My accountant just called and asked me if I’d robbed a bank.

She just saw the figures from the last few months of blogging and, as I mentioned back in my December earnings update, we’ve had some very good months lately.

December was my biggest month ever, but January and February are shaping up to be great, too.

There are two main reasons for the improvement in revenue:

1. Christmas Promotion: In December, I ran a 12 Days of Christmas promotion on my photography blog. This rolling series of promotions saw a massive spike in affiliate sales, but also a big increase in ebook sales over that two week period.
2. Ebook Launches: Towards the end of January and into February I launched a new ebook on my photography blog. It was our biggest launch yet and the new ebook sold faster on launch than I’ve seen before. In fact, ebook sales for the last three months have totaled just under 13,000 units.

Today, when my accountant rang to check whether the reports I’d sent were real, I tried to explain what had happened. She understood the above two reasons, but dug a little deeper and wanted to know why.

Her reflection was that about 18-24 months ago something changed in my business that seemed to tip earnings up a notch. Understandably, she wanted to explore the cause of that change.

I struggled to answer her at first, but in the end I put it down to two things:

1. I made a mind shift

A couple of years back, I switched my business focus away from relying purely upon advertising and affiliate revenue and decided to get serious about creating some products of my own.

2. Invested in Learning

Two years ago was also the point at which I decided to get serious about learning how to market and launch these products that I’d begun to develop. I knew that simply deciding to have my own products wasn’t enough—I needed to invest in my knowledge of marketing them.

It was at this time that I started to do two things:

1. I began to seek out others who had experience in online marketing. I began to be more intentional in developing relationships with, and collaborating with, smart marketers. These people have taught me a lot!
2. I purchased a variety of online training programs to learn some good principles for marketing products online. I enrolled in the programs, the most helpful of which I’ll tell you about below.

Overnight success?

I wish I could say that this switch in thinking and gaining of knowledge flicked a switch and helped me gain overnight success—but of course it didn’t.

The increase in revenue didn’t happen straight away after making the mind shift or getting the training, although there have been some great spikes in revenue over the last two years. But that marked the beginning of something that seems to be snowballing for me now, some two years later.

Make the mind shift and get the training for yourself

Over the next couple of weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about Jeff Walker and his Product Launch Formula.

Can I suggest you take some notice of what Jeff’s got to say?

I know some will be put off by some of the hype surrounding this launch—sometimes the affiliates promoting these launches build them up into a frenzy. But Jeff’s one of the guys who has helped me make the mind shift I mention above. His course was the main one that worked for me, and is something I’ve come back to numerous times.

Some of the principles he teaches in PLF have really connected for me, and have been instrumental in skyrocketing my own product launches. I’ve also applied some of them in promoting other people’s products—the Christmas launch I mentioned above used the classic launch strategy that Jeff teaches, and led to my biggest month so far.

Jeff is currently releasing a series of videos in the lead up to re-opening the doors of PLF. While some people’s pre-launch strategy is simply to build buzz before a launch, the great thing about Jeff’s strategy is to provide value in the launch process. Whether you buy PLF in the end or not, his videos will help you make the transition I talk about above.

They’re both inspiring and educational. If you do buy PLF, you’ll get some great teaching, but do yourself a favor and at the least watch the videos over the coming days by getting on the list. You can register for the first video here; the second is here. Update: you can also download his full blueprint for launches here (it’s got amazing teaching).

Recently, I worked with Darren on some sales content—including launch emails—for the release of a new product at DPS. That launch email was tested against another version written by a professional marketer in a split test before the launch. In (what was to me) a shock result, the email I’d written achieved:

• 7.3% more opens (39.5% to 32.2%)
• 4.8% more click-throughs (7% to 2.2%).

As we’ll see, this experiment busted five key sales email myths:

1. Use call-to-action sales links in sales emails.
2. We need to “sell” the customer on the product before they’ll click a link.
3. A sales email should focus on a discount or offer.
4. A sales email should overtly drive readers to action.
5. Scannability is about bold font, bullet lists, and subheadings.

First up, let’s look at the email.

—-

Subject: Wish you could take Gorgeous Photos, Every Single Time? Now You Can

Body:

Wish you could take gorgeous photos, every single time? Now you can.

