There are different ways to monetize a successful blog with a lot of traffic. You can offer premium services or membership plans, along with special contents that are valuable to the readers. You can also rely on advertising revenue, especially now that there are more ad networks to capitalize.
For most blog owners, however, merchandising and selling products directly to readers are the two most popular ways of monetizing a blog. Before you get started with selling your own products and pivoting your blog towards the ecommerce market, here are some of the tips and tricks you need to know.
Keep the Blog Untouched
WordPress is a great blogging platform for its flexibility. When you need to offer membership plans or sell products to the audience, you can simply install plugins and make small changes to the layout. Thanks to plugins such as WooCommerce, setting up an online store alongside your blog is easier than ever.
That said, the best approach to take when you have an already established blog and you want to enter the ecommerce market is by keeping the blog untouched. Instead of adding a Shop section to the site, you basically have two options to consider.
The first one is using a subdomain and making small adjustments to the layout so that the Shop part of your site is slightly different than the main blog. The second and perhaps more effective option is to use existing ecommerce platforms to your advantage. Setting up an online store using Shopify is the way to go. Not only will you get all the features you need, you also get extra tools to help you easily sell on Amazon and other platforms.
Content First
The second challenge you need to overcome is maintaining balance between delivering quality contents and pushing your products to the audience. A lot of successful blogs ended up losing the majority of their audience because they push their products too bluntly.
Today is the era of soft-selling. Viewers will still buy your merchandise and products if they like them, and you only need to lightly push the products to potential customers. Just because you have thousands of regular readers, doesn’t mean all of them will instantly convert and become paying customers.
Keep Your Products Relevant
The biggest key to success when you are pivoting from a simple blog to an ecommerce entity is relevance. In order to generate sales as soon as you get started, you want to keep the products (and services) you offer as relevant as possible to the content of your blog.
High relevance means you don’t have to invest a lot in converting readers to customers. You will also find continuing with content marketing campaigns and other digital marketing efforts to be much easier to do when your products are in line with the regular content you produce.
Keep these tips in mind and you will find pivoting to the ecommerce market to be as easy as 1-2-3. Despite the thousands of viewers your blog generates, you still need to invest enough time and energy towards selling the products and services you offer.