But beyond the sales we also have an opportunity to opt those visitors in to our list in the process. You may do that with an opt-in form on your sales page, or–you may use some manner of exit script to capture leads when they try to leave your page (a better option).

There are basically two techniques of getting affiliates to promote for you. You can go out into the marketplace and find product vendors with products in the same niche as yours and contact them about some type of joint venture. Obviously, this can work. If you are in the midst of launching your product, you likely promote your launch at one product launch forum or another.

Another option and one that many top-level marketers rely upon heavily is to recruit subscribers to their in-house list to promote their product. Many of your subscribers likely market products of their own.

This is especially true in the IM niche. If people have purchased one of your products in the past, and if they were delighted with the quality of that product, it is entirely possible they might be interested in promoting that product to their own lists.

In order for this to work you must have several things in place. You must have a sales page that converts visitors into buyers with a bare minimum of a 1% conversion rate. That’s not a great conversion rate, but below that you can’t expect to get good quality affiliates promoting for you. With a rate of 3-4% you’ll have no problem getting affiliates to promote.

There are also special cases, such as if you launch an IM related product on the Warrior Forum where it is entirely possible to get conversion rates of 15%, even more in some cases. Affiliates want to promote products with sales pages strong enough to make them money.

There are cases where an affiliate can pull in enough information about your product from your sales page to generate an effective promotional email for your product. In fact, many affiliates do just that.

But to facilitate the process, it is usually a good idea to have a JV or affiliate page set up to help your affiliates promote effectively for you. How can you do this? What should your affiliate page contain? These are the questions we will address here.

The single most important thing to do is to have a strong sales page set up. If an affiliate reads your sales page you want them to say, “Hey, this offer looks like it would convert my subscribers like crazy.” So begin by making sure you have a powerful, high-converting sales page.

Your goal is to have them promote your product by hitting their list with a promotional email containing an affiliate link to your sales page. So make it clear to people who visit your affiliate page exactly how they can get an affiliate link for your product.

You should also set up a commission rate which entices affiliates to promote. In most cases (there are exceptions) a 50% commission would be the bare minimum. Often product vendors will have a 100% commission rate set up for their product. This means that if an affiliate generates the sale of a $17 product they will get the full $17 for the sale.

The product vendor may be offering the product strictly as a list-building tool. They make no money from the sales of the product, but they build a list of buyers they can market similar products to over and over again over time.

A more likely scenario is that the product vendor will take a hit on the original sale and make their money by incorporating an up-sell or OTO (one-time-offer) into their sales funnel. Don’t overlook the possibility of doing something like this yourself.

Your affiliate page should also include some swipe files affiliates can copy and mail to their subscribers to promote your product. Some affiliates will prefer to create their own promotional emails while others will use the one(s) you provide. Many product vendors will provide 2-3 emails for affiliates to chose from.

You can also consider offering a number of banner ads for your product. You can get these made inexpensively and often times bloggers will use the banner ads to promote product from their blog

Another thing to consider, and something few people do, is to provide a promotional blog post affiliates can use. You could create a blog post of 300-500 words in which you discuss the benefits of your product and allow affiliates to copy and paste it in to their blogs along with an affiliate link.

You can also provide graphic images of your product in different sizes affiliates can swipe and use on their pre-sell or review pages.

Affiliates may be able to either view or infer the refund rate of your product depending on the platform you are selling it through. Affiliates hate refunds. If there is a way to give proof that your product has an exceedingly low refund rate–make sure to provide them with that.

In the IM niche it is not uncommon for product vendors to offer prizes to top-selling affiliates during their product launch. These may range from gag gifts, to $20, all the way up to giving away vacations, cars, and cash. I have seen affiliate contests giving away as much as $20,000!

One other thing I highly recommend is, even if you’re not in the midst of a product launch, if you get an affiliate consider sending them something as a reward for promoting for you. There are all kinds of companies online that sell gives for business employees or clients: things from paperweights, to gold balls, to shirts or caps with your company name on them, to baskets of fruit, etc.

