My clients are great at the bit about blogging for fun. They absolutely love the work they are doing with their website and truly enjoy serving their audience. Some have been putting in hours building their sites for years, with little to no income to show for their effort. That profit bit is where they often get stuck, and that’s the part I can help with.
Asheville WordCamp
Since WordPress is the most popular platform being used to create niche websites, I’m presenting at WordCamp in Asheville. This will give me an opportunity to show a room full of bloggers how they can serve their audiences better by developing a sustainable business around the work they are doing.
The War of Art
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend picking up The War of Art. In this book, you’ll learn about how building a business around your art is the best way to serve your audience. To summarize the book, one of the core ideas suggest that time spent earning a living and not creating art is an atrocity. Essentially, you are not sharing your gifts with the world when you are doing something else to pay the bills at the expense of creating your art.
This is one of the ideas that I try to get across to so many bloggers and other people with an audience online. They are so scared to be perceived as a “pushy salesperson” that they just avoid selling at the expense of better serving their audience. That’s why I help people learn to sell without selling out.
You see, offers that truly serve your audience are received as ways to support your work and trade value for value. On the other hand, promoting products and services that do not serve your audience erodes the trust you have built and drives your followers away.
As an example of this, I launched my first conference earlier this year - The Raleigh SEO Meetup Conference (it’s a long name, but it worked for the first year). This was an event that allowed me to monetize the audience attending Raleigh SEO Meetup events. It was a unique offer that could be seen as a content upgrade from the usual monthly meetings offered by this group. Since the typical monthly meeting costs $0.00, it was quite a jump to ask for $100 or more to attend this event. However, I had already shown what value I could offer with the free product - and my audience trusted that the value would justify the additional cost. This is because they have already begun to know, like, and trust me.
What is your audience already asking for?
In my talk at the WordCamp in Asheville, I delve into these same topics and ask the audience to consider ways they can ask their audience to trust them to provide value. That’s exactly what you should do in your own business.
Carefully consider the ways you already offer value to your audience, then think about how you could ask them to pay for more of that. If you’re having trouble thinking of ways to earn money with your website, take a look at the list of 21 ways to earn money with your website.
