David Risley lit a small fire on Problogger over the weekend with this guest post.  You can read the entire post yourself, but the quote that I think sums it up best is:

The simple truth is this: Poor bloggers spend most of their time writing blog posts. PROBloggers spend most of their time on what actually matters – business.

The thrust of his post is that a blog without a product to sell is not going to be successful at making money.  As a general statement this is quite true.  Bloggers that write simply write post after post and wait for ad clicks are usually the same bloggers that give up after a few months after failing to make any meaningful income.

Generalizations in Blogging Income Potential

The ensuing discussion in the comments had several contradictory examples of blogs that do very well without a product to sell.  This is also quite true.  These sites exist, but they are relatively uncommon and for the beginner blogger it is not an easy model to follow if making a good income is your goal.

But as with most things there is a balance to be struck.  A blog with no product will make very little money, with some exceptions.  And a product site without a blog will also struggle to attract traffic and sales, again with some exceptions.

For bloggers looking to generate revenue, a combination of product and blog content is the better approach.

Another thing to keep in mind is that product revenue can be stronger for low traffic blogs than advertising. This is very important for smaller niches. A niche with low traffic but a well engaged audience can convert to good product revenue, when the comparative ad revenue could be next to nothing. Even for larger niches with more potential audience it can take big traffic numbers before advertising starts to generate a good income.

Diversity of Revenue Streams

I won’t tell you that its impossible to build very successful blogs based on ad revenue alone. Obviously there are blogs out there generating strong incomes from advertising.  The question you should ask yourself is whether you want to go to all that effort to build a business relying solely on ad revenue as an income stream?

The risk with this approach is that all your eggs are in one basket.  If your best performing ad network or affiliate product changes their rules or disappears entirely, all that revenue goes with it.  Similarly, if you’ve invested heavily in SEO to drive the sort of traffic volumes that it takes to do well from advertising, and Google changes their algorithm or even de-indexes you entirely (even accidentally) then you could also find your earnings dry up overnight.

Instead you can aim for a more diverse mix of revenue sources, combining ads, products, and services.

The right mix of these has some clear advantages, because one method’s pros balance out another method’s cons.

• Ads are easy to add to a blog and are 24/7, but earnings tend to go hand in hand with traffic volumes
• Products are a lot of work to create, but they are also 24/7 and the ongoing revenue stream is less effort in maintenance and customer service
• Services are lucrative, but don’t scale up well because you can only work so many hours

Best of all if one revenue stream is temporarily stalled (eg you take time off for health or family reasons) the others will keep going.

Creating Product Revenue

So with all of that in mind what can you do about it on your blog?  If product creation interests you but you’re not sure what to do first then think about who your audience is and what problems they need solved.

Maybe you’ve already got a great idea but haven’t been able to execute it yet.  Finding time is hard, instead you need to make time for the projects that will generate you the income you want.  Its easy to think you need to blog every single day and wonder where you’ll find the time in the rest of your life to create your product.  If that is how you feel then think about cutting back your blogging to every second day and use those alternate days to work on your products instead.

Or if you don’t have any solid ideas at the moment you can use free content to test out a variety of product ideas, with the dual benefit of building your mailing list for future marketing efforts.

Don’t be afraid to try out different models and test ideas.  The days of everyone making big money just by writing a lot of blog posts and using advertising for revenue are behind us now.  You can go down that road if you like, but there are better roads to consider if you ask me.

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Blogging, Marketing, Monetization, Motivation, Productivity, Products