“And the Winners Are … #QldBlog” plus 2 more

And the Winners Are … #QldBlog
Unearthing Your Blog’s Money Pages
Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product

Posted: 26 Apr 2012 07:01 PM PDT

As promised earlier in the week, today I’ve got great pleasure in naming the winners of the Great Barrier Reef Queensland Blogger Correspondent competition.

767 bloggers entered the competition. They came from an amazing array of counties (52 in all)—from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Spain, Malaysia, Belize, Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Italy, France, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, India, Romania, Argentina, Phillipines, Indonesia, Hawaii, Pakistan, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Denmark, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, Belarus, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, South Korea, Costa Rica, Moldova, Japan, Kuwait, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Chile, Mauritius, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, UAE, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and Greece.

Interestingly the vast majority of entries were from those in the USA, and from women. This is reflected in the winners list.

Choosing the winners was no easy task. The entries were of a high quality, from some amazing people, and many of the submissions were very attractive to the judging panel who were seeking to find bloggers that they felt were a good “fit” in promoting the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.

We saw some very creative submissions and I myself spent a whole day looking through them all—and loved the experience! But without further ado, here are the winners:

Rebecca Cooper (Canada) of Simple as That
Tsh Oxenreider (USA) of Simple Mom
Chantelle Ellem (Australia) of Fat Mum Slim
U Mei The (Malaysia) of CC Food Travel
Katja Hentschel (Germany) of Travelettes
Stuart Flatt (UK) of Average Joes Blog
Kara Williams (USA) of The Vacation Gals (see her announcement post here)
Jodi Friedman (USA) of MCP Actions (see here announcement post here)
Jackie Hutchings (UK) of Scubadviser
Elizabeth Hooper Alton (USA) of PolicyMic

Thanks again to those who entered and to Tourism Queensland (connect with them on Twitter here or on Facebook here) for their sponsorship of the competition. This experience has been a lot of fun, and you’ll hear more about it in June when the above crew gather together in Queensland with me to have an amazing five days together.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

And the Winners Are … #QldBlog

Unearthing Your Blog’s Money Pages

Posted: 26 Apr 2012 01:09 PM PDT

This guest post is by the Web Marketing Ninja.

Earlier today, Greg explored the question of pricing products that you’re creating for sale on your blog. Setting the right price for your products is extremely important, but I wanted to take that discussion one step further for those who are already offering products on their blogs and want to take their conversions to the next level.

When I approach conversion optimization on websites, which in most cases is simply cash optimization, I stick to a few golden rules:

Think in people, not pageviews.
People are looking for a reason not to buy—don’t give them one.
Go for biggest bang for buck.
Test everything!

I’ve already covered points 1 and 2, so in this post, I wanted to export number three, going biggest bang for buck.

If you’re trying to figure out how to turn some money into more money without creating new products, campaigns, or deals, you need to unearth the pages on your site that are going to give you the greatest return from an improvement in conversion.

…and for that, I have a three-point plan.

1. Understand where you money comes from, and find your influenceable end-point

Now, being the smart bloggers I know you are, you should know where your money comes from. Your income might be derived from ads, affiliate income, or product sales—among others. And I’m sure you’re able to identify your top-level driver of that income—the last point in the conversion process that you can influence. Here they are:

Product sales = successful checkouts
Affiliate sales = clicks to affiliate site
Ads (CPC) = clicks on ads
Ads (CPM) = page views
Subscription = activated subscriptions
Service = contact form submissions

Whatever your strategy, knowing your influenceable end-point enables you to set some specific goals on key metrics for your blog (for example more sales, more clicks, more pageviews).

2. Set yourself up to track those end-points

Whilst it can be a bit of a challenge initially to set up measurements for your blog’s conversion goals, without them, you’ll never really know where your money comes from at a granular level.

For most, a well configured Google Analytics setup is all that you need, as it has goal tracking built in.

If checkouts are one of your goals, then ecommerce tracking is what you need. If your ads are sold by CPM, then you’ve got it easy—you have the data already. If your goal is clicks, that presents a slightly bigger challenge. Let me explain.

In Analytics, a goal is measured by successfully reaching a page on your site that you’ve specified. When a click takes a visitor to another site, Google Analytics sees it as a visitor that exits to another site rather than a successfully reached goal. To solve this, you can use any of a few options.

If you’re using AdSense, you’re fine—that’s already integrated with Analytics.
Use a redirect page to collect goals. Instead of sending users straight through to the advertiser or affiliate, you can send them via a page that automatically redirects the user, but includes the analytics goal code to track.
Use a paid service like Kiss Metrics … but even that can be a bit tricky to set up.

