The online marketplace works the same way as the offline marketplace: you need to figure out something that you have to offer for which people will be willing to give you money. There is no magic bullet, and the answer to how to make money from your blog might be far less glamorous than you were hoping. However, if you want to make money online, quickly, the best way is to market your skills with a blog, rather than sitting around and waiting for your traffic to increase to astounding levels. Here’s how to figure out what you can offer.
1. Figure out what your marketable skills/salable products are.
In order to use a blog as a marketing tool, you need to have something to sell. The first way to figure out what you have to sell is to think about what you could do, today, if you went out into the workforce and tried to get a job. Are you able to do web design? Editing? Freelance writing? Accounting work? What would you be doing if you were working at a regular job (or, if you are working at a regular job, what is it)?
Alternatively, maybe your skills are more creative — are you somebody who can make jewelry? Bake? Cook? Write down all of the things you can make and/or services you can provide that have a tangible market value on a piece of paper before you do anything else.
2. Figure out a way to make a “product” out of those skills.
Depending on what skills you have, you can either create tangible products to be sold from the platform of your blog, or you can use your blog as a means of attracting the attention of people who might need your services. If you are good at some kind of consulting, you can launch a consulting business and use your blog to sell it. If you are good at making jewelry, or baking, you can use your blog to sell it. Alternatively, you might be able to think of new products that can be created that package your expertise in an easily accessible form to be sold. An extremely financially successful example of this concept can be seen in the travel guides that Chris Guillebeau sells on his blog: these guides are summaries of travel tips and pointers that Chris has gained over his years of world travel, and they are sold in ebook form to people who visit his website.
3. Use your blog to provide consistent, free, high quality content that is related to your products for people who want more guidance.
Though I make some money from advertising on this blog, by far the most financially successful venture attached to this blog is my consulting business. People read my site and get some general advice for running their blogs, and when they want more specialized attention they hire me to consult them. The same thing works for people who want to sell ebooks or other products as offshoots for their blogs; if you want to sell baked goods, post a recipe for cupcakes and link to your etsy page, and if you want to sell jewelry, feature pictures of your latest styles and how you made them, and give your readers a way of purchasing. The blog allows you to soft sell to your readership without bothering them, because people who don’t want to buy anything from you never have to get involved, and the people who do come to you are usually ready to give you money.
Hey kids. It’s time to check in with the great monetization project again, and I thought I’d get you all caught up on the ad situation here at ABDPBT. I’ve been selling my own ads here for over a month, with some success here and there, and I’ve picked up a few pieces of advice to share, as well as some thoughts on how to change my media kit in the short term to better reflect the needs of my potential advertisers. I thought it would be a good idea to keep this process transparent with you guys, so that those of you who are hoping to at some point replicate the process on your own blogs can take this advice and either use it for yourselves or discard it as you see fit.
Before reading, bear in mind that every audience is so different, and similarly, every advertiser is so different, so what I’ve found to be true might not be true of your own readership, and what you find to be true of your readership might not be true of mine, or your friends or whatever. You have to experiment. Oh, and before you ask, this advice is specifically for the ads I am selling myself, not the ads that are sold through my new network, BlogAds. The difference is that the top column in the right sidebar is a BlogAds ad, and then beneath that are smaller ads that are private ads sold through me. Not that it really matters all that much, but I’m speaking specifically about the advertising placements that I’m trying to fill myself, rather than the ones that are filled through any kind of network.
Choose Sizes That Reflect The Needs Of Your Target Advertisers.
The sizes in my initial media kit fit my template and the sizes I was using with my former ad network, so they were large size network ad friendly. These are generally not good for the kinds of advertisers I’m looking to solicit, even if they are at affordable rates. I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter that these sizes are offered at reasonable rates, I think there is some kind of psychological block there that small businesses have towards having a large ad like a rectangle or a skyscraper. They are just not used to being able to afford it, so they don’t look to buy it. Maybe they don’t even have the artwork for it. I don’t know. I’m not going to eliminate it as a possibility, but I’m going to add some new, smaller sizes, and the media kit now emphasizes those sizes instead of the larger ones.
Don’t Be Afraid To Change Prices To Get Things Moving.
I sold a few ads at my original prices as posted a little over a month ago. The overall results of my initial advertising solicitation are as follows:
6.4% responded to my solicitation;
3.2% expressed interest in buying an ad, either now or in the future; and
1.3% actually purchased ads.
Given that this was first month selling private ads, and from what I understand about advertising sales return rates, this is actually not as bad as it sounds. Still, I would like to do better.
