How to Balance Income, Promotion & Value to Your Readers

This post is aimed at bloggers who wish to make money blogging. If you are somebody who blogs purely for pleasure then you can safely skip this post! A Little while ago Darren Rowse showed us how the addition of the Aweber Lightbox popup to advertise a newsletter on his photography blog drastically increased the signup rate to the newsletter. Many bloggers, including myself, followed suit and found results to match. However the downside is that the change has also met with much resistance around the blogosphere.

The Balance Problem

If you’re blogging for profit, then in one way or another you have to promote something. There are many ways you can do this and some are more subtle than others. You can sell something and write a blog post directly promoting it and this is probably the most in-your-face method but this kind of post will usually turn off your readers unless you find a way to create value from it. For example, earlier this week I promoted the Become a Blogger membership site being run by Yaro Starak. If all I did was write a sales pitch that would have offered no value to the reader but by combining that with an offer that cannot be obtained anywhere else, the post provides it’s own unique value. Still, these kinds of promotions have to be used sparingly. If you wish to sell something to your blog readers, then you need to keep your blog readers! If your promotional efforts cause them to unsubscribe then you can hurt your bottom line.

With any action that you take you have to balance two factors:

• How does this action increase my revenue?
• How does this action provide value to my readers?

If you are doing something that hurts your readership you have to calculate how much revenue is lost from that damage vs how much revenue is gained from the action and then you can determine whether or not it is worth taking the action.

Revenue + Value = Win / Win

The ideal situation is to provide value to your readers in a way that still generates revenue. That is the essence of a profitable blog and also the basis on which many freebies are made. Your overall blog should provide value to your readers otherwise why read it in the first place? But your overall blog also needs to generate some revenue otherwise why spend the time on it? Again – I’m concentrating here purely on blogs that are designed to make a profit.

Now within that broad perspective you can break that down in everything you do. If you sell a product that product has to provide value to the consumer and for maximum customer satisfaction it would ideally provide more value than the cost. Not all kinds of value have a price tag of course. If you produce an ebook about dating and somebody finds true love with that book, how much is it worth? You can’t really put a figure on that but you can understand that the book has a value that consumers will pay for.

Now as bloggers, creating our own products is certainly an effective way to monetize but it is often thought of as an advanced strategy and many people are simply not comfortable with direct selling at the beginning. That’s cool though as there are lots of other ways to monetize and a great way is by giving away free information that drops in affiliate links. I do this all the time everywhere – in my blog posts, in every product I produce, in my Bloggers Bible lessons, in short – everywhere.

This model is different from the paid product because people can get the value without generating any revenue for you. You only make money if somebody goes on to buy something that you are promoting in the midst of your free information. This is great for the consumer because they are not forced to buy anything if they don’t want to but the results for you can be mixed – some promotions work better than others. For instance, I have a large number of people subscribe to the free lessons on my Traffic Rush course and the upsell is the paid version. The free lessons provide the value but I only make money if somebody buys the paid version and the percentage of people who do that are lower than I would like.

Another way to make money that is even more subtle is to use some kind of on-page monetization such as contextual ads. Readers can get your free information and you get paid if they click on an ad – the reader doesn’t have to buy anything and you still get paid.

Subject / Price is Irrelevant to Promotion

Whatever model you are using to make money, you have to promote your efforts. If you’re running contextual ads on your blog in a site-wise manner then your promotional efforts really boils down to just driving traffic to your blog but when using something a little more direct – something that encourages your reader to buy something, to get the best results you need to actively promote your material.

Here’s the thing – many readers resist promotion of any kind and the subject of the promotion is irrelevant. At the beginning of the post I mentioned the resistance towards the popup – the resistance here is to the popup itself, not necessarily to the content. You could be promoting world peace in your popup but if somebody doesn’t like it then it makes no difference! If you are using some kind of freebie to promote a paid product then you have two layers of promotion to deal with – the freebie itself has to effectively promote the paid product and then you have to promote the freebie!

