How To Make Money Blogging: 7 Questions To Success

 

Turning your blog into a profitable business

There is a big difference between blogging for pleasure and blogging for profit. Most people who have been blogging for quite a long time, but are still unsuccessful in monetizing their blogs, fail to realize this.

Here are some facts about you:

You are probably already a good enough writer. Sure, you are probably no Stephen King (yet), but you have some solid writing skills. You are probably super creative and passionate about your topic of writing. Heck, you are even pretty good in getting people to read your stuff.

And yet, you fail to make money doing the one thing that you love the most — writing. You might even have been trying to get there for many years now, but it just doesn’t work.

Well, that sucks.

I know it, because the person I have just been describing is me.

The problem is that I have been approaching blogging from the perspective of a creative while ignoring the perspective of an entrepreneur. I needed to make that shift in mindset before I could see any financial outcomes from my work.

In this article, I am going to discuss seven questions, which are going to help you make that shift from creative to creative entrepreneur.

1. What niche am I willing to commit to for many years to come?

If you want to be successful at making money blogging, you will have to remain grounded in a niche. By being grounded within a niche, you focus your attention on one specific topic and establish your blog’s authority/reputation over time.

The question is just: what niche can you commit to for years? What topic is interesting enough for you to dedicate your full attention over a long period of time?

2. Who do I want to serve? Who is my target customer?

It is only when you have a clear understanding of who your target customers are, that you can create something that is truly valuable to them. People pay for the value that they receive. It is your job to figure out what it is that they value and then give it to them.

But if you want to figure out what they value, then you must first have a clear idea of who your target customers really are:

• What do they fear?

• What do they love?

• How do they define themselves?

• What is important to them?

3. Which problem am I solving for my target customer?

In order to create something valuable, you must solve a problem. Not just some problem that comes from your imagination, but a real problem that people are willing to pay for.

How do you know that it’s a real problem?

By doing market validation.

It is quite simple: you know that you’ve discovered a real problem when people willingly pay you for the solution you provide. That solution might not be perfect at first. But you can refine it as you go.

4. How am I going to solve that problem for my target customer?

This is where your creativity comes into play. It is one thing to identify a problem, but providing an actual solution to the problem is a whole different story.

Let’s say you’ve identified the problem that people moving to a new country (e.g. France) are struggling really hard to learn the local language. That is the problem that you are trying to solve.

Well, now you will have to come up with a solution that leads to real, measurable results for your customers.

And that is the hard part.

5. How am I going to position myself in the market?

Well, let’s stick with the example of helping people to learn French for a moment. Surely, there will already be a lot of products out there attempting to do just that.

And probably, there’s already a whole bunch of good solutions available on the market. Whether that is:

• language learning apps

• one-on-one coaches

• video courses on sites like Udemy

• Private language institutes

• University programs

• or whatever else.

Positioning is all about deciding how you are going to stand out from the market.

What makes your solution unique? Why should people pay exactly for your product as opposed to choosing one of the other ones? What makes your solution better than all the others for your target customer?

6. How am I going to package that solution so that it becomes a product people will buy?

Let’s say you’ve come up with a solution that satisfies you. You are convinced that the learning program you’ve just created is really going to help your customers learn French.

Now, what do you do next?

Well, you need to decide how to package your solution into a product that people are going to buy.

The question you will need to ask yourself is:

What would be the best solution for my target customers? In what format do I have to package my product so that it gives them what they need?

7. What kind of revenue streams can I create for my business?

I have touched upon this before, but there is a lot of different ways in which you can generate revenue from your business, even if all of these different ways essentially solve the same problem.

For example, you could have:

• A book about learning French

• A membership site where you generate new learning tips on a regular basis and give people an online forum to discuss & share.

• A group coaching program via Google Hangouts

Your strategy could be to first get people to buy your cheap introductory product (i.e. the book). If your book provides super high value, your customers are going to buy your more expensive products and so on and so forth.

Conclusion:

If you want to make money blogging, then you must “graduate” from being a pure creative (“struggling writer”) towards being a creative and an entrepreneur at the same time.

In short, you need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.

Perhaps you have always been thinking of making your money by selling books (like most writers do). But hey, perhaps that’s not the best way for you to monetize your blog at all. Maybe the way for you to move forward is to sell a completely different kind of product but to use your writing skills as your main marketing tool.

Instead of selling books about time management, you create your own physical time planner tool. Or an app that helps people to manage their time better.

I’m not saying that there is something generally wrong with a book as the main product. You just don’t need to limit your way of thinking to that traditional path. There are so many ways to monetize a blog.

In the end, it all comes down to one thing:

Create a viable product that solves a real problem for a real group of people. Once you’ve achieved that, then you figure out how to sell it on a large scale using your blog as your main marketing channel.