Yesterday I made the following comment on Twitter, I thought I would follow it up with a full blog post explaining what I mean
If you can write a decent blog post on a subject, you can probably do it for someone, for a fee, that’s one way blogging can make you money
What I mean here is that you can indirectly monetise your blog, it’s not always about adsense clicks or ad sales.
What Is Indirect Blog Monetisation
Indirect Blog monetisation is about making money because of your blog not through it. You write your blog posts to create authority in your niche and to direct your blog readers to a desired monetisation method. Some examples of indirect blog monetisation are:
- An online store behind your blog
- Consulting / coaching
- A Service business for example WordPress services, more about that later
- Speaking
- Book sales
- Freelance writing
To Quote Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett from their book Problogger Secrets fort Blogging Your Way To A Six Figure Income, you should look at indirectly monetising your blog if you meet one of these criteria :
- I blog to help me promote my business
- I blog because I want to promote my writing
- I blog because I want to make myself know
Is It Better Than Direct Monetisation?
I cannot answer that one, I would love to be a Problogger, so my ideal is to directly monetise my blog, but the time when I can make a living just from writing blog posts is away in the future, right now I am making about 95% of my income from indirect methods. But what I can say is that indirect methods are far better when you are growing your blog. You need to look at your own desires to answer this question.
To earn a decent living as a problogger, you need traffic, and you ain’t going to get that for a few months or even years when you first start a blog. Therefore my roundabout answer is yes indirect monetissation is better for the new blogger whilst they are building their profile.
My Example of Indirect Monetisation
The best way to illustrate indirect monetisation is with a case study of my business.
You may see ad banners and affiliate reviews on my site but they are secondary to my main income stream which is my WordPress services business. My blog is to attract people to my site and give me the opportunity to present my offering through my sales page. I offer WordPress technical support services to bloggers wanting to concentrate on content creation and leave the backend technical stuff to someone else. I have the technical expertise to fix your problems more efficiently than many bloggers, this then frees up time for their main task of writing excellent blog posts.
My blog posts help to provide organic search engine traffic, give me something to add value to my social media streams ; twtitter and Facebook, but most importantly they allow me to show my expertise at WordPress. As I said on twtitter, if I can write a competent blog post on how to do something then I can probably do it, that is why many of my blog posts are case studies if my services – how I solved a problem or telling people how to do something. I am providing social proof of my expertise.
Many of my readers are not my customers, and that is fine. I run with a freemium model, I write my blog posts for all to enjoy, for free, and that is great I love doing that, but if you need more than my writing, my direct help, or you know someone else who does. Then though my blog post and your exposure to my soft sell marketing you will know where to come.
As I have mentioned my sales funnel is all about the soft sell. Prove my authority and then give a call to action at the top of my site, the less than subtle hire me button. I have a footer on my rss feed suggesting people may want to hire me, and another at the bottom of each post. It’s not too pushy but it lets people know there is more than just a series of blog posts to this site.
Can You Retrospectively add Indirect Monetisation
I think yes, add a services page detailing your offering, then inform your readers via your email list or a blog post to your RSS subscribers and there you go. Be preapred for some backlash, there is still a movement that believes blogs should be non-commercial. You may loose readers.
Another thing I would recommend is to look at your existing ads / adsense config. Are your advertising services which are in conflict with your offering, you may want to remove them. If you look at my affiliate reviews and banner ads, they are for things I do not offer, so I feel they are complimentary.
Jobify Your Passion
There is a good change you love the niche you are writing about, if you could take that to the next level and jobify your passion what would that mean to you?
As with all blogging activities, indirect blog monetisation is not a get rich quick scheme. It takes hard work and dedication, I am worse off since I started wpdude.com leaving my very lucrative corporate freelancing gig, but I love what I do, I get to interact with some cool people running excellent blogs. I’m not going back to a corporate gig again.
If any of this break free and work for yourself resonates with you, I heartily recommend a couple of unconventional work products:
F2 Firefly Manifesto By Jonathan Fields
A Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau
So What Are You?
Direct or Indirect let me know, also another of my indirect methods is WordPress coaching (can you see what I’m doing here) if you want a one-on-one session to talk about how to market your services through a WordPress blog please contact me.