Photo Nuts and Shots is your comprehensive guide to creative photography. And for a limited time, you can get 25% off the cover price!

If you know your way around your camera, and you’re ready to harness practical techniques to take stunning, evocative images, this 100+ page ebook is for you.

Over 9 down-to-earth chapters, professional photographer Neil Creek will show you how to:

• harness light to convey emotion
• know the rules of composition … and when to break them
• take the sharpest possible photo every time
• adapt the camera’s exposure to produce the shot you want
• master the concepts of shot perception, planning, and execution — in any setting
• tap into your unique creativity to take evocative photographs that reach out to viewers
• be the best photographer you can be.

For full details, visit our Photo Nuts and Shots page.

This lush, inspiring, practical guide normally retails for $19.99 but for a limited time, you can secure a copy for just $14.99.

That’s 25% off!

Of course, you’re protected by a 60-day money-back guarantee, so if you don’t feel this detailed ebook has helped you become a better photographer, you can get a full refund.

For more information, and to order your copy today, visit Photo Nuts and Shots info page.

Darren Rowse

PS: Order Photo Nuts and Shots in the next week and you’ll also go into the draw to win a brand new Canon EOS T2i SLR camera and lens.  But hurry, time is limited.

—

One thing you’ll notice is the aspirational nature of the selling point here. This was an aspirational product, being sold to people who had an ambition. Also, the DPS audience members aren’t new to the Web—they’re comfortable with technology and this medium.

The other email we tested used an offer-based subject line that promoted the launch discount. While discounts certainly appeal to customers, this example shows that a discount doesn’t always have the pulling power we think it will. What works best always depends on your audience.

This email contains a number of audience-specific techniques that I’m happy to discuss in the comments if you like, but in this post, I really wanted to focus on the broader techniques that I think helped give this email—and could give any sales email—a solid head-start in the response rate stakes.

1. Tie the opening to the subject line

The first sentence of this email is identical to the subject line. I don’t think that’s necessarily ideal, but I do think your email has an immediate hook if your subject line identifies your key selling point, and your opening answers that point.

As I’ll explain in a moment, this email does achieve that “answer” in its opening. But what do I mean by “answer”?

In this context, an answer isn’t necessarily an answer—to a question, for example—although it can be. An answer is a secondary piece of information that actively and substantially supports the proposition contained in your subject line. Look at a book’s chapters and you’ll see that their opening paragraphs directly relate to, explain, and/or support their titles. You’re aiming to achieve the same thing, but in a sentence.

So, for example, it would be much stronger to follow this email’s subject line with an aspirational opening sentence than an offer-focused opening sentence. Why? Because the selling point in this version of the email is aspiration. The opening sentence needs to reinforce that positioning whole-heartedly.

2. Make the first word count

The first word in this email is “wish”. It’s a present-tense verb, it directly reflects the selling point (aspiration), and it’s sweet and non-spammy. Wish? Who doesn’t have a wish?

I could have started with “Do you wish” or “Have you ever wished”, but those sentences just push that crucial word—wish—further and further away. We have micro-seconds to catch potential customers’ attention. We need to cut to the heart of the matter.

That first word is valuable in itself from a positioning point of view, but as we’re about to see, it has much greater value than this alone.

3. Link to the sales page

The first link to the sales page appears on the second line of the email. It’s an informational link containing the name of the product.

The other email we tested included its first link to the sales page in the fifth paragraph, and the link text was a call to action: “Order your copy here.” In fact, that email had two links, and used the same call to action in both. As you can see, the email above does not use call-to-action link text.

I think this points to a couple of common misconceptions about writing sales copy:

1. The first is that a call to action is the appropriate form of link text in sales copy.
2. The second is that a reader needs to be told things—that you need to “sell” them on your concept—before they’ll be sufficiently convinced to click on a link. I think most web users are more sophisticated than this. They trust their own opinions far more than yours or mine, and they know that clicking on a link is not a commitment to buy.

If you look glance at the opening of this email, you see two things: “Wish you…” and a link to Photo Nuts and Shots. I may be alone in my take on this, but to me, that says “Problem? Solution.”

4. Make it scannable

You knew this was coming, right? And yes, we included a list (every point starting with a carefully chosen verb, to communicate a benefit), a bolded discount offer, and an eye-catching post-script with a competition to generate immediate action.

