We’ve reached a critical point in the growth of the internet. On one hand, pretty much everybody’s online. Almost everyone has a social media profile or a website. Those who don’t still use the internet to learn, play, or do basic tasks like pay bills. It’s everywhere, and everyone’s using it. On the other hand, nobody seems to be making much money online. Almost every creator is “struggling”, and we often see the same few people rotate within our media echo chamber. The people who are at the top make massive amounts of money. But they’re very much in the minority. If you look on TikTok, even those people have been complaining about social media not paying much. This is because there are more and more people getting online everyday. The COVID pandemic got everyone into remote work. Since then, many people around the world have been creating content, and many of them live in poor countries and low cost of living areas. So, digital content doesn’t pay much, because it’s hard to get lots of views, and advertising revenue isn’t high.
The only way to get around this is to sell a product
Most people are using the internet nowadays. Thankfully most people don’t post much content. This is what gives those of us who try and create content a fighting chance at getting ahead in life. That being said, the world is still a big place, and there are a lot of people who don’t have many fans.
If you don’t have many fans, you won’t make a living from ad revenue. This is just a fact of life, and something that should be fairly obvious. YouTube channels are notoriously hard to monetize. Making anything at all is an arduous task, let alone making a good living. Affiliate marketing sounds good on paper, but most products only offer $10-$50 in commissions. You have to know what you’re doing and pick the right niche. It has made a lot of people wealthy. I know a super affiliate personally. It works if you know what you’re doing.
The easiest way to make good money from your blog is by selling a product, or a service. The service you sell needs to be a real one, one that actually adds value to people’s lives. For myself, that would be an article writing service, or perhaps in the future a life coaching service. Products are more lucrative than services. You can create them more quickly, and you can update your “stack” of products fairly easily. Good products to sell include software, food and beverage products, grooming products, and other consumable or subscription-based items. I’m currently brainstorming some product ideas for this blog. It’ll take me a couple of months to come up with something, but it’ll be good, whatever it is. Coffee is something I’m very interested in. It would be nice to get a piece of that market.
Creating a good product (or finding a good product to sell) is pretty easy. You just need to make sure there’s demand for what you’re selling, that the product is properly marketed, and that the customer receives it in a pleasant manner. If you do these things, you’re likely to have a business. Or a side hustle, and least.
The internet makes it easy to sell a product. You can do research, and find out the exact level of demand for your product. You can get a sense of how loyal consumers are to their brands. You can outsource the design work to professionals over the internet. There are tons of different sites where you can find designers. Fulfillment is easy. You can either dropship, fulfill with Amazon, or handle the shipping yourself. It’s never been easier to sell a product.
Most products aren’t cheap. This is especially true in today’s era. Salaries aren’t high, and as a result most products are very lucrative to sell. This is because companies (often) exist to produce products, meaning that they exploit people’s labour in order to produce things. When you sell your own product, you’re the one taking the lion’s share of the profits. Even with dropshipping, you take a larger share of the profits than an equivalently competent member of a profitable company’s marketing team.
A product can be simple
This is why I’ve spent so much time writing. At a certain critical mass, having a lot of traffic will trump the quality of the product. This is due to two phenomena. The first is scale and randomness. When a lot of people are in one place, a lot of random things tend to happen. This is why places like Times Square in New York are filled with people doing weird stuff. Online, this means that if you point 1 million people towards a specific link, a few of them are bound to sign up or make a purchase. The second phenomenon that allows you to sell whatever you want, is that there’s a new sucker born every single day. I don’t advocate that people sell trash, but there’s a lot of money in selling trash products too a large audience. If you’ve been on Facebook, you’ve almost certainly seen how this is true. So don’t overthink your product. You’re beating the scammers as long as you’re being honest.
The Digital Ad Industry Is Becoming Consolidated
This should be obvious. “Blogging is dead”, “the internet is a giant shopping mall”. These statements are made because nowadays people are largely only in a few different places online. Social media has made content less valuable, and made it so that you need to be in the same places as everybody else in order to get attention. This means that control of online ads will increasingly be in the hands of a few players. You don’t want to be in a non competitive market. This means that you’ll likely be at the mercy of Adsense if you’re a blogger that makes their money from ads. Your business model can fall apart at the drop of a hat.
Selling a product is vital to your online success. More and more people are getting online everyday. This means more saturation, but it also creates a better opportunity for you to find your niche. If you can find your audience and build a personal brand, you should be able to win. You just need to combine the skill sets required to both build and sell. Good luck.