Some people are stubborn and think that they should just keep their rates up no matter what, even if the market won’t support it. I call these people “bad businesspeople.” I understand sticking to your guns about pricing when you are getting a lowball offer from one advertiser in particular. But if you send out a bunch of inquiries that seem well placed and you’re not getting enough sales, it’s time to shake things up a bit. So that’s what I’m doing. Smaller sizes, and slightly lower rates on the sizes than I had before. Making less money than you hypothetically would have made in a perfect economy is way better than making no money at all. Also see: get over yourself. When there is a run on your sidebar space, you can always raise prices again, and you can bet this is what I will do (note to advertisers: get the ads while the getting is good).
Exploit People’s Natural Discomfort With Scarcity And Time Limits.
People are motivated to take action by scarcity and time limits. So instead of just having an infinite number spots of ads open, I’m going to limit my spaces to six, and set special prices until the end of May. I’m sending out a notice of this sale to my whole list today, in addition to posting it here for anybody who might want to take advantage of it in the audience.
Offer a special deal for multiple month purchases for advertisers who are particularly well placed. So this is the part that some people are not going to like. I would highly recommend that you offer, as a perk of multiple month purchases, an editorial option, as a perk of your display advertising. What do I mean by this? Well, I mean: it is in your best interest that your advertisers end up feeling satisfied with their advertising experience. As such, you should do everything possible to seek out businesses that you think your readers will like and want to buy from. Assuming you have done this, it should not be so difficult to go look at your sponsor’s website and find cool products to feature in an editorial post on your site, like the “Meet Our Sponsors” post I did for Magpie Lovely a while back. This is not technically a paid placement, and I wouldn’t necessarily advertise it as a guaranteed part of your ad sales, but it is something to bring up when you find an advertiser that is a very good match. These kinds of things will seal the deal with an advertiser because they ensure that your readers will see their products, and also that they get a permanent placement on the site, even after their sidebar ad is gone.
Now. It’s not going to work in all situations, which is why I would not recommend advertising it as a guaranteed part of ad sales. If an insurance company decides to buy a sidebar ad from you, it’s going to be tough to do this kind of thing, for example. But if the product fits, it’s another way to convince the advertiser to buy the ad, once you have them on the line. Many people will tell you not to do this, because it’s blurring the lines of editorial and advertising and blah blah blah — my comment to those people is to open up a magazine and explain to me why this biggest, most expensive ad in the magazine is always the same brand as one of the things featured prominently in an editorial smack dab in the middle of the magazine? This is the way stuff gets done. If you don’t want to do it yourself, that’s fine, but I think you will find that many of the advertisers out there will expect this kind of thing, just so that you know this up front. Look around at other sites who sell private ads and see if you don’t see this kind of stuff happening regularly.
Last Monday, I posted a list of recommendations for small bloggers looking to monetize. The recommendations I made prompted a few questions regarding timelines and what kind of results to expect, and as I began to answer I realized that perhaps it would be better to just write a post on the topic. In July, it will be two years since I first launched ABDPBT, and though the blog has since grown into four different sections, I have learned quite a bit since then about what it means to approach blogging as a business. Though there are countless other people who have been doing this for far longer than I have been, I am one of only a handful of people who started blogging as a business endeavor from day one and who have worked at it full time since then. Below are some observations and advice based on those two unusual characteristics of my blogging experience.
It takes almost two years really gain traction.
People want to start blogging and hit it big yesterday. There is no one-size-fits-all answer for how long it take to hit it big, but look at it this way: Dooce was blogging for five years before her husband quit his job, and Ree Drummond published her cookbook after about three years of full-time blogging. Those are the two meteoric success stories of the mommyblogging world, and they are hardly overnight success stories, so you shouldn’t expect to be any different. In fact, you should expect it to take longer, if anything.
I think it is something like two years before anything tangible is likely to start happening.
This doesn’t mean that magically after two years, you are huge or an “A-lister” or that everybody loves you and you’re being invited to speak at conferences, represented by Federated Media, and have a book deal. But if you are working very hard and consistently, beating down every doorstep and not taking no for an answer, over and over again, for two years, you will have gained some traction and have a readership in that time.
At almost two years, there are many people who, maybe they don’t actually read my blog, but they at least know this blog exists by now, they are aware enough of its existence to be annoyed by its name. That’s with updates of not every section of this blog every day, but at least a few times per week, going to two or more conferences per year (even though these sometimes give me anxiety), keeping up with tons of other blogs (commenting when I can), returning emails (always), returning comments on my site (nearly always), returning @-replies and DMs on Twitter (very often), responding to PR solicitations (often), offering to help PR people when I think I can help them find people who fit their products better than I do (occasionally).
I consider this my career and treat it that way, even when I don’t want to — like the past few weeks, when I’ve kind of wanted to escape it. I have faced it. And even then, success isn’t handed to you overnight. It takes a ton of work. I rarely think about how long it is going to take, perhaps that is because of my background. But people who think that bloggers who are fabulously successful like Heather Armstrong and Ree Drummond are just lucky are sorely mistaken: it takes a ton of hard work and time to get where they are. You will probably have to work even harder.