But the other email we tested had all these “scannable” elements too. So what’s the difference?

I think scannability has evolved from the early days of subheads-and-bullet-list advice. As we just saw, at first glance, the opening contains a problem and a solution—even if the reader isn’t reading. This may sound extreme, but I’ll say it: the reader doesn’t really have to move their eyes to get that information.

If, as we know from research, readers’ eyes stray down the left of the display, then we should provide them with as much information as we can on the far left of the page. I am an extremely lazy online reader, so I know from personal experience that this makes a big difference to comprehension.

I think scannability comes right down to language choice and sentence structure. On the left-hand side of this email we see—even if we don’t consciously read them—the following words:

• Wish you could
• Photo Nuts and Shots
• Over 9 down-to-earth
• For full details
• This lush, inspiring
• That’s 25% off
• Of course, you’re protected
• For more information
• Darren Rowse

This information combines to deliver:

• acknowledgement of a problem
• the name of the solution
• a link
• value: the book length (9 chapters; I used the number because it stands out more clearly in body copy than would the word “nine”) coupled with the size of the discount (also a number)
• reassurance

The one thing to remember with this left-hand-side technique is that words in subsequent lines of the same paragraph may not display against the left-hand margin in the user’s email client. You really need to focus on first words of paragraphs with this technique.

5. Beginnings and endings

There’s another little scanning-related technique that I wanted to mention. Let’s look again at the list of benefits, which is probably one of the parts of any sales email that gets the most attention.

• harness light to convey emotion
• know the rules of composition … and when to break them
• take the sharpest possible photo every time
• adapt the camera’s exposure to produce the shot you want
• master the concepts of shot perception, planning, and execution — in any setting
• tap into your unique creativity to take evocative photographs that reach out to viewers
• be the best photographer you can be.

I have this idea that we pay attention to the beginnings and ends of pieces of text. Take the middle sections out of these bullet points, and here’s the message you end up getting:

• harness light …  emotion
• know the rules … break them
• take the sharpest … every time
• adapt the camera’s … shot you want
• master the … in any setting
• tap into your …. reach out to viewers
• be the best … you can be.

This applies to other pieces of text, too. Like the first two paragraphs:

Photo Nuts and Shots … 25% off the cover price!

If you know …  100+ page ebook is for you.

And the refund paragraph:

Of course … get a full refund.

So don’t just pay attention to the left-hand side of your content. Also pay close attention to the endings of each piece of text in your email.

Warning: oversell

This email did achieve a good response rate. However, the complaint rate on this email was higher than the other version we tested by 0.04%.

That’s a small percentage, and you’d probably say it was worth it, given the higher open and click-through rates.

Interestingly, Darren told me that the ebook’s author, Neil Creek, also voiced concern at the strength of the message in this email. When the email was mailed to the whole of the DPS userbase, the words “every single time” were removed from the subject line.

I have to admit that I was extremely impressed by the product itself, and that obviously came across loud and clear in my writing. But it makes an important point about word choice and expression. The bottom line seems to be, don’t go overboard, however enthusiastic you may feel about the product.

Rewriting the myths

After this experiment, here’s my take on the sales email myths I outlined at the start:

1. Use call-to-action sales links in sales emails.
   Write your copy for the audience, and use what feels like natural link text. If it’s a call to action, fine. But it needn’t be.
2. We need to “sell” the customer on the product before they’ll click a link.
   Some readers may need convincing, but many just want to look at what you’re selling for themselves. Don’t make them hunt for the link.
3. A sales email should focus on a discount or offer.
   The focus of your email should be dictated by the audience’s needs.
4. A sales email should overtly drive readers to action.
   You don’t need to use in-your-face techniques like call-to-action link text, repetition, and screamy sales lines (“Don’t miss out! Order now! Limited stock available!”) to get results.
5. Scannability is about bold font, bullet lists and subheadings.
   Scannability is about paragraphs, sentences, and words as much as it is these presentation mechanisms.

How do you feel about these ideas? Do you think they’d work with your readers? What other suggestions can you add? Also, if you try some of these techniques and can share your results with us in the comments, we’d love to hear them.

This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant.

