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Written on 5/4/2012 at 12:06 am by

Build Blog Products That Sell 5: Finding Customers

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Featured Posts

This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

Cash crunch

Image courtesy stock.xchng user sqback

History dictates that the current economic malaise will eventually end, but we’re still waiting for some unambiguous signs. That’s why for the past few weeks, we’ve been learning how to create products that are inspired by (and that tie into) your blog, and how to plan to sell them to an audience whose collective disposable income isn’t quite what it used to be.

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 2012 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 book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].

Written on 5/3/2012 at 12:08 am by

A Checklist for Choosing the Right Monetization Method

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you may already have tried a range of methods to monetize your blog. Some will have worked better than others, of course, but most mid- to long-term bloggers are continuously looking for new ways to meet our readers’ needs through products or services we can sell.

Blog products have come a long way since I started out, and that’s partially due to technology and market trends, and partially because of the creativity of bloggers themselves. We now have an endless stream of external product offerings to choose from (such as advertising and affiliate programs), plus our own creative ideas for offerings we’d like to develop ourselves.

How can you choose the right ones to try on your blog?

Obviously, there’s the question of return on investment, and it’s a critical one. But there are other issues that you’ll want to consider, too—especially if the investment (in terms of time as well as money) is large. And in any case, we can’t predict a return without doing some thinking about how relevant the offering is to our readers, along with some other considerations.

Let’s look at them now.

1. Your brand

You’ve probably spent years building your brand—which might include a look and feel, a philosophy or attitude, a tone of voice, an approach to engagement, and—you guessed it—an approach to making money.

It would be jarring, for example, to find the Zen Habits blog cluttered with busy advertising. On-site advertising is incompatible with the clear-minded philosophy of the brand; if it were used, it would dilute or undermine the strength of Zen Habits in readers’ minds.

You can probably reel off at least a few monetization techniques that probably aren’t a great fit for your brand. That’s fine, but when you’re considering a new idea—perhaps one that someone else has suggested or proposed to you—your brand might be a good place to start working out how appropriate it is for you.

2. Your goals

Take a look at your yearly (or monthly) plan and consider, even at a superficial level, whether the idea seems like it would take you closer to achieving the goals you’ve set for your blog.

I find that this can be a good way to weed out possibilities early on, because some ideas are straight-out no-gos. For those that could be plausible, more thinking will be required, but at each point in your analysis, it’s wise to keep your goals in mind.

This way, they can act sort of like a “sense check” at each point: you think, “Sure, this is looking good, but does this still make sense for my goals?” That tends to be important if you’re looking at using the product offering to help you make a change in direction or focus, or build out your audience more broadly.

3. Your audience

Your audience has preferences and expectations about your niche, and your brand. Sometimes, surprising them with something new works wonderfully, but only if that new product or service meets their needs deeply, and is a no-brainer for them to use.

Some monetization options simply will not work with your audience. For an extreme example, if I was thinking of starting a content farm as part of a monetization approach, I’d have to look for a different audience, because the vast majority of my readers would have no use for that service.

That’s a simplistic example—obviously the questions you’ll consider can get much more complex than this. I know that bloggers in some countries, and some niches, still have trouble monetizing their blogs in any way, because their readers consider that their advice and work should be available free of charge—that their blog should be a labour of love and not paid work.

Regardless of where you blog, or the niche you’re in, you have an audience. Those readers have expectations and requirements of your brand, and your niche. While those expectations may curb your monetization options, they may also open up opportunities. You’ll want to keep them in mind whenever you review a new product or service idea.

4. Fit with current offering

If you’ve got this far, the monetization idea you’re considering is probably looking pretty good! Next, look at how this new idea fits with your current offering of saleable products and services.

This idea of fit includes in a range of considerations, from choosing the best-fitting product formats (e.g. you have a practical guide in ebook form, but you might see an opportunity for a video series) to where the product fits within the audience’s learning curve (you might have products for beginners and advanced audience members, but nothing for those at an intermediate level).

Some ideas will complement your current and planned offerings; others may eat into the sales of a product you’re already selling. If you think that might take place, you’ll want to do some sums to see if that cannibalization will reduce your bottom line. Sometimes, losing sales of a lower-margin product to gain sales on a higher-margin offering will still boost your profits overall, so this is an important consideration.

