What You’re Really Doing When You’re Blogging (It’s Not What You Think)

When you write a blog post, what are you really doing?

You’re teaching.

When people read what you wrote, they’re learning.

When you distill the essence of it all, that’s what it comes down to: teaching.

I’m writing this after conducting a group blog coaching call, which the participants paid for. What, exactly, did they pay for? They paid to learn, to have access to information that was valuable and that they wouldn’t get any other way. On my end, what I did was teach.

When bloggers who want more traffic buys WordPress SEO Secrets, they want to learn what I have to teach about blog SEO. When attorneys join Blawging Lawyers, they want to learn what Grant and I have to teach on how to successfully market their legal practices with blogging.

All of this comes down to one thing: teaching sells.

Some of the most successful businesses on the web involve teaching and learning everything from Photoshop, to blogging, to marketing, to freelancing, to SEO, to starting an online business, to just about anything else you can imagine. Educating people for fair market value happens to be an excellent business. It has been proven time and time again that people will gladly pay for access to valuable training.

But how do you make a business like this happen? There is a long list of tasks to accomplish, from determining a market eager to learn to the technicalities of setting up an interactive learning environment to marketing an online learning site.

This is all teachable itself, luckily, and you can learn it and set up your own online learning site (or sites, if you’ve got some ambition). I believe in this model so much, I’m betting my future on it. On September 15th, I will work my last day for another person. After that, creating online educational sites will be a very big part of how I earn my keep.

I learned how to do conceive, plan, create, market, and manage these kinds of sites in a program called Teaching Sells.

Teaching Sells makes a big claim: it’s the best online business, period. In order to show you that it’s got the goods, there is some great information you can check out to learn more: a video and a free report (the first of two) you can download. If the idea of earning money by helping people in the most noble and  ethical way possible has any appeal to you at all, I strongly urge you to watch the video and (or at least) download the report. And I do not use the words “strongly urge” lightly. When was the last time you heard me say that? Probably never. If you told me I could have only one online business marketing program, it would be Teaching Sells.

An online learning site is not the same thing as a blog, but you can use blogging software (WordPress) as the content management system to create your site, along with stuff to manage members, payments, and affiliates. For example, Blawging Lawyers and the Headway Themes members area both use WordPress for content and Amember for member management, combined with PayPal for payment processing. And of course, you may want to use a blog for news updates and to provide enticing, helpful content. An online learning environment is a business which can be marketed with blogs and social just as well as (if not better than) any other business.

The pleasant and brilliant irony of Teaching Sells is that it’s the teaching membership site that is a perfect example of how to make teaching membership sites.

Just let that blow your mind for a minute.

Blogging is also teaching (hence the headline for this post, right?), but a blog is the beginning point of an online business, not the end point. Use your blog to teach many things, but not everything. Also, blogs are lousy “schools” when used normally, because the posts are all ordered backwards compared to an educational curriculum. Not even that: blogs have no order, really. To learn something, and learn it well, you have to have access to the right information in the right order, presented in the right way. The right information is worth paying for, and it makes for a great online business.

Maybe even the best online business. Check it out for yourself: Teaching Sells.