Why Do So Few Bloggers Sell Their Own Products?
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Over the last two days I attended a workshop run by Andrew and Daryl Grant on the topic of joint ventures (JVs).
The workshop was valuable and covered a topic that is rarely given an entire two days worth of focus. JVs are the best way to drive quality traffic today and while they are not always easy to negotiate, they can make or break a business.
The people in attendance at the event were Andrew and Daryl’s membership site partners - people who are launching membership sites online in all kinds of niches in partnership with the Grants. The Grants provide the training and the technology, the partners provide the content and marketing.
Compare Blogging To Internet Business
As I’ve mentioned before I sit in a unique position in that my preeminence comes from being a well known blogger, but I do so in the Internet marketing industry. Internet marketers often view blogs as marketing tools, but nothing more. They use blogs to drive traffic and augment their information selling business. For bloggers, the blog is the business.
Listening to some of the membership site concepts floating around at the workshop it was clear that the focus for these people is to get a product out the door as quickly as possible and then market it using intelligent, high leverage methods, like joint ventures.
The mindset really is powerful and focused on the business of doing business. Create product, then find ways to sell it.
This is very different to bloggers. Bloggers pour their energy into content and resource creation, giving all of it away for free. The strategy is to create a blog of value, build traffic and then monetize with advertising and maybe, for those few bloggers who are business minded, to produce products and sell them.
You can’t really say one method is better than another, but it did raise the questions in my head about whether bloggers give away too much for free and wait too long to sell their information.
Product Leads To Profit
The Grants were a significant influence in my decision to launch a membership site (through observation more than anything else - I watched them do it and decided to do the same). Andrew flat out said to me that I should get a product out the door and start charging for at least some of the great information I produce, which was the final push I needed to make the decision.
I agreed with him, I always had, but it was tough to find the time to produce the free content for my blog and email newsletter at the same time as create exclusive content for product.
As the story goes, I went on to launch Blog Mastermind, produce the content for that program and maintain this blog, but it’s not something that can be done easily part time - especially if you are the sole creator of content for the product and the blog.
As any serious blogger understands, to create and then maintain a good blog requires serious content output. In particular during the early days, to stand out from the crowd you really need unique and powerful ideas and lessons, which you must dish out on a regular basis from your blog.
Over time the workload decreases as you establish authority and you can settle down to a simple 3 or 4 blog posts a week pattern, which isn’t much work. Of course, using time as a resource, you can speed up or slow down results depending on how much effort you put in, but a certain base level of input is required to first get the blog going and then maintain it.
What comes next inevitably creates more work, if the blogger decides to continue growth through traditional Internet business, by releasing product and/or delivering services.
Juggling Different Content Demands
Presently I’m writing this blog article on a Thursday morning. I started at about 9AM after eating my cereal and I’ll probably end up clicking the publish button at about 11AM.
It takes two hours to create the article, proof it, add a picture and then publish it. If I do this three or four times a week my blog grows. Growth continues partially in thanks to the years I’ve spent investing energy into my blog, so I have a certain amount of momentum and a critical mass of content (which is very helpful for search engine traffic) and because I stay up to date in my niche and publish fresh ideas on an ongoing basis, which serves to keep my position in my market.
In return for that work, I generate somewhere between $6,000 and $14,000 a month from this blog thanks to advertising and affiliate income. If you want to know how I do this, read the Blog Profits Blueprint.
Of course, like a good little capitalist, I decided I wanted more. The decision wasn’t based purely on greed, there was also the threat that I know I can’t blog forever, so having a few other income producing assets is a good idea (so yes, fear and greed as motivation - how healthy! - I think I might have wanted to help people too, but no one believes you when you say that).
As a result I decided to become a proper Internet marketer and create product. After several false starts, the first fruit of this decision was Blog Mastermind. The next product, due later this year, is something I will continue to work on after finishing this article.
At about 11AM, with this article safely published for the world to read, I might have a short break and then begin work on Module 3 for a program I’ve got running in BETA right now. I have a group of about 50 students, who were invited into my new program after graduating from Blog Mastermind.
The new program is about launching a membership site using your blog as a leverage tool. I’m creating a course that combines what I have learned from studying several $1,000+ programs on product launch, Internet marketing, business systems and membership sites, with the real life practical experience of releasing Blog Mastermind, to help others to launch a membership site of their own.
The program is about half way through now and when not blogging here, I’m spending my time creating content for the new program and also helping the current group of students in Blog Mastermind.
That effectively sums up my working life and as you can tell, it’s quite a juggle and I’m doing a significant amount of content creation beyond just this blog.
Perhaps Bloggers Should Sell Sooner?
