Most bloggers make a sale here and there. But how can you, as a blogger, get paid consistently?
How do you get a product that will sell on your own website?
If a product is hot, is it already too late to start selling it?
What’s the best thing to sell online?
How do you promote it?
In order to make consistent profits online, you need to answer these questions first.
Marketing And Promotion
These two phrases are used to mean the same by a lot of people. For me they are completely different.
Promotion is the actual steps you take to get the word out about your product, such as the action of sending out emails, sharing it on social media, etc.
Marketing is more like the strategy behind. Naming your product, doing customer surveys, working out an email or social media strategy fall under marketing.
You could have the perfect product and still get nowhere if your marketing is incorrect.
E. g. the product could be named incorrectly or it doesn’t have a good USP (unique seller position).
Here is an example to demonstrate what I mean.
The Heartbreaking Story Of The Fidget Spinner
The answer to profits is in the product itself, but is also in the field of marketing.
It was a huge craze sweeping schoolyards across the world in 2017, but it turns out the inventor wasn’t making any money from it…
Catherine Hettinger knew her invention — the fidget spinner — was working as she sat alone before a meeting with the vice president of Hasbro, one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world.
It was 1997 and Hasbro didn’t see the magic in the low-tech toy, later sending a rejection letter to Ms Hettinger, whose patent for the first fidget spinner was approved earlier that year.
Hasbro now sells the stress-relieving toys that are sweeping the country, as well as causing some trouble in classrooms.
Ms Hettinger said she got the idea for the toy when she saw young boys throwing rocks at police officers in Israel.
She wanted to find a way to distract young kids and give them something soothing to release pent-up energy.
But the craze came a little too late for Ms Hettinger, whose patent on the original product expired in 2017. That means companies like Hasbro can sell their own versions of the toy without Ms Hettinger, who insists she’s not upset about missing out on the toy industry’s latest fad.
“Maybe if it was some kind of exploitative product — like a new style of cigarettes — and my only motivation was to make money, I’d have a different attitude,” she said. “But I am just thrilled.”
Selling Yourself
Obviously, Catherine Hettinger had a cool product, but still wasn’t able to benefit from it because of her poor marketing skills.
Before you sell any products, you need to sell yourself. The importance of this is easy to see if you look into your spam e-mail folder.
I would never buy anything from those e-mails and if you don’t know how to sell yourself, your communication about your products potentially becomes spam in the eye of your potential clients.
Selling yourself is first of all a matter of building trust wit your visitors and it could also be called “pre-sell”. There are many things that go into this:
- Having a nice-looking website
- Communicating your own story
- Photos of yourself and your team
- High quality images, videos
- The knowledge and authority that your posts convey
- Your branding (logo, colors, business name, domain name)
- Having a real address, phone number, e-mail address, contact page
- Communication with your visitors through comments
- Social proof, such as Twitter followers, Facebook fans and likes
- Lack of spam (e. g. your site is not flooded with ads)
- Number of website visitors, domain DA, backlinks
The main thing is communication of the correct data that resolves your users’ problems. This gives you authority and altitude.
You need a HOT product
You throw a bunch of affiliate links on your site and you get no sales.
It goes back to this principle: you need to do your market research before you decide on what products to sell.
From the above story it is obvious that, in order to be successful online, you need hot products or services. Something that has appeal to a group of people.
This is the first banana peel you can slip on when you start your online selling career.
You can’t build a business on products that don’t work. The products you offer need to be of very high quality and solve a real problem for your visitors.
The products you offer can be yours or they can be someone else’s (affiliate system).
If you ever had an online store, you know that out of 50 products you will only have one or two that will sell consistently.
You need to verify the demand for the products that you are promoting. There should be enough sales value (number sold times price) of that product to make it worth for you to promote it.
When I say “enough sales value”, I don’t just mean your small niche segment.
Let’s say you are selling organic eggs and there is a demand for 20,000 organic eggs per month in your area. You should look at the demand for eggs overall, which is let’s say 250,000 eggs per month – that is the potential market sales value you should look at. If you can bring down the price and do a marketing program, you could potentially sell to everyone who wants eggs.
Part of “enough sales value” is related products. If someone buys eggs, they may need an egg holder, a dish to cook it, flour, etc. If you sell an SD card, also sell the SD card converter for USB. You should be targeting all those items to properly monetize your site. A great example of this is Amazon’s cross selling: “Those who purchased this item also bought….”
You Need To Market/Promote The Product
How does this relate to your website?
It is called positioning.
