The Blog of Lisa Morosky

Whatever niche you’re in, chances are you can do some consulting on the side as a way of monetizing your blog. A lot of people get into consulting, then realize they don’t like doing consulting (because they don’t like people or having clients or whatever), so make sure you’re okay with the fact that you’ll have people to email and respond to every day, and sometimes it might be a headache.

I’m going to give you a quick step-by-step on how to start offering consulting services on your blog, using all free tools. Chances are, if this becomes a big earner for you, you’re going to want to upgrade your tools to some that cost money, but for now we’ll stick with the freebies.

The Planning Stage

Before you launch any sort of product or service willy-nilly, you should take some time to plan it out.

• Think about the amount of time you can dedicate to consulting, and therefore what you’ll need to be paid to make it worth your while (and worth their while).
• Set some goals. They can be monetary goals (how much you’d like to earn a month). They can be quantitative goals (how many new clients a month you’d like to see). Have some system in place to measure your progress.
• Figure out how you’re going to offer your consulting services. Will you do it based on packages (so many sessions for a certain price)? Will you do it per hour? What will and won’t you do, talk about, and share with clients? Will you record sessions for clients?

Getting the Tools in Order

So if you’re testing the consulting waters, I don’t think you need to spring for more expensive services (like GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar) quite yet – figure out what your clients want first.

Here are two free tools you can start off with:

• For telephone-only consulting, go with FreeConferenceCall.com. It’s free (obviously), and you can even record your calls for free. Not a bad deal.
• For video consulting, or consulting where you need to share your computer screen, good ole Skype will work. I’ve started doing exactly this for personal blog training. I wish I could find a free app to share with you that allows you to record the screen and the conversation while you’re in Skype – but I haven’t found anything free that works well (and I actually haven’t found anything not free that works real well for Skype recording). If you have, please share it with me.

Getting Your Blog Set Up to Offer Consulting Services

There are two big things you need to do:

• Add a “Work With Me” or a “Services” or a “Consulting” page to your blog. Describe your services. Add some testimonials. Make working with you so appealing that they just can’t refuse.
• Set up an automatic way to pay. Trust me – if you make it easy for people to pay you, more people will pay you. Add PayPal buttons, or shopping cart buttons. When I switched over to doing this versus just saying “contact me for information”, business increased dramatically.

If you want to go the extra mile, you could also:

• Add a little advertisement below your blog posts that says something like “Work With Me” with a link to your consulting page. Sticking advertisements below your posts, but before comments, is a spectacular place to put them. Don’t give Google AdSense that spot – give you that spot.
• Add a little advertisement to your blog sidebar. Can’t hurt, right?
• If you have a blog newsletter template you use, build in a little advertisement there.

Publicize Your Services

Okay, so you’re all set up now. Now it’s time to let people know that you offer consulting services. Here are some ideas:

• Twitter is your friend. Schedule a tweet to go out once a week that says something like, “FYI – I offer such-and-such services nowadays. Read more about it here: <link>.” Once a week isn’t overwhelming, and if you schedule the tweets ahead of time you don’t have to worry about remembering to post something.
• Run a promotion when you’re just starting out to get your first batch of clients and testimonials. Offer your services at a discount at first so you can get that first batch of interested people.
• Add a message to your autoresponder sequence about your services. Another thing that’s automatically done for you.
• Use this as a call-to-action in your blog posts. You know how at the end of your blog posts there should be some sort of call-to-action (leave me a comment, tweet this, check out this product, etc)? Use your new services as your call-to-action.
• Go back and look through some old blog posts and update them with a link to your services. These posts are (hopefully) indexed in search engines, so it can’t hurt, right?

We talk so much about advertising and affiliate marketing and creating products, that I think we forget that a lot of people start off by monetizing their blogs with services. And it can be a good living (with little to no upfront costs). So if you’re struggling with how to monetize your blog, consider offering consulting services.

The way I see it, there are really only two types of forum communities: free forums and paid forums.

Within those are smaller forum categories, if you will: free and huge, free and small, paid and huge, and paid and small.

Real quick, let me explain.

• Free and huge forums tend to be on websites that receive a ton of traffic, and have a huge, passionate community. Think the Get Rich Slowly forums, or the forums on Steve Pavlina’s site.
• Free and small forums aren’t really worth mentioning. I see these forums on websites that haven’t established a big presence yet, and/or with an inactive community. These people probably made a mistake and tried to launch a forums community too early in their development process, or they haven’t actively cultivated and paid attention to the community along the way and it died.
• Paid and huge forums are sometimes seen as a part of a popular membership program. They tend to be launched by people and websites that have a lot of clout. Think the ProBlogger Community.
• Paid and small forums are usually part of a smaller membership program. Perhaps the number of members is capped. Think the Blog Masters Club forums, or the new Beyond Blogging Project forums.

There may be a ton of forum communities in your niche. And we’re told all the time that being a part of forums is a great way to market our businesses, do market research, network, get traffic to our sites, and so on.

But let’s be honest here: we don’t have time to waste “getting our feet wet” in the forums world. I don’t know about you, but I want to know where my participation is going to get me the highest payout (whatever your payout might be – money, contacts, authority, traffic, etc). And then I want to jump in and be an active member and start seeing some results.

Sorry if that doesn’t sound kumbaya-let’s-share-ideas-yay-community-let’s-hug enough for you. While being a part of a community and adding value to it is important to me, I run a business. Being active on forums helps me meet business objectives. I love people and hanging out on forums as much as the next person – but I have a bottomline too (and you do as well).

So let me save you some time and save you some trial and error and tell you straight-up that you’re going to get the most return on your investment (that is, your time and energy spent engaging and cultivating relationships with others on forums) if you participate in small paid forums. Small paid forums are hidden gems.

• There’s less competition, so your voice will be heard.
• There’s more of an opportunity to really get to know other members.
• There’s an incentive for people to participate – after all, they’re paying for access.
• There’s a higher chance that all the conversations will relate to you in some way.
• You’ll see tangible ways that your involvement has helped you reach your objectives.

I participate in really only three forum communities in this niche: ProBlogger.com, the Blog Masters Club forums, and the Beyond Blogging Project forums. In the interest of full disclosure and all that jazz: Dave (Blog Masters Club Founder) is a client of mine, and Nathan and Mike asked me to be a part of the Beyond Blogging Project forums. For what that’s worth.

I enjoy ProBlogger.com. I do. I don’t login that often, and when I do I find that I’ve missed so much stuff that I don’t really have time to catch up. I’ve gotten a couple clients from my involvement over there. But anything I say or do over there is quickly covered up by someone else’s activities.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten more than a few clients from my participation in the other two communities. Traffic to my blogs has increased. I’ve made countless, long-term connections. I’m more involved and engaged in these communities. Participation here has added to my business bottomline.

That’s my $0.02 on the topic. Personally, I probably won’t be joining any other large communities. For example, I didn’t join Third Tribe. Am I a part of the “Third Tribe”? Well, yeah. If you know me and read my blogs, you can see I align myself with the whole philosophy. But the community is huge. I don’t want to fight my way in. I feel like being a part of some large communities like this one is just a status symbol. Similar information is being shared in other communities I’m active in, at events I attend, and between myself and my network.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the people involved in Third Tribe. I’ve met some of them. They do awesome stuff. I’m just into more intimate community settings. It benefits me more. If at some point there’s a gap in my knowledge, and Third Tribe (or any other big community) can fill that need, I’m all over it. For now, I’m reaping the benefits of the smaller communities I participate in.