Ever dreamt of making a living through blogging but feel overwhelmed by the journey ahead?
You’re not alone. Many aspiring bloggers share the ambition of turning their passion into a full-time job, yet the path to achieving this goal often seems daunting.
The Dream of Full-Time Blogging
Last night I was chatting with a blogger who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from blogging.
I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.
They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.
I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?
They thought for a moment and said that they could live off $30,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).
$30,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.
Transforming Overwhelm into Action
If you’re in a similar boat, feeling like you’ve hit a wall in your blogging journey, here are three pivotal steps to help you navigate through:
1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet
Earning $30,000 a year from blogging is achievable, but it demands patience and realism. Overnight success is rare in the blogging world. Maintaining your current job while gradually building your blog ensures financial stability and allows you to invest in your blog without immediate pressure for returns.
2. Set Clear, Specific Goals
Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was $30,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.
For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for $50,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time $50,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).
Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.
3. Break Down Your Goals into Something More Achievable
$30,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.
$30,000 a year = $576.92 per week
$30,000 a year = $82.19 a day
$30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour
We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making $82.19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making $30,000 (or is that just me?). Viewing your goal through these smaller lenses can make it appear more attainable and manageable.
OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case $82.19.
What do I need to do to make $82.19 a day ($30,000 a year)?
Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:
CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).
CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid $2 CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively $6 CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.
Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make $30k in a year you need to sell $2500 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at $416.66 per advertiser per month.
Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn $82.19 you’d need to sell 205 products.
High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning $8 a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.
Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out $300 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.
Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At $19.95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.
Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.
I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).
You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.
Reflecting on Income Streams
When I first aimed for a full-time blogging income, I diversified my revenue through a mix of AdSense, Chitika, direct ad sales, Amazon affiliate sales, and other commissions. It took over two years of dedicated blogging to reach my goal of $50,000 AUD annually and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):
AdSense: $35
Chitika: $20
Private Ad Sales: $20
Amazon: $15
Other Affiliate Commissions: $10
Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).
Embracing the Journey
This didn’t happen over night (let me emphasize this – blogging for money is neither quick nor is it easy money) but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job). Remember, persistence and a strategic approach are key.
Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.
Remember: Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. By setting clear goals, breaking them down into achievable targets, and diversifying your income sources, you can build a blog that not only fulfills your passion but also provides a sustainable income. Stay committed, stay focused, and let every small success propel you closer to your dream of full-time blogging.
You’ve done a great job this year and you should be proud – no step, no matter how small, is too small.
Had a gangbusters year? Good on you!
Had a small year? I bet you’re further than you used to be! Now that’s progress.
The best way to look over all you’ve done and gather your thoughts about where you’d rather be next year is to go through your blog and social media and audit your performance.
What went right (and how can you replicate that)?
What went wrong?
What felt yuck and what are you excited about doing again in 2024?
This audit checklist has served us well and been very popular over the years, so I thought I’d update it for this year and send you off on your merry way with a drink and a pen to revel in your year of blogging. May the force be with you!
Grab a pen and notebook, a fresh Google Doc, a spreadsheet if you’re into that sort of thing, or anything else you’re happy to take notes on or in, and go through each section of your blog thoroughly. What worked, what didn’t, what did you hate, what will you change for next year?
“You can only know where you’re going if you know where you’ve been.” – James Burke
You’re going to have to look at some stats for this, so open your WordPress Jetpack or Google Analytics and be prepared to dive in. First though, a look through the posts themselves:
How long were posts? Did you have a variety of word lengths? All long? All short? Which performed better? What would you say your average post word count would be?
What were the most popular posts? Overall, and for each category of your blog?
What type of posts worked? What resonated with your audience?
What fell flat, or just quite didn’t make it?
Did you write to your niche? Or did you branch out? Was that a wise choice?
Were you helpful?
What posts got the most comments/emails? Which one seemed to touch a nerve in your audience?
What was shared most?
What did you enjoy writing?
Where are you sourcing images? Are you making or taking your own? Could you start? What other options are there (you can find a selection of places that have collections of free, no-attribution images here), what program are you using to create and personalise your images? (We now use Canva pretty much exclusively)Is it enough or should you try something new? What are your image sizes? Are they optimal? Have you changed blog layout and now some of them are poorly sized? Make a note of them so you can update later with a better image.
Which day of the week got the most traffic? What were you publishing on those days? Was it consistent with your brand?
Was your overarching theme this year consistent with your brand?
What search terms got the most people to your blog? are you providing content for them?
Does each post have a good image that’s formatted correctly, a keyword-rich headline, and is it pleasant to the eye? Is there enough white space, and are there calls to action where necessary?
Were you providing enough value?
Back End
The nitty-gritty that we usually ignore unless something has gone wrong. Do a cleanout!
Are your plugins still working for you? What can you delete? What needs updating?
What do you have as a 404 error message? Can you make it more useful to the reader who finds themselves there?
Do you have broken links? (one way to find out is to use a broken link checker, or install a plugin that will do it for you). Can you update them?
What is your SEO plan? Are you inserting key words in all the right places? If you have Yoast installed, is there a green light on the majority of your posts? What can you do to improve in the new year? (Moz has a pretty comprehensive post here on doing a full SEO audit if you feel you need that much depth, and a content audit here).
Have you filled out the alt-text field on all your images with keyword-rich descriptions? (remember, this is what Pinterest pulls so make it user-friendly)
What have you been using to track metrics/traffic? Is it working?
Create a Google Analytics report about what has happened on your site, and who is reading it (and on what device!) Darren has a great tutorial here on how to find the most useful stats in Google Analtyics and use that knowledge to set up your next year of blogging on the right foot.
Design
We eat with our eyes, as they say, and readers will make snap judgements about you and your blog based on how it looks when they get there. What does your design say?
Is it functional?
Is it reader-friendly?
Is it pleasing to the eye?
Does it describe you and your blog at a glance?
Have you stayed consistent with colours and fonts?
Are there any widgets that need removing?
How is your sidebar working? What can you shuffle around or delete entirely?
Are you making the most of the bottom-of-the-blog real estate?
Are the ads old? Can you write to the advertisers and offer them a new deal?
Are you making the most of your design to point to where you could make an affiliate sale?
Are there several points on the page where readers can follow you?
Is your newsletter signup box prominent? Do you have more than one?
Is that pop-up box worth it?
Are your social media icons in the right order (you might want to put your most popular sites at the front). Are they linked to the right place? Are they the right size or colour?
Do all the links on your homepage work?
What can you remove from the design to enhance the look of your blog?
What are you using for social sharing? Do you like it? are people using it? Can you find something that works better?
Personal branding: is it recognisable? Have you been using the same branding techniques on your post images?
Pages/Topics
The umbrella of what you’re about. How’s that workin’ for ya?
Are the pages and topics you’ve sorted your content into still relevant? Have you moved onto other things? Can you merge some? Nest them?
Did you share content equally across all or did you find you wrote on a particular topic the most?
Is the navigation streamlined and user-friendly?
Are your pages and topics easily accessed?
Social Media
Our home away from home!
On what platform did you see the biggest growth?
Where was the most engagement?
What did you enjoy the most?
Have you changed profile pictures and bios lately? How current are they?
What brought most return for your efforts?
Where would you like try in the new year?
Is it obvious on all of these platforms what you’re about? What you can offer people?
Do all your platforms link to your blog, and are these options obvious and easy to find?
Your promotional strategy
You can’t just “build it and they will come”. Because they’re busy reading someone else.
How did you get your blog in front of new readers?
How successful was that?
What wasn’t worth the time invested?
Where will you invest your time next year?
What have you got as an opt-in? Does it need upgrading?
How are you offering your newsletter or mailing list? Have you been consistent with it, have you been tracking open rates etc?
Did you guest post anywhere? Was that worth your time? Where could you try this year?
Did you try to get some traditional media coverage?
Did you try any collaborations or cross-promotions? Who could you work with in 2024?
Did you do any giveaways? How successful were they?
Monetization
What has been your strategy this year?
What monetization models were you using?
What has been the most lucrative?
What hasn’t been worth your time?
What will you spend your resources on next year?
What programs, ebooks or courses need updating?
Can you bundle them together and do a quick lead-up to christmas sale?
Can you release something quick in time for christmas or new year?
How has your audience reacted to each monetisation strategy?
This is a guest contribution from Joen Rude Falsner.
Most of us have been there: we’ve all had this job where the financial compensation was the absolute single motivation to even show up.
Luckily for most people this, usually, low-compensated, uninspiring and numbingly boring job is characterized by being temporary. Something we do only for a short period of time.
Not for me.
For five full years I was rocking the position of a full time phone supporter specializing in assisting surprisingly helpless people with their TV setup and broadband service subscription.
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
I hated it. Oh my God, how I hated it.
A little bit about me
So I’m Joen. A now 30-something-year-old dude from Denmark who has an opinion about most things in life. I wrote this article a few years ago but the story is still relevant today, because my blog is going strong and continues to support me and my lifestyle.
Whether the topic is bear hunting in Alaska or how to keep tropical flowers alive in a costal temperate climate, I will find a way to ask questions that I am genuinely interested in knowing the answers to while also insisting that I know a thing or two about the subject.
The struggle of saying no to the system
This is who I’ve been most of my life. In my mind I have always had all the answers, but never when the topic landed on me. When the topic was ‘Joen’, I instantly became mute.
I was okay with this for a few years, but then I started to realize that my friends were moving up in the world.
Everybody around me seemed to be thriving with fancy degrees, fancy grades and eventually fancy titles. They had their life paved already, while I was digging my own hole deeper and deeper using faulty modems and TV boxes as a shovel.
At age 25, it would be fair to describe me as a rather depressed individual primarily due to the fact that I didn’t seem to have much of a bright future.
I didn’t have any formal education other than high school and a 2-year-short piece of garbage degree in marketing that was worth nothing more than a seat behind the register in your nearest supermarket.
See, that’s the thing. I never wanted a formal education, because it simply wasn’t for me. I just couldn’t care less about it.
I wanted to create. They wanted me to read.
Saying no to the system was a huge deal that I am forever grateful I did. It was also something that was incredibly difficult. Everybody expects you to do what society expects you to do.
Because if you don’t do what society wants you to do, then what are you going to do?
Entering the digital universe
Regardless of my state of depression I was eager to dig my way out of the hole.
My close friend, Frederik, who is kind of a SEO and PPC hero told me about blogging and affiliate marketing. He actually introduced me to the whole digital universe a few years earlier, but it took me two years before I summoned the courage to act on it.
Finally, I decided to start a blog.
February 7, 2014, I started Stayclassy.dk, a fashion and lifestyle blog with focus on quality over quantity and the good life.
I was determined to be successful.
From dinosaur to digital dude
Back in 2014, when I started my blog, I think it would be fair to say I was kind of a dinosaur.
Of course I knew how to work my way around a computer and I have always been pretty handy with ‘basic stuff’, but I had no idea just how big the difference was between casually using a computer and understanding the incredible opportunities the Internet offers.
Getting started with blogging
When I started blogging I was only familiar with basic tools.
I knew that it was important to make a keyword analysis in order to identify the best keyword for an article so that it would be easier for it to rank. I also knew it was important to create a lot of content.
Quality content of course.
But that was pretty much it. Those were my tools. Creating content and using the right keywords. Looking back, I actually like the simplicity of my starting point.
Because creating content is really the most important part of getting started with blogging. Forget link building, guest blogging and what else you got.
There’s no point of reaching out to people if you haven’t already built a solid platform to show.
My goals when I started the blog
I’m not gonna lie.
Getting into blogging was mainly incentivized by the possibility of earning money. I wanted to get out of my day job badly and in order to do so I had to earn money.
I started the blog while also working my full time job. In other words, my schedule just got a lot busier. It was three hours of blogging before work and 3-4 hours of blogging after.
All together that made my average day ~3+9+3=~15 hours long.
The goal from day 1 was to create one quality article a day. An article that had to be at least 1000 words long.
I knew that text heavy articles weren’t necessarily a goal in itself, but setting this rule was important as I was also forcing myself to write.
A lot.
You have to remember that when I started blogging my only writing experience was chatting to girls on Tinder. I had zero experience, although I’ve always been all right at putting together a sentence or two.
The strategy
By writing an article a day, and sometimes even two, I knew that in a year I would have 365 articles in the bank. That’s 365,000 words or the equivalent of 3-4 good books. I liked the sound of that.
Content before anything.
That was my basic strategy to begin with. It wasn’t until I had +45 articles that I began thinking in terms of getting links.
With 45+ articles I had something to show. I had already created a blog that I was really proud of. People would also take my blog seriously and that made my link-building effort a lot easier as more of my guest post enquiries were granted.
Along with the consistent output of quality articles I started getting links. My blog started to become authoritative-ish.
I remember how much I hated the link-building game.
I thought it was so lame that links were the all-important factor in getting those much desired organic rankings. This was also one of the reasons that I didn’t put too much effort into it at that point, which, in hindsight, was a really bad decision, but more on this later.
Affiliate blog posts for the win
That was my mind-set.
If I wanted to earn money, I had to monetize as much as I could without of course making my blog appear spammy.
So the majority of the articles I wrote were affiliate blog posts, however I would complement them with lifestyle blog posts of various sorts in order for my blog to maintain a dynamic range of content.
Mainly it was affiliate articles in the fashion department where I had one particular affiliate program that would turn out to perform extremely well.
I already knew that, as this was the online go-to-fashion retailer for most Danes, but I didn’t know that it would become ~70% of my combined affiliate income almost three years later.
Spending a lot of time analyzing all the available affiliate programs as well as testing them out has been of great importance to the success of my blog.
If you don’t keep a close eye on this, you will consequently earn less money. Less money that over time will accumulate to a huge loss.
Earning my first dollar
Exactly 14 days was how long it took me to earn my first affiliate dollar after having started the blog.
My first sale was worth exactly 7 euros.
I was ecstatic. Just two weeks in and here I am already living the passive income dream.
Okay not really, but I could immediately see that this “earn money online blogging”-thing wasn’t just a fairy tale pipe dream.
It could be done if using the same technique as Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption (best film ever by the way), who dug a hole through the wall by applying only pressure and time.
Pressure and time
That is all it really takes and although there isn’t any hole to be seen right away, you will eventually hit the other end of the wall.
Although I was seeing dollars only two weeks after getting to work, things were moving slow. Painfully slow actually, but it was easy to stay on track as I continued to grow my audience month after month.
The first 11 months of Stayclassy.dk
The first dot on the screenshot above marks the very beginning of Stayclassy.dk with virtually no traffic. Eleven months later the dot had jumped 16,193 steps in the right direction.
This was the time where I finally quit my beloved phone supporter job.
And not only did I quit. I moved to Australia. Away from icy Denmark and on to the deliciously warm continent where endless summer is always thriving.
I was not earning a full time living by any means at that point, but it was enough to get by as I also had saved up a bit of money.
Suddenly Joen was moving up in the world. Life was looking up. It felt great, to put it mildly.
Affiliate Marketing is great, but…
… it takes time and an abundance of hard work to get there.
Being one year into my blogging journey I was still not making enough to fully rely on it. Far from it actually, but I was okay with that. I knew it was only a matter of time, if I kept doing what I was doing.
Nonetheless, it was time to diversify my income stream.
So I engaged in sponsored content. I was getting more and more enquiries from businesses who were seeking promotion.
This was terrific as I was able to supplement my affiliate income with a tangible here-and-now income. They would pay me immediately as opposed to the hundreds of affiliate articles where I was still waiting to reap the true benefits of my hard work.
Given my blog’s good image I didn’t even have to approach businesses. They approached me. That was a solid pat on the shoulder and a strong indication that I was doing something right.