You could even go the route of sending them a ten or twenty dollar gift card to some kind of popular franchise type of restaurant. Most product vends do not do this. If you do, your affiliates will appreciate it and be more likely to promote for you again down the road.

Take care of the people who make you money and they will do it time and time again!

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I mean, that’s only common sense, right? But the thing is that often we run into things that make sense, but it turns out they just aren’t true. The only way to tell if something like this is true is to test, test, test.

In this post I’ll examine the fundamental precepts of email marketing and share some data I have collected that may go against the grain of what you have been taught.

When I started my online career I, of course, began building lists in several niches using squeeze pages set up to offer bonuses in exchange for visitors names and emails. One of the first lessons I learned was that my sign-up rates increased when I only asked for visitors to input their email address on my forms rather than their email along with their name.

That only seems to make sense. It takes less time and it’s easier to just input an email address. The other factor coming into play is that many people will not give their actual name when they join a list. They will make up a name and use that.

So collecting names, even if it allows you to customize the subject lines and content by personalizing them with the subscriber’s name, may not do much because the name in your auto-responder account for them may not be their actual name.

So my first suggestion is to do some testing yourself and see if you get a higher sign-up rate if you use only a box for them to input their email address. Again, there is no substitute for testing. Test it out for yourself and analyze your results (the conversion rates of your opt-in forms).

Another lesson I learned came from Tellman Knudsen. He is a master list-builder. In fact, if you do a search for “list building” his squeeze page will come up in the top 2-3 results. He knows his stuff.

He no longer offers this, but some time ago he offered a terrific little publication titled, The Great Extinction. One of his big points was that for years he struggled with making money by email marketing. Then, a friend told him the importance of hitting his list every single day–never miss a beat. Tellman explained that once he took his friend’s advice his earnings from email marketing shot up exponentially.

You have to keep your name in front of your subscribers. Don’t let them forget you. There are many other people marketing the same products you do to their lists and there is a lot of overlap on different marketer’s lists.

If one of your subscribers gets into the habit of buying products recommended by one of your competitors, they are likely to keep on accepting the products recommended by that marketer. This is especially true in the IM niche. You really need to hit your list every single day with some kind of promotional email. And most of the most successful marketers in the IM niche hit their list twice a day with promotional emails.

When I first started out, I provided my subscribers with very useful information in every single email. I would give them links to sites where they could get even more good content. I would give them great tips as well. And–I would work in a blurb about a product I thought the would be interested in. I did make some sales.

However, again–after testing quite a bit, I found that my earnings increased substantially when I took a different approach. Once a week or so I would offer them a free download–a report or video to help them out a bit. But the remainder of the week my emails were strictly promotional. I didn’t obfuscate the emails with other content, even good content. They were strictly promotional.

Now there is a school of thought that says doing this is not good. They say that you should always provide good content with every email. You know what? When I adopted this new model–sending out a good informative email once a week and on every other day sending out strictly promotional emails–my affiliate commissions more than tripled.

Again, you will have to do some testing. Different niches are different and some people will unsubscribe if all they get are promotional emails. But these people are not likely to buy from you anyway. If they unsubscribe, it only culls your list of unresponsive subscribers. You win on both counts.

And here is something I found really useful. I tried sending out emails with subject lines like, “48 Hour Free Download”. Now most people will think that’s just hype. They think that after 48 hours they can still access the free download. You must prove them wrong! You must train your subscribers to take quick action.

If you use Amazon’s S3 hosting for your downloads, you can set a time for the download to be accessible for download. After that time people clicking to download will not be able to access it.

Doing this will train your subscribers to open your emails quickly if they want your free materials. If someone misses your cutoff point and emails you asking to get it, you must politely tell them no. Again, this will train your subscribers that they must act quickly if they want your free stuff. It works very well.

Those are just a few ideas that may help you grow a responsive list that will buy through your links. Again, it’s all about testing–testing every single aspect of your email marketing campaigns. You cannot accept the generally accepted dogmas as being true unless you prove it true in your own case by testing!

