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Learning how to sell products and services on your blog is a great way to make regular income from your blog following while also providing them with content or merch that they value. This can be a natural step for successful bloggers, since building audience trust in your opinions and expertise naturally leads to people wanting to follow your recommendations—including what they should spend their money on.
Learn more about ways to earn money from your own expertise or via digital and physical products, and how Squarespace tools can make the process easier.
What services can you sell on a blog?
If you start a blog that focuses on a particular skill set, you may develop a reputation as an expert in that area. This could encourage people to pay for your expertise by hiring you to do a specific job. If you have a Bio Site, you can set up a Tip Jar to help you make additional discretionary income.
For example, a home improvement expert who writes about DIY can leverage blog content as a way of building their client base. If that person posts, say, a particular technique for laying floor tiles, this tells prospective customers that they could be the right person to lay their floor tiles, too.
Avoid the temptation to overtly sell your expertise on your blog (e.g., “10 reasons you should hire me to lay your floor tiles”), as this tells your audience that you’re simply pitching to them for work. That tone is less likely to intrigue readers. Rather, present your blog content as free advice on how to achieve the high standards to which you hold yourself. This positions you as a subject authority, and builds trust in your blog, which is also good for its search engine optimization (SEO). You can ask followers to show their appreciation for sharing your knowledge with an occasional tip, and direct them to a tip jar link.
Selling digital products on your blog
As well as helping you sell your services, the expertise you demonstrate via your blog could also help you to sell digital products related to that expertise. Digital products include things like whitepapers, design templates, and access to courses and classes.
You might not think of yourself as qualified to educate people on your niche, but your monthly visitor numbers may tell you otherwise. If hundreds or thousands of people rely on your blog as a regular source of trusted information, that means you’re giving them information they value. You can leverage your acknowledged expertise as a source of income.
One of the benefits of selling digital products is that you typically don’t have any manufacturing or shipping costs to worry about. The income you make is largely profit, minus anything you spend on digital tools to create your products.
Another benefit is that it’s largely passive income. In other words, you don’t have to actively work on the product itself after creating the content. Simply add it to your blog behind a paywall, like a Squarespace Member Site, then promote it on your blog and social media, and you should soon start to see a turnover from it.
After you’ve come up with some great ideas for digital products, you’ll need a strategy for creating and promoting them. Video classes, for example, aren’t scripted, filmed, edited, and sold overnight. They take research, planning, and time for creating, polishing, and promoting each one. It can be helpful to make a plan for how and when you’ll complete each step.
Learn how to sell digital products on Squarespace
Selling physical products on your blog
When we think of earning a living from selling a blog, we tend to think of services and digital products first, because blogs are platforms where people share their expertise. But blogs are also great places to sell physical products related to the things you write about.
Using the earlier example, a home improvement expert who writes authoritatively about floor tiling could, as well as selling their services and expertise, think about selling products related to tiling on their site. They might use a particular adhesive or grout that they actively endorse, for example. These products can easily be integrated into an online store set up as an additional page on the blog. Some popular bloggers also produce t-shirts, tote bags, buttons, and other custom merch that promotes the blog itself.
You don’t even have to stock the products yourself. If the brands who make the products you wish to sell run affiliate marketing programs, you can make a living by driving your audience to their websites, earning a commission each time they make a purchase through your custom link.
Alternatively, you might want to operate as what’s known as a drop shipper. Drop shipping is an order fulfillment model where you don’t keep the products you sell in stock. Rather, you purchase inventory from a third party each time an order is placed by one of your customers, and the third party ships them directly to the customer.
Whether you choose one—or all—of these ways of selling on your blog, products and services are a great way of driving additional income. If you run a popular blog with a loyal audience, your content could, in fact, become your main source of income.