Podcast Archives
Naming Your Price: The True Starting Line To Growing A Real Business
Episode #136 | Episode Date: November 25, 2015
We’ll end off this multi-part series on pricing with a bird’s eye view of the whole thing…
So many bloggers out there don’t have any product yet. They just use banner ads… or affiliate links. And, all this stuff about pricing doesn’t yet apply to them.
If that’s you, then realize this…
Until you make your first offer and name your price, you haven’t even really gotten to the starting line.
Your offer is the starting line.
Give this episode a listen. It is important if you ever intend to make your blog the crux of a full-time income.
So let us get in to our topic for today. Today we are going to wrap up this multi-part series that we have been on here lately on the show about pricing and determining your pricing and talking about various aspects of that. But today, I want to talk about the big picture because I happen to know; because I have worked with a lot of bloggers, that most bloggers out there are still not up to the point that we have been talking about here in this pricing series. There are either screwing around with banner ads, affiliate links, stuff like that or if they sell anything in particular, they are really, really chipping out on it and going really cheap on it.
So at this point, I want to step back and I want to look at the big picture. And I want to talk to those of you who might not have even have an offer yet. Or perhaps you are still playing of that sandbox of really cheap products and you have not done anything really more extensive than that…
Here is the thing… The Blog Marketing Academy is the academy for what I call “Real Blog Monetization.” That word “monetization” can mean a lot of different things. But the way a lot of bloggers think of it; it is all low into crap. Things like, banner ads, affiliate links and just a bunch of crap like that. And the thing is, what we all need to keep in mind here is that – that is all child’s play. Now, if you keep on playing that game, you are most likely never going to get any real traction. I am just being honest with you, here. If you play a small game on other people’s turf then you are going to stay small. And the truth of the matter is that banners and affiliate links as the entire basis of your business; if you can even call it a business, that is other people’s turf. Those ad networks control the game and the affiliate companies control that particular game. You do not get to keep any other customers, it is just not a sustainable business model.
Now I am not saying money can’t be made doing those things but I want you to think bigger. I want you to think beyond just littering up your blog with affiliate links and putting banner ads all over the place. If you want to turn this whole blogging thing into a real life changer in terms of your income, the answer lies in creating a real exchange of value. And you do that by producing and providing value and then insisting on charging for it. You be the creator, not the consumer. You be the creator, not one of a million different middlemen out there.
And that is the thing. Most bloggers are pretty much just middlemen. That is what you are. When you put banner ads on your site, you are just a middle gateway between the customer and the ultimate person who is going to get that money which is the company on the other end of that banner ad. You are just a place where the banner showed up. You are adding no value to the chain. Same with affiliate links… Now, there are ways to do affiliate marketing where you actually are adding value to the overall equation. And usually, it is those affiliate marketers who do a lot better, by the way. But most people, most bloggers are just kind of littering the blog with affiliate links. There is no value being put there; you are just a middleman.
So the difference here is stark.
Now, simply by putting an offer on the table and drawing your line in the sand and naming your price, you have already accomplished a major milestone. The amount of aspiring business owners out there who tell me they have no product to sell… It really surprises the hell out of me! Why? Why would you put all that effort into making killer blog posts and have nothing to sell to that audience? It just makes no sense to me. Having an offer is really where things start. That is the starting link in this particular race. If you do not even have an offer yet, you honestly haven’t even stepped up to the starting line yet.
I find this is also true in other areas…
For instance, one of the classic signs of a person who is not going to make it is they do not assign a value to their own time. They literally will spend hours on some stupid thing that they could have paid somebody else a pretty reasonable fee to do it for them. Here is the thing… Your time is not worth zero. It literally is the only asset you have; that once you spent it, you can’t get it back. It is impossible. So the simple act of naming your price is also an acknowledgement to yourself that you are valuable; that you have value to offer to people. And that realization, in and of itself was very far in securing your eventual success.
You see all that is just different than what most bloggers around are doing. That simple little mindset shift… They try to do everything for free. They will spend their time on useless things. They place no value on their own time, they more often than not never actually put forth an offer of any kind for a variety of reasons. They will be like, “Eh, I don’t feel confident.” They basically screw themselves over and it is all because of their own internal reasons. Now, if they do, then what they usually end up doing is low-ball the price, perpetually give everything away for free. And it is usually because of their own fear of asking for money. I am not here to BS you. So if that describes you, then you really kind of are on the wrong road if you actually want to build up an entirely new revenue stream in a business on the internet. You are not going to do it practicing those old ways.
So, I am going to end off this pricing series with a huge commentary on mindset. I want you to name your value, I want you to name your price… I want you to own it, take responsibility for that and then you will succeed. It really is that simple. If you do not act like you have anything of value to offer, the world is not going to act like it either. You need to be valuable, you want to do valuable things, and then you are going to have VALUE in the form of money and goodwill from your audience. And all that we have talked about in this pricing series are the tools and the principles to help you facilitate doing all of that.
So that is going to be the end of our pricing series. I will see you on the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging where we are going to talk about a related aspect to what we just talked about that might just happen when you start doing this the right way.
I’ll see you on the next episode!