Imagine that you are selling consultation or coaching on your site, which a lot of people do.
You may be awesome in it.
But you may be struggling to sell it, because you present it incorrectly.
If you are a well known big brand, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I came across someone who wrote that he was selling 1 on 1 coaching, for 10,000 a year. He has 10 slots for each year, that is $100,000 yearly income just from that.
But he guarantees that the person he works with will have an e-mail list with 10,000 subscribers by the end of the year.
Do you see the difference between that and just “come buy coaching with me”?
Your Unique Selling Position (USP)
Having a great product is not enough, you also need a unique selling position, i. e. you need to offer your product in a way that no one else does. This could be an unusually low price, free help to set up, guaranteed results, etc.
The easiest way to establish your USP is this: look at the top websites of your niche and see what products/services they offer. See if there is anything impractical, bothersome or annoying about these products and offer something that fixes this problem.
An example would be a WordPress plugin that costs $24 per month. This is annoying for a new business owner who is not necessarily making a profit yet. You could offer a similar plugin for a one-time fee of $45, and this would present a unique selling position for you that would make your offered plugin more attractive for startups.
It doesn’t matter what your USP is, just make sure no one else is offering it the way you do.
Benefits, Not Features
When you have your potentially hot product, whether it is your own or it is someone else’s, you needs to sell it as a specific benefit.
There are two main types of benefits:
- Stopping pain
- Increasing pleasure
Your niche buyers want one of these. Pain is always a stronger advisor than pleasure, but you can use both.
Pick A Non-Branded Product Niche
As a rule, if an area has strong brands, stay away, because people will mostly use those brands and your generic product has no chance.
An example would be search engines.
I remember 15 years ago everyone was starting their own search engines. The search engine game was only starting at that time.
However fast forwarding to 2018, no one would even think about starting a small search engine, Google and Yahoo and a few smaller ones are the dominating brands and not many people would use your tiny search engine, unless it would be some local thing.
Pricing
Pricing is just as important as the product itself and is part of marketing. With different pricing you reach a different audience, even if the product is similar.
An example would be premium web hosts and $1 hosts.
Another example is selling your info product as an Agency package, a Small Business package, or Individual. Even though it is the same service, different features and different pricing options would appeal to each of these groups of people.
This is called a pricing matrix and it has a huge influence on your sales. With correct pricing you can include people that otherwise you would lose from buying your product.
You should have some low ticket and some high ticket products.
If you have low-priced products, you need to be able to sell more of them to make the same amount of money as from selling high-ticket products.
Low-priced products (also called a “tripwire”) are sold at the beginning of your funnel. Low-priced items below $25 are good for an initial sale, as they are more of an impulse buy.
However please note this, very important, many people don’t realize: Real profit comes from selling high-ticket items at your back end.
And here is the ultimate datum in pricing:
Making Money With Adsense And Advertising
I personally don’t recommend using this form of monetizing, especially on a new site.
- Ads are ugly and decrease user experience
- They can reduce your search engine rankings and increase bounce rate
- Most importantly… it makes you less money!
It is more profitable to post actual products for sale on the spots where you would be advertising.
Once your website has a lot of traffic, it may be profitable (and a fixed income) to sell advertising spots for a fixed fee.
Also brands look for smaller blogs that have a dedicated audience, as people are more likely to buy from the blogs they follow. This can land you a regular blog income.
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate marketing is very popular and you hear a lot about it. is promoting a product or service from another company and earning a commission for it.
Sounds simple? It’s really not. There is a lot to learn and a lot to do to set this up.
Don’t be fooled by get-rich-quick programs that suggest that earning hundreds of thousands through affiliate marketing can be done with minimal effort.
I don’t recommend going with big affiliate networks, as a new site is usually difficult to get approved.
Adding affiliate programs is not a one time activity. You need to keep adding them as you add more pages to your site.
Then you need to weed out the ones that don’t convert and put more emphasis onto the ones that do.
Promote the products you use. This works because you know exactly what you are promoting, it is easier to write about it and people can see you using the service or product.
Affiliate commissions unfortunately don’t come instantly. Here is the best description I have seen on how to earn money with affiliate programs and you can check out this affiliate post that was written to rank in Google and for conversions.
Your Own Digital Products or Services
In addition to affiliate products, you can create your own digital product right now and make money from it.
Potentially more money than from affiliate sales. No matter how long you’ve been in the game or how large your audience is.
From a digital product
- You can sell as much as you want.
- You can’t run out of stock.
