How to Make a Full-Time Income by Adding a Storefront to Your Blog

Posted: 19 Dec 2015 03:28 AM PST

Creating and selling your own product lets you open a steady flow of passive income that may last long.

Unlike monetizing your website with advertisements, you don't necessarily need to have a huge traffic base to make a solid income. Other blog monetization models such as sponsored posts, paid reviews and affiliate marketing might come off as a little out of sync to your trusting audience.

That being said, selling products on your blog is not a get rich scheme. However, with the right strategies it is totally possible to make a full-time income by adding a storefront while selling your own product.

In this article, I will show you how to make huge profits by adding an ecommerce storefront to your blog.

What to sell?

Before jumping in to start a storefront on your blog, one of the first questions you should ask yourself is 'what to sell'.

Unless you got hit with a brilliant idea, deciding what you should be selling on your blog can be tougher. With all the available technologies, though there are thousands of possible choices to create, everything might seem like as it’s been done by someone else already.

Here are a few suggestions for brainstorming product ideas.

Look for an opportunity gap and try solving your own problem: Create a product that can solve your own problem. By solving your own problem, more likely you're also solving a problem of others.
Validate the market: Before creating it, ask your followers if it helps to solve their problems. You can also walk through your niche forums and sites like Quora.com to see if your product can solve a common pain point of your potential customers.
Digital or physical product: Creating and selling digital products such as ebooks and online courses are easier than creating a physical product such as books. However, the profit margin will be huge when it comes to selling a physical product. Decide which option might be a good fit for you and go with it.
Pricing: Pricing your product is as important as the product creation itself. If you're not a well-known face among your niche circles, it might be harder to sell high priced products, so rather you should consider selling low priced products at first. After getting a nice start, in order to raise more revenue, you can think about expanding your product lines by releasing new products on a consistent basis or focus on selling a single higher priced product.

Should you start selling?

Once you decided what you should be selling, the very next step is to look at how to sell.

You might have started blogging for a while. However, it doesn't guarantee that you could run a successful ecommerce store on your blog by simply rolling it out and thus make huge profits.

For instance, if you didn't launch a product previously on your blog, chances are your readers might expect everything from you for free. That's a wrong mindset to be in. As a seller, what you could do to change that mindset is to nurture your prospects carefully throughout each customer lifecycle, so that they eventually buy products from your store.

Define your unique selling proposition: You need to define who your potential customers are and why they'd need your product.

Create a minimum viable product: Launch your product to a small group of people and get early feedback. Yaro Starak uses this approach to sell his premium plugin. He made a preselling campaign and asked his readers to buy the beta product for just $5. This strategy has not only helped him to get early funding but also valuable feedback before launching the final product.

Choose an ecommerce platform

As hundreds of different ecommerce platforms are available, it is easy to get overwhelmed with different choices. In fact, each platform has its own pros and cons. Some of them will charge you on the basis of total sales whereas some others will charge a monthly fee. In fact, there are even some other open source choices that charge you almost nothing.

To get a quick idea about which platform is best suits your needs, you can use a recommendation engine such as WebAppMeister. What it does is it does a head to head comparison between ecommerce apps and helps you pick one that seems to be the best choice for you.

If you're a WordPress blogger, below are some of popular shopping cart choices.

E-junkie- For selling digital products

E-junkie is one of the easiest ways to start selling digital products such as ebooks on your blog. All you need to do is to register an account on e-junkie and provide some basic info about your products and business. Copy the buy now button from the e-junkie admin panel and paste it on your blog where you'd like to sell it. Once you did it, E-junkie will take care about everything else.

Price: The monthly cost starts from $5 onwards.

You can visit e-junkie website here.

Woocommerce- For both digital and physical products

Woocommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin that lets you easily add a storefront to your blog. According to datanyze.com, Woocommerce is the shopping platform of choice for almost 22% of ecommerce websites in the Alexa Top 1 million sites.

It is best suitable if you're looking for adding a storefront that can easily integrate with your current blog.

Price: The Woocommerce plugin costs free. However, you may require buying additional plugins for making a fully featured ecommerce site.

Visit Woocommerce official site here.

Start selling

Once you picked the platform, it's time to start selling by adding a storefront to your blog and setting up the products on it.

Here are a few ways you can spread the word out of your new store.

Promote on your network: You can promote the news about the store throughout your blog and social network.

Special offers: Consider offering huge discounts to early customers.

Remarketing: It is a clever way to show ads to your blog visitors who haven't purchased a product from your store. The best thing is that the CTR for remarketing ads will be comparatively low.

Invite affiliates: Invite other bloggers in your niche as an affiliate marketer for your product.

Have you ever considered selling on your blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Author bio: Shahzad Saeed is a freelance blogger and content marketer who has been featured in top internet marketing blogs like Problogger and John Chow several times. Connect with him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed.

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