How to monetize your blog by selling your own product

Making money online is always a very popular topic. The general advice for making money from a blog is to clutter it with ads, ruin the user experience by putting the ads within the content and making the ads look like the content itself.

Another suggested way of making money with a blog is to collect e-mail addresses from your readers and spam them with as many affiliate products as possible in hope that they will buy something before they get enough and unsubscribe.

The never ending chase for page views

As you know, I haven’t chosen any of the two above. I don’t like monetizing my blog with banner ads and I do not think you should spam your subscribers. Until now I have monetized my blog content by recommending products that I personally use.

Earning money from ads on your blog is a complicated strategy. You’ve got to publish new material consistently, attract lots of links and readers in hope that after some time you have enough page views to attract advertisers and sell ads.

It is a never ending process. Every day you’re starting from scratch. You mustn’t quit producing new content as you cannot let your page views drop as that will mean less money from advertisements.

Monetizing by selling your own product

The best option for monetizing your blog is to invest your time in creating something that will provide enduring value and bring you continuous revenue. Create the content once, put it in a permanent form and sell it over and over again. Putting your work into a permanent form is very important as it will allow you not to keep recreating your value over and over again.

The best way of putting your content into a permanent form is to create your own product. Your product will provide value even when you are not physically present and it will alow you to take a break from posting new content once in a while. It will basically let you stop trading your hours for dollars.

Next step: To introduce a paid product

This is the first article in a series of monetizing your blog by creating your own product articles. I plan to introduce my first product shortly and this series will explain my thinking behind it, and will show you steps I am taking as I am publishing this product.

My product is an e-book that will show how I use Twitter. It is for anyone interested in getting on and using Twitter to build authority, build traffic to a site and get customers via Twitter.

The next article in the series will explain why I’ve chosen to publish my Twitter advice as an ebook, and not as a membership site. Please subscribe to my RSS / email updates below to stay tuned.

Image by VoxEfx.