- You don’t need to do shipping or pay money on it.
- You don’t have to work yourself to death to try and meet demand. Your product is always available.
Digital products can be in several forms: e-books, online courses, photos, music, software, scripts.
You can
- Keep 100% of the profits
- Set your own prices
- Hire your own affiliates
- Have complete control over the content
Your own services represent another way to monetize your site.
You could offer a consultation service or any service that can be paid for.
Are you good at taking photos? Offer a service.
Are you good at writing articles? Offer a service.
You can look at websites like Fiverr for ideas.
An eCommerce Store
I don’t want to go into this deeply, but this post would be very incomplete without mentioning eCommerce as a way to monetize your site.
This is its own science and mainly its profitability depends on finding high demand products and suppliers that can give you competitive prices. This latter is not easy at all and has been the downfall of many stores.
An eCommerce store has four possible models:
- the physical product store
- the dropshipping store
- the affiliate store
- the digital store
In terms of the platform I actually don’t recommend WordPress. There are several Store WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce, however in my opinion WordPress and eCommerce form a forced marriage. Your store will never be so clean-looking and trust-inspiring.
Therefore I recommend the use of PrestaShop, which is the WordPress of eCommerce. Similarly to WordPress, it is built with modules, which is the equivalent of plug-ins.
Your Own Affiliate Program
If you are selling your own products, real or digital, your own site’s affiliate program is a must.
It can increase your sales by 25 percent. Especially if you have a new site, it is vital to enlist the help of others who are in a niche that is related to your product.
Giving a fair commission can be an incentive to choose your affiliate program over others.
When your site is new, it could be a good idea even to give a 50 percent commission to start the flow of sales going.
Building Your Mailing List
It is important to start a mailing list from day one.
If people sign up to your mailing list, you have more chance to make money because of the repeated purchases.
You also need to care for your list, keep sending them stuff to keep them alive, otherwise they will not recognize you and unsubscribe.
Website Traffic
The next ingredient in monetizing your website is driving traffic to your pages and affiliate programs.
There are factors that will outright stop you from getting traffic. The most basic mistake is trying to get traffic from places where there is no traffic. Spending all your time trying to rank and get instant traffic to a new website from Google is one of these strategic mistakes.
However knowing these gross errors by itself is not going to generate traffic. You need the techniques that help you get traffic from sites that HAVE a lot of visitors.
Conversion Rate
Once you start getting traffic, the next point that will show up is high bounce rate and low conversion.
Your visitors are not going to sign up for your list.
You will need to improve your headlines, your sales copy, your opt-in text and your opt-in freebie.
You will need to make several different landing pages and freebies for different audiences.
You constantly have to monitor your traffic and conversion and constantly improve.
Use images, videos, etc. to boost your website.
Conversion rates depend on niche also.
Did you know that the internet marketing niche has one of the worst conversion rates?
The Top 5 Converting Niche’s in 2016 were:
- Sports – 21.7%
- Food & Wine – 21.5%
- Spirituality – 15.8%
- Self Help – 13.7%
- Green Products – 12.5%
Strategy To Get Paid As A Blogger Within Weeks Of Starting Out
What I have described so far is quite a wide range of important data, that will probably help you.
However let’s look at the practicality of things.
You start out blogging and you don’t want to wait six months to start making sales and money, right?
Because that’s the whole point.
Strategically speaking, you need
- great products with correct positioning, USP
- email list building to increase your sales
- website content for obvious reasons
- and you need many visitors flowing though and taking action on your stuff even though your site is new.
In another post on website traffic I already covered the power of using another established website’s traffic and promotional methods for your own purposes.
I ran into a website that is a perfect example and lets you “steal” high quality targeted traffic for your affiliate offers.
They have a really crazy offer:
You WILL Start Making Money In 30 Days
…Or We Send You $100 Cash!
First I was skeptical, because I don’t believe in such schemes. But then I looked into it deeper, and this is how it works:
- You get an exact 30 Days, Step-by-Step Day-to-Day blueprint to follow
- You can submit your articles to promote your own affiliate links and they will be made to rank high in Google.
[They have a DEDICATED IN-HOUSE team spending all day legitimately ranking good quality posts on their site.] - Your post will be featured on their home page for a few days to get EXTRA exposure.
- The same goes for their sidebar, header banner, etc.
- Your articles will be sent traffic from 50 to 100+ quality blogs, thanks to their partnership with 100+ high traffic bloggers.
