Make Money Blogging: Tips and Techniques - Part 4 of 5

Part 4

Selling your own Products

Help E-books

From time to time you publish posts, endeavouring to fill your blog with highly relevant content,  but at first the choice of topics may occur somewhat randomly.  However, with time you will start seeing a pattern - certain topics will be developed much better and at a deeper level than others. Those selected topics may contain really good practical advices and tips, some of which are perhaps even your own know-hows.

You know what? Why not work through the posts, systematize them, extract the most valuable content and write an E-book? If you manage to tackle a certain issue clearly and in easy-to-follow manner, this could turn out to be a great e-book. Alternatively, you could just scan through forums and see what are the typical question people keep asking most often, do a research and, based on that, write an e-book.

It doesn’t have to be a proper size book and can be as short as a few pages or a few tens pages at maximum. What’s more important it has to deal with burning issues and meet needs of rather wide category of Internet users.

Then you can go to SEO, webmaster or topically-related forums and offer this ebook for sale. The price of ebook may vary from $1 up to $100 or even more, depending on its size and content. But don’t be greedy, look at what other people are selling similar ebooks for, and decide on  your price.

To attract buyers, you can offer a few copies to forum members with high reputation*) for FREE. If your ebook has a valuable and actionable content, you will get some positive reviews and these will greatly enhance your chances to make a tangible income.  You are unlikely to become a millionaire selling your ebooks, but you can readily make a few hundred or,  if you are lucky, even thousand bucks.

Video Tutorials

You work with some popular software and have become an expert in it? Great! Because you can sell your skills by making a video-tutorial on how to use the software. A tutorial can be made at different levels - getting started, intermediate or advanced. You can also combine all your instructions into one video, starting from the basics and finishing with more advanced features. This depends on how elaborated and detailed tutorial you want to make.

To make a video-tutorial you will need a special software. I recommend Camtasia by TechSmith - this is one of my favourite, easy to use and greatly versatile software for capturing screen activity on video and thus is ideal for making video-tutorials.

Bear in mind that most of Web users are impatient and have a short attention span. Therefore, I do not recommend to make your videos too long - 10 minutes maximum, and ideally 4 to 6 minutes. If you have more to show than that would fit into such a short video, make a few videos instead, each focusing on a particular function(s) or menu item(s) of the software, starting from simple and proceeding to more complicated issues.

Before making video tutorial, however, make sure that the software manufacturer doesn’t provide video tutorials itself or, if it does, that the tutorial you are making will be much better (more detailed, covering more features, easier to follow etc.) If you don’t check this, and it will turn out that better tutorials exist, your efforts could be wasted and you may not sell a single copy.

When done, you can sell your video tutorial either directly on your blog or through an affiliate network for digital products such as clickbank. However, there is always a chance that your sale campaign will not go well and the videos won’t bring you any sensible income. If that’s the case, you can still benefit by sharing them fro FREE. Yes, yes, you heard me right - for FREE! How? Read on.

To still benefit  from your videos, you can upload them to youtube.com or Google videos,  and if your videos receive good rating, they could become a source of traffic to your blog, which will eventually turn into revenue via other monetisation methods described in other parts of this 5-part article. Alternatively, you can promote your videos on forums and thus attract some viewership.

If your tutorial is really good, it can with time become “self-promoting” through a word of mouth, that may turn your promotion campaign into a snowball effect. You may get lots of new visitors, some of which will become your permanent readers and this will help to increase your revenue.

One-to-one tuition

If you are in expert in your field and have managed to establish a relevant reputation, you can offer a one-to-one consultation to your readers for a fee. The fee will depend on the nature and depth of consultation, as well as on trustworthiness of your services. To make a successful start you will most likely need testimonials from at least a few people (with their names and contact details in case if anyone wants to verify those) .

To start earning a reputation and testimonials, I recommend to offer some free consultancy to a number of selected users. If you really can render them valuable help with problems and questions they have, you may get some flattering reviews and display these on your blog.  This will help you to expand your clientele and make this business successful.

Other Products & Services

The products describe in this section are not exactly “your own”, but they are closely related to the blog content and therefore with those products you are, in a way, selling your content.

JobThread

You put a piece of code, JobThread Widget, on your blog, and it displays job ads relevant to both the topic of your blog and a chosen geographical area.  When a reader from your blog click on a job ad, you earn money. The earnings depend on both quantity and quality of your traffic - the better the ads you choose to display are matched to the content of your blog, the higher is your revenue.

Chitika Premium

Chitika Premium is a valuable addition to Google AdSense, but unlike AdSense it does not displays ads to all visitors of the blog, but only to your search traffic, i.e. people who found your blog via Search Engines using specific keywords. Because of that, Chitika Premium ads do not annoy your regular readership and, on the other hand, are highly targeted to the users who sees them, thus greatly increasing traffic conversion and your earnings.

CafePress
If you can make or order a great looking logo for your blog, you can make custom-designed T-shirts and other outwear with your logo on it at Cafepress and sell them via a Cafepress e-shop (basic e-shop is free). People who will buy those,  will wear T-shirt with your logo and thus advertise your blog.

Special forum

You can make some information (like ebooks, special “how-to-do” articles etc.)  or personal help to your readers available via reserved areas on your blog, to which you grant access on a membership basis. You set up a reasonable fee and will get some income from the paid members.

Your Feedback

Your feedback is welcome!
Feel free to leave a comment below.

Footnotes:
*) Hint: Be sure to check their previous reviews for products/services offered by other forum members and make sure that those reviewers sound fair and adequate. This is important, because you don’t want to screw up your first reviews, especially from reputable forum members. Unfortunately,  the reputation doesn’t always goes hand in hand with sense of justice and adequacy.

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