Using Your Blog To Make Money – Little Used Strategies You Can Exploit – No. 4 of 4

This is the fourth and final post in the series I began on the 6th October 2012. The first post argued that you need to determine if your blog needs comments to succeed – instead of worrying about what others say. Note that I refer specifically to blogging for business purposes, with emphasis on earning income via sales of products and services.

The second post discussed five questions you can ask yourself, to decide if your blog type needs comments to succeed (especially in financial terms). Going by my personal experiences and observations, if you avoid needless sentiment, these questions WILL help you choose right. In the third post (preceding this one), I discussed six different measures that can be used to evaluate the performance of a blog.

Now, this final post returns attention to the point I’ve made all through this series that my focus is on the use of blogs to earn income – directly or indirectly – for the owner. It explores what my checks suggest are three relatively underutilised strategies for making money with the help of a blog, which ANYONE can take advantage of.

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Blog Comments Multi-Post Series – Table of Contents

Post 1: Should You Worry About Getting Blog Comments?
Post 2: Deciding If Your Blog Needs Comments To Succeed (5 Questions To Ask Yourself)
Post 3: Six Potentially Useful Measures of Your Blog’s Performance (Hint: Comments Vs. Five Others)
Post 4(Final): Using Your Blog To Make Money – Little Used Strategies You Can Exploit

Why this series? There’s a lot of debate surrounding the value of comments. Many blog owners are not sure what to think or do as a result. This series offers ideas to help interested blog owners decide if their kind of blog needs (or does not need) comments to succeed – and steps to take in either case.

Introduction

All through this series, I have made it clear that my focus is mainly on blogging as done by persons engaged in business to enhance their ability to make money.

Making money from blogs is a fairly hot topic going by what the search engines reveal. And the topic has been quite thoroughly treated by many well qualified and accomplished blog owners. Most use conventional and popular strategies (E.g Adsense, adverts, affiliate marketing, information products, membership sites etc) to make hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

It would therefore be a waste of time to attempt discussing any of the methods they’ve already touched on. (See the Reference/Further Reading list at the end of this post, to read some of them).

My purpose in this post is to suggest relatively uncommon – but highly effective – strategies through which a blog can be used to make money (or facilitate the process).

First Establish Authority Status

For best results in using the techniques described in this post, I suggest you aim to establish authority status for your website or blog. Very rarely, especially in a field that involves writing to build credibility, will a total newcomer be able to instantly command authority status. It will take some time.

However, your commitment to relentless creation of unique and original content on your blog; and to syndication of your content (e.g. via guest posting, social media marketing etc), will gradually get you there.

Begin by building a distinct and recognisable blog presence. Add to that a no-nonsense commitment to regular publishing of high quality content on a carefully chosen subject area or theme. And you’ll eventually have a good foundation on which to launch your income generation efforts.

You need not however wait to become THE king of the (blogging) ring to get started. Once your efforts have begun to yield decent traffic results and possibly some level of return visits, it would be time to explore ways to reap some financial rewards.

What follows below are three relatively little discussed strategies that ANYONE can use to make money through (or with the aid of) his/her blog

1. Making Offline Sales

Did I hear you say “Huh?”. Well, that’s understandable. Like I said this post is about little used strategies. So, bear with me as I explain.

The idea is to use your blog to facilitate making money offline. All you need is to be quick thinking and a smart sales person, to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. If you run a brick and mortar business, explore ways to turn potential clients or customers’ attention to your blog e.g. when one walks in to make enquiries and appears to be in a hurry.

If you’ve diligently created content to make yours an authority blog, you’re likely to find something s/he says that you can relate to your blog’s content. Refer him/her to a PDF report or blog post you wrote to address a similar concern to the one s/he is raising.

If you have an Internet ready laptop within reach (which you could make a permanent feature on your premises) use it to show him/her what you mean. This can boost your credibility in the eyes of that individual. Sometimes that alone can convince an undecided buyer to place an order right there and then.