I’ll be flat out honest with you, right now I work hard, harder than I want to, but because I know it won’t last forever, I’m happy to do it. It’s a lot of fun too and compared to most, I’m still working less than “normal” people, so perhaps I’m just really lazy and don’t want to work very much at all. I think spending two hours every day to write a blog article is about the amount of work I like and I hope to return to that schedule by the end of this year.
What I do now beyond blogging is create assets. The products I release can be sold over and over again, and unlike blogging, do not require near-daily maintenance.
These assets wouldn’t succeed if I didn’t have a marketing system, which in my case is completely focused on my blog, so there is a very symbiotic relationship between everything I work on. To put it simply, I’ve got an online business based on a blog, something I know a lot of people want and perhaps, something bloggers could have a lot sooner if they decided to adjust their content creation focus and revise how they conduct marketing.
A potential problem bloggers have - and I’m guilty of participating in and perpetuating this idea - is that we need to first create a blog asset, something of authority and then work on leveraging it for all the other benefits we want, like an income, speaking gigs, book deals, etc.
As Brian Clark explains in the Teaching Sells report, the attitude of everything for free is not going to make many people rich. At some point it’s a good idea to charge cash-money for your content.
Bloggers need to use what they know about online marketing and begin building a business based on selling some of the information they produce. Bloggers are such great content producers, it’s crazy for us not to take some of that energy and create premium content to release as product.
Selling your own product will always make you more money than selling other people’s product and places you in a much better position to become an authority in your niche. All these elements can be enhanced with a great blog - and I would never recommend you stop blogging - but consider now, rather than later, what you can produce and sell.
Selling Product Gives Your Blog Focus
One great thing about having a product of your own to sell is you can use your blog as a focused tool for delivering leads. Your product solves a problem and your blog attracts people who have this problem. Your topic area becomes that much more focused when you clearly understand what part your blog plays in your marketing funnel.
When there is a product to sell, you gain a better understanding of what you want to be to other people. You can decide what niche you want to establish authority in and understand explicitly how you will make money from it. When you can picture your business and the sales funnel it is based on, it’s much easier to grasp how your blog, your products and your email list all play a part and thus you will better execute your grand plan.
Changing Mindset
I think a lot of this comes down to mindset. Bloggers rarely think like business owners, more like writers, and thus work about as hard as the struggling writer stereotype depicts - lots of work for little financial reward. I for one, prefer the care-free entrepreneur motif as one I want to emulate, and as such, must think like a business owner who writes a blog.
Andrew and Daryl Grant do not sit and write a blog or any content day after day, nor do most successful Internet business owners. Sure they have spent time in the past creating written content, and like all Internet marketers, they know how to write a great email that sells, but most of their content creation time is put into creating sellable assets, which they sell using powerful marketing ideas like joint ventures.
Content is still a factor. In many forms of marketing you need some form of content to make it work, be it a teleseminar talk, a DVD recording of a presentation, a free PDF report, or an interview with an expert - there is always a value preposition that attracts the attention, but the ratio of free content to paid content is very different to how most bloggers operate.
Understand that what I am saying here isn’t a major shift from what most bloggers already do. The only change is to take some of the time you spend creating all the great content you give away for free and instead devote a little time and energy to product creation and business development.
Think more about high leverage marketing, business positioning and product funnels and less about your RSS counter or increasing the number of comments made to your blog.
Tell me, what product could you release 30 days from now if you started writing 1,500 words towards it every second day from now until then? (or swap writing for recording audio or shooting video).
Yaro Starak
Charging for Content
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This is so true. I think the case is basically that most bloggers are trying to get to the stage you/brian/darren are at first. This is still a new industry and there are few guidelines for this sort of thing. I can see the production of premium content and membership sites becoming more and more popular in the next couple of years and people do try to leverage their blogs more forcefully.
Web 1.0 = Free and Paid content
Web 2.0 = Free Content
Web 3.0 = Free and Paid content
Anyone see a cycle?
The timing of this post is amazing! I’ve been planning a membership site that uses my blog and forum as major advertising vehicles. Then earlier on DoshDosh, Maki questions the idea of free content. Now that’s a pattern that means something to me!
I would love to hear much more about this beta program you mentioned. I think I am prime for what you so briefly described.
My product will be a course on living authentically (a different approach to ’success’ and ‘health’).
I’m writing it now. I have the text of the free report written.
My major problem is setting up a forum, a landing page and email subscription.
Marketers love to lecture content producers on how they should be marketers. Here’s what they should do - set up a site that provides the platforms and does the marketing for those who want to produce content. This is a market opportunity, they should take it up. Offensive? It’s just a content producer telling marketers what they should do (the reverse to the usual).
I am thinking of enrolling in your course on niche blogs. I have found your blogmastermind course well worth the money (and I’m difficult to please).
This post is very timely.
I have been thinking of some sort of business model for my blog. (Still at building traffic stage….so monetizing is a little way off)
Your post is very thought provoking.