The trouble is that people come to the Internet seeking information and the reality is that nobody wants to be sold to, or only very rarely. As an Internet marketer you need to be prepared to deal with this resistance. If you shy away from any activity that could upset people you will never make any money! The key is finding that balance.

About a month ago Lynn Terry published a great post about what she calls Apology Marketing – where marketers are afraid to market their products and always apologise for it. When I read it, I saw myself a year ago in that post! A year ago, I wasn’t making any money :-)

Not All Blog Readers Are Your Customers

Here is another point to consider when thinking about promotion… As I said there will always be some people who hate certain promotional efforts (such as a popup) regardless of what is being promoted. There will be people who hate long-form sales letters (I do!), there will be people who hate sales pitches in emails. But here is the question – are those people going to be your customers?

I am a fan of Yaro Starak and his products but I don’t like the sales letters he uses. If that was the only promotional vehicle he used I would never have bought any of his products. I also dislike being pitched in emails and I have now unsubscribed to every single newsletter I have ever subscribed to because the pitches just piss me off. But the truth is that I am never going to buy something on the strength of a sales letter and neither am I going to buy something from an email sales pitch. Those people who lost me as an email subscriber did not lose a customer!

I spend a ton of money on the Internet and I buy lots of Internet marketing products but if you want to sell to me you have to find another way of reaching me as those methods won’t work. And so it is with your blog. If you lose a few subscribers because they object to some promotional method you are using ask yourself if you have lost a customer. This may sound harsh but if you are blogging to make money then you have to consider the benefits for your readers AND for you.

You already provide a ton of information for free – your blog archives are full of free posts. If you are giving away a freebie then that is more free information that you are giving away. As long as you continue to provide genuine value to your readers then you don’t need to feel guilty about making money out of some of them! Those people who boycott you because you dared to offer them something that provided them with even more value are not your loss.

Some Numbers to Play With

So how much promotion is too much? If you write a blog and every blog post is a thinly disguised sales pitch – that is too much. I would go as far as to say that every post you write should provide value BOTH to your readers AND for you – at the very minimum some links to earlier posts to increase internal linkage and page views. If you can drop in an affiliate link or a link to a freebie then go ahead as nobody is forcing your reader to click the links.

What about email lists? Josh Spaulding recently wrote a report called New Age Email Marketing (yes that is an affiliate link!) which was about how to profit from an email list. In that report he actually gives a ratio to follow and suggests that every third or forth email should be a pitch and the ones in between should be content. While I can see this might be good advice for somebody who is used to doing just pitch, pitch, pitch, I don’t like that kind of approach myself and wouldn’t recommend it for bloggers.

Coming back to the earlier equation of revenue + value = win/win, what you should aim to do is provide value in everything you do - every blog post, every email, every page of an ebook and so on. When you do this, promote freely. For example, my blogging course the Bloggers Bible is an example of the ‘freebie monetized with affiliate links’ model. It is free to get the lessons and every single one provides value but I also promote something in quite a lot of them – probably around half and the ones where I don’t promote anything is not because I don’t want to but simply because there wasn’t anything suitable that I wanted to recommend. Some people will think to themselves, “I don’t believe it, Caroline has only written this free course to make money!” Well duh :-) And yes some people will unsubscribe but those people are not my customers – they are just people costing me money in Aweber subscription fees so I lose nothing when they unsubscribe.

Similarly, I now promote this course on every page of the blog. When you get to the bottom of this post you’ll see a signup form for it and of course if you have visited the website directly you’ll most likely see the popup I have been talking about. In short, every single blog post on this blog promotes the Bloggers Bible and many of them promote something else too. I don’t have a problem with this because I know that every single post I write provides some kind of value.

Will that please everybody? No it won’t. There will always be people who object to such promotions and efforts to generate an income but I know that those people are what we call ‘freebie-seekers’, they want everything to be completely free. None of us have the time to serve the wishes of these people!

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