Even though I work from home, I’ve made this happen many times in the past, while in a client’s office, and using his/her laptop!

One example: Few months ago, I visited the office of an old client for a meeting. In the course of our discussions, she complained about poor service from her internet provider. This made me mention that I’d written a new report on my blog, about a massive cost-saving method I discovered, which involved using my smart phone as a modem on my laptop. 24 hours later she had paid for the e-book, and I’d sent the PDF to her.

In some cases, apart from getting paid in cash for a $40 PDF report I showed a client on my website/blog, I also got hired on the strength of that showing, to do the major project we originally came together to discuss!

I hope you see what I mean. This is about using your blog to facilitate the marketing and sales process in offline, one-on-one or group situations. And why not? Not everyone is a freelance writer who blogs for a living. Some business owners run blogs for use as marketing tools, to build market place credibility.

It only makes good business sense to “talk up” their high content quality blogs to prospects they meet, in a way that generates sales leads and ultimately income. Of course this may not happen often, or the same way every time. But if/when it does, the benefits can be multiple, and would come with minimal effort.

If you sell products, the fact that your store is online should not stop you from making sales if you physically come across people who need them. You (and members of your team) should be prepared for all possibilities – within reason.

In my part of the world, that’s not an unrealistic thing to do. Even in developed societies, a blog setup with this kind of mindset could be used to generate sales during say, a 3 day conference, if the owner provides a purchase processing equipment (e.g. credit card swiper) for dealing directly with interested attendees.

That’s better than asking them to place their orders when they get back to their homes or offices(which can result in some forgetting, or even changing their minds)!

If the product is physical and you have it on you (or in a sales truck at the venue) many people who meet you in person are likely to place orders, knowing the “shipping/handling” expense and waiting period will be eliminated.

Depending on the level of interest you perceive, a sales terminal linked directly to your blog’s payment processing system could be installed in a strategic location. Visitors to your premises would then read signs announcing such blog based offers and if interested simply make their purchase at that terminal.

That’s how a strategy of selling information products related to your business can make customers and clients who come in to place orders for them. It will earn you extra income without the overheads. And you’d also have the email addresses of buyers added to your mailing lists etc.

In summary, the fact that you display products online should not stop you from ALSO taking orders offline. Depending on what part of the world you’re in, NOT all your potential buyers will own PCs or have Internet access. So, when they visit your physical premises, or run into you in person, if you’ve prepared yourself as explained above, both you and such buyers will be happier at the end of your interaction!

If the product is electronic, they’ll get it in their mail boxes as soon as they complete payment right there and then. And YOU would get home with money in the bank. No need for follow ups or reminders.

How Do You Accept Credit Cards Offline?

To really make the most of this strategy, especially when dealing with large numbers of people in a physical location, you’ll need a purchase processing device. This tends to be a bit more complicated than the online system. But once setup, it can bring useful flexibility to your ability to make sales anywhere you are.

Thankfully, with advancements in technology, today’s providers continue to offer improved options. It is now possible to use a standalone credit card swiper linked to your mobile phone to take orders from offline customers. Other variants exist. Even Pay pal offers an offline merchant account option. If you are willing to do some creative thinking, it’s likely this strategy can yield some useful financial rewards for you. Read “this ehow article ” for useful details.

Here in Nigeria, Interswitch and other prepaid card swipers are increasingly becoming available in physical stores and business premises. The problem I see is that most owners fail to think beyond the conventional use these tools were setup for.

If you already use such a device on your premises, what stops you from encouraging customers or clients to use the card swiper to purchase information products from your blog? Basically, you could use your smart phone to email the download link (or file attachment) to the customer while s/he stands right in front of you AFTER making payment with his/her card. That would be passive income earned – which can add up over time.

2. Generating Pre-Qualified Leads For Sales of Your Products/Services

You can be more deliberate when you write posts for your blog – with the aim of getting potential buyers for products and services you offer, to contact you.