Wouldn’t it be nice to send out an email or two and pull in $10,000+ to pay your rent or mortgage payments for the year? It is actually possible using your own products or those of selected affiliates. And while some of you will be thinking that word “affiliates” sounds dirty and underhanded, I’m here to tell you that affiliate marketing is actually one of the most honest ways to make money on the Web.

In this post I am going to show you how you can make $10,000+ a year using your email list and a product or affiliate program. I’ll even do a bit of math to prove it.

photo credit: Esparta

How it works

Let me start by giving you a little overview of how this all works, in case you’re totally new to the idea. I’ll go in to more detail later on.

1. Use your blog to grow an email list
   If you’ve read any of my other guest posts on Problogger you will notice that I have a pretty (un)healthy obsession with email lists. I’m constantly telling my readers to focus on growing a list of active, engaged, and interested email subscribers. It should be the main focus of almost every blog.
2. Provide value
   The most important thing to remember with this process is that you need to provide value. You need to enrich the lives of your subscribers. You need to solve their problems. Without this step you will find that your list grows largely unresponsive.
3. Create a product or find affiliate programs
   The next steps is to create a product of your own (ebook, ecourse, etc.) or find a product of someone else’s that you can promote and sell to your email list. It needs to be highly relevant, valuable, and helpful.
4. Promote it to your email list
   This stage is actually rather complex and can involve a pre-launch and launch, as well as automated messages and so on. The net result is that you make a lump sum of money during a launch period, or an ongoing stream of income from automated sales that happen over time.

The whole thing can be a very exciting process and, if it’s done correctly, it is an extremely ethical way to make good money while enriching the lives of your subscriber list.

Doing the math

Now, let’s do a little math to see if $10,000 per year is really possible. In fact, if you really catch a hold of this concept you’ll find that $10,000 is actually rather conservative. The possibilities with this type of marketing are endless.

Let’s take a look:

1. Capture four email subscribers per day
   Let’s assume you are able to capture four email subscribers per day. It is a very small amount that any one can do with ideas like this and this.4 x 365 = 1460 subscribers per year.
2. Sell a $37 ebook to 20% of your list
   If your followers are loyal and engaged you should be able to sell to around 15% to 20% of them.1460 subscribers x 0.2 = 292 sales @ $37 = $10,804

Now, for those whose lists are significantly larger than this, the estimates are conservative. For those who have smaller lists, this can serve as inspiration to keep going with your blogging work. Remember, an ebook is just one example of the multitude of things you can promote to your list.

How to make $10k+ per year with email subscribers

photo credit: peasap

The wonderful thing about this process is that it can be expanded upon to incredible levels. For some bloggers, $10,000 is a tiny sum of money. My hope is that this post serves as a catalyst for you to learn more about the field and really take your blog to its full potential.

1. Grow the email list

The email list is the backbone of all good blogging income sources. If you can capture a large number of email addresses of readers who love what you write, trust your advice, and look to you for help and new information, then you are setting yourself up to be in a very profitable situation.

I know what you’re thinking: “But isn’t it rude/annoying/spammy to sell stuff to my followers?” This is a very common question. I encounter so many people who don’t want to sell anything to their subscribers but, to be honest, the logic doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Because, like everyone else, you also have bills to pay, you aren’t trying to rip anyone off, and with the right products, you can help your subscribers to better their situations.

Don’t get me wrong: some people abuse their lists. I don’t condone this at all. But guys like Darren, who only sell high-quality ebooks or training courses that can help you grow a bigger and better blog, are helping their subscribers. Why shouldn’t Darren make some money selling a product that has taken him years and years to acquire the knowledge to create—and helps you in a big way?

How can you grow your list quickly?

