How to build a profitable blog: create a product to sell
In the 11th part of her series on how to build a blog, Andrea Wren discusses using the blog to sell a product
Right now, I'm working on the creation of a product for my blog Butterflyist.com. This will hopefully make me my millions. Or at least, if it's popular, a tidy regular income.
"The great thing about having your own product is that you spend the time it takes to create it once, and then it can continue to make you money for months or even years to come," says Glen Allsopp, my blog teacher from ViperChill.
"Imagine having a job where you only worked for one month and your employer paid you that monthly wage for another 11 months? It just wouldn't happen."
But a successful product combined with a well read blog can do this for you, helping you earn an income long after the actual work was put in.
For Butterflyist, I'm currently writing an ebook (by the final update in two weeks, it should be available on my site). In producing my ebook, I need to make sure I'm offering a solution to a problem, to make people want to buy it.
An ebook is a relatively easy product to create. It takes time, of course, though the nice thing is that you can produce them by expanding on the content in your blog posts, taking ideas and advice further.
They are simple to put together; with some formatting, you can just save them as a pdf file, although people with fancy techie skills might be able to jazz them up a bit. Ultimately though, it's having excellent content in the ebook that really matters.
But an ebook isn't the only option, says Glen. You could go a step further and publish a real, made-of-paper book, such as the blog Get Rich Slowly.com did with Your Money: The Missing Manual.
Or you might start a monthly membership site, like Third Tribe Marketing.com, or create paid, private forums for your audience.
CDs or audioguides may be another product idea ? especially if you have a meditation or yoga blog, or you could sell your training courses, as Lucia Cockcroft has done at Yoga Abode.com.
And then there are video courses. Glen says these can often be easier to produce than ebooks, as it could be as simple as just getting in front of the camera to start talking and teaching. If successful, you can make your video more professional-looking.
You could even sell yourself as the product. Many people who blog about the area of their expertise go on to sell coaching or consulting services, as Steve Pavlina does.
One of the reasons that selling products works above something like affiliate marketing is that the product has your name on it. You've built up a rapport and trust with your audience, otherwise they wouldn't be there.
"If people are reading your blog for you, then it's likely they're going to want whatever else you have to offer," Glen says.
For more details go to BloggingCaseStudy.com ? the site that Glen has created to pass on additional information on the technical aspects of product creation, and things such as price-setting.
Next time, in what will be the final column, we'll be reviewing Butterflyist and the progress of the last six months.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/feb/10/how-build-profitable-blog-create-product
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