5. Peer blogs’ offerings

This is a bigger consideration with some product ideas than others, but it’s always worth reviewing your peers’, or competitors’, offerings to see how your new product or service will stack up.

By looking at what others in your niche are doing, you’ll probably be able to get an idea of the monetization options that are likely acceptable to readers. You’ll also be able to see how stiff the competition will be in a certain product space you’re considering.

Finally, you might be able to glean opportunities that haven’t yet been tapped in your market—opportunities that your new idea can take advantage of.

6. Time to launch

Product development or setup time is a big consideration in ROI calculations, but it’s also an important consideration in a practical sense.

The time it would take you to create or set up your new monetization method may simply be beyond what your schedule will allow. Unless you can make some space, this product might be out of the question—for the time being, at least.

By assessing the time to launch, you can also more easily choose between competing monetization ideas, and schedule the ones you do select into your calendar.

7. Time to run

There are very few set-and-forget monetization options, especially for those who have been blogging for a long time. The longer your blog has been around, the more likely that you’ll have explored all of the lower maintenance monetization possibilities.

This means that taking on a new product or service will eat into your time—probably significantly. Once you launch the new offering, you’ll need to promote it in an ongoing way. Each new product takes an extra commitment. Are you wiling to make it?

Again, considering the time it’ll take you to run a product after its launch—to deal with affiliates, say, or write guest posts, do interviews, and do any day-to-day maintenance—can help you to decide between different monetization possibilities. It can also help you decide whether you’re prepared to commit the necessary time to the make the new product a success in the longer term.

8. Scalability

This is more than a current entrepreneurial buzzword—scalability directly affects our abilities to boost our blogs’ bottom lines. Is it as easy to deliver 100—or 100,000—units of this product or service offering as it is to deliver one? Is there some sales level at which you’ll need to invest more time to continue to make—or grow—sales?

The more scalable the product or service idea you’re considering, the more value you’re likely to be able to get out of it. The easier it is for you to ramp up service capacity, or product sales, the more lucrative that product will probably be.

When you’re considering scalability, look at your product and how you can potentially reuse or repurpose it, as well as at the support services or systems you’ll use to run and manage it.

This can help you to understand another element of risk involved in developing a new product or service idea. The more time and money you spend on it, the more easily scalable you may want the product to be—especially if that larger investment requires, from the outset, that you make large numbers of sales.

Is this monetization method for you?

Your experience as a blogger, and your understanding of your audience and niche, will probably make some of these considerations no-brainers. Over time, we all begin to develop that gut feel that tells us if a possible product or service will work for us.

But sometimes, the choices (or our reasons) aren’t that clear-cut, and it’s those times when working through this checklist might be helpful. Of course, you might need to add to or adapt this basic list to reflect certain extra considerations for your blog, brand, niche, or audience. If you can share your ideas for assessing new products with us in the comments, I’m sure we’d all find that helpful!

Written on 4/27/2012 at 6:09 am by

Unearthing Your Blog’s Money Pages

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by the Web Marketing Ninja.

Earlier today, Greg explored the question of pricing products that you’re creating for sale on your blog. Setting the right price for your products is extremely important, but I wanted to take that discussion one step further for those who are already offering products on their blogs and want to take their conversions to the next level.

When I approach conversion optimization on websites, which in most cases is simply cash optimization, I stick to a few golden rules:

  1. Think in people, not pageviews.
  2. People are looking for a reason not to buy—don’t give them one.
  3. Go for biggest bang for buck.
  4. Test everything!

I’ve already covered points 1 and 2, so in this post, I wanted to export number three, going biggest bang for buck.

If you’re trying to figure out how to turn some money into more money without creating new products, campaigns, or deals, you need to unearth the pages on your site that are going to give you the greatest return from an improvement in conversion.

…and for that, I have a three-point plan.

1. Understand where you money comes from, and find your influenceable end-point

Now, being the smart bloggers I know you are, you should know where your money comes from. Your income might be derived from ads, affiliate income, or product sales—among others. And I’m sure you’re able to identify your top-level driver of that income—the last point in the conversion process that you can influence. Here they are:

  • Product sales = successful checkouts
  • Affiliate sales  = clicks to affiliate site
  • Ads (CPC) = clicks on ads
  • Ads (CPM) = page views
  • Subscription = activated subscriptions
  • Service = contact form submissions

Whatever your strategy, knowing your influenceable end-point enables you to set some specific goals on key metrics for your blog (for example more sales, more clicks, more pageviews).

