Last week I sent out an email asking my readers to send over any questions they have for me. I’d like to do one of these features more regularly – maybe monthly or quarterly – so if you have any burning questions you’d like me to answer in the next one, you can email them to mandy@agirlsgottaeat.net.
Q: Can you give some tips on figuring out what digital products to sell on your blog? I have a dog-related blog and I am having some difficulty figuring out what digital product would go well with my content.
Your blog is great! It’s a super-specific niche with helpful and informative content, which are some of the most crucial ingredients for a money-making blog. As far as digital products, I would start by evaluating any questions, comments, or feedback you’ve received from your audience. Oftentimes, this information is enough to figure out where your audience is looking for help and what their biggest pain points are. You can also do this by looking through your analytics and the search terms that bring people to your site. You’ll likely notice some trends – are you getting lots of searches for the same type of question or phrase? If so, that’s one area you’ll want to look into how you can help people through paid products or services.
That’s my general answer, but having looked through your blog, here are my specific suggestions for monetization right now besides digital products:
- Banner ads – You could easily sign up for Google Adsense and start placing ads on your site for revenue. You don’t have to do it forever, but whenever I start a new site I always do this to at least see if I can bring in a little bit of coin.
- Affiliate links – Your product reviews should DEFINITELY have affiliate links to the products in them. Lots of brands have their own affiliate program (check by Googling “brand name + affiliate” to see if anything comes up). If the brand doesn’t have one, sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program and link to the Amazon listing for the product. They don’t have the greatest payouts, but it’s a good backup when the actual company doesn’t have their own program. Plus, you’ll make money off any other Amazon purchases they make. Here’s my post on affiliate marketing for beginners.
- Print-On-Demand – Since your site is about a specific breed of dog, my top recommendation if you want to sell your own products would be to start a print-on-demand store selling Malinois-themed merch. As I’m sure you know, people are VERY passionate about their pets and breeds so there’s great money to be had by selling breed-specific products like t-shirts, mugs, gifts, etc. I just searched Malinois on Creative Fabrica and found several graphics you could use to create designs in Canva (or hire someone on Fiverr to create a batch of designs if you don’t like designing). Since your blog is on WordPress you can install the WooCommerce plugin to sell right through your site, or you could start an Etsy shop where your products are listed and promote them on your blog. That way you’ll get the benefit of Etsy’s traffic as well as traffic from your site. Here are all of my posts on print-on-demand if you’d like to learn more about how it works.
Q: How many Etsy shops do you recommend having?
As many as you want! More realistically, I should say as many as you can handle. If you’re a brand new seller, my recommendation is to start only one shop. Etsy is ultimately a volume game since there are millions of products competing against each other in search, so in the beginning, it’s much easier to gain traction if you have 100 products in one shop rather than 100 products spread across 5 different shops.
Q: Do you still have an Etsy store?
I do! Etsy is still my largest and most reliable source of income.
Q: How long did it take you to reach $500 a month in profits?
I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but I just checked my Etsy stats and it looks like my shop was making multiple sales a day about a year after I started selling printables. This is also around when I started adding print-on-demand posters to my store for my best-selling designs, which I know contributed to a big increase in sales because people now had multiple buying options and it grew my shop volume. A lot of sellers consider 100 listings to be a big milestone for consistent sales, and although there is no guaranteed recipe for any of this, I do know that it definitely helped my sales numbers once my shop had 100+ items.
Q: Now that your shop is established, how many hours a week do you put into all aspects (creating, dealing with orders, uploading pictures to Pinterest, etc)?
I spend about a week out of each month working solely on my shop. It’s easiest for me to block out time in weeks, so one week I’ll work on my shop, the next week I’ll work on blog content, the next week I’ll schedule any meetings, and the last week I’ll do whatever I feel needs my attention the most (my brain reserves the right to derail any of this at any time). My average workweek is anywhere from 20-40 hours depending on how motivated I am, how nice it is outside, whether I’m on my period, how badly I need money at the time, what the moon is doing, how many dishes there are to do, etc.
Q: What sells the most for you – clothing, digital posters, or mugs?
Printable wall art still sells the most for me year-round. During the holiday season when people are buying gifts, mugs and posters definitely sell the most. During the summer, t-shirts and tank tops are my best sellers.
Q: What are your thoughts on starting an email list on Etsy through Aweber?
Do it! I didn’t even realize they had this integration and it sounds simpler/more automated than my method which involves a manual workaround. Thanks for the heads-up because I’m probably going to switch to this.
Q: I just read your BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SELLING ON ETSY and it was a huge help! I went through it in one day and spent the rest of the week working on my store which has 12 products for sale already. Do you plan on making any more ebooks or courses this year?
Great job! And yes, I do! I’m actually working on a new version of both my eBook and course that will combine the contents into one larger manual for beginners. I have another book in the works about online business in general that I’m hoping to also release this year.
Q: I have been trying to figure out a viable side business for several months, and it seems to me that selling on the internet has become so complicated and SEO-driven that it shuts out a lot of people. What advice would you give to someone (me) who has a limited social media presence, no graphic design or SEO/marketing skills, but wants to bring in extra income?
I would tell you to learn the basics of SEO and marketing 🙂 Lots of people get intimidated by it, but it’s less about your technical skills and more about how well you know your ideal customer and what they’re searching for in hopes of finding your product. The only time you can get away without it is if you already have an audience that’s so big and engaged that they’d buy your toenail clippings if you listed them for sale (and if that’s the case you probably have someone managing marketing and SEO for you because they’re still essential to your success). I’ve never had a large social media presence either – most people in my personal life have no idea what I do online because I don’t really promote my businesses where they’d see it. I rely more on SEO because it’s so much easier when search engines can do the work of sending people your way. Check out my SEO posts for a rundown of how it all works. Other than that, if you want to sell products then make sure it’s something you’re genuinely interested in because that makes marketing them 100x easier. If you don’t want to sell products, focus on what you can offer to others through your knowledge and skills and package that into a sellable service.
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