Creating a product to sell on your blog is both exciting and frightening. You are venturing down a new road to share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. You want to monetize your blog. But fear and uncertainty linger in the back of your mind. The fear of failure and rejection have the potential to divert your effectiveness. To avoid the pitfall of self-doubt, start at the beginning of the journey and follow the road signs.
How Create Products And Monetize Your Blog
Start Here
Know Your Audience. Before creating any product you should know who you are creating it for and why. Understand who your readers are and what they want from you. Why do they visit your blog? What questions do they ask? What posts are the most popular? Each of these answers will help guide you in the creation process.
Build Your List. Creating a product and putting it out there is brave. Make the launch a success by using a pre-created list. Do not expect to create more traffic because you created a product. Rather, share your new product with the followers you have now. Encourage those followers to share your new product (incentivize).
Which Product Should You Sell?
There are so many different and creative ways to create products. Deciding which is the best for your audience is important.
1. Understand Your Strengths And Weaknesses. Understanding your skills is vital to creating a valuable product. If you are terrible at graphics and infographics consider hiring someone to do them for you. Terrible proofreader? Ask someone to proofread your material.
2. Research. It is not enough to draw upon your own knowledge. Back up what you have to say with solid research and resources. Your audience loves extra resources, examples, and information. They are looking to you as the expert with access to the vaults of knowledge. Do your research and you can give your readers that knowledge. Understand the product creation process and take a look at your competitors.
3. Examine Why. Ask yourself why readers will want your product. What problem do they have that you can solve? What are their needs? It could be something practical like how to make great coffee drinks. They many need or want entertainment, inspiration, or laughter.
Examining the problems above will help guide you to create specific solutions. Perhaps your readers need a book of inspirational poems, daily affirmations, coffee drink video course, or a series of humorous kid-inspired prints for the walls. Make a list of potential products that will solve a problem or meet a need.
4. Narrow The List. Take a hard look at the list of products and narrow it down. Focus on the products you believe will address the needs of most audience members.
Product Ideas
eBooks: Create an eBook and market yourself. They are easy to market and sell. You can offer them as downloads directly from your site, and have a low overhead.
Video Series: I love a great video series. They are perfect for teaching skills such as cooking, assembly, and computer.
Courses: Teach a skill through a series of lessons. Use video, photos, and written instructions to instruct. This is a wonderful product to incorporate social media. Ask your students to log progress on Twitter with a hashtag, watch a Periscope video, or update progress in a Facebook group.
Services: Consulting services, SEO and Keyword Optimizing, Freelance Writing, Virtual Assistant. Each of these services are products you can offer and market on your blog.
Digital Product: Wordpress themes, holiday graphics, and decorative elements are just a few examples of digital products.
Physical Products: Perhaps your readers are looking for beautiful candles, handmade hats and scarves, or something decorative.
Launching And Selling
During the product planning process, create a timeline with product milestones. The final destination should be the launch date. All along the timeline you will include:
- product brainstorming
- product development
- creation
- web store set up
- proofreading
- social media teasers
- gathering leads with a landing page
- final proofreading
- product manufacturing / creation
Tips For A Successful Product Launch
Each point along the timeline will have several tasks. This includes launch. Create a plan to share the product launch on all social media channels. Use your networks to share your product.
Leading up to launch day you may want to:
- Write a post
- Share a post on the process on other sharing websites
- Tweet
- Facebook your progress
- Email your audience with a pre-order offer or landing page (include a discount)
- Launch Day: Tweet, Facebook, Instagram, E-mail, and generally toot your horn
Resources
You may be asking yourself where to start. Here are some resources to research and consider when creating your product:
Gumroad | create and sell a variety of products – courses, books, video. Also integrates into WordPress.
Small Product Lab | a boot camp approach to launching a product in 10 days.
The Printful | create custom printable products on your site.
Scrivener and Scapple | terrific tools for writing and illustrating an e-Book.
Woocommerce | one of the most highly recommended WordPress eCommerce platforms
Share with us what you are creating to monetize your blog.
Looking for more information to help create products for your blog? This article from ProBlogger is excellent. You can also find more information about specific products here: creating and selling printables and how to turn blog posts into an ebook.
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This is a GREAT article! I’ll be sharing this on Facebook tomorrow. Cheers!
Hi Tammi,
Love how detailed this is. I’m in the process of brainstorming products to offer and this helps. Thanks so much! Maritza
I am so happy this article is a help. It can be an overwhelming process. But if you are true to your audience and yourself you’ll do great!