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These days, everyone is looking for a way to make money online. From freelancing work to creating videos to surveys, there are quite a few ways to do so. But what about starting a blog?
Getting into blogging might seem easy, but there’s quite a bit more to it than you may expect. Many a successful blogger won’t see a cent from their work, but most people don’t do the research and take the difficult steps necessary to monetize their blog and generate a profit.
Now What About the Profit
According to Oberlo statistics, on average, the typical profit margin is 200 percent.
For pricing strategy, you can approach it in two ways. First, match the price with the product quality so that you can increase the profit margin with high-quality products. Second, price your product based on the advertising cost spent. For instance, if it costs $15 to receive one order, the product should be priced beyond it to make a profit.
However, of course, dropshipping also comes with disadvantages.
Among them is the limited control you have, as the store owner, over how the orders are shipped, meaning that you must rely on the wholesaler to process, fulfill, and ship each order. Sometimes, there can be some issues, which should be able to be solved with good communication with the supplier.
Dropshipping business relies heavily on advertising, such as Facebook and Instagram ads, as it depends on “impulse buying” rather than keyword search on Google and other search engines. However, the profit margin would offset this promotion cost.
Another con of dropshipping business is the limited branding opportunity. When you open a box sent from a “regular” non-dropshipping e-commerce store, more likely you’d see a card box with its logo and slogan. Inside, you’d find flyers, vouchers, and coupons for future purchases. These branding opportunities aren’t available with the dropshipping model. Or, at least, it’s limited.
Dropshipping Business Models
In general, there are three ways to approach a dropshipping online business model.
1. Use WordPress and e-commerce plugins, like WooCommerce, Ecwid, and Jigoshop.
Using WP e-commerce plugin only would require you to upload product images and specifications one-by-one, which can be time-consuming when you intend to sell hundreds or thousands of products. The plugin doesn’t come with any feature that a dropshipping business would require to run smoothly.
Also, the WP theme must be tweaked to ensure it fits the dropshipping model. It’s probably the most common way to sell online, but not the most practical way.
2. Use WordPress, WooCommerce, and dropshipping plugins, like AliDropship, WooDropship, and Ezusy.
Using any of these dropshipping plugins with WooCommerce installed on a WP site is a lifesaver. You can upload the images, and product specs with more ease and these plugins come with conveniences like search and import, auto updating, ePacket shipping filter, pricing automation, order tracking, product customization, and others.
However, since WooCommerce and the dropshipping plugin are installed on your standalone WP site, you need to maintain the e-commerce store by yourself, including the security issue. Many people prefer using dropshipping plugins like these, due to its convenience.
3. Use Shopify and Oberlo dropshipping app.
Using Shopify platform frees you from worrying about the security issue, and it only takes a few minutes from registration to start your e-commerce store. Its comprehensive features include built-in themes, unlimited bandwidth, secure site, fraud analysis, discount codes, and others.
Installing Oberlo to the Shopify stores dramatically increase the features, particularly those for dropshipping, such as ease in importing product images and specifications, fulfill orders, inventory and price auto updating, product customization, shipment tracking, switch suppliers with the best price, filter products with ePacket, and more. Both Shopify and Oberlo can be tried for free.
After deciding how you’d want to develop your dropshipping e-commerce store and have it ready, you can start considering which products to sell. Most drop shippers use AliExpress as the source of products for its convenience, wide array of products, and low prices.
If you use WooCommerce and one of its dropshipping plugins, most likely it already comes with AliExpress functionality. The same also with Shopify and Oberlo, which allows you to choose AliExpress vendors’ products quickly and have them uploaded immediately. It’s recommended to buy several samples from several suppliers, to ensure you’re satisfied with the quality of the products and the services provided.
With Oberlo installed on your Shopify store, the process of scouting for products is even simpler. Thousands of pre-vetted products are already there in the Oberlo Products, which is part of the dashboard.
What You’d Want From a Method to Monetize Your Blog
So if all of those methods are too unreliable, what’s your other option?
Let’s pretend you can wave a magic wand and create the perfect product. I don’t know about you, but this is what mine would look like:
- Guaranteed to be loved by my audience.
