Despite the phrase “sell from your blog,” that’s not what really happens. You don’t sell from your blog, people buy from you. It’s not the same thing. There’s an old saying:

Nobody likes to be sold, but everybody loves to buy.

So, what’s the difference in practical terms? It’s about keeping your head on straight and remembering that you’re there for your audience. They’re not there for you. Your goal may be to sell a bajillion copies of your latest super-fabulous e-product, but unless that meshes with the goals of your audience, nothing’s going anywhere.

The Intersection Between Your Wants and the Wants of Your Audience

You have your goals, but your audience has its own ideas about what it wants. Somewhere, those roads cross paths. That intersection is a magical place to be. Being there means you want what I have to offer. It means I can offer you what you want.

You’re Doing it Wrong

Here’s an anti-example: I wrote an ebook on how to choose and hire a web designer, but it was a complete mismatch for the Remarkablogger audience. It didn’t meet their needs or satisfy any want they had. It was a product I created without any real research into the market. It’s a great book, but it’s just not right for my blog audience. Bloggers tend to be do-it-yourself-ers, and they’re more technically savvy (in general) than the audience for which I wrote that book. So, selling it from my blog wasn’t such a hot idea. Nobody wanted to buy it (not literally nobody, but not very many).

That’s how it goes: you learn from your mistakes and you do better next time. In my case, I did a lot better.

Rock On

The next time I launched an e-product, it was a much better experience, because it meshed with the real wants and needs of my audience. I had discovered a market within my audience:

• The majority of my audience uses WordPress on a self-hosted blog
• They know little about SEO, other than what it’s supposed to do for them (be found in search)
• They need to increase their search visibility and search traffic

I knew that a learning program to teach people who use WordPress how to optimize their blogs for search, I had something people would actually buy, because it met a need. The key was that it wasn’t just SEO (there are already a million programs/products/web pages to teach that), it was to teach WordPress SEO, because there are so many specific things to the WordPress environment to “map” to SEO.

In order to “sell” this, all I had to do was spell out the case for it and what it would do for people with WordPress blogs. Once people understood this, the buy decision came easily, and it was their decision. We speak of selling as though we’re forcing something that is unwanted upon a hapless person who has better things to do. That image couldn’t be more false. 

Emotions vs. Logic

You can’t force anyone to click that Buy button, no matter what you write in your sales copy. You can build up excitement and features, you can provide bonuses, and you can create deadlines, but all these do is make it easier for a person to carry out the decision they’ve already made emotionally, because they know their need will be met by your product. Your job is to make it easy for them to convince themselves they’re buying for logical reasons.

This is one of the reasons why simply providing large amounts of information helps people decide to buy, and why sales pages can be long. Sometimes, there is a lot to explain. This is also a reason why it’s possible to sell from a blog: you can provide this information in the form of posts before the product ever even goes on sale.

If you look back over the posts which preceeded the launch of WordPress SEO Secrets, you will notice they are all about WordPress SEO. I wanted you as educated as possible about the subject so that you could make the right decision for yourself. By providing as much information as I can, nearly anyone could reach the point where they have decided one way or the other. When that point is reached, all I have to do is ask for the sale.