A great way to make money off your blog is as a consultant. As with freelancing, you may not make a huge amount of money, at least until you have a large audience, but consulting can give you a decent side income.
Remember: The way to make money on your blog is through a number of income streams. Advertising, affiliate programs, selling your own digital products … these are all great ways to bring in income. Consulting can add yet another stream to this flow of income.
In my mind, a freelancer produces something for a fee (an article or blog post, photos, graphics, a design etc.), while a consultant will offer expertise for a fee. Consultants tend to help a business or group or person improve something, or come up with a plan to do something, or work on a specific project.
Freelancers usually work from their own offices or homes with their own tools, doing work independently, while consultants might go into a place of business and do work with that business, often with less control over schedule and tasks. However, this is all up for negotiation and can vary greatly from one job or industry to another.
Some examples of what different consultants might do:
There are many more types of consulting, obviously — this is just to give you an idea of the broad array of consulting businesses that are out there.
Basically, you need to know how to do something well. If you don’t immediately know what you can do well, give it some thought — what have you spent years doing, either professionally or personally? Don’t just think in terms of what your job has been, but what work you’ve actually been doing. You might have been in tech support, but mostly building a company website, or in PR but creating a lot of kick-ass brochures. Or maybe you were a secretary, but organized a lot of events.
Once you’ve got an idea of what you can do, think of who needs this skill or expertise. Who uses this skill but needs improvement? Often it’s large businesses, but it could be non-profit organizations, small businesses, individual entrepreneurs, or just regular people. Now where are these people? What do they read? Where can you reach them? What are they interested in? Here, do as much research as you can.
Experience and expertise is the starting point. But to have a successful consulting business, you need a way to reach people. This is where the blog comes in — it can be the best advertisement possible for a consulting business. Build a blog around great content related to what you really know, and you’re showing what an expert you are — you are building your authority. Help others to do what you know, and you’ll build an audience. Once you have the audience, you have the consulting business.
When I dropped most of the ads on Zen Habits and went down to one single ad, I decided to supplement my ad income with consulting. So I put up a link in my sidebar, did a post announcing my new consulting business, and had a “Hire Leo” page where people could find out about what I was offering, what my rate was, and how to hire me.
It was that simple. I got a number of people interested in consulting: for blogging, for business strategy, and personal development. In fact, I had to turn away business.
However, it was successful simply because I already had an audience, which is why it’s important to build the foundation first — growing your audience. As you do this, you can establish your authority/credibility. And by helping people, you’ll do two things: show how much you know, and grow your audience.
It’s also a good idea to establish some things at the beginning of any consulting gig:
There are other things you should establish, but that’s a good start.
If your blog is still small, there is a simple way to kickstart your consulting business. The following strategy was developed by Jon Morrow.
Step 1: Write a blog post about a pain point that your readers experience.
Step 2: Offer to help ten people (or five if your blog is very small) for free with a 30 minute phone or Skype consultation. All your readers have to do is to leave a comment describing their biggest problem relating to your post.
Step 3:Choose the winning commenters, contact them by email, and complete the consultation. If you have consulting packages or services that you think this client might benefit from, be sure to remind them of this before you close the call. Follow up the consultation with an request for a testimonial.
Step 4: Email the rest of your commenters and say that unfortunately, all free slots have been taken. Offer to do the consultation for a fee.
You can see how Jon Morrow set up his consultation business using this method with a post on Copyblogger, called Screwed Up Your Blog? Here’s What to Do.
Author: Leo Babauta