Writing for Your Wealth

Since I make the majority of my income through running advertising and affiliate links on my blogs and websites, I write on those topics fairly often, but there are a lot of other ways a writer can build wealth. A blog should be a part of your core strategy (it’s the best way to attract visitors and build up an audience), but selling advertising may be just the beginning for you.

A lot of ambitious writers go on to create products of their own.

If you’re a words-loving blogger, you might naturally think of books or ebooks as a next step, but some successful Internet entrepreneurs are going past products people pay only once for and adding “continuity products” to their arsenal.

What Is a Continuity Product?

Basically it’s something people pay for again and again, on a regular basis. If you’ve ever subscribed to a magazine or newspaper, then you know exactly how it works. You pay a certain amount per month, quarter, year, etc. and you receive new installments at set intervals.

Fortunately, you don’t have to own a magazine or be a newspaper publisher to take advantage of the possibilities continuity products offer. If you enjoy writing, there are quite a few models open to you. We’ll look at a couple here: subscription newsletters and membership sites.

Subscription Newsletters

This is exactly what it sounds like: you charge your interested readers an ongoing fee and send them a newsletter chocked full of good information.

On the Internet, publishers have been experimenting with premium (or paid) content for years, and many have had little to no success. With so much information available for free on the web, it can be hard to get people to pay.

In order for a subscription newsletter to work, your words don’t necessarily have to be golden, but they should focus on solving problems for people (as we’ve mentioned before, there’s money to be made in providing solutions to people’s problems) or satisfying their wants.

Also, your potential subscribers need to believe you’re the person qualified to fulfill this role.

Through your blog, you can gradually work toward that type of authority. They say everyone is an expert at something, and if your expertise lies along a line that others will pay to learn about, then you may have the opportunity to turn it into ongoing income through paid newsletters.

Don’t feel you have to stick with online newsletters either. Many people value physical products they can hold in their hands more than purely digital products.

I know I’ve ordered physical ink-on-paper newsletters from a couple people based on information I’ve read on their blogs or websites. I don’t know if I’d ever pay to subscribe to an email newsletter, but in this day and age when you’re lucky to get anything besides junk in the mail, it’s nice to get a letter in the real mailbox!

The cool thing about a physical newsletter is that it’s something you can start at home, just using your own printer (you may want to invest in a P.O. Box though, since you don’t necessarily want your subscribers knowing your home address). There are plenty of software programs that allow you to print a professional looking newsletter (you may want to outsource the design of the original template), and when your content is good, few people are looking for flash anyway.

Once your subscriber base grows, you can turn the distribution over to a fulfillment company which will print out and ship the letters for you.

With all information products, your earnings tend to be high since costs to create the products are low, and with a subscription newsletter your income will continue in at a steady (and ideally growing) amount each month.

How much can you make?

It depends a lot on your subject matter and audience demographics, but in certain niches (finance, real estate, business, etc.) people will pay $100 and more a year to subscribe. Even in niches that have nothing to do with teaching people to make money, it’s possible to build a base of paying subscribers. Just think of all the folks who want to lose weight, find their ideal match, train their dog to stop destroying the house, etc.

Another perk is that when you’re talking about a topic that you know well, it may only take you a few hours a month to write a quality newsletter of a few pages. (Once you’re established, guest authors can be brought in to help fill out the pages too.)

Membership Sites

This is another model of continuity product. With a membership site, you pay a monthly fee for access to a website, which is usually set up in an e-course format. You’ll often learn in modules and may have the opportunity to interact with the instructors and other students taking the course at the same time. A membership site may run six months or be ongoing with registration open all the time, and new courses being added on a regular basis.

This is more technical than writing a newsletter and as you can imagine, it’s best to sign up for someone else’s membership site (maybe several) before trying to start one of your own.

In addition to the e-course style site, there are also some that regularly publish original articles for other webmasters, ezine/newsletter editors, etc. to use. These articles often come with Public Label Rights (PLR), allowing the folks who subscribe to download them, alter them, and even claim them as their own. These types of membership sites may be limited to 200 or 300 subscribers at any given time (so the folks getting the articles know there aren’t thousands of other people out there with access to the same articles).

If you love to write articles, then you could learn more about PLR membership sites and start one of your own. To put out the necessary articles, you’d probably want to outsource some of the writing (some people outsource it all!).

Notice that both of these membership models are focused on solving problems for people. With an e-course style site, you’re teaching people how to do something. With PLR articles, you’re providing content for those who don’t want to write all their own stuff.

While creating a membership site is probably more work than writing an ebook or publishing a newsletter, the potential for profits (ongoing profits) is impressive. Again, how much you can charge depends on your niche and the authority you’ve built up, but site owners charge anywhere from $20 to $100 per person per month. Even if you just had 100 subscribers, that could be a pretty lucrative addition to your income each month. The downside is that membership sites require more technical knowhow to get them up and running, but it’s certainly possible to outsource a lot of the work (just count on a higher initial outlay than with a newsletter).

But before you can be successful with continuity products…

The challenge with these types of products is that you need to establish yourself as an authority in your field and be willing to share information people want in order to attract subscribers. You also need to offer quality, precision content that may be difficult for people to obtain elsewhere.

A newsletter that covers the latest home and garden trends probably isn’t going to get as many subscribers as one that teaches you how to launch a successful interior design business with low start-up costs. The former is something people can already get in magazine form for a low price, but the latter promises to teach and share information that may not be available unless one spends a good deal to hire a consultant or coach.

Again, you don’t have to be teaching people how to make money in order to build wealth of your own with continuity products, but you do need to establish yourself as an authority. And it’s okay if you don’t know today what you want to be an expert in–there are lots of other ways to make money, and along the way you may just find your field.

Links to Successful Newsletters and Membership Sites

Since I’ve not personally pursued these avenues myself (yet!), I’ll direct you to some established pros, so you can get a better idea of what’s possible.

John T Reed is a no-B.S. real estate writer who has published a line of books and charges $125 a year for his subscription newsletter.

Yaro Starak has been making thousands a month from his blog for quite a while, and teaches his blogging secrets in his Blog Mastermind* membership site.

*Affiliate link (I’ve been following Yaro’s blog for years and figured as long as I was going to use his program as an example, I might as well make it affiliate link!)