- Brings them back for more again and again.
- Lets you keep 100% of the profits.
- Doesn’t rely on any platform that isn’t owned by you (no Facebook, Amazon, or Google).
Does this kind of product exist?
Yup.
And I’m going to show you how to create it. Let’s dive in.
Why Creating Your Own Product Is the Best Way to Monetize Your Blog
What if you didn’t have to pay Amazon 96% of every purchase your site visitors make? What if instead, 100% of the profits went straight to you?
That’s what happens when you sell your own product.
And really, the process of selling your own product isn’t much more complicated than selling an affiliate offer.
In fact, the process of selling pretty much anything online is almost the same no matter what you’re selling. It just takes three steps: Attract, Trust, and Monetize. We call this the “ATM method” — bad acronym, great method.
- Attract: You have to find a way to attract people to your site.
- Build Trust: You have to build up enough trust that people are willing to give you money. With a blog, you do this with content.
- Monetize: You offer them products.
This process applies to every company — from Starbucks, to Amazon, to someone selling produce outside of a pyramid in 2000 B.C.
Sometimes the process happens in five minutes. Sometimes it takes five years. It just depends on the product you’re selling.
Let’s think about your blog: You’ve already done the hard work of attracting people, so the first step is done.
Now you have to build trust. With affiliate marketing, Amazon has the trust. People buy from them every day, so if you recommend a product on their site, it’s a no-brainer to buy from them.
If you want to make money blogging by selling your own product, you have to build your own trust.
Building trust takes a bit of time and consistency, but it’s not difficult. And once you do it, your monetization opportunities open up big time:
- You’ll get to keep your profits because you sell directly to your own audience.
- When people trust you, they’ll tell you what they want to buy, so you know what products to sell.
- Your income will be much more reliable because it depends on thousands of people, not one big corporation that could shut you down at any second.
- When people trust you, they make bigger purchases and will buy from you again and again.
And by the way, you can sell almost any kind of product. It could be coaching, freelance writing, a digital product like a course or eBook, a physical product, a membership site, or a mastermind group.
In fact, one of our Growth University students, Elena Favilli, used the exact process we’re about to show you to rake in more than $675,000 pre-selling a storybook for young girls.
Don’t think you have the chops to create your own product?
Try asking yourself this question:
Could you spend five hours on a Zoom call answering questions about the topic of your choice?
If the answer is yes, you can probably create your own product.
In fact, that Zoom call could probably be the product. You’d just have to transcribe it, chop it up into smaller sections, and repurpose it as a course, eBook, or outline of a freelance or coaching package.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a quick look at the overview of the process we’ll use to find your specific “Perfect Product”.
Here’s a Quick Overview of the 5-Part, Perfect Product System You Can Use to Monetize Your Blog
- Step 1: Build an Audience via Email.
We’ll show you why email is the best platform for building a valuable audience and how to optimize your blog to build your email list over time.
- Step 2: Build Trust with Regular Content.
You’ll learn what kind of content to send to your list to build trust without spending hours writing.
- Step 3: Find Your Big Product Idea.
Your blog and content analytics (such as WordPress blog plugins) have all the information you need to create a list of great product ideas. We’ll show you our system for where to look and how to come up with your own unique product to sell.
- Step 4: Validate and Pre-Sell Your Product.
We’ll give you our step-by-step system to find a select group of engaged email subscribers who will give you feedback on your product. We’ll even show you how to collect pre-orders before your product is built.
- Step 5: Create and Launch Your Product.
The final step is creating your product and launching it to your entire audience. We’ll walk you through the exact email sequence you need to make this a success.
You’ve already attracted a steady stream of blog traffic to your site. This system will help you turn it into a profitable audience. Let’s jump into Step 1.
Step 1: Build an Audience via Email
Email is the ultimate platform for building an audience.
Why?
You own the interaction.
It doesn’t matter if Google’s search engine algorithm changes or Facebook Ad costs skyrocket. If you have an email list, you can still talk to your subscribers (and make money online).
Plus, email helps you sell to more customers than any other method.
With affiliate marketing or Google ads, someone leaves your site to make a purchase and you never see them again. If you have an eCommerce store, 1% of your site visitors will buy, and the rest disappear.