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Discovering what triggers people to buy goods and services online can be one of the most powerful revelations you will ever experience in your internet marketing career. Once an understanding of purchasing decisions has been achieved, your whole approach to marketing may need a little tweaking, or even a complete overhaul. Read below to find out what makes most people click the Add To Cart button on a regular basis.

It’s no deep, dark secret, and the reason people buy things online is pretty much the same as in the offline world. I can sum it all up in one word.

Emotion.

That’s right, the biggest factor that figures into most buying done both online and offline is emotion. You can examine your sales stats every which way, do split test after split test, and tweak your sales copy until your eyeballs fall out, but until you understand that basic fact, you won’t have much data to analyze.

Consumers may start out looking for something that will fill a need, but chances are, online or off, there are many goods and services that will satisfy what they’re looking for. Picking one of the widgets out of all the widget sales pages online will mean that they have made some sort of emotional connection with the sales page. People buy things that make them feel good and emotionally secure. Armed with this knowledge, how do you think that we, as internet marketers, can appeal to this emotional side of our customers?

If you’re thinking that forming relationships with your visitors is one of the keys, you are right on target. People are much more apt to buy something from you after they’ve formed a relationship. In fact, the majority of the time people will not act on an offer the first time they see it. Instead, it may take 5 or 6 or even more contacts to convince people that you are trustworthy and real. Unless you enter into the bargain with the idea of creating an atmosphere of trust and friendship, you don’t stand much of a chance of making a sale.

The best way to get people to feel comfortable with you is to be a real person. Show them you’ve got a human side by telling them a story instead of reeling off facts and stats that prove to them that they need your product. Make your sales copy and emails something they can relate to instead of listing feature after feature.

Your number one priority when someone visits your sales page should be to engage your audience on an emotional level. Appeal to their human side, the one that has needs and feelings. They arrived at your page because they have a need to fill, and that’s a very rational thought, but that’s where the rationality ends. Once they have decided they need something, their decision making process will shift gears, and they’ll buy from a person that they feel they know and can trust, someone they feel an emotional attachment to.

Always remember, when a person decides they need to buy something, that’s probably the last time they’ll rationalize their thought process. When they actually pull the purchasing trigger, they’re doing so because buying the product has made them feel good emotionally. They’ve made a connection, and that’s why people buy online.

Ted Begnoche is writer and online marketer. You can visit is blog at http://netprofitpersuasion.com

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Everyone involved in email marketing in any niche is concerned about the open rates in the emails they broadcast to their lists. The difference between an open rate of  8% and 30% can make a huge difference in your earnings.

But let’s forget about your open rates for a moment and dig a bit deeper. A significant portion of your emails may never even make it to your recipients. They may get blocked in cyberspace long before they make it to the end user’s mailbox–and that will be reflected in your open rates.

Web hosts, Internet service providers, auto-responder providers and third party spam filtering systems can all have an influence on how many of your emails actually get delivered.

And even if they get delivered, many of your emails may be going into spam folders at their final destination where they will never be read. So here are a few tips to help make sure as many of your emails as possible avoid the spam folders of your recipients.

Tip 1: Check Your Own Spam Box
You can get some insight into what kinds of emails get marked as spam by checking your own incoming emails. First open your own inbox and just give a cursory look at the subject lines of the emails you receive. Then look in your spam folder. Do you see anything different?

I have done this myself and here are some things I have noticed. A high percentage of emails hitting my spam folders have one of more these things in common.

A. They use numbers, especially in dollar amounts

B. They use all caps in subject lines or capitalizing every word in a subject line

C. They use your email address in the subject line

D. They use one or more of the following words in the subject line: earnings, commissions, profits, investment, funding, reward, download, bonus, free, activate, easy, easily, marketing, account, important, pending, proven, selected, claim confirmation, secrets, balance, money, make money, get paid, notification, status, deposit, confirm, free,  hash words (v1agra, vi.agra, f.ree, etc.), the % sign, the $ sign, and the use of “Re:” at the beginning of the subject line.