2. Set yourself up to track those end-points

Whilst it can be a bit of a challenge initially to set up measurements for your blog’s conversion goals, without them, you’ll never really know where your money comes from at a granular level. 

For most, a well configured Google Analytics setup is all that you need, as it has goal tracking built in.

If checkouts are one of your goals, then ecommerce tracking is what you need. If your ads are sold by CPM, then you’ve got it easy—you have the data already. If your goal is clicks, that presents a slightly bigger challenge. Let me explain.

In Analytics, a goal is measured by successfully reaching a page on your site that you’ve specified. When a click takes a visitor to another site, Google Analytics sees it as a visitor that exits to another site rather than a successfully reached goal. To solve this, you can use any of a few options.

  • If you’re using AdSense, you’re fine—that’s already integrated with Analytics.
  • Use a redirect page to collect goals. Instead of sending users straight through to the advertiser or affiliate, you can send them via a page that automatically redirects the user, but includes the analytics goal code to track.
  • Use a paid service like Kiss Metrics … but even that can be a bit tricky to set up.

I’m really hoping that at some point Google’s ad manager, Double Click, will integrate with Analytics so this issue is rectified. But even if it’s a little bit of a hassle for you to set up right now, it’s a hassle that’s worth going through in order to understand just how good—or bad—your conversion performance is.

So after a bit of research, action, and maybe fumbling, you’re now hopefully able to track the conversion rate of your commercial goals (whatever that are) and you’re ready to move forward.

3. Think in one-percents

The final step in identifying biggest bang for buck is to put a dollar conversion vale against all your pages. All this takes is a bit of simple math.

Page X

  • 10,000 page views
  • 100 sales
  • $4000

Those figures give us a conversion rate of 1% and an average income per sale of $40. If I increase the conversion rate itself by 1%, to 1.1%, my sales will total 101, and my income will be $4040. I’m up  $40.

Page Y

  • 100,000 page views
  • 50 sales
  • $1000

So this page has a conversion rate of 0.05% and an average income per sale of $20. If I increase this conversion rate by 1%, to 0.051%, my sales will total 51 and my income will hit $1020. I’m up  $20.

As you can see, there’s double the return for a 1% improvement on Page X, as compared to Page Y. So Page X the one I’m going to focus on. Not the one with all the page views: the one with the greatest return.

Obviously, on your blog, you’ll have far more than two pages to pick from, but this model will allow you to rank them in order.  Make sure you don’t forget to include your checkout process as pages in this analysis, as well. You might be surprised by how they stack up.

And just in case the figures of $20 and $40 don’t get you motivated to do any testing, remember that variances of over 100% are common across different variations of a page. So add a couple of zeros … feeling motivated now?

The three-point plan

So just to summarise, your three-point plan to unearthing those money pages is:

  1. Understand your last influenceable conversion metric.
  2. Start tracking those points in the sales process.
  3. Stack all your pages together and find the one that’s going to give you the biggest return for a 1% conversion increase.

…and that’s how you can unearth the pages that are going to give you the biggest bang for buck.

Stay tuned for more posts by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand. Follow the Web Marketing Ninja on Twitter.

Written on 4/27/2012 at 12:09 am by

Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Featured Posts

This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

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.

Checkout

Image courtesy sotck.xchng user Dioptria

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.)

Next, create something identifiable with your blog and your style—a video lecture series, ebooks, online classes, personal coaching, podcasts, whatever. Budget the requisite time to create your products, plan far enough in advance that your blog won’t be compromised in the short run, test-market your products, then make them available for sale. Couldn’t be easier, right?

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 book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].

Written on 4/20/2012 at 12:01 am by

Build Blog Products That Sell 3: Develop Your Product

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

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 spent so long conceiving.

Making time for product development

Identifying what your product should be is one thing; actually creating them 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. 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 book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].

Written on 4/19/2012 at 12:03 am by

Get Off the Plateau: Growth Tips for Mature Blogs

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

Once the heady days of new-blog success are over, many bloggers find themselves on a plateau. Readership has stalled, subscriptions seem to be maintaining momentum but not growing, and you’re having trouble squeezing more value out of your already-loyal customer base.

What should you do?