I’m really hoping that at some point Google’s ad manager, Double Click, will integrate with Analytics so this issue is rectified. But even if it’s a little bit of a hassle for you to set up right now, it’s a hassle that’s worth going through in order to understand just how good—or bad—your conversion performance is.

So after a bit of research, action, and maybe fumbling, you’re now hopefully able to track the conversion rate of your commercial goals (whatever that are) and you’re ready to move forward.

3. Think in one-percents

The final step in identifying biggest bang for buck is to put a dollar conversion vale against all your pages. All this takes is a bit of simple math.

Page X

10,000 page views
100 sales
$4000

Those figures give us a conversion rate of 1% and an average income per sale of $40. If I increase the conversion rate itself by 1%, to 1.1%, my sales will total 101, and my income will be $4040. I’m up $40.

Page Y

100,000 page views
50 sales
$1000

So this page has a conversion rate of 0.05% and an average income per sale of $20. If I increase this conversion rate by 1%, to 0.051%, my sales will total 51 and my income will hit $1020. I’m up $20.

As you can see, there’s double the return for a 1% improvement on Page X, as compared to Page Y. So Page X the one I’m going to focus on. Not the one with all the page views: the one with the greatest return.

Obviously, on your blog, you’ll have far more than two pages to pick from, but this model will allow you to rank them in order. Make sure you don’t forget to include your checkout process as pages in this analysis, as well. You might be surprised by how they stack up.

And just in case the figures of $20 and $40 don’t get you motivated to do any testing, remember that variances of over 100% are common across different variations of a page. So add a couple of zeros … feeling motivated now?

The three-point plan

So just to summarise, your three-point plan to unearthing those money pages is:

Understand your last influenceable conversion metric.
Start tracking those points in the sales process.
Stack all your pages together and find the one that’s going to give you the biggest return for a 1% conversion increase.

…and that’s how you can unearth the pages that are going to give you the biggest bang for buck.

Stay tuned for more posts by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger's Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand. Follow the Web Marketing Ninja on Twitter.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Unearthing Your Blog’s Money Pages

Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product

Posted: 26 Apr 2012 07:09 AM PDT

This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

If you're late to this particular party, we've been spending the last few weeks examining ways to monetize your blog in an era when readers are holding onto their wallets more tightly than ever.

Sure, you can make money by selling ads if all you care about is revenue. Any link farm can do the same thing. But by extending one's blog into different media, a diligent blogger can create and sell products that no one else can duplicate.

The process we’ve stepped through so far has been fairly straightforward. First, coldly assess what makes your blog distinctive. (If the answer is anything other than "Nothing" or "I don't know", proceed to the next step.)

Next, create something identifiable with your blog and your style—a video lecture series, ebooks, online classes, personal coaching, podcasts, whatever. Budget the requisite time to create your products, plan far enough in advance that your blog won't be compromised in the short run, test-market your products, then make them available for sale. Couldn't be easier, right?

This is precisely where many would-be entrepreneurs get smacked in the face with the harsh truth of the marketplace: putting a dollar figure on that product.

How much should you charge?

Not to turn this into a university-level economics lesson, but the tricky thing is to set a price that maximizes revenue. Sure, you can sell your ebook for 10¢ and theoretically reach the widest possible audience. But if you could charge three times the price, and still retain half your audience, wouldn't that make more sense?

Ideally you're doing this to turn a profit, which isn't necessarily the same as generating as much revenue as possible. You also need to factor in your expenses. Otherwise, this is just a pastime or a vanity project. Creating products certainly requires time, and possibly requires materials.

That means that before you sell your first unit, you'll already have spent money that you'll need to recoup.

Say you've spent 30 hours writing a plan for a coaching program you plan to sell via your blog. Is $20 an hour a fair assessment of your worth? (That is, could you have earned that much doing something else?) Then you'll need to sell a single copy for $600. Or two for $300 each. Or three for $200. Or…

You can see where this is going. It's tempting to lower the price as much as possible, in the hopes that every reduction will attract more buyers. That's largely true, but a) the relationship isn't linear and b) there's a limit—otherwise, you could give your product away and an infinite number of people would use it.

Finding the balance

How many unique visitors do you have? If you don't know, Google Analytics can give you an idea. What proportion of those are invested in your blog and read it regularly? And what proportion of those will cough up a few minutes' worth of wages in exchange for the promise of you enriching their lives somehow?