But if you set up your website right, you can convert a full 10% of your visitors to email subscribers day in and day out. Then you can keep in contact with them until they’re ready to buy, and you can even sell them more products after the initial sale so your customer value goes way up.
There are just three steps to building a profitable email list:
- Turn your homepage into an “upside down” sales funnel that’s optimized for opt-ins.
- Add content upgrades for your five most popular blogs.
- Create an exit-intent popup for all your blogs.
Together, that’s enough to get your site converting visitors to leads at about 10%.
So if your site gets 10k unique visits per month, you’re talking about 1,000 new subscribers.
Use an “Upside Down” Homepage
Your homepage should use an “Upside-Down” design to attract the max number of sign ups.
We did this for Growth Tools and increased homepage signups by 86%.
Here’s how you can do it too.
Start by using a very direct CTA at the top of the page, and ask visitors to sign up for your email list. Then add social proof, tell your visitors a bit about your story, and ask for their email again. You can include a basic navigation at the top of the page, but the main navigation should be in your footer so it doesn’t distract visitors from signing up to your email list.
That’s why the page is called “upside down.” You put the menu in the footer and ask for action right away — the exact opposite of what you’ll see on most sites.
What You’d Want From a Method to Monetize Your Blog
So if all of those methods are too unreliable, what’s your other option?
Let’s pretend you can wave a magic wand and create the perfect product. I don’t know about you, but this is what mine would look like:
- Guaranteed to be loved by my audience.
- Brings them back for more again and again.
- Lets you keep 100% of the profits.
- Doesn’t rely on any platform that isn’t owned by you (no Facebook, Amazon, or Google).
Does this kind of product exist?
Yup.
And I’m going to show you how to create it. Let’s dive in.
Why Creating Your Own Product Is the Best Way to Monetize Your Blog
What if you didn’t have to pay Amazon 96% of every purchase your site visitors make? What if instead, 100% of the profits went straight to you?
That’s what happens when you sell your own product.
And really, the process of selling your own product isn’t much more complicated than selling an affiliate offer.
In fact, the process of selling pretty much anything online is almost the same no matter what you’re selling. It just takes three steps: Attract, Trust, and Monetize. We call this the “ATM method” — bad acronym, great method.
- Attract: You have to find a way to attract people to your site.
- Build Trust: You have to build up enough trust that people are willing to give you money. With a blog, you do this with content.
- Monetize: You offer them products.
This process applies to every company — from Starbucks, to Amazon, to someone selling produce outside of a pyramid in 2000 B.C.
Sometimes the process happens in five minutes. Sometimes it takes five years. It just depends on the product you’re selling.
Let’s think about your blog: You’ve already done the hard work of attracting people, so the first step is done.
Now you have to build trust. With affiliate marketing, Amazon has the trust. People buy from them every day, so if you recommend a product on their site, it’s a no-brainer to buy from them.
If you want to make money blogging by selling your own product, you have to build your own trust.
Building trust takes a bit of time and consistency, but it’s not difficult. And once you do it, your monetization opportunities open up big time:
- You’ll get to keep your profits because you sell directly to your own audience.
- When people trust you, they’ll tell you what they want to buy, so you know what products to sell.
- Your income will be much more reliable because it depends on thousands of people, not one big corporation that could shut you down at any second.
- When people trust you, they make bigger purchases and will buy from you again and again.
And by the way, you can sell almost any kind of product. It could be coaching, freelance writing, a digital product like a course or eBook, a physical product, a membership site, or a mastermind group.
In fact, one of our Growth University students, Elena Favilli, used the exact process we’re about to show you to rake in more than $675,000 pre-selling a storybook for young girls.
Don’t think you have the chops to create your own product?
Try asking yourself this question:
Could you spend five hours on a Zoom call answering questions about the topic of your choice?
If the answer is yes, you can probably create your own product.
In fact, that Zoom call could probably be the product. You’d just have to transcribe it, chop it up into smaller sections, and repurpose it as a course, eBook, or outline of a freelance or coaching package.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a quick look at the overview of the process we’ll use to find your specific “Perfect Product”.