There are a number of ways to kick yourself off that plateau and move into a new phase of blog growth. The ones that will work for you will depend on your blog’s niche and audience, where your skills lie, and what you’ve already tried.

That said, I thought I’d set out some of the starting points that I’ve used to change gear on my blogs over the years. You might already have tried some of these ideas, but I hope there’ll be something here that you haven’t experimented with yet.

First, secure your position

You’ve already built a blog with a loyal following, so why not use that as the starting point for your future growth? By looking at what’s working, you can hone your approach in those areas to make it more successful, and potentially identify areas where you could improve.

The other thing that this kind of review will achieve is, potentially, to free up some of your time to focus on new tasks. By looking at what’s working, you can identify what’s not working—and cut your losses. This will help you secure your position, give you the maximum return on your time investment, and give you a clear run at new ideas and markets (which we’ll get to in a moment).

Review posts

Spend some time analyzing which posts are working to help you achieve your goals.

Those goals might be readership figures, long-tail search traffic, social media shares—or something else entirely. But whatever your goals are, work out which posts are working best to achieve each of them.

Once you have this information, you can spend your writing time focused on creating the content that’s working best to maintain your blog’s current position in the market. It’ll give you a solid basis from which to spring forward using the other techniques we’ll discuss.

Review promotions

Some promotional channels are bound to be working better than others. Identify those, and cut your losses with the channels that aren’t performing as you’d expect or hope.

Again, we’re shoring up your current position here, so it’s important to face the facts about what’s working to attract readers to your site, and what’s not.

Review conversion funnels

Whether yours are sales funnels, or free conversion channels, review them to ensure that their working optimally. We have some great content here on ProBlogger to help you do that (have a look at How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Success).

Look at systematising your approach so that it’s as scalable as possible, with a view to growing your readership and conversions in the future. Then set aside regular time in your schedule to do whatever you need to do to keep those cogs well-oiled.

Review design, categorization, and usability

If your blog’s outdated, your content categorization is hazy, or the site makes it difficult to navigate through content and offers, you’ll have trouble growing your audience.

The fact that you’ve grown your blog to its current point isn’t reason to skip this step—it could well be that elements of design, categorization, and usability are whats’ keeping your blog from shifting up a gear. Tweaking categorization can have significant implications for organic search traffic, for example, and design considerations can make or break your users’ ability to find what they need.

Secure your blog’s current position using these techniques. Then, it’s time to look at growing your blog.

How will you grow?

Growing a blog, like building it from scratch, usually requires a multi-pronged approach. You might get lucky with one technique that’s wildly successful, but it’s probably best to try a few of these ideas—though you don’t want to spread yourself too thin—and see what works.

Find ways to reengage

Again, start with your current, loyal fan base. Find new ways to reengage with your existing readers, and to deepen loyalty, and you may well see sharing and traffic rise.

Consider these options.

  • Create a free subscription offering (such as a course or series of regularly emailed bonus material) or reward (a giveaway, competition, etc.).
  • Try new engagement initiatives. Perhaps it’s time you tried running a weekly video interview, a contest that spans your Facebook page and blog, or a podcast that features a Q&A with your own readers?
  • Survey your readers to find out what they’re thinking about, and what they need. This can do a lot to create a sense of engagement beyond the everyday blog comments and social media interactions. It can also provide valuable information that you can use to approach new audiences.
  • Perhaps a new product could help you to reengage with your readers, and give them something to talk and tweet about at the same time. Building out your existing product offering to fill any gaps in readers’ experience can deepen loyalty and boost buzz that can attract new readers from segments you haven’t already met through your product offering.

Find new markets

For most mature blogs and brands, tapping new markets is a necessary part of a growth strategy. This can be intimidating for some bloggers who are comfortable in their niche, with their current readers, but branching out can open up a world of possibilities for your blog.

