Have you ever looked at your blog stats and thought, “All that work for just a handful of sales?” Let’s talk about the pressure to sell on your blog.

Episode Highlights:

• Where is this Pressure Coming From?
• The ROI Challenge
• How to Relieve the Pressure to Sell, Sell, Sell

Resources Mentioned:

(referral link) Apply for Journey by Mediavine: Thanks for using my referral link!

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can help as many teacher business owners as possible.

Have a question you'd like me to answer on the podcast? Ask it here: stephanieroyersolutions.com/podcast

Dive into my signature course: Bring Your Own Traffic!

Check out my favorite places to look for fresh blog post ideas!

Or if you're ready to hire support for blogging and Pinterest, check out my services.

Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephanieroyersolutions/

Have you ever looked at your blog stats and thought, all that work for just a handful of sales? Let's talk about it.

Welcome back to the podcast. If you missed last week's episode, I have dubbed this month, No Pressure November. I feel like, especially at the end of the year, there are just too many things putting pressure on us in the world of marketing. If you feel like you can relate, you are definitely in the right place.

This week, I wanted to talk about the pressure to sell. We always talk about how a blog can bring you traffic and sales on autopilot, but I think sometimes we are only paying attention to the sales part of that statement - that your blog can bring you sales on autopilot. So that if your blog doesn't seem to be converting to sales, it's easy to get disheartened and wonder if all of the effort to blog is even worth it. So in this episode, we're going to dive into that pressure to sell. We're going to talk about where that pressure is coming from and what you can do about it.

So first, where is this pressure actually coming from? If you feel like your blog just isn't doing enough for your business and you're feeling the pressure to get more sales from the work you're putting into your website, it's helpful to think about where that pressure is coming from. Who is telling you that your blog isn't pulling its weight in your business?

I think there is an overarching theme in the TPT marketing space that everything you do to market your business should result in a sale on TPT. And so that's why everyone says add UTMs to all of your TPT links on your blog so that you can make sure that your blog is bringing you sales. Now, as someone who writes blog posts for TPT sellers as a ghostwriter,

I have had some clients in the past who frankly stressed me out because they were measuring whether my blog posts were worth my paycheck based on how many TPT sales each blog post generated. And that's fair. I think that the pressure to sell is ultimately driven from an internal expectation that the work we put into our website should bring us monetary results. It makes total sense.

If you're paying someone hundreds of dollars a month to blog for your business, you want to be bringing in at least that much money from your store. If you're spending hours of CEO time writing blog content, it would be nice to get paid for your time.

However, the problem comes from expecting there to be a straight line from someone landing on a blog post to then buying a product from you on TPT. And it's this expectation that can be putting more pressure on yourself to sell, sell, sell on your blog.

The fact of the matter is that the ROI of a website can be tough to measure since there are so many ways that it can contribute to your business. First, your blog helps you to build trust and authority online. This is so important in the age of AI slop right now. People want to connect with humans. They want to spend their dollar bills on products that have been made with care and concern and not necessarily by a robot.

A website is one way that you can establish that trust with potential customers.

Second, your blog helps to increase your brand visibility. Ranking on Google gets more eyeballs on your brand. Even if people don't necessarily click on your posts, they will see your brand name over and over again in search results. So let's say that you create kindergarten content and a kindergarten teacher, every time they're looking for ideas on Google, they see your name in the top five results. They will become familiar with your brand simply by seeing it on Google. So that when they go to TPT to look for a product, it will come to their mind that they've seen your brand name before and they'll type it into the search bar to see what you have to offer.

And third, your blog can warm up your leads. The people who visit your blog might not go straight to your TPT store and make a purchase, but they might return a few more times and then eventually become a customer.

This journey is common with blog content. Cold traffic does take a bit of time to warm up, but it will with the right blogging strategy. So now let's talk about how you can feel less pressure to sell, sell, sell.