So by all means, do a little research yourself to see how your emails are segregated into spam and inbox folders.

Tip 2: Disaggregate You Subscriber List
Your subscriber list is not a homogeneous collection of names and email addresses. Major auto-responder services will allow you to search your lists using different sorting functions. Let’s look at some actual data. Here are the email services used by subscribers to one of my lists:

Gmail: 38%

YaHoo: 17%

HotMail: 9%

AOL: 3%

MSN: 2%

Other: 31%

Now, armed with that data, you can take the last email you broadcast (actually, take one you sent 2 weeks or so ago so people who open late are included) and sort out the list of those who actually opened it.

Then sort that list according to the mail services I collected above (use your own data, of course) and see if the open rates have a strong correlation to the above figures.

For example, suppose that the open rate among YaHoo subscribers turns out to be only 2.3%. That tells you that a disproportionate rate of YaHoo subscribers are not opening your emails because 17% of the recipients are using YaHoo mail. In fact, it is so disproportionate, that something must be going on. It is likely that YaHoo’s filters are flagging your emails as spam.

NOTE: YaHoo mail is notorious for assigning false positives to emails which have no spam characteristics at all!

You could simply live with that fact, or you could do some split testing to see if you can determine what YaHoo is finding objectionable with your emails. Split testing your emails is the only valid way to make informed decisions about what NOT TO DO to enhance the number of emails getting through to specific email clients.

To be honest, if it were MSN users who were not getting emails delivered to their in-box I wouldn’t lose much sleep. But if Gmail, YaHoo or HotMail messages were not getting through, I would spend considerable time trying to figure out why.

It could be your subject line; it could be the content; if you are mailing through a server of your own, your IP address could be blacklisted by a filtering service. Whatever the root cause, you could increase your open rates if you can determine what it is.

Tip 3: Subscribe To Your Own Lists Through Different Accounts
It goes without saying that you should be subscribing to your own lists through various accounts. Most definitely use a Gmail account, a YaHoo account, and a HotMail account as well as accounts through some of your private domains. With every email check to see if the email you just broadcast made it to your inbox, spam folder or neither (yikes!).

If your email is hitting spam folders in any accounts check your emails to see if you are violating any rules you’ve set up by analyzing the subject headings in emails you find in your own spam folders.

Most major auto-responder services let you check your outgoing emails using Spam Assassin or some similar tool before you send them out. But note, many emails with Spam Assassin scores of “0″ will still hit spam folders. Do your homework.

Tip 4: Learn From The Spammers’ Mistakes!
Here’s a little hack that might come in useful.

Look in your spam folder. The best way to do this is to look for emails from senders whose emails regularly hit your inbox but for some reason hit your spam folder once in a while. Grab one of those emails and copy both the subject line and the body copy and save it to your notepad or clipboard.

I use aWeber, but you can do this with other services as well. Create a new broadcast email. Paste the subject line from the spam mail into the subject line for your new email (don’t worry, you won’t actually send this) and paste the body copy in as well. Save the email.

Now look at the score Spam Assassin assigns to the email you created. If it’s more than zero, it will likely give you reasons for the score it assigned to it. Maybe you used “bad” words, all caps, or too many links. Then trash the email.

Doing this a few times may help you learn why some of the mail you receive goes into your spam folder. It’s a learning curve that may be worth jumping on as it might help you prevent your own emails from ending up in spam folders as well.

Hope these things prove useful in achieving higher open rates for your emails!

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Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian
(reprinted with permission)

We’ve seen many discussions about what to do with articles you’ve written (or had written for you) in the wake of Google’s Panda/Farmer update and the resulting drop of EzineArticles.com ranking in Google’s eyes.

A lot of good advise is scattered all through the forum, on multiple discussion threads, sometimes buried among other conversations. And it isn’t cohesive or coherently organized to help a struggling article marketer figure out what exact sequence she should follow with the work she has created.