Thanks
That puts a different twist on my way of looking at my boring a$$ blog. I need to get my personality into it and figure a long term plan for where I want it to go.
this is also what I’ve ‘learnt’ in the last few months.
@fathersez: you should be thinking about how to monetize your site before you even start it. If you don’t have a ‘business plan’ then you’re just stabbing in the dark with no torch, no direction, and no end goal
Hi Yaro, I’m in the process of starting a new blog and the whole idea about how to monetize it, is playing a big part in everything from the actual design of the blog… to the connections I’ve made with other bloggers before actually launching it.
Trading time for money is definitely not the best way to go. You expressed it so eloquently. Awesome post!
As a blogger who has still not released a paid product I feel I can answer this question somewhat. For me personally there are many reasons. I guess the most basic one is that I did not have the confidence to charge for my own work - I wasn’t sure that it would be good enough. Also, as a relatively new blogger nobody knew who I was so I feared that releasing a paid product would elicit responses like “who is this Caroline person? who is she to charge for this?”.
By releasing a lot of information for free first it gives you some authority, it shows people what your writing style is like and it gives people an idea of your capabilities. Now that I have released a free ebook and seen a lot of positive response from it I now feel that I could release a paid one but I couldn’t have done that a few months ago.
This is a very timely post actually but next to me I have a notepad with some goals on it that I wrote out just 2 hours ago and one of them is to “create and sell a product”. hehe
Oh I would just like to add though, I think a lot of other bloggers dont sell a product simply because they don’t think of it. The “make money online” niche and the “blogging for profit” niche are slightly disjointed I think. Many bloggers are not involved in IM, just blogging so they just think in terms of on-page blog monetization techniques.
I think releasing premium content is more about internet marketing and strategy than the content itself.
If I were to plan to release a piece of premium content I would take a phased approach. First I would release a piece of free content, teaser content, if you will. Then I would leverage the success of the free content to promote the premium content.
Selling premium content seems to be more about internet marketing strategy than the content itself.
I’m one of the Andrew and Daryl Grants JV partners that Yaro talks about in this blog. The 2 day workshop we just had was fantastic. Like Yaro mentioned it is rare to see so much time dedicated to such a topic. Just think about how much time and energy Andrew and Daryl had to spend creating excellent content for two days straight!
In my mind membership sites are clearly a mix of good quality content and sophisticated marketing. As someone who is embarking on the journey of membership site creation I can tell you producing content is high on the list of anxiety inducing thoughts. We all want to create good content and provide excellent value to our readers especially if they are paying for it. Creating a sophisticated marketing strategy is just a way of insuring a return on investment for the time we dedicate to producing the content.
Yaro sums it up well; it really is a matter of mind set. That is probably the only thing that differentiates bloggers to internet marketers other than the money factor. Both are providing content and a great deal of value which appeals to their market.
Hi Yaro,
Though still early days, I have changed my sales letter for my membership site to a blog so I could display some of the content. I know most marketers would frown at it, but I decided to give it a shot and though I’m still playing with it, I’m adamant it has more value long term than a salesletter by itself.
That said, if you have an army of affiliates, a salesletter is definately a plus but after the initial push, you have to constantly find JV partners.
An authority blog selling a membership … the concept is only 5 weeks old in my mind but your blog post has sealed it for me. I’m gonna stop playing and make it real!!
Thanks Yaro,
Trish
Excellent article, Yaro!
One of the best I’ve ever read in the blogosphere!!!
I’ve been “pondering” this whole issue, as I’ve already written the book that ties into my blog.
And now I see…THERE’S NOTHING STOPPING ME FROM LAUNCHING IT, SO WHAT AM I WAITING FOR???
Thanks for your inspiration/encouragement!
I wonder if this article can help us pinpoint a trend in blogs and blog marketing. A person creates a blog, gets a reputation for being an authority and then starts a membership site based off of that authority (for instance, you, SEOMoz.org and, in a slightly different way SEO Book who now has a $100.00/month membership program).
Of course, these membership programs need to provide greater value than the free blog. That creates an opening for new bloggers who can build up a reputation by providing even more information on their blogs. They can then build up their own reputation and then create their own membership site. And so on…
If we take this to it’s natural conclusion - eventual blogs will provide top quality information for free (and some of them will even organize it well so that it’s easy for people to find).
Where, then, will that leave the membership sites? They’ll need to provide a service beyond good content. Tools, services and community come to mind. SEOMoz offers some premium SEO Tools (although, SEO Book offers some decent tools for free, but that’s another story for another time). They also answer questions. Many membership sites have a community aspect where the members help each other out.
Search Engine News not only answers questions, but they publish the best ones as part of their monthly service.
