As the third and final post in my Blogging for Money series, I want to steer you all away from the direction of donations, advertising and affiliate programs and towards creating and selling your own content.

Gasp!! But that requires work outside of blogging! Which is totally what I just preached against! Let’s take a breath so y’all can get your panties unwadded…

Creating your own content requires more effort and a definite niche, so I’m not saying it’s for everyone. But I had a nice long chat with my buddy Michael, and he had some amazing thoughts on the subject.

Build a Tribe

By blogging, or “building a tribe,” you’ve made a community of people who are giving you their attention. “In today’s economy,” Michael said,  “attention is the most scarce and valuable resource there is out there.” His advice is to use that valuable asset instead of steering people’s attention away from your content and towards someone else’s advertisement/book/product/whatever.

According to Michael, if you want to be playing a game where you’re getting pennies, using ads and getting a little

Rolling in dough now!

money from affiliate programs is the game to play. “If you want to get potentially thousands of dollars out of people’s attention you have to play a different game. That game is figuring out: what’s the highest value service or product you could sell?” Now, these services can either be your own, or a product you’ve created or a really high quality (and relevant) product of someone else’s.

An Example

A great example of someone who does this very well is Brian Clark over at Copyblogger. “He is the gold standard of how you should monetize a blog,” Michael told me. “He would never let some random company pay him pennies to flash unrelated ads to his audience. All his efforts go toward getting people subscribed on his email list and into his various products and services that he sells.”

So it looks like the ultimate goal is to be selling something that has a higher price tag down the road. Your own service or boot camp or mastermind group or community or info product is where you can use the trust and attention bestowed upon you. If it’s of a really high value it can have a higher price tag rather than using people’s coveted attention to sell something that’s low value and has a low price tag.

Make sense?

Your Blog is a Doorway to Your Business

Like I said, this doesn’t work for everyone. If you have a pretty successful personal blog and no desire to spend the time and energy on creating your own product, a couple dollars here and there through donations might be just the thing for you. I think what Michael means though, is that the blogs used for business/entrepreneurial purposes would benefit from this tactic.

The man actually has me thinking about my own business. The one thing you know people are interested in is you. I adore my freelance work, but I think opportunities exist for me to sell myself. So I am going to use this space to tentatively announce a a bad ass project in the works. Through the Virtual Mastery program with Marie Forleo, I (and the other amazing women in the program) have been brainstorming away and I’m happy to announce I will soon be launching an incredible course for recent grads.

Watch this space…