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

  • Try reaching a new market using a particular promotional channel. For example, you might write some guest posts to be published on blogs in a complementary, but different niche from your own. So, for example, I could promote Click! (and Digital Photography School) via guest posts about kid photography on mommy blogs, or smartphone photography sites. They’re not key market spaces for DPS, but could be good ways to reach new segments of the general photography market.
  • Alternatively, you could take a look at niches or topics that are related to your blog, and look for opportunities within them. I might, for example, read about the growing market for iPhone lenses, and decide to create content for DPS on photography using iPhone lenses specifically to capture that market segment.
  • Another approach is what traditional marketers call “product line extension.” This involves developing new products that reflect your existing core offering, but open it up to new markets. So far, we’ve developed ebooks for Digital Photography School. What if we turned some of those products into online courses, complete with videos, post-processing cheat sheets, and so on? What if we developed our own post-processing tools? These new products could open up new markets, and as a handy side-effect, help us to deepen engagement with our current customers, too.
  • If that sounds like a leap you’re not ready to make, why not try different approaches to monetizing your blog as it is, and your existing products? Perhaps it’s time to dip your toes into the affiliate marketing waters—either by offering affiliate products to your readers, or by establishing affiliate programs for your own products. Or maybe you should try advertising or media relations or sponsorships—whatever suits your niche and target markets.

Find ways to make more from what works

Last, but not least, look back at the reviews you did at the outset, and seek to optimize what’s working for your blog. Try applying the tactics or techniques that have been successful to other markets or areas within your topic area.

  • To start, you might look at a product that’s sold well, or a promotional approach that worked well to boost readership within a subsegment of your audience. From there, you could develop a strategy to reapply that model in other areas of your readership or would-be readership. If promotion through targeted on-site advertising worked with one of your products, perhaps it would work for other products, or to promote that first product in other markets.
  • Consider becoming an “expert” at some form of promotion that seems especially successful for your brand, but which you haven’t really committed to yet for whatever reason. Try SEO, content marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing—whatever works for your niche or brand, or appears to work for a new market segment or offering you’ve developed.

Experiment and refine

The process of trial and error—or experimentation and refinement—isn’t just inevitable in getting off the traffic plateau. It’s a valuable process that will help you make the most of your efforts and work smarter to get a foothold in new markets in the future.

This is a grab-bag of ideas, but I hope that some will strike a chord with you. Try one or two of these tactics, track your results, and keep tweaking and improving on your efforts. You might be surprised by what you can achieve.

What tactics have you used to get your blog off a growth plateau? We’d love to hear your advice—share it with us in the comments.

Written on 4/13/2012 at 6:05 am by

Use Video Testimonials to Increase Conversions

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This guest post is by Annika Martins of AnnikaMartins.com.

You think you want more traffic, but you don’t.

You want I’m really interested in your stuff traffic that converts into social media sharing, new signups to your list and of course, sales.

But how do you make that happen? How do you ensure that when first-time visitors land on your site, they’re going to take the action you want?

You have to wow them. You have to (very quickly) convince them that you’re the real deal, that you have what they want and need.

Common sense, right?

But most people screw up the execution

In trying to position yourself as the go-to person in whatever you do, are you actually shooting yourself in the foot?

Are you one of the guilty ones who wrote a 1300 word bio telling us your entire employment history and why that makes you the best person to deliver X service or product? Do all of your blog posts reference your client work and how much better you are than your competitors?

Yawn.

Standing on a soap box and bragging about how awesome you are doesn’t impress anyone. In fact, it encourages most people to turn around and run in the opposite direction.

Let someone else be your soap box

When it comes to determining whether you’re legit or not, that first-time visitor couldn’t care less what your opinion of yourself is.

The opinions of your former clients and customers are what they’re really interested in.

They want to hear from someone who worked with you, who has used your products and loved them—and isn’t being paid to say nice things about you. They want to know what problem you help people solve and how you do it. And they want to hear it directly from the person who had the problem.

In short, you need to immediately provide convincing, concise (and honest!) quotes about the quality of your service or product from someone other than you.

The marketing world calls this “social proof.” Most of us refer to these as “testimonials.”

And because ProBlogger has told you before about the importance of including a testimonials page, you might have already created a dedicated page for this very purpose.

And then you filled that testimonials page with glowing quotes from former clients and customers, each neatly formatted into a short paragraph. Maybe you were smart enough to include their picture and URL too. Perfect, right?

The problem with your testimonials page

Creating a centralized storeroom of digital love is a great move. But a stand-alone testimonials page is only one piece of the puzzle. By itself, it is not going to make much of a difference.

The main reason a stand-alone testimonials page isn’t much good is because, aside from the first one or two testimonials on the page (if that), most people won’t read through it.

Get practical about this. Consider your own internet-perusing experience. In the course of a single hour, you probably have dozens of popups, emails, status updates, tweets, phonecalls, text messages, doorbells, maybe a screaming kid or two, and whatever else vying for your attention.