Here’s an attempt to put it all together into a formula (even though article marketing is anything BUT formulaic!)

Hope it helps.

1. Consider Your Purpose:

What do you intend using that article for?

* Getting more traffic to your website or blog?
* Attracting more fans to your writing?
* Solving a problem for your end-user audience?
* Being published across many other resources?

Each of these purposes will require a slightly different style of action, so knowing it before-hand can help guide you to doing the right thing.

2. Define Your Target and Goal:

A few weeks or months from now, where do you SEE this article being?

* At the top of Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) for specific keywords?

* On dozens of directories around the Web?

* Featured on hundreds of blogs and sites, not necessarily connected to your topic?

* Spotlighted on the very best industry publications (online and off) in your niche?

* Reprinted in newsletters and ezines of other publishers?
Knowing this will help you plan a specific set of actions AND monitor the impact of what you do – so that you’ll learn what works or doesn’t… and then tweak your action steps the next time around.
3. Get Your Content Published:

The obvious question is “Where?”

The not-so-obvious answer is “It depends!”

Read this first. And also get an overview of what Google considers to be ‘duplicate content’ and how it deals with such content by reading this from Google Webmaster Tools.

Done? Now you have a fair idea of how a specific course of action will affect your content/article – and you will be able make a reasoned decision about where to submit first, where next, and so on. Here are some places you may want to publish your content:

* your own blog
* your own website or article directory/archive
* your own email newsletter
* article directories (for being viewed by others, and perhaps syndicated)
* private blog networks (for back links)
* other blogs, as guest posts
4. Get Your Article Indexed:

Once you have submitted your article to a content resource (your own or others), it is often desirable to have it ranked on search engines.

For that, it must first be ‘indexed’. The benefits are two-fold. Indexing is the first step to entering SERPs. And it also places on record the fact that you have published the content first.
Otherwise, it is possible that someone may rip-off your hard work, publish it and have THEIR version indexed faster… leaving you struggling to convince the world that it was originally yours!

Not desirable – at all

How to get an article indexed? Everyone has their own preferred method. Here are a few that work well for me:

* publish it to your blog, and then ping services like Pingomatic. As your blog grows established, indexing may happen literally within SECONDS!

* publish it to a popular article directory like EzineArticles.com – content often gets indexed within hours of ‘going live’ on the service

* Link to it from frequently spidered services and sites like social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Mixx, Digg, Diigo, Delicious etc.)

* Post a link to it from a popular forum
All work well to get fresh content ‘indexed’.

5. Get Your Content Syndicated:

The ‘Holy Grail’ of most effective article marketers is to make their content widely accessible… to the right audience, and in a manner that does not compromise their own best interests
in any way.

Why do I qualify my statement? Because some article marketers are arguing that publishing ALL their content on directories like EzineArticles.com is a viable strategy with long-term benefits – while in reality, such an approach may end up with your content on the directory’s website ranking HIGHER than your own resources under your control. Which means, any time a shift like the recent Google update happens, your “business” is at risk!

Another reason is to highlight that “less is sometimes more”. You don’t gain much value by having your content in front of unqualified viewers. You want to target your syndication to reach your best/ideal audience, and targeting your efforts to a certain extent will bring you much better results than taking a shotgun approach to “creating the widest damage”!

Here’s an action plan you could follow or adapt to suit you:
* Launch a blog of your own, and publish the articles there (and link back to it in ALL your syndication request messages to showcase your other work, in case a publisher likes another article better or wants to syndicate a lot more of your content!)

* Submit copies (rewritten, or as-is) to article directories (at least the top ones, EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, GoArticles.com and maybe few others)

* Contact ezine publishers in your niche and ask if they’d like to publish your articles in their newsletters – for free

* Submit your work to niche Web publications that are ‘authority sites’ and that are looking for (and accept) guest submissions

* Contact popular bloggers in your niche to ask if you can submit ‘guest posts’ from time to time (or on a regular basis)

* Use article distribution software (like ‘Article Bot’) or services (like ‘Unique Article Wizard’) to submit your content widely

* Look for ‘syndicators’ or ‘syndication services’ in your niche, or even publicists who work with content publishers, and ask if they’ll help spread your work (sometimes, you’ll have to pay for this service)

* Submit your work to offline publications like newsletters, magazines, newspapers etc. – and ask if you can become a regular columnist for them.