So I carried on.
The digital dude
That’s who I was starting to feel like. After a year of hard work, I was beginning to get a real grasp on blogging and this digital universe in general.
I was suddenly able to have “academic discussions” with my friend, Frederik.
I knew what was going on in the world of blogging and the wide variety of things you need to consistently keep an eye on.
After just one year I felt like I had learned incredibly many things that no school could ever teach me.
The main reason for this was that every time I wanted or had to implement something on my blog, I had to learn about it. Combining theory and practice was apparently the way to go. At least for me.
Becoming a successful blogger
So basically, in year two of my blogging career, I was kind of living the dream. I was travelling around Australia living in Darwin (not that much of a dream spot by the way), Cairns and Melbourne. I also spent six weeks in Bali and a month in Thailand.
Was this it? Had I made it?
I think most people would agree that I had indeed become a successful blogger, but to me I was only getting started. I was comparing my blog to a successful start-up. Things were going just fine, but it was nowhere near enough.
In short I kept maintaining the outlook of treating my blog as a real business: that strong growth was the only acceptable outcome. I think this has been an essential ingredient in getting to where I am today.
Being a successful blogger isn’t a static thing. It’s a constant battle that requires a continuous effort.
Very quickly things can go the wrong way. You can get hit by the Google bus (yes, that was a metaphor for losing rankings) subsequently affecting your income. There can be a drought where businesses are not interested in having sponsored content on your blog.
So many things can go wrong along the way.
I’ve been through all of this.
Several times. Up and down. Down, down and then up, up and up. It’s a never ending rollercoaster that will sometime make you feel sick and other times euphoric.
Dealing with the hardships of blogging
So yeah, blogging is no walk in the park. I have been through quite a few hardships.
Oh God, the discipline…
Call it what you want, but I call it hardship. One of the biggest challenges I have faced, and still am facing, is discipline.
It is so much easier to get up in the morning when you have a boss, who expects you to be there at 9am sharp.
When you are your own boss, it is so easy to allow yourself to sleep way past 10am. It is so easy to browse through hilarious cat photos instead of doing what you should be doing.
I have definitely not solved the problem of procrastination. I have, however, become more self-disciplined. I am constantly trying to improve my self-discipline by the use of various techniques.
Urgency
Because life seems so long, it is really hard to work towards your goals with a sense of urgency.
The mind seems to think that there always is plenty of time to do something else, which is why it is okay not to do what you should be doing right now.
I tell my brain every day that I need to have a better sense of urgency. This actually helps me with being more disciplined.
Mental toughness
Everybody talks about motivation. “You need to stay motivated”. “Read this book so you can get motivated”.
Of course motivation is a good thing, but I have come to the realisation that motivation is something that comes and goes as it pleases. It is a temporary state of mind and you have no control over it.
Instead, I have learned that the key to becoming a disciplined blogger (and person in general) is to work on your mental toughness.
Convincing yourself to write when you reeeaally don’t feel like it. Convincing your mind to finish a blog post although it tells you to stop right now. You get the point.
It is a draining exercise that will only be fruitful if applied repetitively.
It is a quite complex topic that I am by no means an expert on, however I have found it easier to work on my mental toughness when combining it with meditation and cognitive behavioral self-therapy.
Yeah, that was a pretty advanced word, but it’s actually not that complex.
In essence, it is about analysing your own thoughts and rationalising the why and what’s: why am I feeling this lack of doing anything productive? What is the consequence of not doing this work and what is the positive outcome if I do? By working right now, I will move closer to my hopes and dreams.
This exercise is really helpful as I simply get more shit done.
Delayed gratification
It’s about working hard now and then at some point later be rewarded. It makes sense, but the waiting time can be daunting. And it usually is.
At least for me as I am notorious for being impatient. When I hit publish on a blog post I want it to rank immediately, but fact of the matter is that it usually takes months before it sits on page 1, IF at all.
When getting into blogging you really have to be okay with delayed gratification.
I have been dealing with this hardship by always celebrating the small victories. It can be a little improvement in my rankings. It can be a few new e-mail subscribers, new fans on Facebook, a little increase in affiliate sales and so on.
Don’t be too hard on yourself just because you have yet to reach your big milestone.
Surviving ‘the dip’
You are probably familiar with Seth Godin’s terrific book, The Dip. Basically it addresses how every new project, business and hobby is all fun and games in the very beginning.
It’s exciting and you are as motivated as can be.
Pretty fast, though, the excitement fades. Suddenly obstacles are starting to build up. It’s not as easy as it was yesterday and you actually have to work hard.
Few people are lucky enough to avoid the dip and I sure as hell wasn’t one of them.
When I started the blog I had already read Seth Godin’s book, so I was aware of the concept.
That was a good thing as I therefor was expecting the dip. I was prepared for it and knew that this was simply just a state I would have to hustle my way through.
By keep telling myself that surviving the dip is an essential part of becoming successful, I was able to power through.
Having to do everything yourself
Most bloggers who start out have very limited resources. That means they have to do everything themselves. Outsourcing is generally not an option.
Right from buying the domain, setting up the first blog post to sending business proposals to potential partners, fixing various technical aspects and understanding how SEO works, everything is on your plate.
And you have to be really hungry if you are going to chew your way through all of it.
Having to do everything yourself has been one of the most valuable things I have had to do. You learn so incredibly much so incredibly fast simply because you have to.
The downside, however, is that you easily will find yourself overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start and it all just seems too much.
What I have done in order to not go down Overwhelm Lane, is to break down the tasks in what is super important and what is not so super important.
Then I will start with the number one super important task and solve it. When I have somewhat solved it, I move on to the next one. And then the next one.
It’s so much easier this way as opposed to starting from scratch with five different things you have zero grasp on.
From successful to thriving blogger
Even though I felt like a successful blogger after only twelve months of blogging, I wasn’t thriving. The blogging hardships were still of too great proportions.
I was still waiting for the blog to properly take off. I also still had so much basic stuff to learn.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2017
That’s today.
2 years and 10 months later I am still blogging away. I have written more than 700 articles. I have published more than 700,000 polished and edited words.
Stayclassy.dk has become the largest men’s fashion and lifestyle blog in Denmark with more than +60,000 monthly readers.
Blogging is my bread and butter, but my blogging income allows me to eat steak and béarnaise – and quite often actually!
I feel like I am thriving. I understand the blogging business. I know how it works. I generally just find it easy to connect the dots. Getting to this point has also sped up the growth of my blog.
2024 Update
In terms of age, I am in my early 30s. Geographically, I now live in Portugal. On a daily basis, I deal with various things and cases, which can probably best be described as a mixture of ideas and developing concepts as well as online marketing.
Alongside Stay Classy, I also help my girlfriend’s blog, AmalieRohde.dk , which has since become an integral part of Stay Classy – namely Stay Classy Kvinder . Likewise, we also run Stay Classy Vlog , which is the associated website for our YouTube channel , Stay Classy Vlog.
The most valuable tools I use
Consistency
It might seem self-explanatory, predictable and whatnot. I don’t care. Consistency carried out with persistence is by far the best path to destination successfulness.
And everybody knows that, right?
I think they do. The problem is that most people don’t understand just how important it actually is.
Or maybe they do.
They just don’t have the stomach to stay on course by moving one feet in front of the other every day. Because it is by no means an easy tool to use. It requires self-discipline on a daily basis, and yeah, we’ve already been over that.
The most incredible SEO-research tool available
Right up until six months ago I have been a cheapskate when it comes to the many online research tools available. No way I was paying $200+ a month just so I could look at competitor backlink profiles and keyword rankings.
Boy, has this been a poor decision, and not only a poor decision, it has also been an expensive one.
I’ll tell you why.
In the jungle of SEO-tools I was referred to Ahrefs.com by a friend of mine who was doing an unbelievable job with building links and domain authority for his own site.
I signed up with a paid profile and started looking at backlink profiles of competitors and people in the Danish SEO-industry, who I knew were building lots of links.
Immediately, I saw how many quality links that were just laying there. Up until July 2016 I really hadn’t done much about building quality links to my blog, so I figured it was well overdue I put in an effort.
And so I did.
I picked all the low hanging fruits to begin with, however sticking only to relevant and natural ones. I moved on to approaching strong websites where guest posting made sense.
Quickly, I got into the game of doing white hat link building. So many strong websites were suddenly pointing to my blog and then, BAM, I saw the effect.
The annotation next to July 2016 marks the day I started putting effort into link building. Two months later my blog took a massive jump. And then again.
Essentially I had doubled my organic traffic. This naturally had a pleasant effect on my affiliate income.
It was great to see this boost in traffic and earnings, but I am still cursing myself for not putting in this effort much earlier. I wonder how much money I have lost.
Oh, well.
Expensive lessons are sometimes the most valuable ones. And here the lesson was that links are ever important, whether you like it or not.
I know that everybody knows this. I’m not sharing any wild information that will shake the blogging or SEO industry. I just want to remind people that as ridiculous it can seem to spend an entire day on getting a single link, it is most likely worth it.
Another great thing about Ahrefs…
… is that their ranking system works as daily motivation for me.
Being able to see your Ahrefs rank, but also domain rating and organic search movements is fantastic.
It makes me want to work even harder as the daily effort I put into my blog translates to these Ahrefs statistics. Everyday they are updated.
Here is one of the Ahrefs graphs I follow religiously. Notice how it started going upwards in July, when I signed up.
What blogging has given me
Getting into the blogging business was in many ways a desperate measure.
Back in 2014, I would never have guessed just how many good things that would come out of it.
Because fact of the matter is that blogging has done so much more for me besides giving me juicy do-follow links, a bunch of traffic and a passive income.
I’ve become an independent dude
Almost three years of experience with running my own business has made me very independent to the point where I will never work for another person.
The joy of seeing my own business grow and grow is more fulfilling than anything I can think of.
The independence has also given me clarity.
I am more focused on what I want to achieve with my time on this little planet of ours. I will always have doubts about the decisions I make, but I have become confident enough to follow through and take the risks regardless.
Being a good writer is incredibly valuable
I will probably never be the Mark Twain of the 21st century, but I think that I have become a pretty decent writer in the course of the last three years. A writer that keeps improving.
One of the things that I have realized and thought a lot about lately is how valuable it is to be a good writer.
Writing not only allows you to tell a compelling story, it enables you to reach out to other people with a much higher rate of success. Here I am talking about creating appealing proposals to businesses, but also communication in general.
Additionally, writing has made me much more creative simply because I have forced digital ink on the screen every single day. Coming up with blog post ideas and putting them to life is one of the best ways to exercise your brain’s creative muscle.
Freedom to do what I want to do
Although blogging is no 4-hour-work-week gig, it comes with a tremendous amount of freedom.
Yes, you have to spend a lot of time in front the screen, but having the freedom to choose where in the world you want to sit and when is priceless.
In many ways it is the ultimate thing in life. Being able to do what you love from anywhere in the world.
I wrote this sitting on a roof top bar in Melbourne with the sun in my face.
I moved back from Australia to Denmark in December last year as I wanted to have a steadier base to work from. That hasn’t stopped me from bringing my laptop around the world.
In the last 12 months I have brought my laptop to Dubai, Italy, Greece, Berlin, Switzerland and now Melbourne where I am spending two months before moving onto an epic road trip around the southern parts of Australia.
The doors that have opened
Blogging has opened so many doors for me. It has led me to bigger and better on a continuous note. I get to work with amazing companies.
One of the best experiences was a company that wanted me to do an article on their insane collection of whisky, rum, cognac etc., where I was literally paid to taste some of the most expensive drops in the world. Is this real life?
I have established a network with talented, interesting and reputable people that stretch much further than the blogging environment.
My blog has given me a strong résumé that makes a formal education irrelevant. Although long educations in Denmark are free, I have also saved a lot of time and money by not wasting the last three years on a bachelor degree that won’t serve me.
Most importantly, blogging has made me a happier dude
And not just happier. Happy.
Blogging has given me a sense of purpose in life. I feel like I make a difference doing what I do, which is a feeling that gets emphasized by the many messages I get from inspired readers.
Okay, I’m gonna stop now with the happy camper poetry. It gets a bit much, doesn’t it?
Is blogging for everyone?
Certainly not. And I don’t mean that as in ‘not everybody is talented enough’. I am pretty sure most people could create a blog with decent content.
The problem is just that blogging is much more than creating content. As we talked about earlier there are so many strings to pull, if you want to become successful.
Of course everybody can blog on a hobby level. Nothing is stopping you from writing about your love of gluten free unicorn shaped candy, but if you want to make a living off of it, you will have to go beyond the content.
You will need to treat it like a business. Are you up for starting a business?
What’s next?
For me, you might ask? Only three years in, I still have a lot to learn. I feel like I am still just getting started. After all, three years really isn’t that much.
But to answer your question, I will continue to create content relentlessly although things are beginning to head in new directions. Directions where the format isn’t necessarily text-based, or at least where I don’t have to create all of it myself.
This means that I am in the process of expanding the team from 1 (me) to 2 or 3. This would allow me to take things to the next level and move closer to the ultimate goal, which is becoming the leading fashion and lifestyle magazine in Denmark.
Right now I am in the early phase of starting a vlog.
Something that scares the shit out of me. Putting myself in front of the camera and figure out how to tell a story. Am I even interesting enough? Hardly, most of my friends would probably say.
But I don’t care.
It’s time for Stayclassy.dk to work on even higher engagement. In a world where people can’t seem to get enough of videos, it is increasingly difficult to keep your audience interested only via text formatted content.
People want variety.
Although I have zero experience with recording I decided to jump straight into the vlogging world. I bought a Canon 70D, Røde VideoMic, various tripods, lenses and the whole shebang.
I am on really deep water, but I think I will manage to find my way to the shore.
This is the first vlog of Stayclassy.dk. One of many adventures to come.
So this turned out to be quite a long read. 5000 words actually. That’s a pretty good length if you want it to rank high. Google loooves rich content.
Remember, though, it’s not about the word count. It’s about the message.
I’m sure you got what it takes to become a successful blogger. Really all it takes is to get started, be consistent and passionate, and carry on.
Joen is the guy behind Stayclassy.dk, which is the biggest fashion and lifestyle blog for men in Denmark. He writes articles with the main purpose of inspiring his readers to become the best version of themselves. Connect with him on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Say you’ve done all of the above. Now, the only remaining step is to get the sale. Sounds obvious, but all the preliminary work means nothing if you don’t close. You need to tell people to buy, rather than just crossing your fingers and hoping that they might.
It’s not just writing…
There’s a certain finesse required with this. You don’t sell in the same voice in which you entice, cajole, or inform. Lots of bloggers have trouble making the transition. If you’re going to put yourself out there as a seller of “you-branded” content, you don’t have the luxury of stumbling through and hoping that your sales pitch falls on receptive ears.
At this point, considering how much you’ve put in, selling yourself is mandatory, not optional. You have to use language forcefully, more forcefully than you do in your blog posts. Burrow into your prospect’s head, and by extension, your prospect’s wallet.
Focusing on the benefits
There’s a timeless axiom in the advertising business: People don’t want a bar of soap, they want clean hands.
The benefit of the product is far more important than the product itself. When you instead start focusing on the product—which, granted, you expended considerable effort to create—you’re not exactly empathizing with your clientele. It’s supposed to be about them, not you. No one cares how many hours you spent interviewing people for the DVD series you’re selling. Nor could anyone be less interested in how many pages your ebook is. (Beyond a certain point, of course. If you’re going to charge $329 for a three-page ebook, it had better contain the GPS coordinates for the Ark of the Covenant.)
No, cost-conscious buyers—any discerning buyers, really—want to know the answer to the universal question:
What’s in it for me?
