The real money in blogging comes from having a vertical business model. Instead of promoting a product or service that doesn’t belong to you and taking a small portion of the profits, you can go vertical and promote your own products and services instead. The point of this vertical business model is that you gain a larger portion of the profits from the products and services that you promote. You also gain a larger amount of control over the prices and branding of what you’re promoting, which means you’ll never have to be at the mercy of advertisers again. Here we’re going to take a look at a few examples of the vertical business model in action for bloggers and how you can maximize the efficiency of your blog’s new approach to business.
Developing Your Product or Service
Depending on your blog’s industry and your particular level of expertise, you’ll want to go one of two routes when it comes to developing your product or service. If you have a high level of understanding and experience when it comes to your blog’s industry, you will be able to develop products yourself that provide value to your users. Another option is to provide some sort of consulting with an hourly or session-based fee.
If instead you are a bit of a hobbyist when it comes to your blog’s niche or industry, then you might want to employ an expert to write a short book for a set fee, and then promote this book as your own. Obviously you would want to get the rights to sell the book in writing, but this is a very valid business model. No matter how you go about developing your product or service, the end result should be that you have complete control over some high-quality item that you’re promoting on your blog.
Subscription-Based Content
Instead of developing a set product and promoting it, some blogs will have success with a more dynamic approach based on selling access to subscription-based content. The industry your blog is based on will be what mostly determines the chances of success for such a monetization model, but when it works, it works extremely well. The general idea is that you sell access to a set of premium content on your website while adding new content on a regular basis to keep members around. This works best in industries and niches that include a lot of people trying to learn a craft or particular set of skills that you can teach them. For example, any sort of blog based on learning a traditional school subject or a vocational skill will excel with this vertical method of monetization.
Collecting Information to Build a List
Another benefit of developing and promoting your own product is that you will have access to the personal details of all of your customers. This means that you will have more chances to sell to your customers in the future, since you know they will be interested in your blog’s niche. Moreover, if your initial product or service was of a high quality, they will be excited to see that you are offering a new product or service because they will come to expect great things from you.
This mailing list can generate a lot of extra money for you in the future by driving return traffic to your blog for months and years to come if you use a regular newsletter. What’s more is that you’ll be able to break up your newsletter into different demographics, which allows you to market to your repeat customers more efficiently. With the vertical business model for your blog, you not only make more money and have more control over what you’re promoting, but you’re able to build closer relationships with your customers over time instead of giving that away to the owner of whatever affiliate product or service you’re promoting.