how to monetize a blog in 2022? part II.
Sell Ebooks to your Audience
Selling ebooks is one of the most popular ways bloggers choose to monetize their blogs. This is perfect because it’s relatively easy to create and is usually priced right that most visitors will be able to buy.
But ebooks do more than just allow bloggers to quickly monetize their blogs. As a blogger, selling an ebook can be the fastest way to test if people are interested enough in what you’re covering to pay for it.
Ebooks are a low-risk way for your site visitors to judge the value of what you have to offer before buying more expensive products.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a lot of traffic to your blog to make money from your books. For example, David Oudiette turned the knowledge he gained from building landing pages into a 252-page book for $39.
He didn’t have much traffic on his blog since all he did at the time was offer consulting services, but David was able to generate over $13,000 in profit from his ebook.
This is what David had to do to sell that many books:
- He asked his blog subscribers about his landing page, gave them some free tips, and then described them in his book.
- He answered questions and gave feedback on landing pages on Quora and Reddit, then mentioned his book as an additional source of information.
- David also added the book to Product Hunt.
- Even more impressive, David cold emailed businesses and gave them free feedback on his landing page, then he replied to everyone who responded and sent them a link to his book.
So David didn’t get a lot of traffic, but he did work a lot.
Then there’s Taylor Pearson, who sold over 5,000 books in four weeks and in 2015, made over $60k from that one book alone. Taylor only had 700 subscribers to his email at the time.
Taylor credits the success of his book to a couple of things:
- Getting fans of his blog to become beta readers during the writing period.
Creating a Facebook group to communicate the progress of his book with his core readers. [Read: How To Create A Facebook Page] - Send the book to everyone in your Facebook group so they can leave an honest review on Amazon.
- Keep everyone on your list informed about the progress of your book, which gets them more engaged and possibly buying later. Synchronize messages from social networks during and after the launch.
- Send a personalized email about your book to others in your Gmail contacts.
- A contest to promote his book.
The book ended up being a bestseller on Amazon’s small business section and the rest is history.
What’s great about these examples is that they show that, with the right marketing and a good book, you don’t need that many subscribers and you certainly don’t have to be an expert writer.
None of these authors published and waited, in fact, they worked very hard for their books to come out ahead.
Where to Sell Your Ebook
You can choose to sell your ebook directly on your blog or through platforms like Gumroad or Podia.
Selling your ebook on your own site can have some advantages, as you will keep 100% of your profits. For example, ShoutMeLoud’s Harsh Agrawal has an entire section of his site devoted entirely to his ebooks.
You can easily create something like this with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin for WordPress.
If you choose to publish your ebook as an Amazon Kindle, then you will only get 70% of the profits, but it comes with the advantage that the more books you sell the more exposure you will get which will lead to more sales.
Selling books is not restricted to a particular niche. There are plenty of ebooks out there on blogging, photography, fitness, and whatever else you can think of.
For example, if you had a blog that teaches gardening, you can sell an ebook that teaches your audience, in more detail, how to care for and grow their own gardens or a particular plant.
You can even reuse some of the content you’ve already written on your blog and then add more detail and context.
How to Make a Book
If you don’t have the time or skill to write a book on your own, you can hire a ghostwriter to do it for you.
You can find ghostwriters on LinkedIn, Scripted, Upwork, and even Fiverr. Keep in mind, as with anything, you get what you pay for. The most experienced ghost writers will charge more than the beginners.
You can also create your book cover yourself with tools like Canva, Photoshop, and Snappa or you can pay for a service like 99designs and let a professional do it for you.
In our case, we have our physical book on a national platform called author publishers and our ebook on hotmart. If you are interested in seeing our book and ebook you can see it here:
Create and Sell Online Courses
Another way to monetize your blog is by selling online courses. What stops most bloggers from creating their own course is that they think they need to be some kind of expert to teach a course.
But this is not true, the only thing you need to really teach a course is to know more than the people you are teaching and to be able to present this information in a way that people derive value from it.
IWT’s Ramit Sethi makes millions of the courses he creates, not because he’s a certified financial planner, but because he helps people eliminate problems in their lives.
You don’t need to be a certified chef to create a course that teaches people how to cook. If you can cook better than most people and create the course material in a way that can actually teach people how to cook, then there is nothing stopping you from making your own course.
With more and more people taking online courses, the e-learning industry is forecast to grow to around $325 billion by 2025.
You also don’t have to be an influencer like Ramit Sethi to make a decent income from your courses.
There are many people like Joseph Michael who made $40k as a beginner teaching writers how to use the popular Scrivener software.
Joseph didn’t have thousands of visitors or a gigantic email list. He sold his course by contacting influencers and promoting his course in webinars he participated in.
How to Get Ideas for Courses
If you already have an audience, then you simply need to identify a problem that many people share, that you can solve.
Ways to Identify Pain Points Your Audience Needs to Resolve:
- Send out a survey: The quickest way to find out what issues people in your audience are having is to ask them directly. You can do this by sending a simple survey by email.
Here’s an example of Ramit Sethi doing exactly this in one of his emails just before the new year.
Read your blog comments: The comments section can be a treasure trove of ideas if you pay enough attention. And if you don’t have many comments on your blog, you can read comments from other blogs in your niche.
If you don’t have an audience, then you can get some ideas by creating a list of all the things I could do better than a lot of people.
Here are some questions that can help you figure this out:
- What is something your friends always praise about you?
- Why do people go to you for advice?
- What is something that people always complain about, but you have zero problems with?
What have you learned from your past jobs?
What can you do better than most of the people you know?
For Joseph, he knew how to use Scrivener, when most people saw it as complex. In his case, it could be playing an instrument or how to dress. As long as you can do it better than most people, then you can teach them this.
Hosting Your Own Courses
You can choose to host your courses on WordPress with LMS hosting for WordPress, in this case you would receive a large part of the profit from your course, but you would have to set everything up yourself or hire a developer to help you with this.
There are also external platforms that you can use to host your courses. These platforms either charge a monthly fee or a percentage of sales, with this, you will get a more professional platform where you can upload your courses.
WordPress Extension for Your Courses
- WP Courseware
- LearnDash
- LifterLMS
- LearnPress
- External Platform to Host your Courses
could - teachable
- kajabi
Start a Coaching/Consultation Business
Sometimes people want more detailed and personalized instruction than a book or course would offer, so these people seek one-on-one coaching (or consultation depending on the type of services you offer).
Coaching or consulting is a monetization strategy that most blog owners who have had success selling books and courses choose when they want to create an additional income stream.
This is not just for established bloggers, consulting can also be your monetization strategy from the start.
Coaching, like most of the monetization strategies we’ve already covered, depends on you being able to use your skills and experience to help people solve problems in their lives.
Brennan Dunn for example helps businesses sell more with marketing automation and charges around $9k for a consultation and Nagina Abdullah makes over 100k a year coaching clients who want to lose weight.
Here is a snapshot of Nagina’s revenue throughout the year:
If you’re already generating income from books and courses, consider offering one-on-one consultations to people in your audience.
And if you’re just starting out, the low-volume nature of queries means you can start generating revenue without a lot of traffic.
With queries it’s not just about how much traffic you generate, it’s more about getting the right traffic, e.g. people who need your services and can pay you for this.
This means writing articles focused on topics that your type of client is looking for, this means speaking on podcasts that your audience listens to, and going to events where they go so they can learn more about you.
