Hey guys,
Simply looking to pick your brains a little for ways to monetize what is currently my hobby for writing wine reviews. I'd ideally like to develop it as a separate income stream from my main biz, so I am ideally looking for some recurring revenues.
To tell you a bit about the project, I started a wine education/review blog a little over a year ago. I am also quite active with it on social media. I have +-700 fans on Facebook and about 14.5K followers on IG. The website itself gets between 1000 to 1200 visitors per month, and things seems to be looking up as I get more and more organic traffic from Google (I do a bit of SEO myself). I have a hard core of loyal fans who engage with my content daily, and tend to follow my recommendations quite regularly. My main angle is true accessibility and avoiding the general snooty vibe that is generally associated with the wine industry through millenial-friendly humor and a heavy use of gifs and memes. Feel free to PM me if you'd like the blog's URL, as I'd rather not post it here for confidentiality reasons.
I have started receiving free wine to review while being invited to tastings and press trips. All that is great, but I'd rather make some money myself. Now, the obvious way to monetize this would normally be to sell wine and/or get affiliate commission on bottles sold. Alas, I cannot get into this biz where I am from as the sale of wine is covered by a state monopoly.
Banner ads are a joke, and I do not really like the idea of selling other people's products. I'd rather sell something myself and use my "influencer" status to reap up some sales around what I would like to build as a brand. Thing is, wine accessories are generally quite inexpensive, and I fear that my margins will not be worth my while unless I can sale a relatively pricy product (80$+ ideally). Indeed, winos are a weird bunch who do not care spending thousands for the stuff they like, so I'd rather sell fewer goods to fewer people and make higher profit as a result. I've also thought about going the traditional educational video series or book, but these seem VERY labor intensive and tech heavy, and since I already work more than 60h weeks on my regular gig, I'd rather keep this as simple as possible.
Just to help me brainstorm and/or get out of my own head a little bit, what is a product you think would be a good fit for my audience? Ideally something I could either drop ship or have built in a very efficient/scalable manner without much initial investment (I'm still a fair bit of a mustachian after all). Still, if the margins are worth it, I don't mind investing the time and/or money to have it take off.
Thank you so much guys, and can't wait to hear from you.
Cheers,
-M