How are you going to make your readers’ lives easier/simpler/richer? State how you’re going to do it. Yes, it’s great that you poured your heart and soul into your work, but that doesn’t necessarily make it sellable.
The human tendency is to concentrate on oneself, rather than other people. Which makes perfect sense—of course you’ll brush your own teeth and wash your own windows before doing the same for your neighbor. But if you want other people’s money, you have to force yourself to think about them first, as unnatural as that might sound.
Here’s an example of what not to write to get people to buy your products. The example is technically fictional, but it’s a composite of other bloggers’ calls-to-action:
“Starting today, I’m running a discount on my latest project. You can get my 36-page, 8,459-word ebook for just $11.99. This ebook, Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them, is the result of many months of research, and is now being made available to you for a special introductory price.”
Wow. Thanks for doing me the favor of offering to take my money. This is like the employee who walks into the boss’s office requesting a raise, and the first point he cites is how many hours of uncompensated overtime he puts in. Or that he has a baby on the way. You need to give your employer, or anyone else in the position of enriching you, a reason for doing so. Again, concentrate on the end users here. Without them, you and your product are nothing.
Here’s an alternative sales script, one that focuses on the buyer. It’s longer, but it also (hopefully) appeals to the buyer’s senses:
“Your car makes an unfamiliar noise. So naturally, your first reaction is to drive to the nearest mechanic, and waste maybe half an hour in the waiting room, putting yourself at the mercy of a professional whose livelihood rests on finding as many things wrong with people’s cars as possible.
For the love of God, don’t. Stop throwing your money away. That knock you hear doesn’t mean you need a new $1400 transmission assembly. It means you need to spend a couple more dollars on higher-octane fuel. That ear-splitting undercarriage rattle can be quieted in seconds, with the appropriate ratchet and a quarter-turn of your wrist.
My new ebook, Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them, breaks down the most common, least pleasant sounds that can emanate from your car. It tells you where they originate, what they mean, and how to prevent them. Some will require a look from a technician, but you’ll be amazed how many won’t. Fix them yourself instead, and you’ll save untold time, money and aggravation.
Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them includes sound files of dozens of the most common noises, along with complete directions on how to locate and assess them. Download it here for just $12, and I’ll include a mobile link for iOS and Android (because very few car noises occur when you’re sitting in front of your computer at home).”
Obviously that sales treatment isn’t going to be suitable for your blog and its products, but you get the idea. People are more budget-conscious these days than they’ve been in some time. They will part with their money, but you need to give them a compelling reason to.
Drawing the line
This doesn’t mean you should be penning advertising copy with dubious assertions. (“Scientifically proven to regrow hair!”) Quite the contrary. If there’s ever a time to be honest, it’s when you’re explaining to your readers what your products can do for them. Your readers will respect you for it, and if you give them value, they’ll spread the word.
For an established blogger, creating products that extend that blog can be a rewarding way to engage your readers and foster an ever-growing audience. For an up-and-coming blogger, selling a worthwhile product can cement your reputation as an authority in your field all the more quickly. Creating blog products takes plenty of time and effort, and while selling them in a rough economy can be a challenge, it’s such challenges that separate the average bloggers from the remarkable ones.
Say what your product’s benefit is (not what your product is, what its benefit is.), and sell.
Key points
Understand that writing sales copy is different than blogging.
Don’t write about yourself.
Don’t write about your product.
Write about your product’s benefits.
Practise makes perfect: keep trying to improve your sales writing skills.
That’s it for our tour of the tricky business of building blog products that sell. How are your products selling at the moment? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
So finally, after approaching this scientifically and methodically, you’re there. You’ve created a product built on the expertise your readers have expected from you and your site. And you’ve priced that product (or series of products) at a level that will generate income without scaring off too many potential buyers. Now all you have to do its open up the storefront and watch the money roll in.
If only.
The good news is that at this point, most of the work is done. But you still need to build your clientele beyond its traditional bounds. To amass your army, if you will.
Flipping the switch
After you’ve created products and made them available for purchase, a radical shift occurs. Whether you realize it or not, you’re now (at least) 51% entrepreneur and (at most) 49% blogger. The set hours that you spend updating and freshening your blog every week are now secondary to your sales efforts. Once you’re committed to creating and selling your product, people will identify you with it, for better or for worse.
If your product is, say, a collection of spreadsheets you can use to organize your home and eliminate clutter, then sink or swim with it. Henceforth, home organization will be your blog’s primary focus. Even though you may love collecting miniatures, and have occasionally blogged about it in the past, your days of doing so are now over. Apple used to sell stand-alone digital cameras. Not anymore.
You’re now a salesperson, and the more seriously you take your new job, the better you’ll do.
For generations, your typical commission salesperson was given a list of leads and an admonition to break a leg. If the new hire didn’t work out, no big deal. There would always be plenty of others willing to step in. Unfortunately, your incipient business doesn’t get that same luxury. The sales staff is you, as is the product.
And your current audience, regardless of its size, is limited. Some of your longtime readers might buy out of a feeling of allegiance or mild obligation. If they do buy, it probably won’t be because they’d been dying for someone to create whatever it is you created. And while your loyal readership may have given you the impetus and spawned the idea for your product, they’re not the only ones you’ll want to buy it.
So where to find a lasting and larger clientele? It involves expanding your horizons, but not in a rote way.
Finding customers
If you blog long enough, eventually you’ll be approached by similar bloggers offering you various stratagems for mutually benefitting your sites. A link exchange, a guest post exchange, and so on. Those are all well and good, if you enjoy the novelty of exposing your blog to an audience that is already loyal to another blogger who operates in the exact same field of interest that you do.
One fellow personal finance blogger, who seems to be an awfully agreeable fellow, recently offered to create a discreet badge allowing me to sell my products on his site, and vice versa. I trust that he accepted it as a business decision and didn’t take it personally when I told him I wasn’t interested.
Why not accept the exposure? Among other reasons, his blog has fewer readers than mine does. Many of those readers of his already read my blog anyway. Besides, what’s to stop him from making a similar offer to other bloggers with greater readerships than his, diluting the impact of his agreement with me?
Also, to put it kindly, he’s not an authority. He’s a guy with a blog, and a relatively new one at that. My products will be an afterthought on his blog, as his would be on mine. That won’t do.
A passionate evangelism
In selecting and pursuing offsite promotional opportunities that will actually help you find customers, you need to be a passionate evangelist for your product. Whether you’re considering buying ad space, using email marketing, social media promotions, or even creating a physical promotional freebie to give away (which we’ll cover on ProBlogger later today), you need to advocate strongly for your product, all the way.
My products need to be advertised in a place of prominence, because I care about them. Not just in and of themselves, but for a more pragmatic reason: it sounds obvious, but every item I ship makes me wealthier. I don’t want the seminars I hold and the ebooks I create to be just another offering in a catalog, vying for attention with someone’s unreadable treatise on dividend investing and the overpriced collection of Visio diagrams that someone else slapped together.
I want my products to stand front and center. I also want to remind potential buyers that no one else’s work can substitute for what I’ve created. If you want to know The Unglamorous Secret to Riches, no one else has it. If you want to know how to get out of whatever unhealthy relationship you have with your employer, that outspoken guy who runs Control Your Cash is the only one who’s going to show you how.
Just another vehicle
That’s why you have to acknowledge the limitations of your own blog. Most of your buyers aren’t there. They’re on unrelated sites, where it’s your job to get their attention and show them what you have to offer. It takes time. In my case—and you can apply this to your own situation—it means posting regularly at major, well-established blogs in my area of concern. It means guest posting at general-interest blogs where I know I’ll reach a diverse and erudite audience. My business model is predicated on the following belief: if people like anything I have to say, once they find out a little bit more, they’ll like everything I have to say.
Which means your blog becomes just another vehicle for selling your product(s). Once you sell to someone unfamiliar with your blog, you then sell that buyer on your blog itself. Anyone who buys your product should immediately become a subscriber. Now that buyer knows where to find your entire oeuvre, including the subsequent products that you’re doubtless working on.
Key points
Once you launch your product, you’re a salesperson. Be prepared to put your product first.
Recognize that the bulk of your buyers should not come from your own site: if you’re to give your product the best chance of success, you’ll need to sell it to people who have never visited your blog … so far.
Be choosy about the promotions you use.
Become a passionate evangelist for your product. This will help you sift the great promotional opportunities from the not-so-great.
As your promotional efforts gain traction, you’ll begin to see your blog as just another vehicle for sales. Importantly, those customers are becoming subscribers … which will help when it comes time to sell your next product.
Still, buyers in 2023 remain wary. They have less money available to spend in an ever-growing market. With more vendors making their products available for sale every day, the successful sellers aren’t necessarily the ones who shout the loudest or the most frequently. Instead, the ones making sales are the ones who communicate the most effectively. Next week, we’ll find out how they do it.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
If you’re late to this particular party, we’ve been spending the last few weeks examining ways to monetize your blog in an era when readers are holding onto their wallets more tightly than ever.
Sure, you can make money by selling ads if all you care about is revenue. Any link farm can do the same thing. But by extending one’s blog into different media, a diligent blogger can create and sell products that no one else can duplicate.
The process we’ve stepped through so far has been fairly straightforward. First, coldly assess what makes your blog distinctive. (If the answer is anything other than “Nothing” or “I don’t know”, proceed to the next step.)
This is precisely where many would-be entrepreneurs get smacked in the face with the harsh truth of the marketplace: putting a dollar figure on that product.
How much should you charge?
Not to turn this into a university-level economics lesson, but the tricky thing is to set a price that maximizes revenue. Sure, you can sell your ebook for 10¢ and theoretically reach the widest possible audience. But if you could charge three times the price, and still retain half your audience, wouldn’t that make more sense?
Ideally you’re doing this to turn a profit, which isn’t necessarily the same as generating as much revenue as possible. You also need to factor in your expenses. Otherwise, this is just a pastime or a vanity project. Creating products certainly requires time, and possibly requires materials.
That means that before you sell your first unit, you’ll already have spent money that you’ll need to recoup.
Say you’ve spent 30 hours writing a plan for a coaching program you plan to sell via your blog. Is $20 an hour a fair assessment of your worth? (That is, could you have earned that much doing something else?) Then you’ll need to sell a single copy for $600. Or two for $300 each. Or three for $200. Or…
You can see where this is going. It’s tempting to lower the price as much as possible, in the hopes that every reduction will attract more buyers. That’s largely true, but a) the relationship isn’t linear and b) there’s a limit—otherwise, you could give your product away and an infinite number of people would use it.
Finding the balance
How many unique visitors do you have? If you don’t know, Google Analytics can give you an idea. What proportion of those are invested in your blog and read it regularly? And what proportion of those will cough up a few minutes’ worth of wages in exchange for the promise of you enriching their lives somehow?
On the flip-side are blogging entrepreneurs who charge too much for their services. They’re like the commission salesman who wanted to get a job at Northrop Grumman, selling B-2 Spirit heavy bombers at $1 billion apiece. (“People have been slamming doors in my face all week, but I get 10% of each sale. And all it takes is one.”)
To avoid this, you need to find a comfortable medium between how much you’re willing to accept, and how much your product can realistically benefit its user. That sounds obvious, but most sellers don’t even bother weighing those variables. They just conjure up a price and hope for the best.
What does your product do … for whom?
Be honest with what your product can do. It won’t make the blind walk and the lame see. But will it show readers how to declutter their lives once and for all? Can it teach them how to change their car’s oil and tires themselves, instead of relying on costly technicians? Can it help readers travel to strange places inexpensively, and does it include an appendix that will teach those readers how to keep their cross-border hassles to a minimum?
Then say so. You don’t have to work miracles. You just have to make some aspect of your readers’ lives easier, less complicated and/or more fulfilling.
More to the point, remember who you’re selling to: your readers, not yourself. No one cares how much asbestos you inhaled in the mine, they just want the diamond. It’s a cardinal rule of civilization that results count, not effort.
One famous globetrotting blogger has recently diversified, and now sells a guide that ostensibly tells artists how they can throw off the shackles of poverty and start making money. He’s certainly appealing to his clientele’s emotions—what’s a more accurate stereotype than that of the starving artist?
Never mind that this blogger is not an artist, and that his background consists of little more than that educational punchline, a sociology degree. His blog’s sales pitch details how many painstaking hours he spent writing how many words and conducting how many minutes of interviews in the creation of his guide, as if any of that matters to an artist who just wants to know how to locate buyers for her decoupage and frescoes.
Keep scrolling down and you’ll find out that for just $39, you’ll receive “15,000 words of excellent content”. No one buys this kind of thing by volume. Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country runs over 850,000 words. That’s 90 times longer than Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which sold far more copies and was far more influential.
Don’t hide your price!
That brings us to another thing not to do: treat the price as fine print. Which is to say, don’t build to a crescendo and make your readers sift through paragraph upon paragraph of hard sales copy before finally deigning to tell them how much your product is going to cost them. To do so is insulting. It’s the tactic of someone who has something to hide.
(There’s one exception to this rule. That’s when you’re using the late-night infomercial strategy, saving the price of your product until the very end because it’s so shockingly low. That almost certainly doesn’t apply in your case. You’re not an experienced marketer with a reputation, hawking indestructible knives and superabsorbent towels that suck up ten times their weight in liquid. You’re a blogger looking to turn your followers from loyal readers into paying customers.)
Getting back to the real blogger in our example, if you spend another $19 on the deluxe version, he’ll throw in three more audio interviews. There’s nothing quantifiable here, just a collection of messages that differ by media. (Incidentally, I asked this blogger how what kind of volume he does. I wasn’t expecting an answer and didn’t receive one, but it was important to make an effort to see if his methods worked.)
Given the choice, I’d rather take my chances giving my money to a blogger with authority and experience, who’s offering me something believable, and who’s not afraid to tell me how much it’ll cost me and how much it’ll benefit me. Is that you?
One more thing. If you’re creating a series of products in which each builds on the previous ones and no individual product can stand alone, you’re putting yourself in a fantastic position. You can give away the first and then start charging with the second. If you do, that’ll give you an accurate gauge of how many people are legitimately interested in your product, as opposed to just being curious.
Accounting for expenses
Once you make the decision to sell, and to price, you’ll have to account for expenses you’d never imagined. Maybe you’ll need to move from a shared host to a dedicated one. Or pay for a business license in your home jurisdiction. Or hire a graphic designer after concluding that your own Adobe Illustrator skills are wanting. A few hours of planning and estimation now can save you weeks of frustration down the road.
Speaking of quantifying, here’s a sample budget (in PDF) that you can adapt for your own use. Be conservative with your revenue estimates, liberal with your expense estimates, and you can get a better handle on how much you should charge when your products finally make it to market.
You might also find the formula presented in The Dark Art of Product Pricing useful. It integrates many of the considerations I’ve outlined here but, like this post, that one can’t definitively tell you what you should charge either. Ultimately, that’s up to you.
Key points
Cover your expenses. Don’t set your prices so low that you’re losing money on every sale.
Don’t set your prices so high that you need to camouflage them, either. Be direct.
Honestly assess what your product can do for your customers.
Explain to your customers what they’ll get for their money.
Like anything else, first plan, then execute.
Next week, we’ll discuss how to increase your potential clientele beyond its traditional bounds.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
Welcome to the third weekly instalment in our series on how to sell products of your own creation, via your blog, in a world in which everyone’s reluctant to spend money. If you’ve been following the series so far, then you’ve learned how to conceive of a product and conduct market research into its viability, at least in theory.
In the process, you’ve learned how to identify your clientele, and create a product that:
has unmistakable value
people will want
is a natural extension of your blog itself, and
no one can duplicate.
