How to Create a Product with Your Blog (A Guide to Profiting)

If you want to make real money blogging, you have to create a product with your blog.

Too many bloggers fail because they don’t want realistic ambitions for monetization. They think Google AdSense and affiliate marketing will give them a salary. That will give you pennies. Each year, the commissions from services like those seem to decrease, too.

Using ad networks and affiliate marketing is fine at the start, but you should always maintain a goal of doing something more for a higher-paying commission.

Enter Products and Services.

If you create a product with your blog or even a service, you can acquire 100% of the profit.

You’ll make pennies with AdSense and affiliate links. That’s because Google and Amazon are doing most of the work and, therefore, collecting most of the money.

However, your own product or service is yours, and that means you collect it all.

In this guide, I’ll provide step-by-step instructions on how to create a product with your blog so that you can start making money sooner rather than later.

Why Create a Product with Your Blog?

There are many reasons why you’d want to create a product with your blog.

Chances are, if you’re reading my blog content, then you want to make your blog either a side hustle or a full-time career. I center my content around doing just that.

If you want to make a blog and not earn money, then my content isn’t going to be for you.

And in all honesty, everyone should want to make some kind of profit. Now, whether you make enough to simply let your blog pay for itself or you make enough to quit your day job and focus on blogging is up to you.

That’s the thing, though – if you want your blog to be a profitable side hustle or a full-time gig, the little ways of making money aren’t going to cut it.

You need to create a product with your blog or a service that will allow you to make all the profit.

Think about it…

A click on AdSense might earn you a few cents to a few dollars. A purchase of your own product or service might earn you anywhere from $150 to $2,500+, depending on what it is and how much you’re charging for it.

Which sounds better to you?

But let me be honest and blunt about this!

It requires work and dedication on your part. Google does most of the work with AdSense, which is why they take most of the money. Amazon does most of the work with Associate Links, which is why they take most of the money.

Selling your own product or service requires you to do most of the work, which is why you get to enjoy all the profit that it brings.

Making a living from blogging isn’t easy. I’m not going to lie to you. But it’s very possible if you’re willing to work for it.

 

Steps to Create a Product with Your Blog

Now that we’ve covered the reasons why you’d want to create a product with your blog let’s jump right into the steps of actually getting started and taking control of your blogging profit desires.

 

Step 1 – Fully Understand Your Niche and Audience

The first step is simple.

You need to know your niche and you need to know your audience!

Your niche is the topic you blog about. It should be a specialized topic that you focus your content on. It shouldn’t ever be multiple topics. You need to narrow it down to one specific topic that you can build authority and expertise on.

I have a monetized hiking blog. The topic of “general hiking” is too general. It’s too broad and too competitive to completely focus on. I’d be up against competitors who hike way more than me. It would not be easy to try to compete.

So, I’ve narrowed down my niche or “niched down” to focus more specifically on a topic. Instead of “hiking” in general, I cover “hiking” specific to where I live, in Southern Illinois.

My competition is low but still exists. I can cover the area I live in a lot easier than “everywhere.” I know a lot about my area and the trails.

In three years of running my local hiking blog, I held page one on Google, built a strong social media following, and monetized my brand. I’m in my seventh year, and it has turned into a secondary income.

You must have a niche that you’re passionate about, but you must narrow it down to something you can actually compete in.

You want to make sure the niche has competition and an audience but not too much competition. You also want to make sure you can monetize it easily. Not every niche is created equally. Some are significantly harder than others to monetize.

It’s important to have a strategy before jumping right in. Try to plan for it first.

You also need to know who your audience is.

If I had chosen the general hiking niche as my niche, it would almost be impossible to know who my audience was. That’s because the niche is too broad. There are so many different people that it would be extremely difficult to know which ones to target.

And it’s easy to that if you target everyone, that means you can make more money. That’s almost like an optical illusion in blogging. It’s false because you won’t have a specific audience to market to. If you market to a broad audience, you’re using all your resources on too many people rather than focusing them all on that one group you know you can convert.