Before we dive into my suggestions for relieving some of this pressure, I need to share a little analogy with you. I'm a mother of three kids. When they were really little, my husband and I shouldered all of the pressure for taking care of the house. We'd tidy things up, only to have our toddlers come right behind and work their toddler magic. But then when they got to be a little bit older, we started to give them chores to encourage them to learn basic self-care tasks, like making their bed, that type of thing. Now the pressure to take care of the house was still on our shoulders. In fact, standing back while a preschooler makes their bed can feel like even more pressure. But something magical happened as my kids got older. As they progressed from elementary school, to middle school, to high school, they had been able to take on more jobs and responsibilities around the house. Now I don't sit around eating bonbons, but I definitely feel much less pressure about the overall upkeep of our there are now five people who value a clean home and can take steps to care for it instead of just the two of us. But the key to relieving this stress and pressure was to gradually give our kids more jobs to do. Having teenagers that help around the house isn't something that happened magically overnight. It was finding chores that matched their current abilities, starting when they were really young, and then gradually changing the number or type of chores as developmentally appropriate. And I also don't expect my teenagers to manage the entire house all the time. That wouldn't be reasonable or fair.

Instead, I found tasks that my children do really well and frankly, they kind of enjoy. And those are their ongoing chores around the house. My husband and I take care of the rest with a lot less pressure on ourselves. So let's swap out taking care of the house with earning an income for your business. And let's swap out one of the kids with your blog.

Your blog will never be the sole source of income for your TPT business, just like one of my children isn't going to be in charge of caring for the entire house.

My guess is that the TPT search bar will always be your main source of sales. Instead, your blog can be part of the toolbox that adds more store visits and sales to your dashboard.

But the key to feeling less pressure is to give your blog more things to do, just like I would give my kids more jobs to do over time. Because there are more ways that your blog can be adding income to your business besides just pointing people to TPT and hoping that they'll make a purchase. The more jobs that you give your blog, the less pressure you'll feel about sales.

First, your website can be building your email list. Many TPT customers just need some time to get to know you and your business before purchasing for the first time. Your email list is where that nurturing happens and your blog posts can provide that easy yes when it comes to getting people on your list. Blog posts with freebies are easy to market on Pinterest, so your email list can be growing and nurturing your audience on autopilot with the right lead magnet and welcome sequence.

Second, your website can also be a source of significant affiliate income. Now, I'm not talking about just hyperlinking random words in your blog posts and pointing to Amazon. I'm talking about writing blog content specifically to drive affiliate clicks.

It can take some of that pressure off of your blog to constantly be selling when it is also bringing in consistent affiliate income.

But I know the bank account pressure is real. You need the math to math, and this economy is making it harder and harder. that's why I am a huge proponent of using display ads to take some of the pressure off. Now that Mediavine has the Journey program with a very low threshold to qualify, and Raptiv has even lowered their requirements to 25,000 page views per month as of the date of this recording.

It really is possible to make good money from display ads on your website. I know it's a hot topic because, let's face it, ads aren't pretty, but I think you'll be surprised that they really don't impact your conversions all that much for the amount of extra income that you can earn.

You are providing free content for website visitors to enjoy. There is nothing wrong with including display ads to offset the time and effort that it takes to prepare that free content. Especially since your cold traffic from Google is often looking for free information and not necessarily a paid product. Just to give you an idea, my first full month on Journey, I made an additional $500 of completely passive income, just from my small neglected website.

Think about how many sales you would need to have on TPT in order to make $500. And you can quickly see how display ads can relieve some of the pressure that you might be feeling about your blog making TPT sales. But one word of warning. Just like I didn't expect my toddlers to take on a huge list of household chores, you shouldn't try to implement all of these things all at once.

Even more important, you shouldn't expect one blog to do all of the heavy lifting for every monetization method.

It's important to be really intentional and strategic about when you're going to offer a freebie in a blog post and when you're going to be writing an affiliate ultimately, first step is to look at your blog as an asset that can pull more weight in your income generation. It might not be a straightforward conversion to sales on TPT. Instead, you should look at the different ways that your blog can enhance the customer journey that will eventually lead to income for your business.

I hope that relieves some of pressure to sell, sell, sell. If you'd like to to follow along with No Pressure November, be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening today.