Today, we’ll look at actually developing the product you’ve been thinking about.
Making time for product development
Identifying what your product should be is one thing; actually creating your product is something more. It’s a laborious process that requires you to devote hours that you’d otherwise have spent on your blog’s day-to-day upkeep, your sleep, or your work schedule.
Do yourself a favor and choose the first of the three – your blog’s day-to-day upkeep. A weary blogger is an inefficient blogger, and a blogger who leaves the office early to work on his blog every afternoon will soon see his mornings free up, too.
That doesn’t mean you should let your blog go dormant while creating your ebooks, online courses or series of webinars. Far from it. Instead you need to leverage your time, which is a skill that every successful person on the planet has mastered. That applies to bloggers as much as it does to anyone.
With a little planning, you can maintain your blog’s relevance and timeliness. A few minutes of prevention are worth hours of cure.
Accept guest posts
If you’ve ever been approached by people wanting to write guest posts for your blog—and I think almost all of us have—there’s no better time to take them up on it than when you need to commit resources to creating your suite of products. Let someone else do the work, at least temporarily. Besides, guest bloggers don’t exactly drive hard bargains. A backlink or two should be enough to keep them happy.
Toil away on the task at hand while you delegate what can be delegated, and your readers will marvel at how you managed to create sellable products while your blog never missed a perceptible beat.
Publish timeless content
But what if you’re the kind of blogger who considers every post a uniquely crafted representation of your ability to persuade or engage, and who would no sooner have someone else write for your blog than have someone else raise your children?
You can still leverage your time, by breaking out timeless content.
To give you an example, I update my blog with long-form posts three times a week. Occasionally the content is topical and temporal, but most of it is evergreen.
Write in advance
When you know you’re going to be immersed in creating your product for the next few weeks, write as many blog posts as you can, as far in advance as you can. I always have at least a month’s worth of posts ready to go in my content management system, even if I’m not working on a product.
Not only does it give me peace of mind, it gives my blogging partner plenty of time to shop around for a replacement should I get hit by a train.
Write hot; edit cold
Creating a sellable product from scratch takes more time than does creating a blog post, so you want to be able to set aside sufficient hours to work on said product without thinking, “Alright, that’s enough. I have to stop so I can get to tomorrow’s blog post.”
The author’s directive to write hot and edit cold applies here. When you’re sufficiently motivated and your muse is feeling prolific, that’s the time to knock out as many days’ worth of blog content in advance as you can.
Get committed … and disciplined
If any of this sounds daunting, rather than inspiring, save yourself the energy and don’t even waste your time getting started. There are countless bloggers who sell (or more accurately, can’t sell) redundant, uninspired products. Don’t be one of them. Be at least as passionate about any products as you are about your blog itself. You need to have a more compelling reason for selling products than “I probably should” or “everyone else is doing it.”
Creating my own products forced extra discipline on me, which is never a bad thing. Instead of writing until I’d lose interest, I had no choice but to devote certain hours every day to building and formatting my ebooks. For me, that meant 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. for writing, editing and researching products. If I needed to, I’d work on my blog itself later in the day, a few hours removed from the pressing problem of completing each ebook by my self-imposed deadline.
Maintaining the other parts of my life (physical activity, earning money, feeding the pets) prompted me to get as much production as I could out of the finite time I’d allotted for ebook creation. If I hadn’t, I’d have fallen behind schedule and possibly never recovered.
Test marketing
So, you’ve done everything according to plan, and you’ve finally managed to create a product that you think has real value. As far as you know, your brainchild is ready for its formal debut. The readers you’ve spent years building a relationship with should be ready to overcome their inherent frugality and spend a few dollars patronizing you.
But how do you know they will? Or at least, how can you increase the likelihood of them doing so?
You test market your product, just like a major conglomerate’s sugar-free soda or exotically flavored toothpaste. At this point, your product is a hit only in theory, and you need to determine via a sample of people whether you’re ready for the marketplace at large.
This is the hardest part of the process for many. Most people feel uncomfortable having their work criticized. And among the few who think that they’re beyond that, most of those handicap themselves by selecting test marketers who’ll give them the answers they want to hear.
Here’s how you test how feasible the first draft of your product is.
1. Choose your testers
First, determine whom your 12 most critical friends and acquaintances are. You want the ones whom are unvarnished, even caustic in their opinions. Candor counts even more than objectivity does, because the former is a harder quality to find. The fawners and sycophants have no place in this experiment, and your mother will be of little value. They’re not going to help you, and they’re not going to help the only people who matter here—your readers.
Assess your potential test marketers honestly. The absolute last thing you want is respondents who are going to tell you how awesome you are and wow, you created a blog and every post you write is magical and it’s only a matter of time before the International Herald Tribune comes calling and asks you to share your opinions on budget scrapbooking with a worldwide audience.
Why do you want 12 test marketers? Because six of them are going to agree to critically assess your products, yet never get around to doing so. Bribe them if you have to. Offer to buy each one lunch or something.
2. Send them your product
Now, give them your product, with explicit instructions for them to be as critical as possible. Tell them to try to find something wrong even in the parts they like. A third party (or the fourth through 14th parties) will notice mistakes and omissions that you’re too close to the action to see for yourself.
Never send anything to market too early. If you’re a blogger looking to extend your brand (and line your pockets), that might mean nothing more than adding or rewriting a few lines of code. It is far, far better for everyone concerned to improve a product before it goes live, rather than after.
As far as can be determined, no prototype in the history of commerce has been better than the finished product slated for release.
Key points
Don’t sacrifice your income to develop a product: plan development up front.
Accept guest posts, publish timeless content, write in advance, write hot and edit cold, and develop discipline and commitment to what you’re doing.
Test market your product with actual readers of your blog.
Take their feedback and use it to improve your product. Run the tweaked product past your most reliable testers again if you wish.
Alright, enough about “what?” and “why?” Next week we address the most critical question of all: “How much?” But stick around, because later today, ProBlogger will be taking a closer look at a technique to help you generate an unending stream of post ideas. It might just help you save some time to put toward developing your product.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
—Attributed to Wilson Mizner (1876-1933), among others
…Or you can take it a step further. If you research many, and then forge something original, your readers will take notice. And then, if you market yourself in the right fashion, they’ll buy what you’re selling. In the meantime, though, look out later today for a post that explains how you can use video testimonials to set yourself apart from the competition in your niche.
Last week we began our examination of not just how to sell products via your blog, but how to do so when customers are watching their dollars, pounds, euros, rands, pesos and zlotych like never before. As the very concept of “disposable” income becomes less realistic, it’s imperative that you provide real value for your customers instead of just a product that you slapped together out of boredom.
Last week’s post was designed to help you identify what you offer that’s unique. It also helped you to consider that unique offering in reference to your audience’s present, most pressing needs.
Competitor and market research—seeing what else the marketplace is already offering—is a good next step to take. It shows you exactly what not to sell, and forces you to work a little harder to create something truly distinctive.
Assessing the competition
Candidly assessing your competitors isn’t plagiarism, but it’s unquestionably research. This isn’t a call to rip anybody off—quite the opposite, in fact.
Say you’ve got a blog that focuses on international train travel for the budget-conscious. Assume you’ve developed a dedicated and regular readership that considers you an authority on the subject. Would there be any market for a handy ebook that tells readers where to buy inexpensive tickets throughout the world?
Of course there would be. For the intrepid and peripatetic traveler, it’d be awfully convenient to know how to save money everywhere from the Camrail station in Yaoundé, Cameroon to the Trans-Siberian depot in Erenhot, China. The information clearly exists, albeit in diverse and unconnected places. For the hypothetical blogger in question, it’d just be a matter of taking the time and effort to compile and present it.
The idea is to create something that’s not only valuable, but unique and, ideally, impossible for anyone else to reproduce.
Again, drawing from personal experience but keeping it generic enough that you can apply it to your own situation, the primary products I sell on ControlYourCash.com are ebooks on selected personal finance topics. The ebooks are short (6000 words or so), easily digestible monographs illustrated with the occasional graphic and written in a style that hopefully serves to distinguish my blog from its myriad competitors. The ebooks are completely of my own derivation, and merge seamlessly with the content on my blog itself. They “extend the brand.”
Which, of course, assumes that the brand is worth extending in the first place.
Unique products are easier to sell
Creating products worth selling is only half the battle. You still need to make the sale. The list of worthwhile consumer items that never get sufficient exposure in a saturated marketplace is a long and depressing one. Marketing is an inexact science, but there are simple rules that you can follow to publicize what you’re selling. Those rules can be more self-evident that you might think.
I once worked for an advertising and marketing firm whose clients included a hot sauce manufacturer. The firm created multiple innovative, entertaining campaigns that attempted to position the company’s sauce as a bold alternative to Tabasco, Nando’s peri-peri and other competitors.
But the needle never budged. Countless man-hours and dollars went down a hole, sales remained static, and the hot sauce company’s representatives were ready to take their business elsewhere. They demanded an emergency meeting, and the advertising firm’s employees assembled for the inevitable dressing-down. Charts were presented, projections recalibrated, and (gasp) lawyers consulted. It looked as though we were certain to lose a lucrative client, one that was justifiably looking at other options.
Finally, the chief executive officer of the advertising firm—who probably wondered why he was bothering to pay the rest of us—stood up and asked, “Have you ever thought about widening the opening of the bottle by an eighth of an inch?”
Of course it worked, and the moral to the story is that it’s easy to unnecessarily handicap yourself right out of the gate. Many bloggers offer worthwhile products and services, yet treat them as afterthoughts, which is astonishing.
If you’re attempting to sell a product, Job #1 is: make it as easy as possible for customers to buy and consume said product.
Stand out, not beside
Remember that the market for bloggers selling products is amazingly segmented and diffuse. There are hundreds of thousands of diligent bloggers. Your blog’s area of interest is almost certainly well represented, if not overrepresented. Thus it’s important to market yourself aggressively and boldly. That being said, it makes less sense to contrast yourself with, or even acknowledge, your competitors.
Aggressive, confrontational marketing that draws a clear distinction between your product and someone else’s works fine if you happen to be major beer brewer or mobile phone service provider chasing market share. Everyone already knows the competitor exists, and pointing out the little differences counts when comparing essentially homogenous products.
Different rules apply when selling niche products of your own creation, especially in a climate in which consumers as a whole are cautious about spending money. Don’t avail your customers of alternatives. It’s best to pretend they don’t exist. Customers are a lot more likely to spend when there’s only one supplier. The power of monopoly is a formidable one, and no one else sells (or can sell) the properly conceived and executed products that make you and your blog distinctive.
Key points
Assess your competition closely.
Hone your product idea accordingly.
Ensure your product’s key benefits directly reflect your brand.
Make your product as unique and difficult to replicate as possible.
Don’t compare your product directly with those of competitors: design and present it as the best solution available for your target audience segment.
Selling a product takes time, but not as much as creating it in the first place does. Next week, we’ll learn how to develop your product and devote the appropriate time and resources to it.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
How do you get readers to part with their money, especially when said money is scarce?
This year has been particularly tough for businesses and individuals who are all dealing with rising interest rates and cost of living pressures. It’s difficult for most merchants of any kind to make a sale. It’s particularly so if you’re a blogger who wants to advance from engaging readers about your subject of interest to getting those readers to buy something. In an average-to-booming economy, it’s easier to get people to part with their discretionary income, and not that much of a deal if they don’t.
But when belts are tightening across the globe, how do you get readers to buy from you?
This post is the first in a series where we’ll systematically prescribe a foolproof way for you to create worthwhile, lasting products that your readers can actually use—and that they’ll pay for the privilege of owning.
If you’re blogging regularly, and are the kind of blogger who reads ProBlogger, it’s safe to assume that you’re at least amenable to the idea of a digital storefront. Yes, maybe you consider your blog to be strictly a labor of love: something that serves solely to convey your thoughts about woodworking, or Pacific Island languages, for the sheer satisfaction of sharing such with your readers. If that describes you, great.
Yet if you could monetize your blog—sell a product or service of your own creation—you’d at least think about whether any profit you’d make would be worth the effort, right?
We all want a bigger audience. But how can we turn regular readers into paying customers? Having half a million unique visitors means a lot more if even 1% stop to buy what you’re selling. Of course, that implies you’re selling something in the first place.
But what should you sell? Where do we begin?
You need an idea
It all starts with an idea. Really, it does. That’s not just an empty axiom.
(Apologies in advance. The next couple of paragraphs might read like an end-of-chapter exercise from a self-help book. That’s not the intention. Take them literally and don’t read between the lines.)
Answer the following questions, one series at a time. Explanations to follow:
1. What do I have to offer?
How am I different?
What makes me unique?
What can I offer to readers/customers that’d be hard for someone else to duplicate or automate?
Obviously you can only answer these questions for yourself, but I’ll walk you through it with my own set of answers.
My blog, Control Your Cash, is one of a few dozen personal finance advice blogs in existence. But “personal finance” is a wide umbrella. Most of my competitors can be placed into one of several subcategories. Some blogs focus on listing inventive ways to save money; others talk about personal finance exclusively from a Christian perspective; still others do nothing but spend every post comparing different credit cards.
Then there’s mine, which is probably most distinguished by a tone that readers have described as everything from “uncompromising” to “snarky”. Also, Control Your Cash explains complex and arcane personal finance topics in something of a readable and not altogether unfunny style, a skill that took a few years to develop.
That isn’t bragging. That’s determining what makes my site different, and what makes its author’s offerings of potential interest to a customer.
Understanding difference
My blog’s central feature is its thrice-weekly posts, there for the reading and delivered free to whomever subscribes to the site’s RSS feed. I also sell a full-length book on the fundamentals of personal finance for people who know that they know nothing about money, and a series of inexpensive ebooks, each of which deals with a particular topic. (How to read financial statements, how to buy a house, etc.)
The wonderful thing about taking the steps to create products is that few of my competitors, and presumably few of yours, are going to bother. The discipline required to write something 6000 words long, let alone 75,000 words long, intimidates most bloggers. The majority would rather just throw a bunch of unconnected thoughts on the page, run spellcheck (or not), then publish.
One of the elite bloggers in my field of interest is Mike Piper of Oblivious Investor. Even though we both write about personal finance, I hesitate to call him a “rival” because there’s little overlap in what we do. Mike’s tagline describes his site succinctly: “simple, low-maintenance investing.” To that end, he’s written a series of books—one on income taxes, one on accounting basics, and so on. As a certified public accountant, but one who can write captivatingly and with minimal jargon, Mike knew he could own that niche with little fear of serious competition.
You answered the questions, right? The ones at the start of the section?
If it took you more than a few seconds to answer them, stop. If you can’t effortlessly determine what makes your blog and your perspective unique, you can’t very well expect your readers to do it. Remember that they aren’t in the market for a faceless product that had dozens if not hundreds of hands in its creation, like a car or a jacket.
For better or worse, they’re buying you and whatever it is you’re identified with.
Accepting an ugly truth
If you answered the questions and came away with the conclusion that your blog just isn’t that distinctive, save yourself hours of frustration now by acknowledging that. It’ll be far better than creating a suite of products that hardly anyone will buy.
There’s no shame in coming to this realization at the outset. If anything, it gives you a chance to start afresh and establish your point of differentiation before you embark on anything else.
You don’t necessarily need a dedicated following to sell products—many of the people who buy my ebooks do so on their first visit to my site. (Which makes sense. What would compel an 89-time visitor to finally break down and buy something on his 90th visit?)
Now that you’ve determined what makes you different, consider your audience.
2. How can I build a following?
The speed with which people blog and get feedback makes it easy to confuse traditional roles in commerce. Just because someone leaves an insightful comment on your site doesn’t make him your confidant.
