How to Make Money Using Your Blog as The Tool

In the long run you shouldn’t make all your money from your blog, no full-time blogger makes all the money from advertisements, AdSense click or whatever you are aiming at.

So Where Does the Money Come From?

The most people who makes a living from blogging is actually just using a blog to brand themselves, you wont just go and buy a product from a guy if you didn’t knew him. You probably see ProBlogger as a blogging expert, you wouldn’t consider him a blogging expert if he didn’t have that blog.

He branded himself as “the” blogger and he the term. So if Darren Rowse didn’t ran ProBlogger, but only his photographer blog, you probably wouldn’t buy the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog-product, but because of his blog he have reached your credibility and he can sell you blogging books and that’s actually it. You are blogging because you want to gain trust and credibility to be able to sell.

Therefore you can’t (of course you can, but) sell your products immediately, you have to build a strong brand around your name (like Darren did) and then you’ll automatically get more trust from readers and other bloggers as well.

This post shouldn’t build around credibility, I have written a few posts on how to gain credibility, which you can just search for, if that’s what you are looking from.

Indirect Money Makers

When I say that the most full-time bloggers (if not all) are not making 6-figures from their blog only, then I mean that they are using their blog to get money indirectly from their blog. You see they gain trust by building a blog and then they are publishing a product or something like that, then people buy and they eventually likes the blogger more and then they’ll buy again.

So when you create a product or whatsoever, you are actually using your brand (which you have gotten from the blog) to sell the product. If they didn’t knew you through blogging, you wouldn’t have a single chance at all to sell them, anything.

I want to let you know, the less people who are in your blogging niche, the easier it will be for you to gain trust, because of the less competition you get.

Sidetrack

Sometimes competition is good. Let’s take a Danish example. A person called Martin Thorborg created the software called SpamFighter. It was an effective program, which got you rid of spam. The thing is, they didn’t have the money, back then, to market the problem.

People got spam, but they didn’t knew what spam was and didn’t knew you could get rid of it. So software giants as BullGard and Microsoft, marketed the problem, but SpamFighter was #1 on the search engines. So they went to SpamFighter’s site and then they got customers. In that way, competitors aren’t that bad as they sound.

Back to Reality

When you publish products and have the right credibility level, people will start seeing you as an expert, of course the more competitors there is in your niche, the harder it will be for you to sell and to get credibility as the niche will be filled with scam products as of the more competitors.

I think that you need to think about things before you are going to create a product. Think it through, before you are going to start to write a book, would you keep writing or will you eventually stop, before you are done writing?

You need to have some discipline if you want to be done the product.

You could also start a service. If you are a fitness blogger or something like that, then you could start consulting and motivating people, to start exercising, that would be golden and just give them some tips. You could start at a cheap price and then after you get some clients then raise the price as they recommend it, etc.

You could do it for 4 weeks, for each client, 1 hour (or more) each week, where you evaluate and so on. I think such a thing, in the fitness world would be awesome, I think lots of people actually want to get started, but isn’t doing anything about it.

When You Have Decided Then What?

When you have decided what you want to do, then you should start thinking about how you want to approach this task. You need to think this through and eventually you will find out if this is something for you.

Maybe do some mind-mapping or whatsoever. You just to think, how the best way would be to approach this.

If you are going to write an ebook then, tell your audience on your blog, what they can expect and when they can expect getting it. When the book is near the release then you should try to talk a lot about it on Twitter and just promote it.

It is fine if you don’t want to share the book with the audience before the date of the release, but you should try to create a bit of mystique about your book. Which means you should say “31 days till the big day” on Twitter or something like that, maybe even build a mystique email list, for those who wants to know what it is.

Conclusion

I think that you need to use the credibility you have gotten from your blog, before it’s too late. You can offer some services, just be creative. That’s the key when thinking about creating stuff.

Doesn’t matter if you want to write a blog post, to create a product or to create a podcast you need to be creative. Sometimes you also need to connect with people to get ideas. I find that as a huge inspirational source.

So before you are going to use the indirect money opportunities then you need to evaluate with yourself, if you really want to write that book, or if you want to do something else, that maybe doesn’t require that much work, instantly. Then consulting might fit better there.

It depends on who you are.

I hope this blog post was inspiring and that you liked it and that you actually feel inspired to make a product/service for your audience. It could be a good credibility test.