As I’ve explained on the About This Blog page, THIS is a multidisciplinary blog. I decided to focus all my content publishing in one central location on my domain, to ease the process of promoting different products and services I offer different audiences. Some of the these groups share similar overlapping interests – and that’s what makes it possible for me to do this. For instance a number of my web marketing clients have at one point or the other ordered a custom spreadsheet solution or PDF information products from me.

So, when I write new posts based on my blog publishing schedule, I’m actually doing so with deliberate marketing intent. And it works. Indeed, I have found that my newsletter subscription rates have risen since I launched this blog.

You could setup a separate contact form for each area of service you offer. The forms should be customizable – and must work with a script that will send auto responses with download links to needed documents etc. The script should also send YOU custom email messages that let you know which products and/or areas of your service are being requested from the SUBJECT line alone. This can make you well informed about your most in-demand product or service.

But what’s really important is the useful information the above setup can help you gather. In my case, the reports help me determine much more accurately, what those who contact me are looking for. That guides me to better tailor subsequent posts published in each blog category.

A good example of how I write posts with deliberate intent to generate sales leads for a product or service can be seen in my recent post(based on a pre-existing article) in the public speaking category titled “I Flopped Badly At The National Finals! (A True Story About How NOT To Prepare For/Deliver And Important Presentation). Note the 3D ebook cover(shown below) of a special White Paper inserted at the post’s bottom. That FREE download offer links to a squeeze page offering an additional FREE PDF report download. In the PDF white paper, this one page flyer announcing Burt Dubin’s speaker mentoring service is included.

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Write posts with timeless useful content, that can help potential buyers gain insights to address needs they have. They’ll come to regard you as a competent authority. And when they see an offer to get more content from you in form of a report or book, there’s a good chance some will take up your offer. If you go on to play your cards right, say through your newsletter and e-mail marketing, some will eventually take buying action.

3. Subscriber Web Contact Form Data Mining:

This strategy builds on what happens in 2. above. Success in the latter implies you’ll gradually build a mailing list of potential buyers. That mailing list CAN then be “mined” for three key purposes:

a. To gain insight for new post titles and website content you can create that will interest visitors

b. To understand the demographics of those who make enquiries e.g. job titles, occupation, area of interest, etc.

c. To determine the frequency of enquiries relating to a specific product or service: It was this that helped me discover an overwhelming majority of visitors to my Farm Biz Ideas website were keenly interested in learning about Livestock Feed Formulation. And this has been reflected in the repeat sales I’ve made of my Feed Formulation Handbook and also via one-on-one coaching of clients on the subject.

Each time a request form on my website is used, the script that is executed auto-updates a text database with the information submitted by the prospect.

Whenever I need to do a comprehensive review, I simply download the text database from my website’s cgi-bin and import it into Excel.

Each database field is placed in a separate spreadsheet column. This makes it easy to access what you want. Basically, I use a small MS Excel app I built to review enquiries sent in by visitors over time, to get ideas for new topics to write on. And since the enquirer is already on my mailing list, whenever the resulting new content is published, s/he gets to know as well.

The point being made here is that you can analyze the visitor contact information collected from 2. above, and use it to refine your content marketing efforts via your blog. That’s where the “mining” of your data comes in. Believe me, when you put that data into a spreadsheet it can really open your eyes to useful trends in the requests and “characteristics/profiles” of those who respond to your content.

For instance from “studying” my form data, I’ve discovered that over 80% of sales I’ve made of my Farm Business products and services have been to people from a specific region of the country. It’s so uncanny that I’m planning to visit that location to see if I can understand why that is so – and possibly make it happen more often!

Final Words

The strategies I’ve described above provide potentially viable complementary alternatives a blog owner can adopt. They would probably appeal to people just starting out or at least in the early stages of running their blogs – until they can build enough recognition/authority to facilitate access to more popular channels.

Having said that, even blog owners who already enjoy financially rewarding returns from using the popular strategies may find it beneficial to ADD these strategies to boost their blogs’ ability to generate financially rewarding returns.