I’m constantly amazed at how marketers seem to think free content and paid content are two entirely different things. That fact is, your most successful blog posts and newsletter articles can make you more money than many of the products you’ve promoted.
The key is to pay attention to how your content is received.
Look back at your posts from the past year and see which ones gained the most attention. Which ones did people comment on and forward to others the most?
A little 200-word article that gets great feedback is trying to tell you that you’ve struck gold. You might choose to expand that article into a full-blown product and sell it or use it as a lead magnet.
Take your most successful free reports and turn them into paid coaching programs.
Answer a customer’s question and then send that answer out to your list and see what happens. Do you get a lot of response? Bam! There’s another product waiting to be made.
The point is to monitor the reception you receive on every piece of content you create, whether they’re posts, recordings, videos, launches, emails, reports or whatever. If you’re not sure how something is being received, ask your readers what they thought of it.
Take the most popular topics and expand them or repurpose them into something else. You don’t have to continually come up with new ideas. Instead, figure out which ideas are working and then get most out of those.
And you can also purposely float your idea for a new product by creating a mini-version of it as a post and then seeing how people respond. Do you have 10 ideas for products? Create 10 posts, see which one is the most popular and start working on that product right away.