You have to bring something new to the table.
It’s really easy on the outside to see a blogger who is successful and think, “I can do that.” Maybe you can. But they did it first. What are you going to do that is different? Because they’re already doing it. We don’t need another one of them. We don’t even need a better one of them, necessarily. We need a different something.
The easiest thing to do is to just figure out whatever it is that makes you you and make that your thing. Like for me, maybe being a pain in the ass critic is not necessarily something that you would consider an asset, but look, nobody can do that like I can. So that’s my thing, and that’s what I built this site around, different aspects of that, and my life. And all of the parts of the site feed into that. Nobody else is doing it because, well, nobody else can do it — and would they want to? And there’s a purpose to it, and there’s a market for it, and it allows me to do what I do best, and I can go through the web and be me, even if I have to take heat for it sometimes, I never have to hide who I really am, or worry that somebody will figure out that the way I present myself doesn’t really match my personality.
If I have one piece of advice to give a new blogger it is this: try to make you “online brand” match your real identity as much as possible — to the extent that you can control this. They don’t have to be the same thing, necessarily, but try to keep them from totally clashing. Discrepancies between the two can really cause problems down the line. This might not make sense to you now, but later on it will — you need to have a brand that allows you to be true to yourself, or else you won’t want to stick with it for as long as blogging takes to turn into a money making endeavor.
Very few can make it on display ads alone.
Very, very few bloggers can make a living solely on display ads. There are some who do: Dooce, Pioneer Woman, MckMama, and some others (Nie Nie?) I believe. But even those ones are plagued by the problems we have seen with ad networks being able to meet their ad inventory demands in a down market. You have to have crazy traffic to do so: I’m going to estimate that the point at which it becomes a full time income (when using an ad network, that is) is somewhere over a million pageviews per month, though this would depend upon where you live. If you live in Los Angeles, it would probably be several million pageviews per month, but elsewhere in the country, perhaps only 750K would be enough. If you sell private ads on your own, you might be able to make a full time living before that point, and if you broker your own placement deals, you definitely could make it long before that. The point is: display ads, at present, are only an option for full time income for a small portion of bloggers with very high traffic levels. You might be one of those people some day, but you have to be in it for the long haul and you have to really put in your time and be willing to sacrifice to get there. It is not going to happen in a year. It might not happen in five years. It might not ever happen.
There must be some kind of EVENT (over which you have no control) that brings you to the next traffic level.
This is the very cynical part of my analysis that is going to make everyone cringe, but when has this ever stopped me from doing anything in my life? If you look at the few people who have reached the very very high traffic levels, the ones who have a full time income from display ads, they all have some kind of EVENT that got them there with one very notable exception. That EVENT includes a firing for writing about a job on the internet that was covered extensively in mainstream media (Dooce), the heartwrenching struggle with sickness of child (MckMama), a horrific near-death accident that was covered by mainstream media and subsequent triumph of the human spirit recovery that was covered by Oprah (Nie Nie). The exception to this is Ree Drummond, who I think bypassed these through masterful use of marketing to get the word out about her site, and kept people around because the content was good and everything spread through word of mouth until mainstream media finally caught on within the past year. My point is not to lessen the merit of these bloggers but rather to call attention to the importance of these EVENTs in bringing up their traffic to income-generating levels. Without those EVENTs — over which a blogger cannot have any control — the blogger’s traffic might not ever have reached the traffic at which it currently resides. (And yes, I know I will be attacked as “heartless” for saying this.)
You must be an entrepreneur first, writer second. At some point in the history of the blogosphere, it might have been the case that you could end up finding yourself at the helm of a very profitable blog without a plan, but this is not the case anymore. Do I consider myself to be a writer? Yes. I always have been. When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. But if you want to turn a blog into a money-making endeavor you need to think of yourself as an entrepreneur first and a writer second. Hopefully you have skills in both areas, and about eighteen other areas as well, because you are going to need them. Being a good writer is not enough. In fact, it’s not even necessarily required. There are tons of good writers, and not all successful bloggers are necessarily the best writers. If what is most important to you is to write, then just write. If you want to find a market for your writing, then blogging is a good way of doing that, but you will have to be willing put your artistic needs in the backseat on occasion to get stuff done. This does not mean it’s not important. It just means that there are many ways of being creative. The great thing about building a blog is that you never know which way you’re going to be able to express your creativity next.
You know what the world needs more of? Social media consultants! AWESOME. Anyway, if you need help with your blog, you know, hire me if you feel like it.
PERSONAL FINANCE?!
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