When I started blogging ten years ago, I thought that affiliate marketing and display ads were the only blog monetization options available. Obviously, I left more money on the table than I’m willing to admit.
It turns out that you can also make money by selling physical products online on your blog. And in this guide, you’ll learn how to do just that, even if your blog currently gets only a handful of readers per day.
Physical products are items people can touch, feel the weight, and use for the intended purpose. Unlike digital downloads, physical products require more time and money to make, pack, store, and ship. But if done right, creating, promoting, and selling physical products on your blog can bring you a huge competitive advantage over digital products.
With that said, here’s how to sell physical products online on your blog:
1. It Starts With Research
You’re going to put time, money, and effort to have physical products created and sold online on your blog. So you first have to start with proper research to lower your chances of failing.
Research starts with an idea, and it can take an afternoon – or even a day – to figure out whether an idea is worth pursuing or otherwise.
You have multiple ideas that relate to your niche initially, but that doesn’t mean they’re all sustainable and/or profitable.
What you do next is to research your ideas to find out the earning potential if you were to make the product.
It’s at this stage that you evaluate the market to find out whether your physical product can attract the right audience and make you money.
2. Make the Products
Your research may take a few days to complete, but you should be able to come up with a profitable physical product idea that you can make, market, and sell online on your blog.
Before you go all in, do a second round of market research to determine whether the product you’re about to make has direct competition. By studying the competition, you’ll be able to:
- Determine how the competition brand their products so that you can level up.
- Evaluate the weaknesses of the competing products so you can ensure improvements by adding your own spin
- Develop a clear product description that your manufacturer can keep up with when developing the product
- Create a quality checklist that inspectors might use to ensure you get the highest quality product during the production process.
In the end, you’ll have a product that’s not only better than the competition but also the kind that people can spend money on because they see its value.
3. Create a Bog on WordPress
Now that your product is ready to launch, you need to create a WordPress blog where you can post content about your physical products.
I recommend creating your blog on WordPress because we’ll be using WooCommerce platform to build an online store for your physical products.
4. Create an Online Store for Your Physical Products
Now that you’ve already crated your physical product and have a blog already running, it’s time to create an online store where you can list your products.
Web application developers have created so many storefront solutions. And while they spoil you for choice for solutions you can install on WordPress, we do recommend using WooCommerce to create an online store.
The WooCommerce solution isn’t just popular because it’s free. It’s also popular because it includes rich features, such as payment integration and useful extensions, to help you build, grow, and scale your online business.
To create an online store with WooCommerce:
Install the WooCommerce Plugin from WordPress Plugins Repository
To do this:
- Hover over the “Plugins” link in your WordPress dashboard
- Click “Add New”
- Search for “WooCommerce” and click the “Install Now” button
- Wait for the plugin to install and then click “Activate”
If you look closely, you’ll notice that WooCommerce has 1+ million active installs, making it one of the most popular WordPress extensions for building an online store to sell physical products online on your blog.
Setup Your WooCommerce Store
Now that you’ve activated the WooCommerce plugin, the next step is to setup your store.
The plugin will prompt you to start the setup, and every step should be easy to follow, with the entire setup process not taking you more than 120 minutes to complete.
In the next four screens that appear, you’ll be able to:
- Create important pages for your store, including the main shop, a shopping cart, checkout page, and default customer account area.
- Setup your ecommerce location, currency, and units, which are important because they help your customers know what they’ll get for their money.
- Update taxes and shipping for physical products. You have the option to indicate the cost for domestic and international shipping, so your customers know how much the total cost is likely to be.
- Setup your payment option. You can receive payments with PayPal, check, bank transfer, or cash delivery. If you like, you can use paid extension for additional payment gateways such as Stripe.
Once you complete the basic setup via the WooCommerce walkthrough, go back to the plugin’s settings link and configure all the options accordingly.
Because there are many settings that you may need to change, make sure you spend enough time here to get the setup right.
Remember, you’re doing these settings only once, so it’s fine if it takes you longer than we did mention earlier.
Add Your Physical Products to the Store
Adding products to your WooCommerce store isn’t any different from a new post or page to your blog.
Start by adding a category. You can base the name of the category on the type of products intend to sell – or whatever name you like.
Next, add the physical products that you intend to sell. WooCommerce give you the option to provide as much information about your product. So make sure your description is clear and worth reading.
We don’t expect you to grasp everything about WooCommerce in one sitting, but the description we’ve provided above should be more than enough to get you started.
5. Promote and Sell Your Products
The last step to selling physical products on your blog is product promotion. Check out my guide to grow blog traffic and implement the marketing techniques I share there to grow your audience and sell your products.
Conclusion
Selling physical products online on your blog doesn’t have to be difficult. Figure out what you’d like to sell in your niche, study the market, do your research, develop the product, and promote it online.