Here’s a Quick Overview of the 5-Part, Perfect Product System You Can Use to Monetize Your Blog
- Step 1: Build an Audience via Email.
We’ll show you why email is the best platform for building a valuable audience and how to optimize your blog to build your email list over time.
- Step 2: Build Trust with Regular Content.
You’ll learn what kind of content to send to your list to build trust without spending hours writing.
- Step 3: Find Your Big Product Idea.
Your blog and content analytics (such as WordPress blog plugins) have all the information you need to create a list of great product ideas. We’ll show you our system for where to look and how to come up with your own unique product to sell.
- Step 4: Validate and Pre-Sell Your Product.
We’ll give you our step-by-step system to find a select group of engaged email subscribers who will give you feedback on your product. We’ll even show you how to collect pre-orders before your product is built.
- Step 5: Create and Launch Your Product.
The final step is creating your product and launching it to your entire audience. We’ll walk you through the exact email sequence you need to make this a success.
You’ve already attracted a steady stream of blog traffic to your site. This system will help you turn it into a profitable audience. Let’s jump into Step 1.
Step 1: Build an Audience via Email
Email is the ultimate platform for building an audience.
Why?
You own the interaction.
It doesn’t matter if Google’s search engine algorithm changes or Facebook Ad costs skyrocket. If you have an email list, you can still talk to your subscribers (and make money online).
Plus, email helps you sell to more customers than any other method.
With affiliate marketing or Google ads, someone leaves your site to make a purchase and you never see them again. If you have an eCommerce store, 1% of your site visitors will buy, and the rest disappear.
But if you set up your website right, you can convert a full 10% of your visitors to email subscribers day in and day out. Then you can keep in contact with them until they’re ready to buy, and you can even sell them more products after the initial sale so your customer value goes way up.
There are just three steps to building a profitable email list:
- Turn your homepage into an “upside down” sales funnel that’s optimized for opt-ins.
- Add content upgrades for your five most popular blogs.
- Create an exit-intent popup for all your blogs.
Together, that’s enough to get your site converting visitors to leads at about 10%.
So if your site gets 10k unique visits per month, you’re talking about 1,000 new subscribers.
Use an “Upside Down” Homepage
Your homepage should use an “Upside-Down” design to attract the max number of sign ups.
We did this for Growth Tools and increased homepage signups by 86%.
Here’s how you can do it too.
Start by using a very direct CTA at the top of the page, and ask visitors to sign up for your email list. Then add social proof, tell your visitors a bit about your story, and ask for their email again. You can include a basic navigation at the top of the page, but the main navigation should be in your footer so it doesn’t distract visitors from signing up to your email list.
That’s why the page is called “upside down.” You put the menu in the footer and ask for action right away — the exact opposite of what you’ll see on most sites.
Now you’ve understood the process of developing an e-commerce store on your blog, it’s time for action. With this article as a starting point, carefully analyze the pros and cons of each option. Many people make a good income from selling online with their own e-commerce dropshipping store. And one of them could be you.
Beyond dropshipping: what next?
Solely relying on dropshipping as a revenue stream, while easy and profitable, isn’t always viable in the long-term.
As a small enterprise, you will find yourself in price wars with your competitors, all vying to offer the lowest price on the market.
And as your side hustle grows, you might find yourself yearning for a bigger piece of the pie.
Consequently, you should start thinking about diversifying your offering further. What can you offer your followers that no-one else can?
Take a look at your blog: why do people return to your blog time and again? Is there a way you can monetize your niche by creating a new product or service?
For example, let’s say you’re a dog blogger specializing in Golden Retrievers.
Why not create an online course teaching new owners how to train their new puppy?
Alternatively, if you’re a mummy blogger, you could reach out to an apparel print company and create a line of branded baby clothing.
The possibilities are endless if you really want to make money with dropshipping. Just think outside the box and come up with great ideas.
Don’t neglect your dropshipping though.
It still provides you with valuable income, and you can use it to market test potential products before sinking capital into it.
Dropshipping and Facebook is a strong combination that bloggers can jump on to make real money.
Follow the tips above to create a dropshipping sideline powered by Facebook that will generate you revenue for time to come.
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