How to Decide How to Monetize Your Blog or Blogged Book

As you consider how to monetize your blog beyond your blogged book—and eventual printed book or ebook, you need to consider what types of activities you want to take on to produce information products and services–which ones are best for you and for your readers. Unless you want to put advertisements on your blog (and have the traffic to actually make money with them), these products and services are how you will create a business around your blog.

If you want a good example of an author who has done a good job of adding information products to his book to build a business, and who also has a successful blog (not a blogged book), take a look at Jack Canfield, whose first success was Chicken Soup for the Soul. He’s gone onto become “America’s #1 Success Coach.” He has more than one website; here’s his coaching membersip site (a product/service):

Here’s an advertisement for a variety of information products, including his books:

And here’s a promotion for a workshop or intensive weekend seminar:

In yesterday’s post I described a variety of products and services you might consider creating and offering from your blog and in addition to your blogged book. You can see from the examples above how effectively you might utilize many of them with your blogged book. Obviously, you won’t want to offer your services as a speaker if you have a terrible fear of getting up in front of audiences. Nor will you want to take on webinars if you are a technophobe. However, if you like teaching and speaking, becoming a speaker and offering workshops and seminars, as well as teleseminars might be a good choices for you, and you can easily start turning some of these into online or home study programs.To decide what types of products and services to create, ask yourself:

• What am I good at?
• What do I enjoy?
• What do I have to give?
• What am I passionate about?
• What am I likely to follow through with?
• What do my blog readers spend money on?
• What do my blog readers want?
• What do my blog readers need?

Then ask yourself:

1. How will I combine my expertise, passion and purpose (and the focus or topic of my blog) with the needs and desires of my blog readers?
2. What products and services can I create that combine these?
3. How do the products I plan on creating help me monetize my blog—support my long-term overall plan for the blog and my business?

When you can answer the questions above, you have a strategy to monetize your blog. And then you can go on to actually brainstorm and create products and services.

There are still a few spots left in my Writers Digest How to Build a Business Around Your Blog Boot Camp. It begins this Friday, August 24, 2012 with a webinar and then extends into Saturday when you’ll take what you learned during the webinar to create a rough draft of the business plan for your blog. I’ll provide you with special worksheets to help get your plans down on paper. (You’ll answer questions like the ones above!) You’ll identify what you know that makes you an expert. And you will identify short books and information products to create and sell that:

• support or establish your expert status
• promote your existing fiction and nonfiction books
• increase or develop revenue

Also on Saturday, you’ll get a chance to use a special message board to get your questions answered by me for 2.5 hours as you create your business plan. Then, on Sunday you turn in a business plan and I’ll personally review it and send it back with comments.

If you want this kind of personal help with your blogged book–or blog–business, you can sign up for the boot camp here. Hurry up, though. There were only 25 slots when it opened up, and there are only a few spots left now. So, claim yours now!