Make Money From Blogs With No Readers

I’ve been reading a lot recently how blogs are essentially ‘nothing without readers’. Strictly speaking, this is true in a sense. I mean, what is the point of blogging if your not blogging to anyone? Well, if your not looking to make money online, then there are lots of reasons - keeping track of your life, sharing things with family and friends etc. Yet if you are blogging to make money, readers should be your biggest concern right? Well…not necessarily

So lets say you have a blog that you post on often, however your readers are dwindling - it seems no-one wants to stay up to date your your posts and your reader count hovering around the zero mark. You think your posts are up to scratch, and you’ve been posting for a while now, but for some reason you cant bring people in. At this point in the game you would normally have three options - keep posting and promoting the site, sell the site for profit, or slowly come to a halt with posting on the site and let it slide down the google pit, waiting for the lions to devour your site. Well, selling the site would be a good way to make a quick bit of cash, but then if you wanted to carry on blogging at all you would have to start all over again - new domain, new layout etc. So why not choose ’secret option 4′, which will allow you to make money, keep the site, and also bring in a host of visitors. So how do we do this? Simple - we create a product.

Already I can hear people groaning - the suspected work you will have to put in to actually create a worthwhile product to sell, all the reading and researching you will have to do etc. Yet what you fail to realise, is that all your work is already done for you. Everything you need, you have already pre-written in your blog. Now if no-one is reading your blog (or maybe a few people), and you have been posting a lot of useful tips and facts, why not collect together a selection of your posts and turn this into an eBook that you can sell. You might have to do a little bit of editing to make sure that it make sense for a book (you cant write in a book about your ‘last post’ for example), but this detail is minor. Split each ‘post’ into a chapter, slap on a contents page, maybe a front cover if you feel so inclined, and your almost ready to sell.

See, selling the eBook and keeping the website alive fill 2 steps of ’secret option 4′, but what about bringing people back to your site? Well, first things first, you will need to remove at least half of the posts relating to the eBook on your blog. People won’t be happy if they have just paid for all this information and then can find it all on your blog for free. Once done, we want to strategically place links within the eBook back to your blog. These could simply be links saying ‘content by race for a million’, or you could add little links at the bottom of each ‘chapter’ saying something along the lines of ‘if you have enjoyed what you have read…’. We see them at the bottom of a lot of peoples blog posts, so why not include it in your chapters? After creating these links - proofread, and then its time to make some profit off of your currently dead blog.

Now where do we sell the book? Well really it depends on your niche, and there are certain places dedicated to each niche where you can advertise the product. You could try Sitepoint, the digital point forums or the warrior forums if its related to making money online, blogging etc. If its quite unique, you might want to try advertising in some specialist forums, or even try eBay. There is always a market for anything offered, so if you search hard enough you’ll be able to find a place to sell it. It doesn’t even have to sell for a lot - I mean, its not ‘cost’ you anything to create the eBook, you’ve simply taken things that you have already written about and published them!

Now this method isn’t restricted to ‘dead’ blogs, you can also use it on established blogs with older posts (or recent posts if your feeling bold!). Its very unlikely that people who are just finding your blog will go through your back catalog all the way to the start, so offering a ‘condensed’ and ‘concise’ selection of posts that would provide as a good guide (without repeating yourself in your blog) is surely a good thing for any of your readers - and especially people who don’t know about your blog!

An alternative to selling the information is, but not limited to, offer it as a ‘free report’ for subscribers to your blog. Creating an eBook based on your old posts is useful in many ways, not just for selling. Also, you wouldn’t have to remove any posts on your blog because you aren’t offering it as a ‘paid for’ product.

What do you guys think about it? Do you think its a good idea, or do you think you would be cheating people out of their money (if your selling it). Let me know, as always, I’m extremely interested in your views!

Dan