Keep it professional. Many bloggers forget that their customers, their advisors, their test marketers, and their collaborators should not all be the same people.
All too often, I’ll see bloggers make this dangerous transition when conversing with their readers. Don’t be afraid to solicit feedback, but on the other hand, don’t cede the responsibility of initiative by asking your readers, “So, what would you like to see?” That’s the equivalent of the chef coming out of the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand, going up to the couple awaiting dinner and saying, “Here, taste this. Tell me what you think.”
The above “strategy”, or non-strategy, is pervasive among bloggers, yet bears little fruit. Name a successful company—any company. Nike, for instance. Their research and development is a little more sophisticated than asking potential customers, “Would you like to see a running shoe with a waffle sole?” Or “How about workout gear that wicks away moisture?”
Sell yourself
If you’re going to sell via your site, you have to be bold. It starts with you, not your customers. Say “I’ve got a sales method that will revolutionize the industry. Here it is in four easy lessons.” Or “Sick of not knowing how to work on your car? Stop putting yourself at the mercy of repair shops. Download my series of instructional videos instead.”
Personalize it. Add value. Sell yourself. Take the examples from the preceding paragraph. Theoretically anyone could offer them. What makes your methods different? Is it your style and demeanor? Have you done research that no one else has done before? Are you creating a service or product that people don’t even know that they require, but won’t be able to live without once you’re done with them?
Ultimately, you want to understand what your readers want and need. But how urgently do they need it? When money is hard to come by, will they pay to have their pain assuaged? (People are much more interested in reducing pain than in embracing pleasure.) How can you improve their lives, and/or make their businesses more profitable?
Know your audience, and get inside their heads—specifically, the product-buying part of their heads. Read the comments they leave. Gauge their interest in and commitment to your blog. Only then can you create and sell content that resonates with and delights your readers, while staying true to your unique voice.
Key points
It all starts with you. Work out what’s unique about you and your blog.
Don’t be afraid to start again if your point of difference isn’t easy to define.
To build a paying clientele, offer something to your readers to gauge their interest.
Build yourself—your unique point of difference—into what you offer.
Use these offerings, and your blog as a whole, to get inside your readers heads, and understand how you can uniquely meet their needs.
Next time out, we’ll discuss how to research your competitors, and how to stand out from among them when readers are counting every penny.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
In this post, I’m going to show you the exact steps one blogger used to earn over $1 million. That’s making some serious money blogging!
I interviewed Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and if you’re serious about making money blogging, then you need to read this interview.
But a heads-up: this post is long and extremely detailed. It took me over 20 hours to write. It will take you about 15 minutes to read.
I know you may be skeptical about the $1 million, so let’s start by looking at the facts.
Ramit Sethi and I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Ramit’s advice on money has been featured on CNN, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, FOX Business, PBS, The New York Times, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, npr, REUTERS, and most recently in a major feature in Fortune Magazine.
His personal finance book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is a New York Times bestseller, and a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
IWTYTBR is ranked 19,466 on Alexa. It hosts over 250,000 monthly readers, and has 100,000+ newsletter subscribers. Prices of IWTYTBR products range from $4.95 to $12,000. But most importantly, Ramit’s tactics get his readers results. See this post, where over 500 readers wrote 54,818 words that say so. That’s as long as a novel!
Impressive, right?
Now, let’s break down Ramit’s five-step system for creating and earning immense value.
Do Research That Gets Inside Your Readers Head
Examples of research insights for IWTYTBR
Use surveys to uncover the words readers use
Collect words from your email subscribers
When to ignore your readers
Don’t refer to comments on other blogs
Collect all the testimonials you will ever need
It’s your birthday: ask for feedback
Target your customers closely
Write a sales page that makes your fortune
Naming your product
Answer objections before your customers even have them
Don’t waste time A/B testing: it’s about the offer
Understand the taxonomy of pricing
Write Super Specific Headlines
Give Your Product An Unbeatable Guarantee
What to do right after the customer buys
Using ethical persuasion
1. Do research that gets inside your reader’s head
When you can truly deeply understand people, even in fact better than they understand themselves, then your sales skyrocket.—Ramit Sethi
There are two reasons getting inside a readers head will skyrocket your sales.
First, you will use the information to create a product or service that matches their wants and needs.
Second, you can use their exact language in your copywriting to reach them at a deeper level.
A big part of selling a product is being able to understand your reader’s barriers. What’s holding them back from their goals? In terms of money, people already know they need to manage and invest it. In terms of weight loss, people already know they need to lose weight and eat better. And in blogging, you know it’s offering immense value to your readers that will make you a problogger.
But they aren’t doing it. There is something much deeper than this goal, which is the barrier to achieving it. You’ll only discover that by doing enough research.
Maybe you’ll find out that in finance, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “I really need to study a compound interest chart and start investing!” Nobody. They say, “this year I am going to try harder,” or “yeah, I should probably do that, but first I need to figure it out.”
When you know that language, you are inside your reader’s head.
Imagine you are a weight loss blogger. I want you to write a headline for a coaching session on losing weight. Go!
Wait. You don’t have enough information to write an effective headline. The best you can do is generic stuff like, “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days with our experienced coach!”
“Weight loss” is too broad a topic. Maybe your reader wants to lose fat from a specific area. Or perhaps they want to lose weight for a specific reason. A 50-year-old mother of two will have different reasons than a 28-year-old guy living in Manhattan.
So, you do some research and find out your target customer is a single woman who wants to lose weight from her thighs. You could write a killer headline pretty quick, right?
Soon, you’ll be able to truly understand your reader’s hopes, fears and dreams—and articulate them even better than they can. That’s the power of research.
Examples of research insights for IWTYTBR
During our interview, I asked Ramit to share some of the specific insights he has applied from his research. Here’s a big one.
A couple of years ago Ramit was doing a book tour, and he’d ask readers what they really want to learn. Everywhere he went, people were telling him they want to earn more money. That’s why he decided to create his flagship course, Earn 1k On The Side.
But just like “I want to lose weight” is too generic, so is “I want to earn more money.” Here’s what Ramit thought: “I’m so smart. I know my audience so well! They want to live a better lifestyle—fly to Vegas for the weekend and drop a couple grand.”
Then he did his research.
It turned out the real reason his readers wanted to earn more money was so they’d have the option of quitting their jobs. Yeah, just the option. This insight profoundly changed how Ramit created and positioned his course.
By the way, take a look at the signup page for Earn 1k. How much do you want to bet “I can’t freelance … I don’t even have an idea” was one of the objections Ramit was hearing over and over?
So, how do you go about doing research that gets you inside your reader’s head?
Use surveys to uncover the words readers use
The beautiful part is that because so few people are doing this, if you do even a small amount—you completely stand out. You don’t need 25,000 data points. That’s ridiculous. It took me years to be able to get to that. If you have 20 qualitative responses to one survey question, that’s pretty informative.—Ramit Sethi
Before launching Earn1k, Ramit collected 25,000 data points, and then over 50,000 for version 2.0. He calls this his “secret sauce,” which allows him to be the “wife who knows her husband better than he knows himself.” Most of that data came from surveys.
He says that a lot of people don’t use surveys at all, so they come up with useless advice like “keep a budget.” So if you survey even a little bit, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.
Ramit starts with really broad surveys, and narrows the questions down over time. He asks the questions four or five times until he really gets at the truth. Sometimes it takes Ramit four months and 6,000 answers to get at a single nugget of truth. You don’t need that many responses, though: even 20 qualitative responses to one survey question can be extremely informative.
Ask open-ended essay-style questions. You aren’t aiming for statistical validity here.
Ask five questions. Keep them short and specific.
Include examples of the kinds of answers you want: really long, detailed responses, not one-liners.
The two most important questions are “What is it you’ve tried and failed at?” and “What do you want?”
Here’s an example of a question from one of Ramit’s surveys:
“In your own words, what skill would you use to earn more $ on the side? (For example, “I’m good at writing, but I just don’t know how to earn $1,000 using my writing skills…”)”
Download copies of Ramit’s surveys—and an audio case study that walks through an example step by step—here.
Never do this on your survey
I asked Ramit if there was anything we shouldn’t ask on a survey. Here’s what he said.
Don’t ask them what they would be willing to pay. They don’t know. They will tell you an untruthful answer, and it’s pointless to ask them. Okay. People don’t know how to do pricing, so they get lazy and they are like “hey, what would you pay for this special mastermind ebook bootcamp” and you get the worst answers in the world. By the way they are total lies. People aren’t intentionally lying, they just don’t actually know what they would pay for something.—Ramit Sethi
Another thing you shouldn’t do is try to sell. You are doing research. How do these two research questions make you feel?
If I told you I had an eight-week course that was guaranteed to make you 1k a month on the side, would that interest you?
Have you ever tried earning money on the side? What happened?
Aim for the second option. It’s like my mom always said: “treat people how you want to be treated.”
Getting people to take your survey
You write great material, you are adding value for your readers. They love you. They wake up in the morning and see you in their reader, or come to your website or see you on Twitter. They like you.—Ramit Sethi
The key to getting readers to take your surveys is that they have to like you.
If you don’t have a good relationship with your readers, then none of this stuff matters. You can stop reading this post and go read How To Build The Relationship With Your Readers instead.
But if your readers like you, you are set. You don’t need thousands of them either.
Step two is to reach out to your readers via email and social media, saying something like this: “Hey guys, I’m looking for some help here. I’m trying to figure out how I can help you best. Would you mind taking like 5 minutes to give me your thoughts?”
That’s enough. You are set to start getting in your readers’ heads via surveys. But there’s another way you can do it.
Collect words from your email subscribers
You can also use email to better understand your readers.
Here’s what Ramit does.
He writes a big, detailed email with a story about something that happened to himself or to a friend.
He finishes it with a call to action, “Hey, I’d love to hear your story. Please email me back, I read every one.”
He responds to some of the replies. The recipients of those personal responses think, “Wow, this dude actually reads his emails and he cares”.
That last point is pretty good for relationship building, too. These are the little things you can do that will bring you disproportionate results.
When to ignore your readers
Sometimes you’ll get reader feedback that you disagree with. Over time, you will develop a filter for what to listen to and what to discard.
Here’s a way to start developing your filter. When you get a good response, try to find out a little more about the person who wrote it. If everyone who buys from you is a 26-year-old man living in the USA, then listen to them. Ignore the 72-year-old grandma who’s complaining your font size is too small.
If you haven’t made sales yet, focus on getting to know your target audience. As Ramit advised in a previous interview, don’t write for everybody. For Ramit, IWTYTBR isn’t just another blog, so he isn’t interested in people reading just for intellectual entertainment. He wants people who will take action.
Don’t refer to comments on other blogs
You’ve probably heard this advice before: look at comments on other blogs in your niche, then blog about the questions they ask. Ramit says there is no value in this kind of research.
Why? Because audiences on different sites are so profoundly different.
Ramit recently wrote a post called The worst career advice in the world. It received over 200 long comments and was very well regarded. The article was syndicated by another site where the audience didn’t know him at all. On that site, the article got 24 comments, most of which were super-negative.
Your audience is unique and special—that’s why they are your audience.
Collect all the testimonials you will ever need
Another part of your research and development should involve collecting testimonials. We’ve all seen those generic testimonials that are totally contrived: “Oh wow, this is the best product I ever bought and it changed my life forever!”
You need real testimonials, and the best source is people that have bought your products. Send them an email that says, “Hey, hope things are going well. So happy to see how everyone is doing.” Then tell them to click the appropriate link: “If you accomplished x in 5 hours a week, click here. If you did y, but you were skeptical, click here.” This gives you testimonials for all those options.
Here’s another tip for getting rock-solid testimonials. As readers are going through you course, get them to fill out progress reports. That way, feedback is part of the funnel. Believe it or not, Ramit gets so much feedback this way he hired a guy whose sole job is to manage them.
And if you’re developing your first product, Ramit suggests two ways to get testimonials.
First, you may have some respondents you’ve never engaged with before. In your survey, include a comment like, “Hey, if you’ve used any of my free material for x/y/z, I’d love to hear your story. Please be specific”. All of a sudden you have 20 testimonials!
Another way is to offer free trials for your product. So, find five to ten friends or readers. Tell them “Guys, I’m planning to release this thing. It will be about $100. I’m looking for ten people to go through it and give me feedback. If you agree to fill out three surveys, you get this trial for free—and the final product as well.”
It’s your birthday: ask for feedback
During our interview, I asked Ramit about one other way I’ve seen him get people to leave feedback at IWTYTBR.
On his birthday this year, Ramit wrote a post and included this call to action at the bottom: “Nothing could be better than hearing how my material has helped you. Just leave a comment on this post. Or, upload a video to YouTube and tag it “iwillteachyoutoberich.”
“The more specific, the better Share a story. Tell us how IWT helped you hit a goal, pay off debt, earn more, get a better job — whatever. Provide specific, concrete #’s. Tell me what it meant to you. It would make my day.”
The comments are people saying things like “I’m earning $70k more than I was before”, “I was able to quit my job and move across the country” and “I was earning $10 an hour, now I’m earning $40”.
These comments weren’t destined to be testimonials, but here’s one way Ramit uses them. When he makes a post about how he’s able to charge 100x what others do, and why his students are delighted to pay it, he includes the link. It proves that he’s not just providing information, but is also delivering actual results.
2. Target your customers closely
We saw earlier that Ramit targets his customers closely. He targets people who take action. He says it’s better to have a small core audience that takes action, respects what you have to say and gets results from your material, than a massive audience that doesn’t open your emails.
Here is a way to filter them out. Don’t sell via a squeeze page. Ramit sends subscribers through weeks of free material before giving them a chance to buy. If people complain, he unsubscribes them.
Then he tells the subscribers who can and can’t buy the course. For example, people with credit card debt are prohibited from buying his courses. If he finds out they bought it, he will ban them for life. Why? For one, Ramit doesn’t believe it’s right to take that money when he knows it will end up costing the customer twice as much. Second: it sends a message to the other readers.
3. Write a sales page that makes your fortune
We’ve had pages that convert at 68.7%, which in the online world is unheard of.—Ramit Sethi
Ramit spends months (or even years) doing research and development. He spends a lot of time crafting his product and offer, and he has converted as high as 68.7%. In our industry the average is 2-4%.
Realistically, you won’t get conversions that high. But could you improve your sales? Of course. If you don’t you are leaving a ton of value on the table—not just money—but value that users aren’t receiving because you aren’t messaging correctly.
Your blog doesn’t need as big a following as IWTYTBR to implement this. The basic patterns Ramit uses are modeled by people in businesses much larger and smaller. To succeed, you need to deeply understand your readers, then spend time on stuff that matters, and avoid what doesn’t.
Naming your product
Naming your product is some of the most important language on your sales page. If you want inspiration, check out Chris Guillebeau’s work at The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris names products like The Travel Hacking Cartel, Empire Building Kit and A Brief Guide To World Domination.
Let’s look more closely at how Ramit names his products. Why did he call his earning money course Earn 1k on the side? Because $1000 is an achievable figure. A lot of students go on to earn much more. But Ramit says if you tell them they will earn $10,000 they go “I don’t believe you, I’m not the kind of person”. Earning an extra $1,000 a month is life changing for most people. And it’s “on the side” because to become richer, people tend to think that they have to quit their job and start the next Google. The vast majority will not and cannot. But anyone can do five to ten hours a week on the side.
For Ramit’s new Find Your Dream Job course the naming process was similar. Even though the long-term goal is to help people find their dream career, he is using their language. If you are sitting around with your buddies, what you actually say is “I wish I could find a new…” What?
“Job”.
And “dream job” is what people are thinking.