- Your articles will be sent traffic from up to 1,000+ quality sites like CNN.com, thanks to their partnership with 1,000+ sites
- One or more of your affiliate links to our special weekly/monthly EMAIL BLAST to THOUSANDS of their newsletter subscribers.
- They will add a customized banner ad or opt-in form for you, to appear when users try to close the page of at least 1 of your articles. This can contain direct link to any of your affiliate offers, or even allow you build your list.
- Their team will review your results after 30 days. If you have done the 30 days recommended activities but haven’t made MORE THAN what you paid for this, they will speed up the special “fail-safe” strategy for you, to ensure you make MORE than you have paid for.
This means – even if you take the actions recommend but don’t make any profit – you still get paid each and every month, to keep you motivated and profitable, until your actions yield results!
If you carry out the day-to-day recommended activities but still don’t make any money, you let them know and they give you a full refund, plus $100 for wasting your time!
The program contains EVERYTHING you need to start making money within the first 30 days, regardless of your experience.
Even if you have no prior experience, the video, audio and PDF training within will help you get a firm grasp of all you need to know, to get started right.
It was unbelievable for me, please check this program out for yourself.
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Some Example Products
HPD How To Build An Amazon Site And Make Money From Affiliate Marketing
“If you’re struggling to find a niche, build your site, or get it ranking, this course will walk you through every step.”
Now this is advertised as Amazon site, but in reality anyone can learn how to create a website and how to start making money from affiliate programs. There is a high popularity of Amazon sites. People learn how to select a profitable niche, how to set up the site with WordPress, how to write content, how to rank it with on-page SEO and link building. (It doesn’t have is setting up a sales funnel and email autoresponder.)
You can check it our here, it says it costs $7, at a discount from $49, but I keep seeing it for $7, so I think the $49 is a marketing trick that you can also use in your pricing.
This is an example of a tripwire, a low-cost introductory product. You should have similar ones for your own website/blog in your own niche. When people buy one, that is a degree of engagement, and if they see that the product you sold them or recommended them worked, they will be more likely to buy a higher-priced product from you later on.
AffiloJetPack
Done by Mark Ling, who has been doing online marketing for more than 14 years now. Mark says, and he is right, that people
- don’t have the time to build their site
- they don’t know what to write about
- they don’t know how to promote
- how to write emails
- how to get traffic
- It’s too expensive for them to hire someone to do it for them
Therefore they don’t get anywhere.
Therefore his package contains
- 90+ expertly written e-mails
- an opt-in freebie with professional graphics
- a beautifully built WordPress site
- conversion-oriented premium theme
- 12 months of hosting
- 20 content “cheat sheets” that contain all the research and ideas to create a seriously valuable post
- choose from 18 profitable niches
And now listen to this, the cream on the whole thing: Mark is so confident that this will work for anyone, that he gives a 60-day money back guarantee. He offers an additional $100, on top of your money back, if you worked with his system for 60 days and you didn’t get results. How about that for a guarantee?
Please check it out. This is a perfect example of a higher priced, ($997) completely done-for-you product that solves all the pain points of the target market.
AffiloBlueprint
This is the lower-priced brother of AffiloJetPack, and is a perfect example of creating a different version of the product for a different target audience with a different budget.
New affiliates want to know the step-by-step way to build their websites. AffiloBlueprint goes step-by-step, with nothing left out – including our custom-built wordpress theme, AffiloTheme.
You get real-time support: customers don’t just create a website blindly; they can send their new websites to our support staff, and they will help them make them even better. They can also ask them questions and get fast answers.
Stops bleeding money: new affiliates end up buying lots of tools they don’t need. AffiloBlueprint teaches them how to use free tools and get success with them.
Here are the main features:
- A 12-part video series that goes step-by-step on how to create an affiliate website, drive traffic to it and monetize it.
- Over 85 video lessons.
- Includes the powerful Affilotheme WordPress theme, which makes creating optimized and highly-converting websites easy.
- Free Affilotheme hosting for up to 5 websites.
- Access to our support staff and forums to have their questions answered, and to have free advice for their websites.
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Your Product
I think the above gives you an idea of what kind of products you need to have.
I forgot to mention two obvious things: your product needs to deliver what it is designed to deliver… Regardless if it is your product or an affiliate product.
Otherwise you lose credibility.
THe other one is that the product needs to have a name that makes people buy it… But more about this in another post on creating titles that convert.
Now, even if you already have a product, you may need to modify some of its features, its price, whatever, or you may need to add more products… Chew on it a bit and please leave a comment below on what you find, anything this post helped you out with.
