Online Product Launches

Have you ever looked back through your old blog posts and thought, “Why did I give away all of this brilliant writing for free?” Well, here’s some good news: Unless your blog topic is last night’s baseball scores or this week’s hurricane, there’s income potential in those old posts yet.

I was amazed. Jaw-on-the-floor astounded. I’d been imagining what it would feel like for a long time, and truly believed if I put my mind to the task and nose to the grindstone, it was sure to happen. But the reality was like seeing a six-pack after 100,000 crunches (not that I’d know anything about that).

Whether you’re a one-person shop at a kitchen table, or the next Rupert Murdoch (or both), you need to start thinking like a media business. Say you want to run an online magazine. Or maybe you’re a personal publisher executing on myriad ideas that need more options than a simple blog post can provide. You’re covering multiple topics, in multiple formats.

As many bloggers jump off the Adsense bandwagon, they’re getting into the launch game, with a neverending stream of premium eBooks, white papers, audio interview series, video courses, membership sites, networking events, webinars, conferences, consultation packages, private coaching groups, print books, physical items, and anything else that could be wrangled together into a marketable asset.

Remember those puzzles you used to do when you were six or seven? That mass of dots and numbers on a page just looked like a mess. But when you went through and connected dot 1 to dot 2, moving on through dots 100 and 101, you wound up with a picture of a pony.