Why do you blog?
Is it to keep a diary of sorts of your life? Make money? Share recipes? To find freelance work?
I’m guessing you don’t have a strong answer to that, and that’s OK. But what I’m about to share will change how you blog forever.
You’re probably blogging because of all those things above. You want to:
- Share your life
- Connect with others
- Make money
- Quit your job
- Let your spouse quit his/her job
- Give yourself a creative outlet
- and more
But, to be a successful blogger, you have to get out of the “me” mentality. Unless you truly are blogging to document your own life and don’t care one bit if anyone else is reading it, the key to being a better blogger is…
Serving your audience.
Your blog is not about you; it’s about giving your audience what they want.
How to figure out what your audience wants
This is the part that will take some time. I started my blog, for example, in the personal finance niche. I wanted to help people with their budgets, spending habits, and the like. While I still do write about finance from time to time, the topic that gets the most traction is blogging.
Here are five questions you can ask to help determine what your audience wants:
- What are your top 5 posts in Google Analytics?
- Which posts have the most social shares?
- Which posts have the most comments?
- What opt-ins / freebies have been downloaded the most?
- What problems are readers emailing you about the most?
Now, if your most popular posts aren’t in the niche you really want to write about, you just have some work to do. Try to focus on improving the content within your desired niche and seeing if you can get a better response.
A super easy way to get more pageviews is to adjust your title.
Titles are everything. Your title is what gets the reader to click on your article (whether that’s in Google search or on an image in Pinterest). It has to be good.
The two phrases in headlines that are proven to get the most clicks are:
- “will make you”
- “this is why”
This is a fantastic article on how to write more engaging headlines.
What to do once you know what your audience wants
You’ve found their pain point, which is half the battle. Now what? Now, it’s up to you to solve their problem. You can do this in one of two ways:
Become an affiliate for a product that will exactly give your audience a solution to their problem
As an affiliate, you will make a percentage of each sale. If the product is priced high, you could easily make a couple hundred dollars per sale. Not bad, especially considering you didn’t have to create the product. But, the one downside of going this route is you have no control over the product. The product creator could discontinue it if they choose, which leaves you with nothing. Your other option is to:
Create your own product
Since you know your audience better than anyone, you can create a product specifically geared towards what they want.
You’ve already created content that your audience eats up, you’ve shared tons of advice for free via blog posts, newsletters and opt-ins, and you’ve probably shared courses and books that will help them as an affiliate, so you make a small percentage of the sales.
But now it’s your turn to create your very own course designed with your people in mind.
This, my friends, is what separates good bloggers from great ones. Almost every single blogger making tens of thousands of dollars month after month has their own product to sell to their audience (or, they have hundreds of thousands of pageviews each month).
I challenge you today to work on figuring out what your audience specifically wants from you, and then brainstorm product ideas to help them solve their problem.
My very first product is an eBook called The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging. I wrote it in Microsoft Word and use the platform Gumroad to sell it. I wrote an entire post on how to market and sell an eBook. I’m telling you this to encourage you not to be overwhelmed with products. You can write it in Word, have a friend edit it (or read through it yourself multiple times), make your own cover page in Canva, and upload your product to a server such as Gumroad.
My next product is coming out later this summer and I can tell already it’s going to be huge (at least, I hope!!). One of the things I’m doing differently this time around is I’m taking a course on making six figures a year with digital products. It’s called Six Figure Blogger and it’s a game-changer.
One of the reasons I’ve never had a huge launch with a product is I never really understood how to launch a product. I mean, don’t you just create it and then sell it by mentioning it in blog posts?
Well, turns out there’s a very specific process when it comes to creating and launching products. First, you need freebies or opt-ins that relate to your product. A freebie will get the right people in front of your product.
Then, there are all these sequences for doing things. I can’t give away all the details of the course, but trust me, it’s worth it.
Recap: How to be a better blogger
To recap, the only way to be a successful blogger is to truly serve your audience. Yes, there are some bloggers who are super popular and make a ton of money from ads and sponsored posts. While that’s great, it’s a lot harder to get super popular. Most bloggers can do just fine by finding “their people” and giving them what they want. Figure out what they’re problem is (why are they coming to your blog?) and create a solution to that problem.