So, instead, I focus on my local audience and those who live in states around my region who would likely consider my region as an inexpensive option for tourism. I mainly focus on families with my content because that’s who I would want to visit the most.

Once you narrow down your audience, catering to them with your content and eventual products and services becomes a much easier task than trying to please anyone and everyone.

Choose a niche and an audience before you start to create a product with your blog.

 

Step 2 – Research the Needs and Wants of Your Audience

After you decide on your niche and audience, you need to research their needs and wants so that you can create a product with your blog and actually earn a profit from it.

Once you understand this, you can actually offer a product or service worth paying for.

You might want to create an eBook all about your niche and sell it to earn a profit. But does your audience want an eBook? Do they desire that? If they don’t, chances are, they’re not going to pay for it. You’ll likely waste your effort creating a product that won’t make any money.

So, how do you know what to sell then?

You must research the needs and wants of your audience.

You need to get into CIA intelligence officer mode. Start gathering data and information to solve the case of finding the missing things in your niche.

Go to social media and research. Go to Quora and Reddit and research. Go on Discord servers and discussion forums and research. Read the comments on competitor blogs. Read reviews. Go where your audience is and LISTEN TO YOUR AUDIENCE.

I guarantee all the needs and wants of your specific audience are out there on the internet and right in the open for you and everyone else to see.

Once you figure out their needs and wants, you can use that intelligence to create a product with your blog and actually make money with it.

I observed that many people who hike in my area need guides or itineraries to help them navigate the trails.

Our local hiking trails don’t have the best signage.

That gave me an opportunity to offer the digital product of itinerary planning and the more physical product of leading guided hikes. By doing this, I’ve developed an entirely profitable business.

I listened to what my specific audience was screaming for the loudest, and I delivered a product to solve their problems.

If you do that, you’ll make a living from blogging in no time.

 

Step 3 – Focus on What You Do Best

When you create a product with your blog based on your research on your audience’s needs and wants, try to focus on what you do best.

Basically, don’t bite off more than you can chew.

My itineraries are recommendation-based products. I cut the work of doing the research for my customers and then give them a report of recommendations. I don’t call and reserve cabins, rentals, or services for them. They have to do that. I’d be doing more than I want to do if I did that for them and I just simply don’t have that free time available.

So, I focus on researching and recommending the core product.

It’s what I’m good at.

Just because you choose a specific niche and have narrowed it down doesn’t mean you know everything about it. It also means you can’t do everything within it, either.

So, don’t try to do everything in the niche.

Do what you know. Do what you’re good at. Do what you have the time to commit to. But make sure what you do is meeting the needs and wants of your audience or you’ll waste your time doing things you think will pay off.

Don’t try to do stuff that you don’t know anything about. If you do and you make a mistake, you’ll look bad. You might lose trust. You can get bad reviews. It will do more damage than good. You will regret it.

Stick to what you know when you create a product with your blog.

 

Step 4 – Create Your Product or Service

Now for the meat of this guide!

It’s time for you to create a product for your blog.

Your product can be anything, but I highly recommend you keep it digital.

I offer guided hiking, which is not digital but makes sense for my niche. However, it’s expensive for me to offer it. I pay $700 every six months for required liability insurance. I also have to pay federal and state public land management agencies for commercial guiding permits. Because of that, I have to carefully calculate my rates and try to predict an accurate amount of hikes for the year to stay ahead of my spending.

Non-digital and physical products typically cost money to produce and keep selling.

Digital items are usually different. You usually make them once and then rake in the full profit without too much overhead spending or profit loss.

My itinerary service, for example, requires me to research and plan. I don’t have to pay extra for it, get insurance, or buy a permit. I earn full profit.

Digital is the way to go for maximum profit.

