Deciding what to sell on your blog is harder when you have four ideas than when you have none. The course you keep outlining, the templates people ask for, the coaching you did once for a friend, the thing you almost built last spring.
Every one of them could work, which is the problem, because none of them is getting finished.
The advice you find on this is a list of product types. Ebooks, courses, printables, memberships, as if the format were the decision.
The format is the last thing you pick. The decision is which single problem you are going to charge to solve, and you can tell which one that should be without guessing.
I have spent seventeen years in digital marketing, and more things to sell was never what fixed this for me. Knowing what people already came to me for was.
What should you sell on your blog first?
Sell the thing that answers the question your traffic already arrives asking. Not the offer you are most excited about, and not the biggest one you could build.
The answer to what to sell on your blog is already sitting in your own numbers. The posts bringing in the most readers are telling you what strangers come to you for, and the offer that sells is the paid version of that same help.
When those two things do not match, you are asking a woman who came for one problem to buy the solution to a different one. She does not argue with you about it, she leaves.
Want help finding your story?
You cannot charge to solve a problem you cannot say out loud in her words. The Three-Day Mirror walks you through finding that language in your own story.
Help me find my storyWhy do four ideas leave you with nothing to sell on your blog?
Four half built offers earn the same as no offer at all. Attention is the only thing you have that is genuinely limited, and split four ways it is not enough to finish anything.
A quieter cost sits underneath that. Every week you spend choosing is a week your traffic arrives to nothing, and that traffic does not come back later to check whether you decided.
You are not being indecisive. You are trying to make a permanent choice, and it is not one.
If you already sell something and the sales still are not coming, that is a different problem, and I took apart how to find the one leak costing you the most in a separate post.
Which of your ideas can you deliver ten times over?
Whatever you sell on your blog has to survive its own success, so take each idea and ask what happens the tenth time somebody buys it. If the answer involves you being on a call, in an inbox, or building something new each time, that is not your first offer.
Your first offer has to run without you in the room, because you are doing this around a job and a house and everything else in your life. An offer that needs your calendar to work will quietly stop you from selling it.
That is not an argument against ever selling your time. It is an argument against your time being the first thing you sell, when you are still learning what people will pay for.
Is the price low enough for a stranger to say yes?
The hardest move in this whole business is not getting readers, it is getting one of them to hand you money for the first time. Eb Gargano at Productive Blogging puts it plainly, that moving someone from subscriber to customer is the hardest step there is, and that a single high ticket product makes it nearly impossible because almost nobody goes from zero to a large payment in one leap.
What she is describing is the reason a first offer sits low. You are not pricing for profit yet, you are pricing to find out whether anyone will buy from you at all.
What that costs you to deliver, and what a high ticket offer takes out of your week, is its own conversation and I am taking it apart on the tenth.
Does your signup point at what you are selling?
The thing you give away is a promise about what you help with, and the offer has to be the obvious next step from it. When the two point in different directions, the women arriving are the wrong women for what you sell.
That mismatch is easy to miss because both halves look fine on their own. The signup is useful, the offer is good, and they are answering two different questions.
Read your own signup and your own offer back to back and see whether one leads into the other. If a stranger would not guess the second from the first, one of them has to move, and it is usually easier to change the offer than the signup that is already bringing people in.
I went through what makes a signup worth wanting in this post.
Does it finish one problem, or promise a whole transformation?
An offer that promises to change everything is impossible to build and impossible to buy. She cannot picture what she gets, so she waits.
The offer that sells names one problem and finishes it. She knows what she will have when she is done, and that is what she is paying for.
This is where most first offers go wrong, because the temptation is to put everything you know into the first thing you sell.
Everything you know is your body of work, and your first offer is one piece of it.
Can you build it in a week?
If the answer is three months, you have picked wrong, and the idea being bad is not the reason. A three month build means you find out in December whether anyone wanted it, and if the answer is no, you spent your fall finding that out.
Something you can put together in a week can be selling by the end of the month, and the response tells you more than any amount of planning would have.
One offer that ten women buy at a small price is a real answer about what your readers want. Four unfinished offers is no answer at all, and it took four times the work to get there.
What if you choose the wrong one?
Then you will know something in six weeks that you cannot know now, which is what your readers will and will not pay for.
The offers you set aside are not gone. They are next, and they will be better for having watched what happened with the first one.
The work does not disappear either. What you learned building the first one is the foundation the next one stands on, and the second test moves faster because you are not starting from nothing.
What costs you is the version where you keep all four alive and sell none of them, because that one has no ending. Deciding what to sell on your blog is not a permanent decision, it is the first one, and you cannot get to the second one without it.
How do you decide what to sell on your blog this week?
Deciding what to sell on your blog comes down to putting your ideas next to each other and running them through the same questions. Which one answers what your traffic already arrives asking, which one still works the tenth time somebody buys it, which one your signup already points at, which one finishes a single problem, and which one can be built in a week.
Usually one clears them all and the rest do not, and the decision that felt impossible turns out to have been made for you by your own numbers.
Do This
Open Google Search Console, the tool that shows you what people typed into search before they landed on you, and pull your top ten pages from the last three months. The topic that shows up most is what strangers already come to you for, and your first offer is that same help, in a form she can buy.
Ask what it is costing her to leave that unsolved, because a topic people read is not always a problem people pay to end. If the thing you were planning to sell is not on that list anywhere, you were about to sell to a room that has not arrived yet.
If you know what you are selling and the harder part is deciding what to publish so people find it, that is what The Content Map lays out, for thirty seven dollars.
Be unpolished,
Angela