This last action is more time and effort intensive, as you’ll have to either get on the phone, or send a letter by post, or even get out of the house and go meet the people face to face. And because of this “barrier to entry”, you will have VERY little competition – so your chances of getting syndicated are much higher. Also, the reach you’ll get from offline syndication is extensive. All of this will help spread your name and brand widely.

Whenever a reader comes across your writing on a ‘remote’ site and likes it, they will search for more articles from you – and land on your blog, where they can read more, subscribe to your email list or RSS feed, and become your ‘fans’ and ‘followers’… or writing clients, if that’s what you want!

6. Get Your Content Repurposed:

Too many article writers stop after basic syndication efforts are done. They move on to the next article. And even with this minimal attempt, the benefits from article marketing are well
worth continuing.

But you’ve probably heard the phrase, “No traffic jams on the last mile”

It applies to article marketing, too.

Advanced syndication is one untapped avenue of article marketing. Re-purposing content is another.

What if you did any (or all) of these things?
a. add every article you write to your email auto-responder series

b. compile related articles into a short special report for sale or as an incentive to build your list

c. slap a rebrandible affiliate link on them and let your affiliates re-publish on their site, being paid for sales they refer

d. convert the article into a PDF document and distribute it online (various resources accept PDF submissions)

e. convert the article into a slideshow and do the same

f. turn it into a video and do it again

g. read it aloud and record it as an audio version, then turn it into a podcast or distribute it online

h. pack a big collection of relevant articles into a cohesive narrative, and turn it into a book (ebook, Kindle book, printed book, whatever!) There’s more you can do with every article you write or order. And that’s what will make it worth paying $50, $100, or even (like some of my writing clients do) $500 for a single article – because you can squeeze a LOT more from top quality content
over time.

On average, if you get this right, you can generate $1 PER WORD from every article you write – over the long-term.
(I do – which is why I write so much!  )

Do the math on your writing. See if you are hitting this target consistently. If not, change something so that you get closer to this mark.

I’ll leave you with an inspiring message I first learned from
Jeffrey Lant:

“I don’t start writing an article until I’ve figured out 26 different ways to profit from it!”

All success
Dr.Mani
Dr. Mani’s Infopreneur Blog, Turn Words Into Wealth

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There Are Very Few Exceptions
For the most part, you will find that the most successful people online do both of the above things: They create their own products AND they market products as an affiliate. Some start by creating an info product (an ebook) first and then move into affiliate marketing and some do it the other way around, but there are very few exceptions–most successful people do both.

Flashback To 2007
I had a couple of ebooks of my own I was marketing online and one of them was doing pretty well. I had never done anything in the way of affiliate marketing but I decided to give it a shot. There was a guy up in Canada, Craig Beckta, who came out with a product called Secret Affiliate Code a year earlier–and I had bought it.

Secret Affiliate Code 2
I learned from Craig that he was launching Secret Affiliate Code 2 in about two weeks. I took some of what I learned from his first product and set up a pre-sell page for his new product. It was a Clickbank launch so I got an affiliate link from his JV page and set to work.

I Got It Put Together Quickly!
I set up a free Squidoo lens promoting his product as well as a free Blogger blog. I wrote two articles reviewing his product (I didn’t have a copy yet) and submitted them to EzineArticles. I created about 20 back-links to the pages. I did all of this in one single day. I finished all of this up by about 11PM one evening.

I Did One Thing Right
I had been using a free auto-responder account and had grown a pretty anemic little list over the past couple years. I decided to go to AWeber and sign up for a quality auto-responder service. I had it up and running in about an hour. I put an opt-in form on both of my pre-sell pages (it took me a while to figure out how to do it on my Squidoo page). This was the one thing I did right!