You also have a lot of different types of digital products you could offer. A few of the better ones include:

• eBooks – Digital books about a specific topic in your niche.
• Services – Do stuff for people, consult, and provide services.
• Newsletters – Create a paid-only newsletter for your niche.
• Community – Create an online community that costs for membership.
• Courses – Provide educational courses for a cost.

Whatever your product or service is, just make sure it benefits the buyer.

Benefits are different than features. A feature is an amenity for those who like that particular thing. Not all features are liked by all. However, the benefit is different because it is geared toward everyone. A benefit makes the life of the customer better in some way.

An example of a feature would be me providing you with an SEO audit as a paid service.

An example of a benefit would be providing you with a service that will help you reduce your monthly spending costs.

A feature impacts those who like it, but a benefit focuses on everyone.

When you go to create a product with your blog, try to spend some time perfecting it and getting it right before you launch it.

 

Step 5 – Market Your Product or Service

So, after you create a product with your blog, the cash should start rolling it, right?

Sadly, that’s not how it works, but many bloggers fail at turning their blogs into successful profit factories because of that very mistake.

Just because you make a product doesn’t mean you’ll start selling it right away.

If you don’t market your product, you’re not going to sell it.

You have to get the word out about it.

You have to get the word out about you, too.

Before you even release a product, I suggest you focus on content development in your niche. Create tons of awesome blog posts, get known by your community, and develop a following. The more known you are, the easier it will be to create a product with your blog and sell it.

If no one knows who you are – why on earth would they buy from you? That’s taking a big risk. I don’t take risks like that, and neither do most people.

Once you grow a following, you can easily market your product.

There are several ways to market your product, too. A few of the better ways include:

• Paid marketing: This is where you pay for marketing, such as advertising. You just need to aim to earn more profit than you spend on the ad or campaign.
• Organic marketing: This is mainly where you rely on customers to find your product “naturally” and purchase it. You can do this with content marketing and SEO.
• Social media marketing: This is where you gain customers by engaging on social media. It helps if you’ve already built a large following on your social media pages.
• Cold marketing: Cold marketing is when you send emails, DMs, and calls to potential customers as the initiating point of sale. You find ideal customers and contact them with your sales pitch.

Of all the different ways to market your product, there is one thing you’ll need to get good at – sales and copywriting.

You need to be a great salesperson.

You also need to be a great copywriter.

You can outsource all of these components if you have the budget to do it. Even if you do have the budget and plan to primarily rely on outsourcing, it’s still ideal to learn as much as you can about online sales and copywriting. It can really help with business decision-making when you need to make important decisions and changes to your products and services.

Another important thing to consider is failure.

We all fail at some point. It doesn’t mean everything is a failure. It means you have gained a learning experience, and you can either change something to make it successful or pivot to something else that isn’t failing.

Just don’t assume one thing is a failure when it isn’t.

A rejected cold call email isn’t a failure. The contacts just didn’t want to buy from you. Try to find out why, learn from it, and then contact the next person as a better salesperson than you were before.

Marketing is just as important as creating your product – you’ll need both to make money blogging.

Dedicate Time to Create a Product with Your Blog

It takes time to create a product with your blog.

If you don’t allow time and dedication to the process, you’ll likely fail.

The internet is too big and competitive not to give it time and dedication. Someone else will invest more into it, and they’ll out-compete you in the process.

The best thing to do is create a strategy and properly plan for your product, marketing process, and everything in between. A proper plan will keep you aligned with your goals and help you make better decisions about your product and your blog.

Winging it is setting yourself up for disaster and failure.

All the biggest brands that have made the most from products have achieved this by properly planning and strategizing their next moves.

If you want to win, you have to create a product with your blog by planning and strategizing for it before you earn that success.

 

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading my article about how to create a product with your blog. I hope this post has given you some great ideas for products and services to help you make money blogging. If it has, please share it to help support me in writing it and providing it for free.

You can also give me a one-time donation for this article if you really want to. However, it’s not an obligation, and you reading my content is still good enough.

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About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing. Learn more about Shawn Gossman by clicking here.