How Bloggers Make Money Building BRANDS | How To Make Money Blogging

In 2013, a new blogger came on the scene who was talking about mold and drugs. This blogger started a podcast in which he documented the different experiments that he was running on himself, while also talking about the dangers of mold in your environment and the benefits of the different drugs that he was experimenting with. He then started writing about food and other ways that human beings could upgrade their biologies. And the most popular thing that he talked about was putting butter in your coffee. If you haven't guessed yet, I'm talking about Dave asprey. And between 2013 and 2014, he was a blogger on the website the Bulletproof Executive. That blog started getting a huge following because people started putting butter in their coffee and buying specialty beans that were certified mold free. That led Dave to start his first physical products brand, Bulletproof Coffee. Dave is not the only example of bloggers who have built physical products brands that have done extremely well. In fact, around the same time of Dave's rise to prominence, Mark Sisson started marksdailyapple.com where he started talking about Paleo living. But it was just a few years ago that he started the Primal Kitchen, in which he was selling Paleo versions of your favorite condiments and sauces, which later sold for $200 million. Both Dave and Mark were relatively unknown until they started putting out content. But their careers really took off when they started a physical products brand, which they built and either raised money in Dave's case, or sold in Mark's case. Bloggers sit in the most interesting position because they already have a foothold in the marketplace and they already have an audience that wants to buy the products and services that they recommend. So in this video, we're going to talk about how bloggers can start a physical products brand that can establish you as an authority in your space and also be a scalable, sellable piece of your company without you having to hawk other products. I'm Ryan Daniel moran. This is capitalism.com. let's dive in. This is my favorite topic because this is how I made the majority of my money. Building audiences and then starting physical products brands around those audiences. When you've got an audience in a specific space, that's when you're a blogger and you're already sharing your opinion about things going on in your industry and in your space. You sit in a very unique position to be able to do damage in your marketplace. And I mean that in a good way. One of the biggest questions that most entrepreneurs ask me when they're starting their physical products brand is, is what product should I sell. And when you're a blogger who already has an audience, you've already got a few thousand visitors a month. You might already have a podcast and have some connections in the space. You already know exactly what the market wants. And when you're a blogger and you have the audience of people who are demanding something, you sit in the position where you can innovate in the marketplace without the same risk that most entrepreneurs go into. Most entrepreneurs are afraid to take risks when they're starting a new product. So they sell what everybody else is selling. And they kind of have to do that at the beginning because most of them don't raise money. They don't have an audience that can support whatever they do. But when you already have some income that's coming from the blog, an audience that is supporting the blog, or you've got some connections from the interviews or the resources that you've built, you can afford to take more risks. And that puts you in a position to be able to make more money in some cases too. Now, when I talk about taking risks, I'm really talking about innovating on a product in the marketplace, doing something that's a little bit new in the marketplace. For example, talked about Mark Sisson and Primal Kitchen. He started a condiment line. Now, that was risky because the profit margins on condiments aren't all that exciting. You're selling a condiment for like 8 bucks or whatever he charges. But it was because he was able to innovate in the marketplace that it got so much traction so quickly and then ended up selling for $200 million. There's something that most people don't know about Primal Kitchen, though. Before he started the condiment line, he had a supplement line which had much higher profit margins, and that allowed him to fund the build out of the food company. So if you're watching this and you think that I'm recommending that you go all in on a risky business, that's not necessarily the case. Although if you have the funding for it, it can be a really fun way to make a splash in the marketplace. Even Dave Asprey started with some high margin products with coffee, MCT oil, and then other things that followed those all had pretty healthy profit margins, which then have allowed him to fund the coffee shop, the bulletproof vibe, and all the crazy stuff that he's doing, like his biohacking retreats, which actually look pretty darn cool. So it's okay to focus on really profitable products that you know your audience will love and use that Cash flow to fund the growth of something that really establishes you as the authority in your space. So the primary question to ask when you are thinking about starting a brand that is around your blog following is, what do my existing customers really want? In Dave Asprey's case, it was, I'm talking about mold free coffee. I might as well just sell mold free coffee. But if Dave had wanted to be a coffee company, then his second product would have been a dark roast. But it wasn't. It was an MCT oil and then an upgraded MCT oil. This was before anyone was talking about mold in their coffee. And this was before anybody knew what medium. I can't even say it. Medium chain, triglyceride oil, even is. Dave built that market and because those things were sort of hard to find, he had a nice foothold in the marketplace. There's a great teaching lesson here, and that is if you are willing to talk about the things that most of the people in your market are not talking about, it gives you a new perspective that allows people to follow you in a specific way and then buy the products that you end up recommending. Nobody was putting butter in their coffee before Dave was telling them to. And that allowed him to create an even bigger audience, which then he launched additional products to. I think the worst thing that a blogger could do is launch a brand that is not directly targeted to the eyeballs that they control. My favorite clients to work with are people who have blogs with followings that rank for keywords and have an email list. If somebody has those two things, I mean, the things that we can do together are amazing because they already have eyeballs looking for specific products, looking for specific things, trusting an authority with their opinion. And when we launch a brand that's tied around you, oh, I mean, it's just. It's like you can print money in a lot of