Answer objections before customers even have them
Remember all those testimonials you collected? Now it is time to use them, and they are very strategic.
Imagine you find in your research that people don’t believe they have enough time to implement your advice. Great. Now you go to customers who are really happy and say “Hey, I’m looking for anyone who thought they wouldn’t have time to complete this program, but now you’ve achieved x results.”
Add that testimonial to your sales page, and when the reader’s there, they’ll find an answer to their objection before they even had it.
Don’t waste your time A/B testing: it’s about the offer
So few of us are even spending time on language. We are spending time on things that give us a shiny pop. You know you might be able to measure an increase in conversion by 1.6%. But when you do can things like this you can increase every other conceivable measure. Revenues up 500%. Engagement up 750%. Because you are actually speaking to people in the language that works with them, and not at them.—Ramit Sethi
Ramit really emphasizes how you should spend your time on the things that matter. “My point is, focus on the stuff that matters and is going to make the biggest most valuable gain for you… don’t get caught up in this microtesting world. It’s sexy. It’s fun. We see a 1.3% increase in open rates because we tweaked our subject lines. Or, you can get a 500% increase in revenue because you came up with a better offer,” he says.
Why all the hate? Two reasons. One is that even if you change the color of your button and improve opt-ins by 24%, it doesn’t mean you are going to convert any more sales. Second, even if you do increase the conversions to opt-in, they will eventually regress to the mean. You know who actually gets results from testing button color? Amazon.com.
Ramit says one area to test that can skyrocket your sales is your offers. Do your research and find out what people want. Do they want a standalone ebook? Maybe, and they’ll be happy to pay $97 for it. Or if someone doesn’t want a full video course, maybe they do want transcripts at a lower price. Others want accountability, like live calls every week or even a one-on-one call. Ramit warns that people might say they want an ebook but they may really need someone to check in.
One way to craft your offers is to study people you admire in both the online and offline worlds. What do they offer and how do they offer it?
McDonald’s created the kids’ meal. That’s an offer. They packaged up certain things in a certain way. Offered bonuses. Changed pricing. And the kids’ meal is one of the most successful packages ever created in the history of business.
When I interviewed Neil Patel of Quicksprout he told me about a $199 traffic generation system he offered. He also gave buyers a 30-minute phone call, and after hundreds of sales, is buried in scheduled calls. Ramit says Neil learned two things: that he will never do it again, and that people want his time. That’s very valuable.
Understand the taxonomy of pricing
There is a taxonomy of pricing that is well understood in the information product world.
It goes like this:
blog post: no one will pay for
PDF/ebook: $27-$97
audio/video course: $497-$997
must have video or live component: $997+
in person, one-on-one: the most
If you are putting out a book, and all the others in the store sell for $10 or $15, it’s going to be awfully difficult to roll in and get $200 for yours. Stick to the taxonomy.
Write super-specific headlines
There are plenty of great posts on writing headlines, so I won’t dwell on it here. Check out Copyblogger’s How to Write Headlines That Work instead.
I will note that Ramit says headlines matter profoundly. So spend 50% of your time on them and get super-specific. Doing this, you might decrease conversions, but the people that come through are worth so much more—not just in terms of money, but also in terms of the value you offer them.
Then you want to start thinking about your guarantee.
Give your product an unbeatable guarantee
Offering a money-back guarantee forces you to step up your game, because if your product isn’t good, you don’t get food on the table. I think all of us in this market need that, because there have been so many sleazy people that released substandard products. So I’d like all those people to go out of business, and I’d like the best people, the ones who say “look, my product is so good you try the entire thing and if you don’t like it I’ll send all your money back, even the credit card processing fees.” I want more people like that, because that is a product with integrity versus a fly by night product.—Ramit Sethi.
A big barrier for business people who want to offer guarantees is that they are afraid people will rip them off. Guess what? Some people probably will. But the ability to get a refund will drive more revenue and expose you to many more great people than the few bad apples acting illegitimately.
People expect the opportunity to get 100% of their money back. If your product is good enough, why not let people try the whole thing and get their money back? You have nothing to worry about.
But you should monitor your percentages. On a $97 product you can expect a return rate of about 10%. If you are getting 40% of sales returned, your product is not good. If you are getting 2% returned, that’s a problem too. Why? You probably aren’t selling to enough people. Generally the higher the price, the more refunds are requested.
Ramit offered some tips on creating an unbeatable guarantee. First, the more powerful you can make your guarantee, the better. In The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss talks about offering a 110% money back guarantee.
Second, the best guarantees are very specific. So don’t just write, “if you are not satisfied for any reason, we’ll give your money back.” Instead try something like, “if you don’t get three paying clients within 60 days, then write me and I’ll send all your money back.”
Third, take as much risk as possible onto yourself. That means offering refunds greater than 100%, paying for shipping, whatever—as much as is economically feasible.
Neil Patel says you can reduce refunds by sending people free stuff you didn’t tell them about during the sale. Just before the refund period is up, send them an email that says, “Hey, next week I’ll be sending you a document that breaks all this down.” Or, “I’ve got a special bonus for you that I’ll be sending along next week,” for example.
So you’ve created a sales page that converts like crazy. But what do you do after your reader buys?
4. What to do right after the customer buys
When they buy, think through their experience. What are they feeling? Nervous. Don’t want to have gotten ripped off. Don’t want to have been taken advantage of. Don’t want their friends to think they bought a weird internet course.—Ramit Sethi
If you told your friends you bought a $2000 video course, they would probably say you got scammed. Normal people don’t buy stuff online, right?
So your newly acquired purchaser is nervous. And after you ease those nerves, they’ll be excited. They can’t wait. Where do they start?
Welcome your customers with a video—Ramit recorded his first one with his MacBook. Tell them something like, “You made a great decision. This is what you are going to get. If you ever have problems, contact us at…” Then give them the material.
It’s important to curate the material your customers see. If you ask people do they want all the information up front, they say “yes.” But if you give it all at once they will be overwhelmed and more likely to cancel or ask for a refund. So tell them, “Here’s why I’m not giving you everything—trust me, and take these action steps.”
I recently watched a Mixergy Master Class called Grow Your Recurring Revenue. It was about how to keep customers that signup for your membership site or courses.
Noah Fleming led the course and said there are three essential Cs: Character, Content, and Community.
In the case of IWTYTBR, the character is Ramit. He’s the personality that readers buy from. The content is what you offer—Noah also emphasized not dumping it all on new buyers all at once.
Community is the elements of your product that let buyers interact with each other. Noah says this is a great way to keep people around, and suggested the idea of forming small groups and giving them tasks: like creating a product together, or developing a landing page.
Ramit tried community by including a forum for Earn1K buyers. He took it down when he found people were spending more time on that than doing work. People still ask him for a forum. It’s what people want—but not what they need.
5. Using ethical persuasion
Life is not just about more conversions. You want to be classy. You want to be respectful. Yeah, you could make more money, but that’s not the goal—the goal is to help them make an informed decision.—Ramit Sethi
Why is ethical persuasion so important? Because now that you know Ramit’s techniques and frameworks for sales, you’d find it just as easy to implement them on the dark side. There are many ways you can use persuasion nefariously, like to convince people to buy things they don’t really need. Ramit says he knows of hucksters who find out how much money their leads have available on their credit cards, then charge that.
Here’s Ramit’s framework for knowing who to sell to.
rational (information + motivation) = decision?
Rational requires that the potential buyer is in a sound state of mind and able to make their decision. Someone in desperate financial circumstances might not be.
Information assumes the potential buyer has all the information in the world about Ramit’s product.
And motivation means it is something they want.
If those three criteria are met, and the lead would buy the product, then Ramit has the privilege to persuade them to buy.
For example, take someone who’s earning $60,000, has $25,000 in the bank and works 9-5 but really wants to earn more. The person has the time, energy, and no credit card debt. If they took the time to go through Ramit’s program, and they trust him, would they buy it? If the answer’s “yes,” it’s a sale.
If someone makes $30,000, has $20,000 in debt, and is looking for a magic bullet, Ramit won’t let the person make the decision to buy.
So, I asked Ramit about those guys who run sites like www.SuperInstantMoneyMakingMachine.com. You know the kind—the ones where they tell you about their life on the beach, drinking margaritas, and chasing women. And there’s a picture of the guy in front of a jet. There is always a jet shot.
Ramit says if that guy has a product that would genuinely change a customer’s life, and gives them an out in the form of a full refund period, then it’s ethical to aggressively pursue the sale. He warns that many pages of long copy, flashing icons, the jet shot, and highlights are scams. Those guys do it because it works, and there are deep psychological reasons for it.
Can you do me a favor and leave a comment sharing the most important insight you got from hearing what Ramit has to say? Be specific—tell us a story, please.
One way to monetise your blog is through working with brand partners.
This could be anything from sponsored content and affiliate promotions through to ongoing ambassadorships or sponsorships. In any case, there are a number of factors I consider when it comes to determining if a blogger is “influential” and can be successful in securing an opportunity with a brand.
As you would expect, metrics tell part of that story, so let’s take a look at them using a framework I thought I came up with, but has also been neatly described by Nielsen as the 3 Rs – Reach, Resonance, Reaction. I actually use at least one more R for Relevance which we’ll cover later.
1. Reach
How many people in the target audience is the blogger reaching?
Potential Reach and Actual Reach are two types of metrics to consider and not all platforms will provide you with both.
Most traditional marketing channels report potential reach, for example, circulation numbers for a newspaper. Your ad or story could potentially be seen by 300,000 people because that’s the number of copies distributed, and may or may not include a multiplier for ‘pass-along readership’ ie the number of people who might read the same copy.
Thankfully digital media gives us a more granular view, with not only potential reach, but also the actual reach of our content. Using a few platform examples (not an exhaustive list) below we can see the difference.
Reach Metrics
Google Analytics: Unique Visitors (potential reach), Unique Pageviews (actual reach)
Facebook Insights: Page Likes (potential reach), Lifetime Post Reach (actual reach)
Email analytics: Total Subscribers (potential reach), Total Unique Opens (actual reach)
Above is an overview of Facebook Insights Data. You can get more granular data from the exported insights.
2. Resonance
Does the content and message resonate with the audience so that they engage, remember or, ideally, change their attitudes or behaviour because of it?
Resonance is one of the main reasons brands work with influencers – their connection to their audience, their ability to tell a story that resonates with their audience far more than a branded message could, and the effect of their authority or trusted voice on the beliefs and actions of their readers.
The more your content resonates with your audience the more likely they will be to engage with it, and those metrics are easily tracked as dwell time, likes, comments, shares and click throughs.
Resonance/Engagement Metrics
Google Analytics: Time on Page (dwell time), % of return visitors (the higher the better), comments, social shares (to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc), some blog platforms have ‘likes’ which you can also include.
Facebook: Likes, Comments, Shares, Link Clicks
Twitter: Likes, Replies (comments), Retweets (shares)
Pinterest: Likes, Comments, Pins/Saves (shares)
Instagram: Likes, Comments, Tag in comments (shares)
A bit about link clicks – if your content has resonated to the extent that your audience follows a link to the brand or branded content, this is a great result. Make sure you capture it either by using a tracking link provided by the brand, or one you can track yourself like Bitly. You can use these links in your blog post and social posts to show click throughs and also to work out the click through rate ie the number of people who clicked the link divided by the number of people who viewed the content.
3. Reaction
Is there a measurable outcome in the change of attitude or behaviour of the audience?
All influencer campaigns are done to achieve some kind of reaction, whether it is awareness, acquisition (ie leads) or sales. It is at this point that you as a blogger/influencer are less able to measure the outcomes. It is here where rubber meets the road and the brand can determine if they got a return on their investment. However, you should still have an understanding of what actions you can drive that they will ultimately measure at their end.
Reaction Metrics
Awareness – obviously the more people who see the message, the more likely they will be aware of it. However, reach or impression numbers alone do not prove this outcome. A brand could look at things like increases in branded search terms, mentions of their brand on social media, unprompted recall, how they heard about the brand.
One way you can help is to survey your own readers and ask if they were aware of the brand before you mentioned it, and or have bought since you mentioned it.
Acquisition – this could be driving your audience to register their email with the brand, either via a competition, to download a bonus, to sign up for their newsletter. The brand needs to track where these sign ups are coming from to attribute the activity to your campaign and work out the cost per lead.
Sales – did your audience buy something? This can be tracked with a promo code for online purchases, an affiliate link, a printed voucher for in-store purchases, or a simple ‘how did you hear about us’ at point of purchase.
4. Relevance – the Most Important R
I mentioned earlier that I use more than just the 3Rs above. Before you look at any of those Rs, the first lesson is to understand that the same blogger will not be influential in all situations. So your first job is always to show a brand how relevant you are to the opportunity on the table.
Relevance will depend on the opportunity itself. Two main indicators of relevance will be:
1. Audience Demographics, Psychographics and Sociographics
Who is the brand targeting? The more specific you can get the more chance you can show how relevant you are over the next blogger. We’re not just talking about women aged 24-45 – that’s pretty much most blog readers! What kind of women, what life stage are they at specifically, what problems is the brand trying to solve for them? Then look at your own data for your audience and see how many similarities you can draw between the target audience and your audience. Some places you can look without getting too technical are:
Google Analytics Country and or even City data:
Facebook Insights “People” will give you a demographic overview for gender, age and location:
So, if the brief is to attract women in Melbourne to a local event, you can give them specific data on your blog and Facebook reach specifically for Melbourne.
Another way to get a more specific profile of your most loyal readers is to survey them annually. This is a great way to get basic demographic data (like education, income and family size/makeup) as well as the psychographic and specific sociographic profiles of your blog readers (their attitudes, interests and lifestyle choices). For example, your survey may tell you your typical blog reader is 25, single, cashed up and loves coming to you for fashion advice because she’s too busy to try and figure out what to buy herself (Ka-ching! by the way!).
You can then use a combination of the above data to show how relevant your audience is to the brand’s target audience.
2. What Outcome is the Brand Trying to Achieve?
The second factor that determines how relevant you are is the overall objective for the brand. What kind of position are you in to drive the specific outcome they’re after? As mentioned earlier, brands work with influencers, bloggers and media sites for awareness, acquisition, sales. Some more specific examples are as follows.
a) Awareness Objective:
The brand is running a general awareness campaign and want major reach for an emotive piece written from your perspective. They need blog post views.
What bloggers usually rely on:
Monthly Unique Visitors
What you need to show:
How many Unique Visitors (relevant to the audience profile) you can deliver to a single blog post – not just your blog. Work out your average unique views per post based on a range of other sponsored posts, and show them some examples and results of similar posts you’ve written.
They need you to know you can drive a direct response to the blog post, perhaps in conjunction with a social network like Facebook or your email list. Show them where your traffic is coming from and that your ‘big numbers’ are not just search traffic to one well ranking post.
For extra brownie points:
Show how engaged they are with your posts using your averages for the Resonance metrics such time spent on page, comments, shares.
b) Acquisition Objective:
The brand is trying to establish itself on Instagram and an increase in the brand’s followers will be a key performance indicator of the campaign.
What bloggers usually rely on:
Media kit vanity metrics ie number of Instagram followers
What you need to show:
Anyone can buy or ‘game’ Instagram followers. Your first task is to differentiate yourself from these types of accounts. Whilst the number of followers you have on Instagram will be important, the outcome here isn’t how many people might see your post – it’s how many people will click over to the brand’s account and follow them. Show the brand how engaged your audience is with your content with average likes and comments for your posts. Even better, show them the metrics for other sponsored posts you’ve done.
For extra brownie points:
Show them examples of when you’ve done shout outs for other accounts/brands on Instagram. Use screenshots and ask for testimonials. We’re straying outside of just quantitative metrics here and into qualitative data to support how relevant you are to their campaign.
