You’ve been blogging for a while. Maybe even for a few years. You create great content and you’ve even built up an email list. You’ve been hoping your blog will start making some money but it hasn’t. Perhaps you’ve seen other bloggers making six figure incomes and you’re wondering why it hasn’t happened for you.
This is something we see everyday with bloggers who come to us wondering why they can’t seem to make any money from their blogs. And nearly every time, it is exactly the same reason. And the reason?
Your blog is not your business. Your blog is a very powerful marketing tool. Too many bloggers get trapped in to thinking their blogs are their business.
A blog is simply a form of content marketing so unless you are using your blog as a marketing tool to sell something, you don’t actually have a business. You have a hobby.
The dictionary definition of the word business is:
the activity of making, buying, selling or supplying goods or services for money
So, what are YOU selling? Are you selling a product, a service, a skill, affiliate products? If you are selling nothing, then you don’t have a business. Sadly this is the harsh reality for so many bloggers out there. And many of these bloggers have been creating amazing content for years, have big social followings and lots of traffic but have no income to show for it.
Starting today, don’t let that be you anymore. Assuming you’ve got an audience, even a small one, and you have a good understanding of your audience, you can make money.
One small caveat: many bloggers are hesitant to monetise because they feel like they’ll look like they’re selling out. They feel that after providing free content for so long, how can they charge for anything? They worry that they’ll drive away the readers that they’ve already got. Or they worry that they don’t know how and what to sell. These are all normal and very common fears. But at the end of the day they are just fears. And building a business or creating anything in life means that we will face a lot of our fears and the only way to overcome these fears is by doing. As Susan Jeffers famously said: “feel the fear and do it anyway“.
So, how can you make money from your blog? There are so many ways of monetising a blog but that is a whole other post. For now, just know that to have a business, you have to sell something. So ask yourself what can you sell that will resonate with your audience? And then ask your audience if they would be interested in buying that.
You may have to try out a few products/services before you find one that works. It can be heartbreaking to launch something only to find nobody buys it. Know that this is most likely going to happen. So don’t spend months creating something – create a basic version first and you can always improve it. And if it doesn’t sell, have a cry, know that failure is very much a part of the process and get back to the drawing board. Fail often, fail fast!
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