I believe anyone can sell from their blog. Selling products (like WordPress SEO Secrets) or services (like Blog Consulting) from your blog will make you far more money than AdSense. In order to sell from your blog you need a few chief components:

• Expertise, experience, and talent in a subject worth paying for (and if you don’t have that, what the heck are you blogging about?).
• A way to receive money online (PayPal, essentially).
• A way to facilitate digital product downloads, for which I recommend E-Junkie.

If you want to learn more and get an overall picture of how to generate mutliple online income streams through your blog, then I recommend the Online Business School information product from IttyBiz. Here is an Online Business School review post I wrote a few months ago.

The purpose of nearly any information product you could sell is to teach people something at which you are an expert. Knowing your subject matter and being able to market it and teach it effectively are not even remotely related. The program responsible for arming me with the very profitable knowledge on how to do this is Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells, which is reopening soon.

This is not very technical stuff, here. If you can copy and paste HTML code and write a document longer than 30 pages or so, you can do this.

Meeting and talking with Brian Clark of Copyblogger and Teaching Sells was one of the highlights of SOBCon 08 for me. Brian is one of the nicest dudes you could ever meet. He answers a question I had for him after he had just delivered his presentation: what was the most important take-away point from his presentation. He didn’t have just one, he had two (like I was gonna argue about it):

1. Attention by itself is worthless if it can’t be transformed into authority in a real business
2. Build an asset, not a job–in other words, don’t build a blog, build a media property

I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all when I said that this is the most important blogging strategy you will ever hear. If you’re new to blogging, it may not even make any sense, but the more I dwell on it, the more nuances of what this really means become apparent to me.

What may be hard to take is that it’s not really about blogging at all. A blog is a tool. Just one tool, at that. That notion isn’t hypocritical or sacrilegious to me at all. I mostly write about business blogging, where the blog is a tool designed to further the goals of the business.

If you really want to understand what Brian’s talking about, check out Teaching Sells. Teaching Sells is the only program of its kind I have ever suggested to my readers that they sign up for. Teaching Sells teaches you how to do these very things that Brian talks about in the video: transform authority into a business and build a media property asset instead of a job. I have been a member of Teaching Sells since it first began, and the experience has been transformational.

Teaching Sells introduces you to strategies, methods, and an arsenal of other tools you can use to build an asset, instead of slaving away at your blog, one hand clapping into infinity. If you’re curious about what Teaching Sells is all about, and you want to learn more, head on over and check it out or download the free report.