How to start selling products or services through a blog?

How to start selling products or services through a blog? At a conceptual level, selling on the Internet often closely relates to the e-commerce sector or field, that is, with online stores that sell physical products and distribute them through a logistics system that is usually complex.

However, and although common online stores dominate the sales market through digital environments, setting up a large online store is not the only way to sell on the Internet. You can sell through your blog without having a huge online store with all the functionalities available and to be had.

This article brings you some tips to start selling products or services through a blog and be successful in the process. We should note that these tips can perfectly adapt to the situation of each person.

What can you sell on the Internet with your blog?

Through your blog, you can sell from digital products to specific services. These can be e-books, tutorials, video courses, online services, offline services, etc. The range is quite wide.

If you are not familiar with this topic, you are probably wondering how you can turn a blog into a platform that accepts payments. Well, we have good news for you. Some solutions are easy to integrate, for example, with WordPress.

SendOwl is the solution that we like the most among those that allow you to accept payments, it integrates with WordPress, among other types of content management systems, and through it, you can sell digital products, services, and physical products.

If you want to know more about configuring or creating your website, we recommend the Classroom CM WordPress classroom course. It is practical, and you will learn to configure plugins of this type and more functions. And if you want to do it from home or from wherever you want, we have at your disposal the WordPress online course, just as practical as the face-to-face.

How Does Internet Selling Work?

Now we will tell you about a topic where there is usually some confusion. Stick with the following:

You don’t need to be an e-commerce expert to sell on the Internet. You have to know how online sales work.

In the same way, we have told you that to sell online, it is unnecessary that you stick to setting up an online store of physical products, nor is it an essential condition that you have experience in the e-commerce sector to earn money through sales on the Internet.

If you have experience in this sector, you will start from a more advanced situation than another person who does not have it, but the most important thing is to understand how people’s minds work and apply it wisely to your online strategy. With intuition and a little sales psychology, you can achieve short-term results. Neuromarketing is in charge of studying and understanding consumer decision-making processes.

You should know that there are three pillars of selling on the Internet that you must take care of and work within a certain frequency. The most important are these three:

a. The authority your articles denote in terms of credibility.

b. The confidence that you build with your audience.

c. The uniqueness of your value proposition.

What is the best strategy for a sustainable online sale through your blog?

Does the concept of Inbound Marketing sound familiar to you? In short, it is a business approach to strategize or a technique whose key vertebrate is to post content on the Internet, aiming to capture leads or prospects to nurture the audience with content that brings them closer to the purchase decision.

Explaining Inbound Marketing in depth would give for several classes and even more. Now we want you to understand the fundamental concept.

Why do we recommend your strategy to have an Inbound Marketing approach?

Imagine you are investing in a Pay per Click (PPC) channel, such as Google AdWords, getting traffic to your platform and sales of your products or services. What will happen if, at some point, you cut the investment? That the results will also end and you will stop receiving traffic and sales.

If you base your strategy on providing content that is truly focused on helping your audience and you work on the web positioning of said content -that is, of the articles, you publish on your blog-, if at some point you stop writing, the articles written and published will continue to bring you visits and potential sales as well.

That is a compelling reason, and not the only one, to prioritize an Inbound Marketing approach in your strategy. We are not saying that PPC doesn’t work. We know it well, but the content strategy is more sustainable.

And be careful: we recommend that, first, you measure profitability. If getting a sale through AdWords costs you, for example, 7 euros, and the product you sell brings you 20 euros, having subtracted the production costs, why shouldn’t you bet on allocating part of the investment to AdWords? Everything is a question of profitability.

What do we recommend you do specifically to sell on the Internet?

To make it easy for you to understand the process that you can follow to sell on the Internet, follow these steps:

1. Do content marketing, selling products or services through a blog

Reflect on what you could offer as a digital product: an e-book, a video course, online services, infographics, articles, video tutorials, audios, etc. What could you offer that you know how to do and explain? Make a list with all the ideas that come to mind and always think of useful resources and valuable content, always thinking about your target audience and the type of people who will read you (their needs, their experience, their training, their age).

2. Create your blog on WordPress.org

Your blog will be the center of all your strategy. In it, you will create the content, and users will come to it looking for information. We recommend you bet on a platform with a content manager adapted for SEO positioning, such as WordPress.

3. Organize a publication calendar, selling products or services through a blog

Schedule the weeks well to publish a minimum of articles every 15 days or every month (or every week if you prefer a higher rate) and set the maximum goal to meet the dates. Without content, there will be no visits, and without visits, there will be no sales, so it is a step that you should follow if you want everything to work. To help you, you can design your post planning in an excel sheet, use apps on your mobile, or work with a professional task manager.

4. Set up the contact/subscribers form

Prepare your blog so that it can capture a database of people interested in what you explain, offering something for the data they leave you. This database will help you build loyalty and later communicate with your followers.

5. Design custom Newsletters, selling products or services through a blog

Send emails not so much transactional -to sell directly-, but focused on educational marketing. The idea is to send more well-structured content. Do not abuse this resource and do it when you have something good to share. Your goal is to remember that you are there and provide them with a summary of your best content to not associate you with spam content (junk or commercial content).

6. Objective: capture traffic

Take actions to capture more and more traffic volume. Here, properly positioning your articles plays a very important role because it will be recurring traffic and will have no additional cost for you, unlike PPC-type actions. Some actions that you can do right now are:

• Always use keywords in your titles (the most searched).

• Post to Twitter using mentions and tags.

• Join Facebook groups and make your articles known.

• Join Google Plus communities.

• Get them to link you from other blogs (backlinks).

7. Optimize product pages, selling products or services through a blog

Create a convincing sales page from where you can sell your products if you integrate with a tool that allows you to accept payments (we mentioned SendOwl before).

It has to be a page designed with great care and always thinking with the user in mind. One of the most frequent mistakes is not adding text. And then, how are you going to position your page on Google? Take care of this aspect including:

• A summary that clarifies: what is it? What is it for? Why does it suit you?

• Describe its characteristics.

• Add visual elements: images, videos, audios.

• Include opinions from other users (it will give you credibility).

• Incorporates buttons with calls to action.

8. Get collaborators and connect with references

Establish relationships with influential people on the topic you discuss on your blog and on topics that may interest your audience, even if they are not exactly yours. Having these good relationships will allow you to get diffusion through your circle of contacts.

9. Define your metrics and study the results, selling products or services through a blog

Make a regular measurement strategy for everything you do. It is essential that you measure the results of your strategy. In this sense, you must be patient and know how to wait because you will not always achieve what you propose in the short term. Loyal audiences are built little by little. Google Analytics can be your main source of information from where you can find out useful things such as:

• Visits and average pages per visit.

• Average time on page.

• Bounce Rate.

• Channels.

• Landing pages.

• Goal achievements.

• Multi-channel funnels.

• Do not feel discouraged

Patience. At all times, forget about the “I can’t do it” mentality. If your value proposition is of quality and you reach the right audience with an offer that helps, the sales will come.

Conclusions

We hope these recommendations are useful to sell products and services through your blog and to be successful in your attempt.