How To Sell Products On Your Blog

This post all about selling products from your blog. In order to follow the process below, you will first need to register and install your blog.

Click here for my free guide to starting your blog (opens in a new tab).

Selling products on your blog is one of the absolute best ways to turn your loyal audience into a consistent revenue stream. In fact, many of my readers set out to start their blogs specifically for the purpose of marketing and selling a product or service.

In this post, I will discuss how to use your blog to sell products. Whether you are selling an existing product of your own or you are using your blog as a hub to sell a product for a company in exchange for a referral fee, I recommend that all bloggers have some kind of product offering.

Whether you have a brand new blog or have already been blogging for years, you might be surprised at the revenue potential of selling products on your blog. Stop overlooking the money making potential of using your blog to sell products, and read on to learn about how simple it can be.

The Keys to Selling Products On Your Blog: Audience and Conversion Rate

The two biggest factors in how successful you can be with offering products on your blog are the size of your audience and the number of your readers that you are able to convert into paying customers (also referred to as your conversion rate). First, we will discuss how easy growing your audience can be.

Building Your Audience Means More Potential Customers

Building a bigger audience is something that every blogger should be focused on at all times. Of course, the best way to build your audience is through quality content that adds real value to the lives of your readers, and of course creating content that is easily shared among people always helps expand the potential visibility of your blog.

This is why I recommend that my readers blog about something that they are already passionate about. Being passionate about a topic makes it more likely that your readers will connect with your content, and it also helps to ensure that you will maintain interest in regularly updating your blog.

When you grow the audience of people who regularly read your blog, you also are growing your potential customer base. The more eyes that you are able to get on your blog, the more potential purchases you will be able to drive. Besides growing your audience, you should also be mindful of the percentage of them you are turning into customers.

Increase Your Conversion Rates by Keeping It Relevant

Increasing the rate of your readers that you convert into purchasers can be tricky, but the best approach is to present a real value proposition with the products you are selling. Even if you create engaging, shareable content that your readers love, offering them a product that has little to nothing to do with what your blog is about is an almost surefire route to failure.

Instead, you should focus your product offerings around things that tie in directly to your blog. If you decided to launch a blog that gives your readers advice or recommendations, find a way to drive your customers towards the products or service that you recommend in your writing. This not only makes your sales pitch seamless, it also makes it much more likely that your readers will take you up on it.

Selling Your Own Products On Your Blog: Turning Readers Into Customers

Many bloggers already have a product that they are looking to sell. This could be something as simple as selling an e-book that you have written, or perhaps selling your time as a consultant or other type of expert within your field.

I have seen many bloggers get overzealous when selling products they own themselves, to the point that they neglect the free portions of their blog that are intended to draw their customers in. My advice is to never lose sight of what brings your readers to you in the first place: excellent content.

After all, the best advertising for any product or service is to give your potential customers a taste of what you have to offer. And there is no better way to do this then in showing your expertise through the blog posts you make available for everyone to read. If you forget this point, you might find that you lose readers before you even have a chance to turn them into customers!

No matter what type of product you are offering, you can leverage your audience into lots of sales by following my advice below.

Don’t Just Sell Products, Sell Yourself

If you are trying to convince a customer to pay you for a product or for your time, showing them a clear example and explaining how this will make their life easier or more fulfilling is an absolute necessity.

Like it or not, we all encounter dozens of advertising messages each day. Because of this, most people train themselves to filter and ignore empty sales pitches that overpromise and underdeliver.

The good news is that you can separate yourself from the pack by making a well founded case for why your readers should purchase what you are offering. I recommend avoiding trying to come up with the perfect sales pitch, and instead making yourself as relatable as possible to your readers. People are more likely to buy from a trusted source, so authenticity is absolutely vital.

Selling Someone Else’s Products On Your Blog

Pointing your readers towards products being offered somewhere else can be extremely lucrative. Typically the company selling the products that you refer customers to will give you a fee in exchange for referring the customer to them. Best of all, you do not have to worry about taking on any of the risk in terms of holding the products.

Rates vary quite a bit depending on the specific product or service, so I always recommend reviewing multiple options so that you can be sure you are going with the most competitive option available. Most e-commerce sites will pay more for bloggers who send them the most customers, so I recommend not getting discouraged if you are not seeing really high conversions in the beginning.

In order to sell as many products as possible I also recommend narrowing your focus to goods and services that directly tie in to what you write about in your blog. One great way to do this is to partner with a major online marketplace, such as Amazon.

Amazon offers a simple referral program that allows you to refer your readers to their products in exchange for a percentage of what your readers spend. Their program is called Amazon Associates.

I recommend Amazon Associates because of the incredible catalog of items that their marketplace has to offer. If you are interested in referring your customers to buy a specific product, odds are that Amazon already has it stocked on their virtual shelves. This also means that you can focus on recommending products that you truly believe in, which I will discuss further below.

Stand Behind Your Recommendations

This point is one that I can almost not stress enough: only recommend products or services that you believe in. There is no value in having your readers associate you and your blog with a product or service that does not work as advertised, so as you begin to offer products on your blog, be sure that you are genuinely recommending the products that you refer your readers to.

Of course, it might be tempting to recommend the product that provides you with the best commission rate, regardless of quality. However, I always advise my readers that there is nothing worth the trade off of staking your reputation behind a bad product.

How To Process Payments

Once you decide to begin selling products on your blog, you will need to make sure that you have a way to process payments from your customers. The simplest way that I have found to process payments on your blog is through the WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart.

This simple to use tool makes it simple for your customers to pay you quickly and securely. Collecting payments is often one of the biggest hurdles for bloggers to begin selling products, and this tool makes it incredibly easy to overcome that and begin collecting money from your readers.

Overall, I strongly recommend that you begin selling products on your blog, and I hope that this guide demonstrates just how easy and profitable it can be.