• Focus on value and quality information
  Your blog needs to publish high-quality content that adds value to the lives of your readers. Every time someone sees a post on your blog, they should leave feeling like a problem is solved. This is important.
• Have an angle
  There are hundreds of millions of blogs out there. You need an angle. Why should people read your stuff over someone else’s? Without an attached story or angle, you give a person no reason to subscribe to your blog.
• Use Aweber to add subscription boxes and send a free ebook
  I recently wrote a post about why I switched to Aweber and the reasons are simple: you can add a subscription box to your blog in about five minutes, you can send out a series of automatic follow-up emails and, best of all, you can send out a free ebook automatically. This is a tried and tested method for capturing a lot of email subscribers: write a highly valuable ebook that appeals to your niche, and give it away in exchange for their subscription.
• Write guest posts related to your niche
  Once your free ebook offering is up and running, get out there and start guest posting on as many of the top blogs as possible. Darren has a thorough post on how to do this, so the only thing that I’ll add is that you should make your posts as good as possible, and in some way relate them to your free ebook. This ensures that all the visitors that trickle through to your site are interested in your stuff.
• Engage people in email, Twitter, comment threads, etc.
  If you want your email subscribers to be loyal and engaged, you want to make sure you engage them in as many places as possible. As a general rule, I reply to every comment on my blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. I work from home so it’s easy for me to do this, but even if you work in an office, you should make an effort to reply to contacts and commenters each evening when you get home.

As a general rule of thumb, the number of email signups you attract is a good indicator of how successful your blog is. You might be getting all the traffic in the world, but unless you can convert it somehow, you probably aren’t making much progress. Capturing as many email subscribers as possible is the first and most important step in affiliate marketing.

2. Create a product and/or find an affiliate product to promote

This section is broken up in to two parts—your two different options. The first option is to create your own product and sell that to your list. I prefer this option because you can tailor it to suit your readers’ needs and wants. The second option is find someone else’s product to promote to your list for a commission (i.e. an affiliate program). Let’s take a look at both.

Creating your own product

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it allows you to create your own product without much in the way of difficulty or start-up costs. In a recent article on how stay-at-home moms can make money, I said that a product launched off the back of an expert blog is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to make an honest living online. This is true.

Your product could take one of many forms:

• an ebook
  Creating an ebook is one of the simplest ways to make money from your blog. All you do is brainstorm a concept, write it out in Word or Open Office, tizzy it up with graphics and pictures, and then convert it into a PDF. Instant product. The problem? There are a lot of them out there. People have become a bit blind to them. If you are going to sell an ebook, you have to make sure it is of an outstanding level of quality and addresses a problem that’s massively relevant to your blogging audience. Ideally, it will cover a topic that hasn’t already been heavily written about.
• an ecourse
  Another popular option is to develop an ecourse that teaches your readers how to do something. It could take the form of a series of emails sent out every week, or it could be an ebook mixed with video and delivered in module form. This is sometimes a better option because, the course content can be created or amended on the go, to respond to the feedback you get from users.
• a membership site
  This is new black: it seems like everyone is creating membership sites nowadays. A membership site is basically a password-protected area of your blog that people can only access by paying. It could contain tools or courses or a forum of experts, for example. Some of the more successful membership sites are SEOBook and SEOmoz.
• a physical product
  If you are one of these talented people who have an actual real-world skill like painting or designing clothes, you might want to make your product a physical one. This can work extremely well if you have a big list of people who admire your work.

Whatever you decide to create, you have to make sure it appeals to your readers and continues to add value as you’ve done on your blog. People simply will not pay for something unless they know that it will add to their lives in a meaningful way.

Promoting someone else’s product

If you don’t have the time, energy, or ideas to create your own product, you can start out by promoting other people’s—by becoming an affiliate. For example, if I created an amazing Blog Tyrant ecourse, I would offer people the opportunity to sell that ecourse on my behalf and earn a commission (usually 40% to 80%) on every sale. If you believed in that product (trust me, it’d be awesome!) then you could sell it to your list. Money for jam.

There are a few prerequisites to generating an income through affiliate sales:

• The product must be relevant.
  If you run a dog-training blog there is almost no chance that my amazing Blog Tyrant product would sell to your list. You need to find affiliate products that are highly relevant to your blog.
• You must believe in it/use it yourself.
  Personally, I never promote an affiliate product unless I use it myself. My site is all about helping people dominate their niche and grow an online business that allows them to work from home. Why would I risk my reputation (and in some cases friendships) promoting a product that I’ve never used?
• It must be reputable and safe.
  Some affiliate programs out there really do not offer good protection for their customers. It’s getting rarer and rarer, but every now and then you come across a program that gets people involved with spam, or makes it difficult to get a refund. If you are going to promote something to your list, you want to make sure it comes from a reputable source that you know and trust. Shoemoney says that he never promotes an affiliate unless he has met the owner in person. This is a good rule.