With all those distractions, is it realistic to assume that a first-time visitor is going to sit there and scroll through each and every one of those testimonials? Probably not.

But there’s hope, so don’t give up just yet!

Revitalize your stand-alone testimonials page

Well-written, praise-showering quotes are precisely the sort of content that motivates someone to sign up for your digital course, to join your newsletter list or start following you on Twitter.

With that much power, you can’t let your testimonials die on a page no one ever sees.

In order to make the most of them and therefore convince first-time visitors to stick around, here are five ways you can repurpose those golden testimonials so they actually get seen:

1. Your homepage

Your homepage is like the front window of a store. People drive past, peering in, debating whether they’re going to come inside and mosey around. Isn’t that the perfect place to tell them Fancy Pants Person A thinks you’re awesome?

Carve out a small (but prominent) spot on your homepage sidebar to include one or two of your most impressive testimonials.

Remember though, this is intended to whet their appetite, so edit longer quotes down to a brief sentence or even a phrase that a former client or customer has used to describe you.

To maximize this space even more, you could also install a plugin that scrolls through several short testimonials. That way, instead of reading only one or two quotes, visitors could easily see three or four quotes before clicking over to another page.

2. Twitter Favorites

If you have a strong presence on Twitter and happy customers have sent you tweets raving about your products, those are testimonials that you have to take advantage of also.

By favoriting tweets that wax poetic about how smart and wonderful you are and then installing this Twitter widget, you can add a sidebar widget that will continually refresh itself with your most recent Twitter love.

This is a great way to amplify direct testimonials by demonstrating the scope of your community, your social media savvy, and the passion others have for the service or product you provide.

3. Video testimonials

Take advantage of the fact that millions of people learn best through visual stimulation by creating a short video that highlights your best testimonials.

Ideally, you want to include footage of interviews with former clients so we can see their eyes light up when they talk about how talented you are. But if your clients are camera-shy, even just putting a picture and their quote on the screen with some energetic music can have a huge impact.

You could also splice in brief shots of you talking about why you’re so passionate about what you do.

4. Product and service descriptions

So now that these mini-testimonial snippets have aroused your visitors’ curiosity and they’ve wandered over to your sales page, you think the testimonials can take a break, right?

Oh no. We’re just getting started.

Another great place to feature testimonials is within and alongside the copy that describes your products and services. Testimonials fit in perfectly here because they bring in more social proof that you don’t just write fancy sales copy, but you actually deliver a valuable service or product to real people with real problems.

Building in testimonials here also assures potential customers that you have the experience and expertise they need.

5. Email launch announcements

When you’re writing to your email list to announce a new product or service, remember that some (a lot!) of those people are still not sure whether your products or services are right for them. They’ve joined your list to get to know you better, to get a taste for what you do and see if it they like it.

When promoting something new, incorporate a quote from someone who’s previewed the product, an attendee from last year’s event or one of the beta testers of your digital course.

Building social proof

Don’t underestimate the value of adding new and relevant bits of social proof to everything you launch.

By using these 5 strategies, you will make sure that your glowing customer reviews don’t stay hidden on some random page no one ever reads.

By distributing testimonials throughout your site and promotional materials, new visitors will be much more likely to morph from casual observers to subscribers and buyers.

Do you have any other ideas for ways to revitalize a testimonials page? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Annika Martins writes about entrepreneurship and not taking ourselves so seriously at http://www.annikamartins.com. She likes jalapenos and counter-intuitive wisdom, like The 10 things no one tells you about being a woman entrepreneur.

Written on 4/13/2012 at 12:01 am by

Build Blog Products That Sell 2: Analyze the Market and Competitors

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Featured Posts

This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

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.

Money in a wallet

Image courtesy stock.xchng user mzacha

Last weekwe 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. In the meantime, keep an eye on ProBlogger. Later today, well show you how to increase conversions on your blog—and stand out from your competitors—using video testimonials.

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 book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].

Written on 4/10/2012 at 12:05 am by

The Systematic Blogger’s Manifesto

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars

This is a guest post by Shaun Connell from Live Gold Prices.

I remember when I first began reading about “passive income”. It seemed brilliant: work hard and make sure you leverage your time and capital so that instead of being paid once, you’re paid a little bit every month into the future.

