Recent Makin' Bacon Food Blogging Articles - Page 17

The one thing that nearly everyone recommends once you decide to monetize your blog is that you need to begin to build your email list. This will allow you to share your valuable content with individuals who are interested in what you have to say, and moreover, have given you permission to email it to them.

Clearly, there is no shortage of email providers to choose from. We are more familiar with three of them and feel confident suggesting that you consider researching each of them to see which one fits your needs most closely. Our favorites are the following:

MailChimp

It seems like MailChimp has been around forever, they were founded in 2001. It was originally a paid service but in 2009 they introduce their freemium option which had a huge impact on the growth of their user base. They have since greatly reduced their free plan, and even limited the functionality of it.

MailerLite

MailerLite was born in 2010 from a company that started as a web design agency. They have increasingly gained popularity largely due to their competitive features and aggressive pricing.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit was founded by Nathan Barry in 2013 and has grown at a meteoric rate to become one of the more popular email systems available. ConvertKit is used and advertised by some of the most well-known bloggers on the Internet.

Let's take a little closer look at what each of the three systems has to offer.

This is an excerpt from my book Self Publishing Made Easy: The Food Bloggers Guide to Writing, Publishing and Marketing a Cookbook, my comprehensive guide to creating cookbooks.

Choosing the right subject for your cookbook is probably the most important decision you will make. The best cookbook in the world will not sell a single copy if it is on a subject no one cares about. Regardless of the goals of your book, there are several factors that make a good subject.

A pretty easy, but often overlooked, way to make some extra money from your food blog is through selling t-shirts, mugs, bags, and other accessories. There are many ways to do this, but this article will look at using Threadless.com to create and sell them.

Threadless is an online system that allows you to upload a design and easily apply it to a wide variety of products. They also handle the product creation, money collection, and shipping, making it a very hands-off system. To get an idea of what you can do, you can check out our products from Threadless in our Amazing Food Made Easy Boutique.

One of the most successful monetization strategies we implemented was to create a plastic "cheat sheet" card that we sold. This can take many forms, but ours was called the "Sous Vide Timing Ruler" and it greatly simplified the process of determining the correct length of time a tender piece of meat needs to be cooked. Here's a shot of it:

Over the first year, we sold about 500 rulers for a profit of $3,000, not bad for a few weeks of work. You can read more about the financial factors in the Physical Produce Case Study: Sous Vide Timing Ruler article.

In today's article I wanted to discuss how to make a similar printed plastic "cheat sheet" card. Starting with picking a subject and going through having it produced, and just touching on marketing it.

One of the most important things to do when trying to get your readers to do something specific is to track what is working and what is not working. This is true whether you are trying to sell them an ebook, share your recipes on social media, successfully navigate your site, or sign up for your newsletter.

There are many tools to do this, and in this article I wanted to look how we analyzed our data by using click tracking and scroll maps. At their most basic level, these tools show you what links your readers actually clicked, and what parts of the page they actually stopped on.

I use these tools for a whole slew of things on Amazing Food Made Easy. They are great for product sales pages but I also use them to help track how effective links in my recipes are, how my right sidebar is functioning, if my newsletter signup links are working and much more.

Today I had a good reminder of the power of providing a product your readers both want and need. It was also a good reminder that your users can forget some of the things you have to offer, so reminding them occasionally isn't a bad thing!

I was sending out my initial 2018 email newsletter and it had 4 articles in it. You can view the newsletter here: Amazing Food Made Easy Newsletter. Of the articles, 2 were completely informational, 1 was half informational and half salesy, and the final was just an "ad" for our Sous Vide Timing Ruler.

Why should rock stars be the only ones who get amazing swag?!?! Be your own rock star!

Selling branded merchandise is a great way to connect with your readers, and give them something they can purchase to feel like part of what you are creating.

It can be intimidating to start thinking about making branded products, but we use Threadless for all of ours. It's free, easy to use, and you don't need to store inventory or ship out anything yourself. They take a cut of every sale, so you won't be making as much profit, but we like how much it minimizes our risk and feel the trade-off is worth it.

When selling your products online, you need to collect money from people and then provide them with the product. There are many ways to do this but the one I use the most is E-junkie.

I started using E-junkie for all my ebook sales. It makes the process of collecting money and sending out the ebook super easy and they automate the whole process for you.

They also integrate with PayPal, meaning all your funds are readily available and you don't have to wait for monthly payments.

We have since moved the majority of our product sales to E-junkie, including the cheat sheet rulers and other kitchen products. I'm in the process of building out the shopping cart, but for now using the "Buy Now" buttons has been more than enough for what we need.

One of the things that helps to easily sell to your Fans is having a solid email list. There are many ways to build your list, but one that we have found to be very effective is using a program called OptinMonster.

OptinMonster can be installed with a simple line of code and it allows you to add multiple requests for people to sign up for your newsletter. You can set the requests to be keyed off of certain things, such as reading 50% of the page or trying to exit your website. You can also customize the requests in lots of ways, and they have multiple templates that you can pick from and make your own.

We have used OptinMonster to encourage guests to sign up for our free Exploring Sous Vide email course. During the last year nearly 10,000 folks have joined the course thanks to OptinMonster. It is a paid tool, but plans start as low as $14 a month which we have found to be worth it with the amount of traffic we have.

If you have gone through the trouble of growing your website, building up your fans, and creating a product, it only makes sense you'd want to market it as efficiently as possible. There are many ways to accomplish this, but using a program like Leadpages is a great way to streamline it.

Leadpages helps you create landing pages and sales pages using easy templates that have been designed and tested to optimize conversions. It's perfect if HTML and CSS isn't your strong suit. They also have many templates set up that you only need to tweak to have them ready for your content.

They provide A/B testing, conversion tracking, and other great human-friendly analytics that will help you maximize your sales. Leadpages integrates with your website and your marketing automation app making the capture of email addresses easy.