In short [if that's still possible :)] - blogs will continue to give away free content because there is a need for it and it can make money. Membership sites will have to offer more than the blogs - such as tools, services and community (perhaps more can also include a greater quantity of content than blogs provide).
Yaro, this is a great post, hitting the nail right on the head. I think every blogger is entitled to make a good living from his products.
Bloggers give a lot to their readers, and it only makes sense to earn a decent income from their blogs.
Flint
Great Post! I had just decided to start working on some of my own products for my blogs a couple of days ago.
Selling other people’s stuff is what I’ve been doing for a while now. But that doesn’t create any assets for me for the future. I’ve always thought that the time and work involved in creating my own high quality product would be too difficult.
It’s time to just get it done. Put in the time or outsource it. Anything to start building up that inventory of assets.
Yaro, awesome post!
Creating products was a top objective of mine since starting to blog. False starts? You bet. Does product creation get easier each time around? Absolutely.
You’re right on about cash-producing assets, using continuity to support the care-free entrepreneur lifestyle and blogs for attracting and delivering leads.
My own “grand plan” as you put it gets revised, but meanwhile let the product and service creation continue.
Thanks for sharing!
To Search Marketing Courses,
I think it was Darren Rowse who said: give away the principles sell the personalisation.
This may be what you mean by services.
If so there is no reason to think that the membership sites will go out of business.
Another reason is that many freely admit that they are packaging what can be found for free. They are selling convenience. This too looks set to continue.
It takes about a year or 2 to create an authority blog, most of the bloggers seem to use their creation simple because its fun. Using a blog for selling your own products is still very rare.
It’s true that most bloggers don’t think like business owners. The reality is that blogging is similar to being in the media business. There is a cost for developing content and if it is your own time, that cost would be your salary or the salary you need to pay someone to write your content. The second reality is that it is difficult for most good bloggers to find people to reproduce the quality content they are used to writing. If you can successfully do this at a decent cost and retain a decent profit, then you may not even have to go into product creation mode. Just focus on ad revenue like any newspaper or TV station. If you can’t achieve this then doing your own product or running decent Affiliate Programs is a good way to diversify.
I thought it’s great that bloggers need to use what they know about online marketing and begin building a business based on selling some of the information they produce, but how do we knows, when the right time is to launch an selling information ?..
beside of that, In my country, Indonesia there’s so many junk selling information like ebook,even though we can still find good selling information but they must be so popular before launche the product..
Yaro,
I fully agree that you must add some product to sell to your blog. It must be something you create. I fully believe that you’ll make the most profit from your own products.
My membership site is doing great and am adding about 2-3 members a week. It’s all because of reading your great content and the blog profit blueprint.
Thanks,
Ryan
I agree that it makes good business sense to release a product that can be sold. I’m doing pretty much what Caroine said above.
My blog is now about 9 months old so it’s time for it to have a baby - hehe. I’m still deciding what to write an ebook about though - and then I need to build a list first.
My other blog is still far too new to consider selling through it although I know exactly what I want to provide. Running my first blog has given me the time to learn about blogging and what I need to do in order to build an audience. I do think it’s important to build up my name in connection to what I do before releasing my ebook or course. I think building trust is vital to the business succeeding.
To Evan,
Just to clarify - I don’t think membership sites are going anywhere. I just want to point out that there is a business model for both membership sites and blogs. Yaro wondered why more blogs don’t offer their own products - and it’s a good question.
My point is simply that there will continue to be a market for a quality blog. And so long as there is a market for it, someone will supply it (because there will be money to be made it in).
The fact that someone could make more money through a membership site won’t undermine free blogs because a successful membership site requires different skills and qualities than a successful blog.
Nice article, I picked up a few tips. I really like to monetize my blog. Hope to learn more when I get back. Thanks.
Yaro,
I keep thinking about monetizing my blog in the past 3 weeks.
I’ve run one blog for 4 weeks with US 0.62 result - not really what I want to see. I keep on working on it right now.
The interesting fact that I concluded from this, that visitors, somehow, learn to accept blog monetization IF and ONLY IF it was not excessive and not overtake the blog content - just like your entrepreneurs-journey did and still does.
I wonder, when is the right time to apply membership to my blog content? Wait until a certain number of article count or a certain number of blog visitor - subscriber?
Thanks, Yaro, for the great posts!
Ivanpw
Noobpreneur.com
Eczema Club
Ivanpw - When you have an engaged audience is the right time…however there is no short answer to this question.
See what others do, get a feel for your readers and above all else - try and see what happens.
I think there’s a big difference between selling a product and creating what is essentially a second, members-only blog. One affords you the opportunity to generate income over and over again for work that’s done once. The other creates an increased work burden on the creator. So, if you’re willing to go the transactional product route, the challenge is to create a product that has ample value to warrant its cost. I suspect most people can’t conceive of such a product, and that’s why you have so few bloggers selling their own stuff.