What A Difference 24 Hours Can Make
I was hoping one of my pre-sell pages would show somewhere in Google and I would get some free organic traffic. If people came to my page I showed them the bonuses I was giving away if they bought through my link. I told them if they opted-in to my list I would notify them the instant the product launched (about 10 days away).

The day after I got this all set up I checked Google to see if either of my pages where showing anywhere for the exact name search of the product. I knew it takes time for that to happen and wasn’t disappointed when neither page showed anywhere that next day. I went on with my normal business.

And then, BANG, the very next day I got up in the morning and Googled up the exact name of Craig’s new product. Are you freakin’ kidding me? Here is a screen shot of what I found.

My two sites were ranked #1 and #2 on the front page of Google for the EXACT name of Craig’s product. The screen shot was actually taken a couple days before the product launched.

I Got My First Sale Within 10 Minutes Of The Launch
For a period of a week or two before the product launched I was getting visitors to my pre-sell pages and people were opting in to my AWeber list. On launch day I had accumulated about 160 names into that list. When the product launched I hit my list with a promotional email and I sold about a dozen copies of the product right off the gate.

A couple weeks went by and my pages held their position. After 10 days or so the Blogger page fell down 5-6 spots the the Squidoo page held tight at #1. I kept getting more sales.

I Continued Promoting One New Product Launch After Another
I continued with this process. I would create pre-sell pages for about-to-be-launched products and opted in names of visitors into my AWeber account. Yes–I was selling products but my list was growing with each new launch I promoted.

With each new launch I had a bigger and bigger list to promote it to. The sales came almost automatically as I hit my list with promotional emails for each new product launch. It became easier and easier to make money because of one thing: I had grown a responsive list to market the products to.

The Biggest Thing I Learned Here…
Yes, you can make money creating products and selling them. And yes, you can make money promoting products as an affiliate. But the single biggest thing I learned was the enormous importance of growing a list and email marketing to it. In short, if you don’t grow a list–you don’t have anything. Your list will become your single biggest asset in your online business.

List Building And Product Development
I know people who spend many months creating a cool product in one niche or another. They put a lot of work into it. And then, an hour or two before they turn their product loose they decide to create a squeeze page to opt visitors in to their list. Selling their product is their first priority and growing their list becomes a secondary concern. Sorry, but that’s exactly the ass-backwards kind of thinking that short-circuits earnings.

It’s The Squeeze Page Thing That’s Important
You need to think backwards. You need to reverse engineer the thing. Sure, developing a quality product is very important. But the big thing is creating a squeeze page (a page where you give away a product to encourage people to opt in to your list) that converts a significant number of visitors into subscribers.

So if you’re working on developing a product of your own–great. But that is a two-fold process. Develop your product, but also work on creating a value-laden mini-product related to that product you can give away on your opt-in page.

Making A Good First Impression
DO NOT skimp on creating a great giveaway product for your opt-in page. If someone joins your list the first impression they get of you comes from the quality of the product you give away as your opt-in bonus. It doesn’t need to be huge–a simple 3-4 page report can work well. But it needs to give people the impression that you know what you are talking about so that they immediately have trust and confidence in what you say.

To Your Subscribers, You Are What You Give Them!
If you give them a piece of junk as an opt-in bonus they will believe that other products you promote down the line will be weak as well. As a matter of fact, if you provide them with a cruddy little opt-in bonus they may never open future emails from you and your efforts will largely be in vain!

The single biggest mistake people make in terms of making money online is NOT BUILDING A LIST and getting started with that immediately.

Create a squeeze page to capture leads. Begin driving traffic to it.

You Must Aggressively Test Your Page
Don’t just create a squeeze page. Test it and retest it making changes and checking the conversion rate in your auto-responder stats. Continually tweak your optin page until you are getting very high conversions and keep driving traffic to it.