Please do not think that affiliate programs are all dirty. They aren’t. There are some really solid brand names out there who are promoting very valuable tools and information. Darren’s one of them. With a little bit of research and planning, you will be able to find something great for your crew.

Finding affiliate products to promote
There are so many different places to find affiliates out there—some good, some bad. What you often find is that it is best to locate the product you want to promote first, then figure out what company that product creator is using to sign up affiliates. Some of the main ones you might want to look at include:

• E-junkie
• Commission Junction
• Shareasale
• Clickbank.

A lot of the larger companies run their own affiliate programs. In this case you want to visit the sites of the sellers themselves, scroll down to the very bottom and look for the Affiliates link that will direct you to the signup page.

3. Sell the product to your email list

The final part of this post is all about selling your product, or your chosen affiliate product, to your email list. This topic could be studied for a lifetime, but here, let’s look at a rough game-plan.

Pre-launch

The first step is to generate some interest among your subscribers around the product launch. You want to prepare your readers for the big sale day. There are lots of different ways to do this, and many different schools of thought as to what works and what doesn’t. Some ideas include:

• a free give away
  Having a free give away that is related to your product launch can be a good idea because people circulate the free part to their friends and on their blogs. It can also help you capture more email addresses to use for the actual promotion.
• a time-sensitive signup area
  Something else that can work is to have a time-sensitive signup area. For example, if you are releasing a membership site you might only want to release it to 100 members. Having an earlybird signup area on the blog a week in advance can get people motivated to join, rather than risk missing out.
• create an affiliate program
  Around this time, if you’re selling a product you’ve created yourself, you also want to set yourself up as affiliate seller so that other bloggers can sell your products. Email your list of high-profile blogging contacts, letting them know about the product launch and the affiliate program, and ask them to help you out.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure it really does generate some buzz. The idea is to get as many people talking about the product, and sharing news about it, as possible.

Launch

The launch stage is where you actually send out the email to your list promoting your new product. You should also do a post on your blog to ensure your RSS readers hear about what’s going on. Make sure your launch email:

• has a strong call to action
• details all the specs of the product
• uses social proof
• focuses on benefits, not features.

As I said, this is only supposed to be a rough game-plan. There are some amazing articles out there that give you specific details on this process. I’d recommend starting with Copyblogger’s landing pages tutorials, Darren’s video on product launches, and Yaro’s article on creating an ebook.

Automate follow-ups for affiliate products

One thing to remember is that if you’re promoting someone else’s product you don’t have to do all this launch stuff. You can actually just set it to be entirely automatic. How? Well remember we talked about Aweber’s automatic messages earlier? What you can do is create a series of follow-up emails that go to every subscriber that you get on a sequence of set days.

For example, let’s say you subscribe to my Dog Training blog. On day one I might send you an automatic email thanking you for subscribing. Then on day three, you get an email with a highly useful dog training tip or tutorial. A week later, you get another training tip and then, maybe a day after that, I send you an email with an affiliate product that relates to the tips and tutorials, and really helps you solve the problem. It’s all automatic, and it works extremely well.

Remember, don’t flood your subscribers with emails, and don’t send anything out unless it’s highly valuable and useful to your subscribers. Don’t risk compromising your relationship.

Have you done it? Will you try it?

I’d really like to open up the comments now and ask you guys for any advice from your own email campaigns. Have you tried these kinds of approaches before? Did they work well? I’d also really like to know whether you will give this a try on your own blogs. Do leave a comment and let me know.

The Blog Tyrant is a 25 year old guy who makes a full time living from blogs and online businesses. He has sold several blogs for $20,000 plus and answers every comment he gets on his blog. Subscribe by email or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or RSS.

Last week at Blog World Expo, I had conversations with literally hundreds of bloggers about their blogging.

It was interesting to see some of the themes that emerged as bloggers shared their challenges, problems and fears.

One of the recurring conversations that I had revolved around bloggers’ fear of being seen as sell-outs by readers when they started to monetize their blogs.

On numerous occasions this past week I’ve chatted with bloggers who’ve been so scared of the potential reader reaction that it stopped them from adding any form of monetization to their blogs. In some cases, this meant the bloggers were no longer able to sustain what they do financially.