cases. We got $300 now. Why is that the case? That's the case because there are people who are already looking for your recommendations for products. And when they can find that you've got the brand and you've done the research, it's the best service that you can do to those people to launch the brand that you endorse because you built it. So a good place to start is to simply look at what products you're already talking about that you're already evaluating that your customers already want, and then start developing your own line of products within that sphere. The next thing that's important to know is that you already have potential investors and Customers who are following you. So I don't recommend that you keep your brand a secret at this point in the process. As soon as you start developing the product, start talking about it publicly. If you run a parenting blog and you're starting to develop a brand new type of stroller, start talking about it now. Now some people will say, well, what if someone copies me? What if someone steals my idea? The fact of the matter is your audience wants the stroller that you recommend, the stroller that you designed. There's also a tremendous number of benefits from talking about your product publicly. That is building up a pre launch list, taking pre orders even before your product is available. And there's a good chance that you have investors who, who already follow you that would love to put up the startup capital for you to develop a prototype and even do your first line of inventory. And in my experience, it takes no more than $25,000 to do a brand really well. In my book, 12 months to 1 million, I recommend $10,000 as the amount that someone would need in order to start a million dollar business, or at least a business that can hit a million dollars within about a year's time. If you don't have 10 or 25 grand laying around, someone in your audience does and they're a super fan. And the more that you talk about the products and the brand that you are developing, the more interested those investors become in being a part of the vision that you're creating. So don't keep your products a secret. You've already got an audience of people who want what it is that you're developing. This should develop confidence in you rather than concern. So you've already got people who are demanding a certain set of products and you've got people who are following you specifically, those two things coming together can almost guarantee a successful launch. When you have trust with the marketplace and you are publicly talking about and documenting the development of the brands that you want to launch, there's a really high chance of success right out of the gate on launch day. The biggest thing that holds people who have audiences like bloggers, bloggers and podcasters, even some social media influencers, the thing that holds them back the most is they can't see the path to success of bridging this space between starting at zero and having a really successful physical products brand. So I use this formula. I beat this to death in my book, 12 months to 1 million. But it's this formula. If you've got four products that sell 25 sales a day at an average price point of $30. That's a million dollar business. Now at the beginning, that's a slow process. But when you've got an email list or a podcast following, or you can write blog posts all about the product that you are releasing or have just released, you have a huge leg up in the marketplace to hit the million dollars. I don't mean to repeat myself, but here I go. This is why bloggers are my favorite people to work with. Because they've already got this intrinsic audience that can have a physical products brand launch to and it becomes very predictable to be able to take a product from zero to 25 sales a day and then duplicate that process over four products. And that gives you the confidence, once you've got a seven figure business to be able to grow this thing to a multi seven figure business. And then we have something that we can really scale or sell this process. When you add in the fact that you've already got eyeballs that want a specific group of products that you've got, it can happen so quickly. It's just, it's so much fun to do with people who already have audiences. Something that you might not see right now is that when I'm working with a new entrepreneur, the thing that I have to convince them to do is to build an audience. I say please blog, please start a podcast, please start documenting your business development on social media. Well, you're already doing that if you have a blog. You've already got Google traffic, you've already got people who follow you. You have the hardest part done. Now we just bolt on the fun part, which is the brand that you're building, the brainchild that you know your market will love because it's something that you love and that becomes a really wildly successful business right out of the gate. Now one of the things that comes up at this point in the process is if a blogger is convinced. Alright, you got me, Ryan. I'm convinced. I know I need to start a physical products brand. I can see that it's the pat to building a seven figure business and more importantly, it's the way that I can impact my customers in a way that can really change their lives and be a scalable, sellable business for me. In fact, quick aside, Mark Sisson sold Primal Kitchen to Heinz, which was really controversial at the time because Heinz was seen as the enemy. But Mark saw it as the natural extension of how to bring the products that he had created to the rest of the world. He was really proud of this line of sauces that he had made. People were loving them. And so when the enemy saw that how many people were consuming the healthy version of these products, it made sense that Heinz could help bring it to more people. And so that's how Mark was able to get behind the idea of selling to this big company, because he was. He was genuinely creating a difference in a lot of people's lives. I tell you that because what you might not see right now is a physical products brand is the natural extension of how you can serve your customers. And if I can convince you of that, then the next thing that we might have to talk about is how do we do this in a way that doesn't monopolize your life? If you're a blogger, a creator, an audience builder, you need to stay in that mode. It's a disservice to the business for you to step out of the thing that is driving the entire business and building more eyeballs and building more followers. You want to stay in that role and simply be the person who comes up with the ideas for the physical products brand. So the best thing that you can do is solicit a manager or a partner specifically on the physical products brand. There's plenty of builders out there who can take your vision and bring it to life. So if it were me, I would keep my blog as a separate company and start a new one that was a physical products brand and then bring on a partner who would manage and do the legwork of bringing that product to life.