-in for ebook creation or a video training series.
The format often affects your pricing, as online course tend to be higher priced than ebooks and a membership site is often lower priced per month than an online course, but in a year or half a year, it might be the same price as an e-course. If your product includes videos, you can also ask more than just text versions.