There Are Tools To Help You…
You can use free tools such as Statcounter or Google Optimizer (both free) or a paid service such as Hypertracker to test different versions of your squeeze page to see which versions work best at converting visitors into subscribers.

As soon as you start developing a list, start marketing other people’s products to that list. Clickank is a great place to start finding affiliate products to promote.

Once you get a decent list you can then think about developing a product of your own. Go through the process again. Create a sales page. Test, test, and retest it until you get some copy that starts converting well. Test your sales (earnings) per click to your page. It may start out quite low. Tweak your copy. Get it up to twenty cents per click, then 50 cents per click, then a dollar per click if you can.

Create a sales funnel with up-sells and OTOs to get your earnings per click to your site even higher. Only when you have established a good earnings per click count go after affiliates.

If you try to line up affiliates with a product and sales funnel that doesn’t produce decent earnings per click for them they will abandon you and never come back. Once you get a mini-army of affiliates promoting for you, create more products and they will promote those as well.

Don’t neglect your buyers. The people on your buyers list can become your greatest affiliates if you have good products and a good sales funnel. Once you can get affiliates to drive you traffic and your products are converting for them you are golden. You’ll soon be a power player and the whole thing will almost run on auto-pilot for you.

If you want to be a player in any niche you must become a list builder. End of story.

I hope that helps a bit. I cannot overemphasize the importance of building a list and creating a good relationship with them. If you can do just this one thing you will be successful in your online business!

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Welcome, Mike McMillan here. Hope you’re interested in creating nonfiction digital products, (ebooks), and selling them online.

That’s what we do here. And–if you’re an affiliate marketer–we’ll have some cool stuff for you too! Basically, we talk about making money selling ebooks online. So have fun and learn some cool stuff here.

An Idea Is All It Takes To Begin!

I’ll be you have an idea for an info product percolating in your head right now, don’t you? Most people do–but most people never take action and turn their idea into a marketable product. It’s really all about selecting a niche you are interested in and filling a need of those interested in that niche.

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Highly Recommended Product

Whatever your level of involvement in Internet marketing, you should always have–or be working on a product of your own to sell. I say this with no uncertainty: My Info Product Earnings Exposed program is the premier product  development course available anywhere at any price. The twelve modules take you through the complete process of developing and marketing an ebook of your own. Learn More Here.

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Selling eBooks Is The Perfect Second Income

No inventory is involved. Products are delivered instantaneously. And the best part-you get paid instantly as well. I can guarantee that once you sell the very first copy of your ebook you’ll be hooked! It is a whale of a lot of fun and it costs next to nothing to get started.

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What's your pitch?

I work with people interested in creating their own info products to sell online. Whatever stage they are in… the first question I ask is, “What’s your pitch?” In one single sentence, and in under 10 seconds, what is your pitch for your product?

It’s easy to describe your product in a full sales page online. But when you have to distill every benefit, every feature, every component that your product represents… well, that can be a stumper. But I really suggest you do this exercise.

Pretend you are at a social gathering and you are talking to someone about your ebook. Another person comes up and asks you about your product. If you had one sentence and no more than 10 seconds to spit out your spiel… what would you say?

This is a good exercise because it forces you to define the main goal of your product. You may ending up using this one sentence as the headline or sub head on your sales page. And–as you continue on developing your ebook, it will help keep you focused on what you are trying to accomplish with your product! Give it a try. It’s worth the 5 minutes it takes to do!

So, what’s your pitch?

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Pretend that every customer is your next door neighbor. Pretend you go to their cookouts and their children play with yours. Pretend you interact with them at social events and you trust and respect them as good friends.

Now pretend you just sold them your product or service. Do you feel comfortable with that. Will they appreciate the value of that product or service, or will they think you have taken advantage of them by delivering a poor product or service to them? Don’t let doing business with people far away allow you to provide anything but the best you have to them.

So at your next cookout with your neighbors look around. If the people there, your friends and neighbors, bought your product would they still respect you? Something to think about!

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