At the time, I was just running a blog for fun, and decided to go ahead and start a blog for profit. It’s been about five years now, and I’ve been doing this full-time for about four years. I’ve learned a lot about blogging, passive income, internet marketing, SEO—the whole works.

The most important lesson I’ve learned?

Forget passive income: focus on systematic income

For most people, blogging is a bad way to get to a passive income. Most bloggers work hard the entire time they have the blog.

A passive income is an income you can just set and forget. And any successful blogger will tell you that for the vast majority of blogging experiences, the work never really stops—it just changes form. You can minimize the workload, but for the most part, it’s just about cutting the load without ever actually making it to a full-on passive status.



Is this a bad thing? Absolutely not. Those who understand that blogging is about finding repeatable systems are the most succesful bloggers on the Internet today. It’s all about learning how to create the right design, the right headline, the right path to success—those are systems that generally work regardless of who the blogger is.

I’ve written here before about systematic blogging and blogging for passive income.

A systematic blogger knows how to leverage usability, other people’s content, and good ideas in such a way that every bit of their work gets as much done as possible.

The following principles are some of the most important concepts one can ever understand in order to make one’s blogging as systematic as possible.

Blogging is just a “regular” website with a specific structure

In the end, the only real difference between the vast majority of websites is how they’re organized. They’re all still pretty much about the same thing—they’re a platform for connecting viewers with information of some sort. When we understand this, we’ll see why that’s important.

Facebook, Wikipedia, and About.com are all platforms for connecting content with viewers in a way that makes each network unique. The content is different, of course, but even if they had equally valuable content, each network would have a very different approach to connecting users with that content.

Once this is understood, the challenge of organizing one’s blog should suddenly present a plethora of new opportunities. For example, it’s alright for a blog to have sales pages as part of the design, or even a static homepage to make it easier for first-time visitors to see all of the most important concepts first. It’s alright to borrow structure ideas from other websites.

The vast majority of my websites—especially my gold prices website—now have the same basic structure: a static homepage, a newsletter page that I link to when saying “subscribe”, newsletter optin forms on every page, an autoresponder with several months’ worth of emails lined up for turning subscribers into repeat visitors and pitching them products, and a “blog” widget or page where users can see the latest articles.

The website structure, along with the other principles listed below, makes my business much more systematic. As long as I find a way to acquire new visitors to the site every day, I’ll end up with more people subscribed at the end of every month. And that’s half the battle: automation.

Blogging for profit is about retaining income, not just traffic

Traffic is just a tool. In the context of profit, it’s just fuel for the engine. That’s why some people are able to make great money with a little traffic when they’re writing about investments, while some websites can have ten times the traffic and barely pay the bills when they’re writing about lolcats.

Understand that traffic is just part of the process, and not the entire goal of the process.

Just because people are reading, that doesn’t necessarily mean the writer is earning. Don’t worry, this isn’t necessarily bad news. For people who understand that building systematic income is all about figuring out what it takes to get to profits in a “repeatable” format, everything is easier.

This is one of the reasons I entered the gold prices and rates niche, and one of the reasons the investment niche is so crowded—the results are generally harder to get, but often exponentially rewarding when achieved.



For example, understanding SEO and guest posting makes the entire process easier. There have been numerous courses teaching the same powerful principle of using proper SEO, proper keyword choices, and setting up one’s blog to be as usable as possible—and then guest posting to put traffic into one end of the “machine.” It’s all the rage because it works.



The systematic blogger understands that his blog is a machine, and if he takes care of it to make sure it’s running as well as possible, it’ll take care of him. By figuring out how to juice every visitor for as many pageviews as possible, to impress them with the best content displayed where it can be easily found, and to reward the visitor with plenty of goodies via an autoresponder, and then using the right keywords and consistent guest posting, the systematic blogger will succeed.



It sounds like a lot of work because, of course, it is. But after a while it becomes a type of routine and becomes simpler and simpler. After all, that’s the point of having a system in the first place—to generate simple, predictable, and powerful results.

What do you do to make sure your blog is as systematic as possible? 
Do you regularly guest post for other blogs? 
Do you have any tips for people looking to make their blog more systematic?

 Share them with us in the comments.

Shaun Connell is a systematic blogger who writes over at Live Gold Prices, his latest project where he discusses both the rate of gold and the future of precious metal overall.