Your Most Important Objective
All of the above should give you a solid basis to create a pitch to a brand that goes way beyond what a standard media kit can do. In fact I’m not actually much of an advocate for media kits for influencers. Remember, when you’re pitching for an opportunity for a brand, your biggest challenge is to differentiate yourself from other bloggers and all a standard media kit does is show one blogger’s audience is bigger or smaller than another’s.
Get smarter and use the metrics and evidence you have at hand to show how you are more relevant than all the others. At the very least, by giving them access to a deeper level of data, you may educate them to start asking the same of other bloggers and that could very well be in your favour!
We now turn our attention to ways of making money from blogging that are more more ‘indirect’ in nature – or how to earn money because of your blog rather than from it (How to Make Money From Your Blog – Direct Methods).
Many of the following methods are the result of the profile and perceived expertise of the blogger themselves (whereas many of the direct methods mentioned previously are less reliant upon this).
Building a profile as a blogger doesn’t happen quickly and starting a blog with some of these hopes should be seen as a long term thing. My own experience in this area when starting ProBlogger is that it took about 12 months for opportunities to open in most of these areas. However, with the accelerated pace with which you’re now able to build a personal brand online, these opportunities are probably all available sooner.
Consulting
When you are perceived as an expert on a topic you will find that people naturally come to you for advice – some of them willing to pay for it. Some niches are probably better positioned than others for their bloggers to get into paid consultancy work of course. I spoke with one blogger recently (blogging in a business/technology field) who was able to charge himself out at $600 per hour to give advice to a large company. Many bloggers sell appointments in their calendar, using a cart linked to a booking app or an all-in-one solution like Book Like a Boss. Most of these 1:1 consults are at the top of a pyramid of consulting-type services or digital services that bloggers offer.
Neil Patel has built a successful consulting business by leveraging his expertise in SEO, content marketing, and online advertising. He offers consulting services to companies and individuals seeking to improve their digital marketing strategies and increase their online visibility.
Amy Porterfield is a blogger, online marketing expert, and host of the podcast “Online Marketing Made Easy.” Through her blog and online courses, she provides valuable insights and resources on topics such as social media marketing and list building. Amy has expanded her business by offering consulting services, where she works closely with clients to develop and implement effective marketing strategies.
Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers, a blog and training platform dedicated to teaching persuasive writing and conversion copywriting. Joanna has utilized her expertise to offer consulting services to businesses aiming to improve their copywriting and conversion optimization.
These examples demonstrate how successful bloggers can leverage their expertise and credibility to offer consulting services in their respective niches. By sharing their knowledge and providing personalized guidance, these bloggers have built thriving consulting businesses, helping clients achieve their marketing and business goals.
Employment Opportunities
There’s many examples of companies not just hiring bloggers as consultants, but actually employing them full-time for their demonstrated expertise. Here’s just a couple to give you an idea of how your blog can act like your online CV.
Lindsay Ostrom started the food blog Pinch of Yum in 2010, where she shared recipes and food photography. Her blog gained a dedicated following and her photography skills attracted the attention of the kitchenware company, Williams-Sonoma who eventually hired her as a full-time photographer and recipe developer.
Gina Luker ran the DIY and home decor blog The Shabby Creek Cottage. Her blog’s success and expertise in home decor and crafting led to her being hired by a home improvement retail company to create content and lead DIY workshops for their customers.
Successful blogs can lead to career opportunities and partnerships with companies seeking to tap into the blogger’s expertise, industry knowledge, and audience reach
Business Blogging
Similarly there are some businesses who employ people to blog for them either as their main role or part of their role. These companies recognize the value of bloggers in creating engaging and authentic content that resonates with their target audience. Hiring bloggers to focus solely on creating content for the company’s blog allows them to tap into the blogger’s expertise and established audience, enhancing their brand’s online presence
Kate Arends, the founder of the lifestyle blog Wit & Delight – which covers topics such as fashion, home decor, and personal development – was hired by Target, where she worked as a full-time blogger and content creator for the company’s website and social media platforms.
The Toren brothers, Adam and Matthew Toren, started the blog YoungEntrepreneur.com, which provided resources, tips, and inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs. Their blog’s success led to them being hired by Dell as full-time bloggers and content creators, where they contributed to the company’s entrepreneur-focused initiatives.
ProBlogger Jobs is worth following if you’re looking for these types of jobs. There are hundreds of jobs listed each month across a variety of niches. You can set up job alerts based on keywords associated with your niche interests.
Book Deals
Some days as I read through the RSS feeds that I follow it seems that every blogger I read has a book either in progress or coming out. Once again it’s about being seen as an expert in your field – if you can achieve this you will find publishers are more receptive to having an idea pitched to them and at times will even seek you out. This is becoming more and more common with publishers as they are seeing not only some great writers but that many of them already have large amounts of content on their blogs ready to be pulled together into a book! Self-publication is also a viable option if you’ve built up an audience via blogging.
Ree Drummond, also known as The Pioneer Woman, started her blog sharing stories about life on a ranch and her love for cooking. Her blog’s success led to her securing a book deal. She has since written several cookbooks, including “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl,” which became a New York Times bestseller.
Jenny Lawson, known as The Bloggess, gained popularity through her blog where she shares personal stories with humor and candor. She received a book deal and published her memoir “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir,” which became a bestseller and launched her career as an author.
Brandon Stanton is the photographer and writer behind the blog Humans of New York (HONY). He started the blog as a way to capture the stories of people he encountered on the streets of New York City. His blog gained widespread recognition, leading to a book deal. He has published several books featuring photographs and stories of the individuals he has encountered, including “Humans of New York” and “Humans of New York: Stories.”
These examples showcase how bloggers who have established a strong online presence and gained a loyal following through their blogs have been able to secure book deals and transition into successful authors. Their unique voices and storytelling abilities captured the attention of publishers and allowed them to share their experiences and perspectives through printed works.
Offline Writing Gigs
Bloggers who demonstrate expertise, thought leadership, and a unique perspective through their blogs can also attract the attention of news outlets, leading to employment as full-time writers and contributors.
Ezra Klein began his blogging career on The American Prospect website, where he wrote about politics and policy. His insightful analysis and writing caught the attention of The Washington Post, and he was eventually hired as a full-time blogger and columnist for the publication.
Megan McArdle began her blogging career with her blog “Asymmetrical Information,” where she covered a wide range of topics including economics, politics, and public policy. She was hired by The Atlantic as a full-time blogger and columnist, where she continued to write on similar subjects.
Martin Lewis began his career as a journalist, then launched the personal finance blog MoneySavingExpert.com, gained a significant following, and was then hired back as a full-time financial journalist and expert by a major news publication.
Online Writing Gigs
Similarly, some bloggers land jobs writing for other niche websites as a result of being discovered from their blogs, to contribute their knowledge, insights, and engaging content to the platform.
Joanna Hawley, the creator of the blog Jojotastic, which focuses on home decor, lifestyle, and travel was hired by Apartment Therapy, a popular home decor and design website, as a regular contributor and writer.
David Lebovitz a food blogger and author known was hired by the food and cooking website, Food52, as a regular contributor, where he shares his expertise and delicious recipes.
Ana White’s self-named blog focuses on do-it-yourself furniture and woodworking plans. Her expertise in woodworking and her ability to provide accessible DIY tutorials led to her being hired by the website BuildSomething, where she writes and shares woodworking projects exclusively for the platform.
Business Partnerships
One of the benefits of blogging about a niche topic that interests you is that you will begin to connect with others who have similar interests and expertise. As you interact with them it’s amazing to see the opportunities for working together that arise.
Joy Cho is the founder of the lifestyle blog Oh Joy!, known for its vibrant and creative content. Through her blog, she connected with her now business partner, Angi Welsch, who also had a blog focusing on children’s fashion. They joined forces and established Oh Joy! Studio, a design and branding agency that offers creative services, licensing partnerships, and product collaborations.
Jess Constable, the founder of the blog Makeunder My Life, and Erin Loechner, the creator of the blog Design for Mankind, met through their respective blogs and realized they shared similar values and goals. They collaborated and co-founded The CAMP, a creative agency that offers branding and design services, as well as workshops and educational resources.
David Schneider, a blogger and software tester, connected with Rosie Sherry through their shared interest in software testing and quality assurance. They co-founded the Ministry of Testing, a community-driven platform that provides resources, training, events, and conferences for software testers worldwide.
These examples showcase how bloggers who meet through blogging can form meaningful partnerships and go on to create successful businesses together, leveraging their complementary skills, shared interests, and established online presence to pursue ventures beyond their individual blogs.
Speaking Opportunities
Once again this is dependent upon the topic you’re writing about but some lucky bloggers end up with all kinds of opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars on their topic of choice. Sometimes they are freebies, other times the conference will cover costs and on other occasions there are speakers fees. You can check out my “Speaking” page for some ideas. Other bloggers who make money speaking include:
Pat Flynn – the founder of the blog Smart Passive Income, where he shares his experiences and insights on online business, passive income, and entrepreneurship. His expertise and success in these areas led to him being invited to speak at various conferences and events related to online business and marketing. He has become a sought-after speaker (he’s spoken at a few ProBlogger Events) and has delivered keynote speeches at renowned industry conferences, earning a fee for his speaking engagements.
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder of the blog Moz, which focuses on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and online marketing. Through his blog and expertise in the field, he became a recognized authority in SEO. He has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events worldwide (including ProBlogger Event), where he shares his knowledge and insights on SEO and digital marketing. His speaking engagements have contributed to his reputation and he often commands a fee for his presentations.
Marie Forleo – Marie Forleo is a life coach, author, and founder of the blog and online platform MarieTV. Through her blog and online presence, she has built a large following and established herself as a thought leader in personal development, business, and entrepreneurship. Forleo has been invited to speak at major conferences and events, where she delivers inspirational and empowering talks with a significant fee for her appearances.
What does this mean for your blog?
If you’re planning to use some of these indirect ways of making money because of your blog it’s important that you think seriously about building your own profile and credibility as a blogger. Think about the types of people that you respect and look to as experts an consider what they offer in their fields.
These people are generally original thinkers that not only report what others are doing, but who provide answers and vision for their industry. They are also often well networked and have the ability to draw others along with them.
Here’s where I’d start:
provide useful content that shows an understanding of your niche.
network within your niche. Work on being connected with other key players (big and small).
use your blog not only to report and rehash news but to also show initiative in proposing solutions. Be proactive in your blogging and lead the conversation rather than just react to it.
There’s probably endless indirect methods to leverage your blog to make money. What are some other ways you’ve used or seen?
I tend to break the different models that bloggers are using to make money from blogging into two areas – Direct and Indirect methods.
Direct Income Earning Methods – these methods are where a blogger earns an income directly FROM their blog.
Indirect Income Earning Methods – these methods are where a blogger earns an income BECAUSE of their blog.
Most blogs tend to fall into one or the other of these methods – although there is nothing to stop bloggers experimenting with elements of both ( I’ve seen a few bloggers get into trouble with this (example: Scenario 1 in the previous post).
In this post I’ll look at 7 direct income earning methods and in the next post of this series I’ll explore indirect methods. Please note that on occasion in the following post there will be few affiliate links to services that I use and have had some success with.
Direct Income Earning Methods for Bloggers
1. Advertising
There are many ways of selling advertising space on a blog (this could almost be a series of it’s own) but some of the different advertising options that I see working for bloggers include:
Display Ads: Display ads are graphical or text-based ads that appear on your blog. They can be placed in various locations, such as the header, sidebar, or within the content. You can use ad services or networks like Google AdSense, Media.net, or Ezoic to display contextual ads that match your blog’s content and target your audience.
Native Ads: Native ads seamlessly blend in with your blog’s content, providing a non-disruptive advertising experience. Platforms like Taboola and Outbrain offer native advertising solutions where you can display recommended content or sponsored posts on your blog.
Programmatic Advertising: Programmatic advertising involves using automated systems to buy and sell ad inventory in real-time. Ad networks like Google Ad Manager allow you to manage and serve ads from multiple demand sources, including direct advertisers and ad exchanges.
Direct Ad Sales: Selling ad space directly to advertisers gives you more control over pricing and placements. You can create an “Advertise with Us” page on your blog and reach out to potential advertisers in your niche. Alternatively, you can use platforms like BuySellAds, which connect publishers with advertisers looking to buy ad space.
Sponsored Content/Advertorials: Sponsored content or advertorials involve creating content that promotes a specific product or service. You can negotiate sponsored content deals directly with advertisers or work through sponsored content marketplaces like IZEA.
In-Text Ads: In-text ads appear as hyperlinked keywords within your blog posts. When users hover or click on the keywords, a small ad box or pop-up appears. Platforms like Infolinks and Sovrn offer in-text advertising solutions for publishers.
Rich Media Ads: Rich media ads include interactive elements like video, audio, or animations. Platforms like Raptive specialize in serving high-quality, engaging rich media ads on your blog.
Contextual Ads: Contextual ads are targeted based on the content of your blog. They analyze the keywords and context of your pages to display relevant ads. Ad networks like Media.net and Adversal offer contextual advertising options for publishers.
When considering ad services or networks, it’s important to evaluate their ad quality, payout rates, user experience, and support. You can explore multiple options and test different networks to find the best fit for your blog’s niche and audience.
2. Sponsorship
Another form of advertising that a smaller number of bloggers are using is to find their own advertisers. All of the above systems have the advantage of finding you advertisers (or at least assisting in the automation of ads to your blog) but as your blog grows in profile and influence you might find other options for private deals come up.
The big blog networks have people dedicated to the task of finding advertisers (often working through ad agencies) but smaller bloggers might find this worthwhile also. I’ve been selling ads on my Digital Photography School blog for years now and as it’s grown in traffic and profile and managed to attract larger companies (who are willing to pay more) to buys space. Currently the blog features programmatic ads as well as periodic sponsorships from companies who can purchase a combination of banner, newsletter and text ads.
The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.
3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to (I reviewed it here). Other affiliate programs that represent many different companies and products include Linkshare, Commission Junction, Clickbank, Shareasale and Impact.
Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic. If you want to explore affiliate programs more you might like to read 10 tips for using affiliate programs on you blog.
4. Selling/Flipping Blogs
The idea of selling (or flipping) your blog is one that many bloggers have in the back of their minds for ‘one day’ but in reality it is not something that is overly common… yet (I think this is changing). Starting a blog with the main goal of selling it down the track is one that I’ve heard of a number of bloggers doing but few have been successful. Rather than starting with this intention I think if you start with the intention of building a quality site that has a large readership and it’s own good income stream you are more likely to find buyers down the track.
If and when you do establish your blogging business as a saleable entity, you can market it via sites like Flippa, Empire Flippers and FE International.
5. Donations and Tip Jars
Some blogs are making good money with voluntary payment platforms like Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee. To be successful with asking for money from readers you’ll want to have a large and loyal readership (and a rich one might help too). Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make it work. Many more are providing more value and content behind a paywall with subscriptions (see below). An example from podcast world of someone who asks for and receives lots of donations is Dan Carlin with his Hardcore History podcast.
6. Merchandise
Another method that some blogs use with reasonable effect is to sell T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers etc with the blog’s name, logo and/or taglines on it. This is another idea that will probably only work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog. Some blog topics lend themselves to this more than others.
7. Selling Subscriptions
The idea of charging your audience readers for content is one that is growing, particularly in the podcasting space. While there are numerous websites around the web that do this successfully (community membership sites) blogs are starting to do this too. The problem that most bloggers who have tried it have run into is that most topics that you could think to start a blog about already have free sites available. To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic alongside an engaged audience with a real sense of community and attachment to you. Patreon is the top platform for this and a good example I’ve seen (listed to) lately is the Tooth and Claw podcast which alternates between free and paid (Patreon) podcast episodes.
