In my last post on Selling from Your Blog, I said you needed three basic things: expertise, a way to receive payment, and a way to facilitate the sale and download of digital products. In the comments, the issue of traffic was raised, and it’s a good issue to address in its own post.

Without an audience, you have nobody to sell to.

Any selling you may wish to do will be more profitable if you have a large audience. I know some people talk about quality over quantity. But since there’s no point in even considering the wrong audience in the first place, I’m not going to waste your time on it (I mean, duh.) 

The simple truth is that it’s a numbers game. More people in general means more people who will buy.

Create Your Audience

You are always getting the audience you deserve based on the content you create and how you promote yourself. So, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the quality vs. quantity debate. This is one of the most mind-blowing and important things I’ll ever say to you: bloggers create their audience. Think about this:

• What you write or say determines what kind of search traffic you get, which is why blog SEO is so important.
• Your content determines whether a reader subscribes or comments, which is why how well you create that content and meet your audience’s needs is so important.
• The effectiveness of  your promotional efforts on social media or other methods determines a big chunk of your blog’s visitors… especially when the blog is new. This is why concentrating on a few well-targeted social media services is a must in this day and age.

Pay attention to nurturing these three activities and watch your audience grow. I’m talking in very general terms, here, since there are ten thousand things that go into “creating content” and “using social media.”

Can You Sell to a Small Audience?

Is it possible to sell profitably if your audience is small? Anything’s possible, but the real question is: is it likely? And the answer to that is: it depends. If you have built up a high level of trust in your audience and you’re in a niche known for its high price points, you could sell quite effectively to a small audience. If you sell a $1,999 product, you don’t need to sell very many of them to live comfortably. If you sell a $19.99 product, you need volume to make any money.

If your content is truly good and you’re doing the right things to promote yourself, it’s only a matter of time before your audience grows to a more profitable size. And then you’ll have somebody to sell to.

Use Someone Else’s Audience

If you don’t want to wait that long, you can always use someone else’s audience. How? I outline several methods below:

Create an affiliate program for your product (which you can do in E-Junkie, by the way). This way, it’s not just up to you to do the selling. You will have others who can sell for you. Even if you don’t have a thousand subscribers, you can drum up at least a few affiliates. Offer at least a 40% – 50% commission so that it’s truly a win-win for you and your affiliates.

Create a contest, which can do wonders for promotion. People often love telling others about contests, especially if the prize is really good. You can make one of the conditions of the contest that participants write about your product and link to it (if a light bulb just came on above your head because you thought of combining affiliate programs with a contest, you get a gold star).

Create an advertising campaign, which, if done right, will bring in traffic even when you don’t already have a good-sized audience. Naturally, this takes money and skill (creating effective ads is not even half as easy as it looks).

Get bloggers to write about your product or services. There are a few ways to do this. Any blogger who is also an affiliate should be blogging about your product. In many cases, bloggers will be happy to write about a product if they get a free copy (however, anyone who couldn’t at least make back their purchase in sales wouldn’t make a very good affiliate).

Another way to pay for reviews and mentions is through blog-for-pay services such as Izea’s PayPerPost and Smorty. Obviously, this also takes money, but it can be very effective. It might cost you a few hundred bucks to get a prominent blogger to write a review of your product, but if you make two or three times that in sales because of it, then it was worth it.

A couple of these methods involve more than just effort on your part. Some of them involve investing some money and there is risk involved, because you don’t know for sure if you’re going to see a return on that investment. You can minimize your risk by choosing sites that are well-matched to your product or service.

So, while it certainly is possible to sell to a small audience, and it’s possible to borrow someone else’s audience, the surest route is to build up your own audience. And this takes time. Be patient. Don’t rush it. The bigger an audience you have when you begin, the bigger of a sales debut you’ll have, and the more momentum you’ll have.

I’ve seen blogs with between 500 and 1,000 subscribers sell successfully using some of the methods I describe above. Now you have some idea of real numbers. If they can do it, you can, too.