Here’s a summary of some of the reflections I had to those expressing this fear.

1. Be clear about your goals and values.

Perhaps one of the best things a blogger can do in this area is to know where it is they’re headed—or at least where they want to move to with their blogs. Just as important is to have a clear understanding of your values.

Give some thought to these factors, and you’ll be in a strong position to make some good decisions about the strategies and methods you’ll use to reach your goals. You’ll also be in a good place to do some self-monitoring to keep yourself from selling out.

Filter people’s reactions through the framework of your own values and goals, and you’ll hopefully be able to tell whether there’s truth in what they’re saying.

2. Provide value to readers.

I remember the first time I released an ebook on Digital Photography School. I was very nervous about launching it, because I didn’t know how readers would react. I remember hitting the Publish button on the launch post, and expecting a backlash from readers emailing to express how insulted that they were that I’d try to sell them anything.

But the backlash didn’t come.

Instead, I started receiving emails from readers thanking me for the ebook. The lesson I learned was that if you provide something of value to people—something that will matter to them, and help them overcome a problem—they’re often only too happy to buy it.

Not only should your product be valuable, but the interaction you have with your readers in the lead-up to its launch should be valuable too. Among the emails I received that day were messages from readers saying that they’d never bought anything online before. Yet, based on the past interactions that I’d had with them and helped them, they’d felt compelled to buy my ebook.

3. Communicate your reasoning for the charge.

I hope I’m not sounding like I’ve never had negative feedback about releasing a product. At times there have been readers who’ve expressed feelings of resentment or disappointment when I’ve released products.

In these instances, my main approach is to attempt to share my backstory of the product’s release. For example, I remember the first time I put ads on my first blog. By no means was this a play to become rich; I was just trying to make my blog break even.

One particular reader started a campaign against me, and accused me of selling out. My response was simply to email him with my story. I communicated how my blog was costing me money each month and that as a newly married guy working numerous part time jobs and trying to provide free valuable information to readers, I needed to find a way for the site to break even. On hearing the story the reader’s attitude was turned around.

Similarly, when I launched the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook, I told the story of how my readers had pretty much demanded that I turn the original series of blog posts into a PDF, and indicated that they’d pay for the content in that format. In doing so I was able to communicate how the idea wasn’t even mine—in fact, it came from reader need.

I also think sometimes people need to be reminded that behind a blog is a real person who needs to find a way to sustain it. In most cases, when you share that information, I think people understand your need to monetize your blog.

4. Monitor your own motivations.

Being in any kind of business will undoubtedly lead you into situations where you’re presented with opportunities to sell out. The reality is that it can be tempting at times.

I remember an instance two years back where I was offered a five-figure sum for a series of tweets promoting a product—a product I’d never used and never would have recommended myself. The catch was that the tweets had to be positive, they’d be written by someone else, and I couldn’t include a disclaimer stating that I was being paid to tweet them.

The situation was certainly tempting on some levels: over $10,000 for a few Tweets!? I could have paid for a new car, or a year or two of my kids’ education with those tweets. But ultimately I knew that it was just a quick cash grab. I wasn’t willing to go there because it didn’t fit with my values, and the motivations I felt for doing it weren’t healthy ones.

5. Be accountable to others.

The last thing I’d add on this topic is that it can be worthwhile to have others who you can bounce these issues off. Sometimes, as  individuals, we can lose a little perspective on the realities of monetization, and the voices of others can draw us back to good decisions.

I regularly bounce the opportunities that I’m offered off a small group of people—family, friends, and fellow bloggers. In a sense it’s a little advisory board (although it’s certainly not that formal!) that I give permission to ask me tough questions, and help me stay on course to achieving the goals and values I mentioned above.

There have been a number of instances over the years when these people have pulled me back from making decisions that, upon reflection, would have seen me sell out.

In a similar way. I think it’s also wise to listen to what a wider group of people are saying to you. And that wider group is your readers. While there will almost always be someone who has a negative reaction to your approach (you can’t please everyone), there’ll be times when there’s a wider feeling among your readers that you really need to hear. At these times, it’s worth going back to your core motivations, and seeing if the wisdom of the crowd is something you need to pay attention to.

How do you stop yourself from selling out on your blog?