Next in the series we’ll look at indirect ways of making money because of your blog.
If you want to learn more about monetizing your blog, you can take my “Make Money” course to transform your blogging hobby into an income-generating business.
I speak with bloggers every day who have heard the stories of blogs that make big dollars and who want to try to make an income from blogging also. One of the pieces of advice that I attempt to convey (and I’m afraid it doesn’t always get through) is that it’s worth pausing, before running out to slap ads on your blog or promoting every affiliate deal available, to ask yourself whether making money from your blog is right for you.
While this might seem to be a silly question to some (what’s wrong with earning money?) I think it’s worth at least asking yourself the question
“Should I blog for money?”
Because, not every blog is suited to blogging for money.
Does it Fit with Your Blog’s Goals and Objectives?
For me, a lot of the advice that I’ve given in this series of blogging for beginners comes down to working out some goals, strategy and vision for your blog (I’ve written extensively on strategic blogging here so won’t unpack this now). There are many reasons why people blog and the motivation of money is just one of them.
Here’s some of the responses I had when I asked why people blog:
‘I blog for recreational purposes – to help me relax’
‘I blog as part of my plan for world domination’
‘I blog to help me promote my book/business’
‘I blog to keep a record of the life and times of me’
‘I blog because I want to help others’
‘I blog to because I’m lonely and want to connect with others’
‘I blog to pick up cute girls/guys’
‘I blog because it’s fun’
‘I blog because I want to build profile – I want to be known’
‘I blog to make a living’
Now there is nothing wrong with blogging for more than one reason – but bloggers considering adding income streams to their blogs need to consider the implications that blog monetization in all its different forms MIGHT impact their other goals.
Let me share some scenarios of real cases that I’ve come across (no names given) where putting ads on a blog wasn’t a good idea. If I were a betting man I’d say that they represent the story of many bloggers and that others could add more scenarios:
Scenario 1: Business Blogs – I remember one blogger who added contextual advertising to their Business Blogs (blogs which had primary goals of promoting a business’s services) only to find that the ads that were served to their blogs were for other businesses in their field who they were competing with. While they could block some of the ads they found that more ads replaced them. In the end they felt it was better to remove the ads and keep the focus on themselves.
Scenario 2: Reader Uproar – Another blogger who I have been talking with recently told me the story of the day she added impression based ads to her blog and created a mutiny among her readers who were angry that she’d gone that route. While on some blogs reader ownership are not very high, there are other blogs where for one reason or another that readers take great offense to bloggers changing the rules midstream – especially when it comes to ads. Depending upon the community levels and the way you introduce the ads you can end up losing readership and you need to consider whether the benefits of the income will outweigh the costs of fewer readers.
Scenario 3: Money Obsession – Perhaps one of the saddest examples that comes to mind is of a blogger who had been running a really interesting and reasonably successful blog (I wouldn’t call him an A-lister but he had a small loyal following) who got bitten by the ‘money from blogging’ bug so badly that it ended up killing his blog. Ultimately he ended up deleting a lot of his archives (the ones that had no income earning potential) and slapping so many ads onto his blog that it was hard to find any content. He ended up only ever writing on topics that he thought were ‘earners’. In doing so he lost the vast majority of his readership and ended up with a pretty poor blog. Greed took over.
Scenario 4: Poor Conversion and Clutter – A number of bloggers come to mind who have announced that they are fed up with ads on their blogs largely because the payoff has not been worth giving the space over to the ads. Ads do add another element of clutter to your blog and if the conversion isn’t sufficient they can seem quite pointless. This varies from blogger to blogger and sometimes comes down to the type of ad chosen and the topic that they are writing about – but it’s one of the main reasons I see bloggers taken ads off their blogs.
Scenario 5: Reputation – My last example is of a blogger who was blogging to build his own reputation in an industry. He’d been blogging for a number of months and was slowly become better known (although had a way to go). His problem started when he started promoting affiliate products that he’d had no knowledge of and which (he later found out) were actually ripping people off. In doing so he ended up doing the exact opposite to what he’d set out to do – he destroyed his own reputation.
I’m aware that this post has a somewhat negative tone to it and don’t want to disillusion readers too much. On the flip side of these stories of bloggers who found that blogging for money is not the answer for everyone are many more stories of bloggers who have found ways to supplement their income via blogging (and even a few stories of bloggers who now blog full time).
If you do want to build a profitable blog and transform your blogging hobby into an income-generating business, then I would strongly suggest you check out my “Four Pillars of Blogging – Make Money” Course. This course encapsulates my practical experience making money blogging for the past 20 years and takes you through:
The many and varied ways to make money blogging
How to create your own monetization strategy and
What to focus on first to develop your revenue streams
Welcome to the next post in our series on monetising your influence type. Last time we looked at Platform-Specific Superstars – a small percentage of all influencers. This time we’re going to take a look at the other end of the spectrum. Most of us fit into the category of “micro-influencer”, and it can be an exciting place to be!
Who are Micro-influencers?
Call them what you will – micro-influencers, long-tail influencers, the “Power Middle” – who are they and why are they getting so much attention?
There is no one defining characteristic or measurement that defines you as a micro-influencer. Generally it’s those of us with an online audience of less than 100,000 followers, be that a social or blog following. Some define it more specifically as having 500-5,000 followers, the power middle crowd have been defined as having 100,000-250,000 followers. You won’t get a straight answer from anyone, so let’s look at something other than just audience size to help figure out if you’re a micro-influencer (my term of choice, so I’ll use that from here on in).
Generally, as audience size goes up, engagement comes down. As marketers get smarter and realise the power of engagement over reach, their gaze has drifted to micro-influencers. Here’s why, neatly summed up in a graph from research done by influencer marketing platform Takumi on half a million instagram accounts.
You could argue that the focus on the superstars and celebrities is warranted – 1.7% of 100,000 is still more people engaged than 9.7% of 1,000. However, here’s where it gets exciting for you if you’re a micro-influencer.
The Advantages of Being a Micro-influencer
As a micro-influencer, the people who engage with you are likely to be more connected to you and more aligned with your passions, niche and generally of a similar demographic. It’s more likely that they actually know you, or have followed you from the beginning of your online presence – they know, like and trust you. This is why reaching a smaller number of your specific and engaged audience can be better than reaching a larger number of potentially less relevant followers of a bigger influencer.
This leads to another reason why it’s good to be a micro-influencer: trust and authenticity. Micro-influencers are less likely to publish as many sponsored posts and ads as bigger influencers, and when they do talk about brands their recommendations are more trusted by their faithful followers.
One of the reasons why micro-influencers can be even more trusted than everyday customers when it comes to recommendations is the ‘expert’ factor. Expertcity, another influencer marketing platform, discovered that micro-influencers have 22.2 times more ‘buying conversations’ than regular consumers and more consumers find them to be more believable and credible, more knowledgeable and better at explaining products than regular consumers.
So maybe that’s why their study showed that 82% of consumers are “highly likely” to follow a recommendation made by a micro–influencer, compared to 73% who are highly likely to act on a recommendation from an average person? It could be that the word of a micro-influencer could hold more sway than that of a friend in situations where an ‘expert’ opinion is more valued.
The Disadvantages of Being a Micro-influencer
It’s all the the word ‘micro’ – you may have better engagement and influence over a more specific target audience, but too often reach wins out. In order to get the same reach of a macro-influencer, marketers need to work with a group of micro-influencers, and that’s hard work. Finding influencers, negotiating with them all and managing multiple content pieces vs working with just one big influencer – many marketers opt for the second.
However it’s not all gloom and doom, because it’s often the group of micro-influencers that will deliver superior results, especially when it comes to conversion rates. Again, as a micro-influencer your audience is more specific, more connected to you and more likely to engage and act on your recommendations.
Monetise by Working with Brands
Whilst it’s encouraging that marketers are realising the value of micro-influencers, they can still very much try and earn your influence rather than pay for it. For example, they’re more likely to offer discount codes or giveaways for your audience, rather than pay you to do a sponsored post.
Rather than be frustrated with this, look at it as a way to prove your influence. If you can show a prospective brand partner proof of how you positively influenced your audience for a brand, then you’re more likely able to convince them that working with you on a paid basis is less risky and will ultimately give them a return on their investment.
Your first hurdle will be getting on their radar, so here are some great tips on marketing yourself. Start small and build up as you build up your evidence of influence. Focus on your engagement rates and other evidence that proves your influence, like testimonials from your followers. Get to know your audience demographics, either through the insights provided by the social platforms, Google Analytics or by directly surveying your audience. For more ideas, check out How to Pitch Brands When You Have Low Traffic.
Monetise via Affiliate Marketing
Put that recommendation power to work with affiliate marketing. Whilst normally a high-traffic strategy, affiliate marketing can work for micro-influencers too. Your best approach is to carefully select the products or services you affiliate. Choosing a few highly relevant products that you have a close affinity to will serve you better than promoting anything you can think of and hope it sticks. What are the products and services you use and love and find yourself naturally recommending?
Also consider the value of the product and the level or type of commission being offered. Naturally higher priced items can net you higher payouts, but make sure you can stand behind why your audience should purchase them. Affiliate programs on recurring services often offer recurring commissions, so you are rewarded for the lifetime of the customer, not just a once off payment. Examples of this include email marketing and other software services.
If you’re going to give affiliate marketing a go, remember it’s more than just dropping in a few links and hoping for the best. Don’t forget the ‘marketing’ part – create great content around the product, tell your story and it will resonate more with your audience. Want to know more? Check out this podcast episode by Darren on how he makes money with affiliate marketing (even though he’s not a micro-influencer, many strategies are the same).
Monetise by Selling Your Own Products
If you have influence with an audience or community you have built up, no matter the size, one of the best ways you can monetise is by creating something for them to buy. Whether it’s an ebook, a course, a membership community or an event, you are in a great position to listen to your audience and create what they need.
An excellent example of this is when Lisa Corduff from Small Steps to Whole Foods decided to run a free challenge after having run a small blog and Facebook group for a couple of years. 550 people signed up to her challenge which she then transformed into a paid eight-week course which she has now launched multiple times to create a six-figure business. You can hear her story here. With less than 15,000 Facebook followers and just over 1500 Instagram followers she’s definitely a micro-influencer who is punching above her weight due to the trust and connection she’s built with her specific community.
So, are you a micro-influencer? Are you having success with any of the above monetisation strategies? Which one appeals and feels most achievable for you?
When we think of influencers, we generally think of people with huge followings on their blog or social media platforms. There is more to influence than just audience numbers though, which is good news for the majority of us! Different influence types means there are different ways to monetize your influence as well.
In this series we’ll take a look at which monetisation strategies better suit your influence type. Hopefully you’ll find something that works in your particular situation, or a mix of strategies you can use do you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.
In each context (or type of Influencer) we’re going to look at influence based on two factors to help inform the best ways to monetize:
a) where is your traffic is coming from?
b) what does the engagement look like?
Influence Type: Platform-Specific Superstar
Do you have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok or YouTube followers? Maybe you’re a celebrity of some kind? More likely you’re not quite there yet, but on the way, so here’s an insight into monetising the influence you have on one specific platform.
Celebrity endorsement is of course used and sought out by brands trying to make it onto the radar of their audiences. The combination of the reach and perceived endorsement is hard to look over, but with wildly differing rates among influencers, increasingly difficult to value! Social Media Stars are the new celebrity and are certainly enjoying their time in the influencer marketing spotlight (and its associated marketing spends). The shine is starting wear off however as marketers are starting to realise what the difference between reach and engagement, and even the type of engagement, means to their bottom line.
Monetize Your Influence Type Working with Brands
If you’ve got a large following you can certainly monetize by working with brands for product placements and endorsements – how much you can expect to successfully charge however will depend on whether you’re just driving impressions or actions.
Where is your traffic coming from?
In this case, where are your followers coming from? Are they following you because you are you (ie a celebrity in their eyes), because of your content, or (not recommended) because you bought them or are using bots to gain followers?
Some brands (or more likely the agencies that work for them) will not care who or where your followers come from – they just want eyeballs. It’s a short-sighted approach and amounts to paying over the odds for awareness. Impressions can usually be bought more cost-effectively through Facebook ads.
This is why marketers are starting to place lesser value on follower stats and even engagements. I’ve recently learned of one platform valuing followers as low as $0.001 per follower (yes, that is one tenth of one cent or a CPM of $1), or you can check out this article to see how marketers are arriving at a slightly more generous CPM of $5 or a Cost Per Engagement (for each like, comment, share) of just $0.25.
These are media buying metrics and the trend looks like the price of reach through influencers is heading south. So your best tactic is to trade on your influence rather than your reach. More importance should be placed on why your followers are following you, because this generally tends to inform the type of engagement and results you can get for a brand.
What does the engagement look like?
Social media superstars can have what looks like impressive reach and engagement, but on closer inspection that engagement can be quite shallow and doesn’t translate to influencing on behalf of a brand. It comes down to this – are your followers engaging with you or with your content? If you feature a brand in your Instagram post, let’s say a handbag, are your followers comments “You look amazing”, “Love your style”, “Insert emoji bot comment here” or are they “Does that bag come in other colours?”, “Where can I buy it?”, “Is it free trade?”, “Do you have a discount code?”
If it’s the latter, you can prove that you can drive conversions and should charge brands for your influence accordingly.
True influence drives action, not just awareness. There are certain verticals where social media influencers will be more likely able to drive these actions, for example: fashion, beauty, affordable gadgets, restaurants and experiences. These are purchases that are just a step above being convenience goods, where your followers are using you as a simple filter to help them make relatively low risk decisions.
Conversely there are some verticals that can almost be too aspirational and even a high level of engagement has less chance of converting. For example, health and wellness, fitness (fitspo), luxury goods. We can like them all day, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to sign up to the gym, actually change our eating or cooking habits, or buy that gorgeous $30,000 watch. These verticals convert better for people who are more relatable, which brings us to an alternative monetisation strategy.
Monetize Your Influence Type by Selling Your Own Products
If you do have a large following on one specific platform, you can use all the aforementioned influence to sell your own products, rather than someone else’s! This is especially so when your audience is more connected to you than just your content. Anyone can curate pretty content that people will click on, but only you can create an authentic connection with an audience and earn their trust.
Where is your traffic coming from?
Selling your own products works best when people subscribe to you because they see you as an authority or thought leader and they keep coming back for more. They seek you out rather than waiting for you to come up in a news feed, for example they subscribe to your YouTube channel and/or sign up to your email list. They want what you have, whether that be an uncluttered house, a passive income lifestyle, a skill they want to master. They’re coming to you to solve their problems, so create a solution and sell it to them.
What does the engagement look like?
When the level of engagement is deeper, the connection to your audience is stronger. Conversations trump likes, real life behind the scenes (ie Snapchat and FB Live) means more than perfectly curated content (Instagram feeds), content people can relate to and feel like you understand what they’re experiencing rather than superficial endorsements. Yes, you could still work with brands and influence this audience, but what they really want is you. When the connection and the intent of the audience (ie their search to find a solution to their problems) is this strong, create a product! Whether that be an eBook, a course, or even consulting services – listen to them and give them what they want.
You don’t have to be a social media superstar to sell your own products – this monetisation strategy and working with brands are not exclusive to influencers with large audiences. Stay tuned for the next instalment in the series where we’ll take a look at how you can monetize your influence when your traffic is passive and less connected to you.
Are you a social media influencer who relies on working with brands? Are you noticing brands being less willing to pay or pay as much? Would you consider selling your own products?
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