On the flip-side are blogging entrepreneurs who charge too much for their services. They're like the commission salesman who wanted to get a job at Northrop Grumman, selling B-2 Spirit heavy bombers at $1 billion apiece. ("People have been slamming doors in my face all week, but I get 10% of each sale. And all it takes is one.")

To avoid this, you need to find a comfortable medium between how much you're willing to accept, and how much your product can realistically benefit its user. That sounds obvious, but most sellers don't even bother weighing those variables. They just conjure up a price and hope for the best.

What does your product do … for whom?

Be honest with what your product can do. It won't make the blind walk and the lame see. But will it show readers how to declutter their lives once and for all? Can it teach them how to change their car's oil and tires themselves, instead of relying on costly technicians? Can it help readers travel to strange places inexpensively, and does it include an appendix that will teach those readers how to keep their cross-border hassles to a minimum?

Then say so. You don't have to work miracles. You just have to make some aspect of your readers' lives easier, less complicated and/or more fulfilling.

More to the point, remember who you're selling to: your readers, not yourself. No one cares how much asbestos you inhaled in the mine, they just want the diamond. It's a cardinal rule of civilization that results count, not effort.

One famous globetrotting blogger has recently diversified, and now sells a guide that ostensibly tells artists how they can throw off the shackles of poverty and start making money. He's certainly appealing to his clientele's emotions—what's a more accurate stereotype than that of the starving artist?

Never mind that this blogger is not an artist, and that his background consists of little more than that educational punchline, a sociology degree. His blog's sales pitch details how many painstaking hours he spent writing how many words and conducting how many minutes of interviews in the creation of his guide, as if any of that matters to an artist who just wants to know how to locate buyers for her decoupage and frescoes.

Keep scrolling down and you'll find out that for just $39, you'll receive "15,000 words of excellent content". No one buys this kind of thing by volume. Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country runs over 850,000 words. That's 90 times longer than Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which sold far more copies and was far more influential.

Don’t hide your price!

That brings us to another thing not to do: treat the price as fine print. Which is to say, don't build to a crescendo and make your readers sift through paragraph upon paragraph of hard sales copy before finally deigning to tell them how much your product is going to cost them. To do so is insulting. It's the tactic of someone who has something to hide.

(There's one exception to this rule. That's when you're using the late-night infomercial strategy, saving the price of your product until the very end because it's so shockingly low. That almost certainly doesn't apply in your case. You're not an experienced marketer with a reputation, hawking indestructible knives and superabsorbent towels that suck up ten times their weight in liquid. You're a blogger looking to turn your followers from loyal readers into paying customers.)

Getting back to the real blogger in our example, if you spend another $19 on the deluxe version, he'll throw in three more audio interviews. There's nothing quantifiable here, just a collection of messages that differ by media. (Incidentally, I asked this blogger how what kind of volume he does. I wasn't expecting an answer and didn't receive one, but it was important to make an effort to see if his methods worked.)

Given the choice, I'd rather take my chances giving my money to a blogger with authority and experience, who's offering me something believable, and who's not afraid to tell me how much it'll cost me and how much it'll benefit me. Is that you?

One more thing. If you're creating a series of products in which each builds on the previous ones and no individual product can stand alone, you're putting yourself in a fantastic position. You can give away the first and then start charging with the second. If you do, that'll give you an accurate gauge of how many people are legitimately interested in your product, as opposed to just being curious.

Accounting for expenses

Once you make the decision to sell, and to price, you'll have to account for expenses you'd never imagined. Maybe you'll need to move from a shared host to a dedicated one. Or pay for a business license in your home jurisdiction. Or hire a graphic designer after concluding that your own Adobe Illustrator skills are wanting. A few hours of planning and estimation now can save you weeks of frustration down the road.

Speaking of quantifying, here’s a sample budget (in PDF) that you can adapt for your own use. Be conservative with your revenue estimates, liberal with your expense estimates, and you can get a better handle on how much you should charge when your products finally make it to market.

You might also find the formula presented in The Dark Art of Product Pricing useful. It integrates many of the considerations I’ve outlined here but, like this post, that one can’t definitively tell you what you should charge either. Ultimately, that’s up to you.

Key points

Cover your expenses. Don't set your prices so low that you're losing money on every sale.
Don't set your prices so high that you need to camouflage them, either. Be direct.
Honestly assess what your product can do for your customers.
Explain to your customers what they'll get for their money.
Like anything else, first plan, then execute.

Next week, we'll discuss how to increase your potential clientele beyond its traditional bounds.

Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product