I see so many discussions focused on monetizing and optimizing your blog, and sometimes I wonder if most bloggers aren’t just building a house of cards, setting themselves up for disappointment, because when all is said and done, they have no idea why they’ve jumped through all these hoops and still don’t have ten cents’ profit to show for all the effort. They’ve paid hundreds of dollars for books and courses and spent countless hours reading and studying others’ SEO techniques and tried this or that money-making program, only to find themselves short of some minimum payout, time and time again.
One problem I see is that many bloggers have no concept of what it is they’re selling, or how to market it. They understand the concept of plastering someone else’s ads on a blog and sucking in traffic with the right keywords, but that will never translate (or convert) to actual click-throughs for most people. Why?
Ask yourself the following basic questions
What, exactly, are you selling?
If you answered, “Everything!” or “Whatever people are buying!” or “A little of this, a little of that…” or “Ad space?” then you probably aren’t selling much of it. Selling implies a tangible something – either goods or services – to be sold. Even if it’s just ad space on your blog, most advertisers want their ads to appear on a blog that has a strong appeal to their customers, because they are selling tangible goods and services and cannot make a profit on idle clicks alone. It’s estimated that a potential customer has to see an ad six to eight times before it really registers in his brain and compels him to act on it. So if you’re serving up ads, and your blog isn’t focused on something that appeals to a particular buyer of the goods and services advertised…you’re probably not seeing a lot of action in terms of click-throughs or purchases, and eventually you will lose your customers who are interested in advertising there.
Start by making a list of the kind of goods and services you want to sell or advertise – and maybe a list of products or services you don’t want to sell. Every product or service fills a need or solves a problem – your job is to identify the need or the problem, and to figure out what it is about what you’re selling that makes people want it and want it so badly they’re willing to pay for it.
Who are your customers?
If you answered, “Anyone with money!” or “Whoever will buy my stuff,” or “Customers?” then you’re probably not alone, and you’re probably not making any money online. If you’re focusing your efforts on selling to other bloggers who are looking to make money online, then your product had better be a really effective “How to Make Money Online” book or course. Or SEO-optimized themes or software applications that do all the heavy lifting for bloggers while they sleep. But even so, this eventually becomes a sort of closed loop – and involves reciprocation. You buy my money-making scheme, I’ll buy yours, and we’ll both promote it on Twitter. Eventually, this becomes a break-even proposition – at best.
Writers have a similar challenge when promoting to other writers. We all tend to be avid readers (shoot, if books are scarce, most of us will read the blurb on the back of the cereal box over coffee), we want to know what our competition is up to, we’re sympathetic buyers (because we know how hard it is to sell books these days), and so we end up trading books and money amongst ourselves. You buy my book, I’ll buy yours. That’s great for networking, and gives us a steady supply of reading material, but if that’s all we do, we’ll go broke. We need to sell books to readers who aren’t also our competition – readers who don’t expect us to buy something from them in return.
What if you are selling women’s clothing? Well, who buys women’s clothing? The obvious answer is women, of course. But what about men buying gifts for wives or girlfriends? Wouldn’t you take a different approach in order to sell women’s clothing to men buying it as a gift?
What about cross-dressers? No, I’m not joking. This is a niche market – there are plenty of buyers, if you can reach them, and you have less competition. You’re not going up against the likes of Macy’s and Dillard’s, because Macy’s and Dillard’s won’t cater to this market. What special needs might these buyers have? For one, the product fit would likely be different; men have fewer curves, and those they have are in different places. They might prefer sexy, plus-sized clothes. To be successful in this market, you would need to study it and understand the needs of its buyers (and there are plenty of buyers) – then figure out how to solve their problems.
If you think about your blog as a professional publication – not just a tacky billboard on the Information Superhighway – what kind of content would appeal to your buyers? Ads don’t bring in buyers – content does. Content helps to expose buyers to the ads, and may encourage them to buy the products or services being advertised. So, what kind of content would keep them coming back – often enough, and exclusively enough, that they see your ad (not the same ad running on another blogger’s site) the six to eight times it takes for them to act on it? At this point, you might explore the idea of setting up more than one blog or Web site, if you have several very different types of buyers for your products and services. Before you do that, though, are you ready to invest the time and effort it takes to run one blog – let along two or more?
What obstacles and alternatives are there?
If you answered, “The economy,” you’d be partly right. But presumably, unless you’re selling cellophane wish fish, your products or services fulfill a need – or at least a want that’s been mistaken for a need (turning wants into needs is a nifty trick good marketers master). In other words, what’s stopping potential customers from buying? What competing products and services are there on the market right now? What do they have that yours don’t?
Now is the time to be realistic and critical, not the time to defensively claim “Mine’s the best thing out there and you’d be stupid not to buy it!” Because it has to compete on so many levels: form, function, durability, reliability, “wow” factor, and – maybe most importantly – price, you can’t just assume that customers will see that your product or service is the obvious best choice. What don’t customers know about what you’re selling that would set it apart from – and above – the competition?
A word of caution is also in order at this point: Don’t make wild, unsupportable claims about the stuff you’re selling. Don’t use superlatives or comparative adjectives like “best,” or “better than,” or make unfounded claims like, “will make you irresistible to the opposite sex” – unless you have independent, unbiased, test data from a highly respected organization to back you up. Be truthful.
What is your marketing plan? If you don’t have one, you’re probably in the majority of bloggers who claim they’re trying to make money online. Get the dollar signs out of your eyes and start looking at your business as a business. There is no magic formula that will make you rich overnight.
This is a guest post by Holly Jahangiri, she is a professional writer with over twenty years’ experience in technical writing, freelancing, fiction, poetry, and editing. She blogs at It’s All a Matter of Perspective (http://jahangiri.us/news)
