INTERNET BUSINESS

Your marketing skills are pointless if you don’t have something to sell that people want to buy. You can market other people’s products (“affiliate marketing”). There’s a lot right with that scenario. But the pinnacle of marketing, what sets you apart and reduces competition sharply is to have your own product to sell, where you can keep all the profits. Here are 3 ways to do just that in less than 60 minutes.

First of all, we will assume that you are selling information. Physical product is fine, but competition can still be high, and the overhead is enormous compared to info product.

Method one requires a soccer-mom cam (i.e. Flip Cam or similar), a friend to hold it, and a simple fix to someone’s problem. Let’s assume that you have a bad back, and have figured out how to lift weights without bad after-affects. Outline your solution on a poster board which will be off-camera, in the weight room. Then you teach it on camera four times. Each is a rehearsal for the next. If you concentrate, there’s a pretty good chance you can get it all correct by the fourth take. (If not, use inexpensive or free video editing software to cut the best chunks of two or me takes together.)

If you didn’t have to edit, then you’re done with this step within 20 to 50 minutes, depending on how many different exercises you show. Remember that video flattens emotion, so gesture twice as much as usual, and give your voice a lot of up and down so the energy stays high. Also, colors will look muted and grayish if you don’t get enough light in the room, so bring in a few lamps. Render the video either to a downloadable format (like QuickTime) or to flash so it will stream from your site.

Method two is to make a short video all within your computer. Now you don’t have to worry about how you look. This works best with info that does not require physical demonstration. You can either use a presentation-type program (like PowerPoint), which can do cool graphics, photos, etc., and then narrate it while you capture video of the PowerPoint on your screen using Catania or Cam Studio, or you can use Audacity (a free download) to record an explanatory narrative first, then import it into video editing software, and add text titles.

So you’ve decided to get into internet marketing. Wonderful. With work you should succeed. Maybe. Yes, it is possible.

But now you’ve got a problem… you’re looking at what you are going to sell and wondering about your product. Should you sell someone else’s products? Either by buying rights or by selling through affiliates marketing? Or should you write your own eBooks and record your own products? And if you do the latter should you take a course to show you how to create products? Or should you just bull your way through?

I’m going to let you answer most of those questions yourself. Why? Because once I answer the question at the bottom of those questions you’ll be able to answer them yourself.

So what’s the question at the core of those questions? It’s the question of why product creation is so important.

So let’s start at the beginning. Is product creation important? Absolutely. No question, no argument, no alternative. It is just as important as marketing is. In fact, I’d argue that it may even be more important. Why? Because a marketer can’t sell anything if he or she doesn’t have anything to sell. Well, I guess they could but that usually is called fraud. You need to have a product in order to use marketing to sell it. From a business point of view there are three major underpinnings to every business: product creation, marketing and administration. If you want to succeed you must have all three… miss one and your company will ultimately fail.

And if it is that important then it absolutely must be done correctly and with the best quality practices. Otherwise you’ll create poor quality products. Oh, sometimes you’ll get lucky and create a good product. But you need a good system to produce good product all the time.

Now, at this point someone is bound to be raising the point of affiliate and rights type product sales. And the answer to that is one word… money. That’s right… the dollar, the lire, the euro, the pound. Whatever currency you use the answer comes down to money. Selling affiliate products and rights products are a good way to make money initially. Selling affiliate products might even be a good way to make extra money long term. Rights products are a bad idea long term — and possibly even short term. But if you want to really, really make good money in information publishing and marketing you need to have your own product. If only because you get to keep most of the money.

If you’re a product creator, you’ve probably thought about putting affiliate links in your eBooks. This article is going to discuss this practice and offer some advice on the subject. I think you will find this information useful.

Let me start off by saying that there are definite pros and cons to putting affiliate links in your eBooks. I know you’re probably scratching your head wondering what could be bad about putting a link in an eBook that helps make us money. Well, consider this.

Your eBook is passing yourself off as an authority on a certain subject. That is, after all, why you wrote it. You know the subject better than anybody. So doesn’t it seem a little odd that inside this book, one that’s supposed to answer the entire customer’s questions has got a link to somebody else’s product? If you’re the expert, why isn’t the link going to one of YOUR products? Don’t you have something similar that is just as good, if not better than whatever that affiliate link is pointing to? Think about it.

Okay, let’s move on to what’s good about affiliate links in eBooks. They provide us an income off of a product that WE don’t have to support. The product creator supports that sale. So this is pretty much found money for us without much effort. However, if you’re going to splash affiliate links throughout your eBook, there are some things you’re going to want to do.

At the top of the list is what I call subtlety. You don’t want to hit prospects over the head with these links. You don’t want large neon signs pointing to each one. You want to mention these links in passing mixed in with the actual content you’ve written. If that method doesn’t work for you, you can simply list some resources in the appendix with your affiliate links sprinkled throughout. Whatever you do, you want to be subtle. Remember, you’ve already sold these people YOUR eBook. You don’t want to come off as selling again.

Beyond subtlety, you don’t want to have so many affiliate links in your eBook that it looks like a classified ad section. A few links throughout is fine. Again, you’ve already sold these people. You don’t want to make it look like you’re trying to soak every last dime out of them.

Are you sitting on a goldmine? If you have information products with resell rights and master resell rights sitting on your hard drive, collecting cyber dust, the answer is yes. They can be the key to fast product creation. Read on to discover how to put them to work.

Maybe you bought them; maybe you got them as up sells when you bought something else. And then you may have gotten your resell rights products from bonuses that come with other products and from giveaway events. So how can you turn them into gold?

1) Take Stock

The first step to fast product creation is taking stock of what you have. Go through your stash of resell rights info products and make a list, marking the rights for each one and whether or not the sales page and download page is included.

2) Start with the info product that is most likely to sell

Pick an information product that you think would sell, or one that you’ve been meaning to sell for a long time but haven’t been getting around to actually setting up properly.

3) Set up a domain and hosting

If you have hosting already, you’re ahead of the game. Then, either piggyback it onto a domain name you already have or buy it its own domain name. If you don’t have hosting yet, now is a good time to get one.

4) Set up an auto responder

If you already have an auto responder service, set up an auto responder for your new product. If you don’t, now is a good time to get started. If you’re serious about doing internet marketing, you must have an auto responder — and use it.

5) Set up a way to collect payment

If you already have a shopping cart system, just set up a new product. If you don’t, now may be a good way to get one. Or you can just set it up through PayPal directly.

6) Edit your sales page and the download page

Edit your sales page and the download page to include your specific information, including your name, your contact information, the price you want to charge, and of course your payment button code. You can either use an HTML editor or open the page in a text editor and edit it there.

If you wish to be a freelance product creator you will need to learn one fact. Being a freelance product creator is a business. And like any business there are some things you need to do. One of those things is marketing.

One of the best tools in your marketing toolkit as a freelancer is the portfolio. For those of us who create learning content (aka information or advice marketing), that tool is the course portfolio.

In this article I’m going to give you seven hints for creating your course portfolio.

1. Use a three ring presentation binder with plastic page protectors to store the portfolio. This allows you to pull things out of the binder and put things in. Yet each page will be protected from finger prints and other attempts to destroy the contents.

2. Think visually. You will have more than enough written word in the binder. Your customer isn’t going to read those words — the best they might do is scan them. However, they are going to look at the layout and the type and organization of the information. So let your inner artist out and think visually.

3. Start with a list of which you have done work for. If possible use company logos. You should include a resume but this isn’t it. A copywriter would call this social proof. In other words — “look who else picked me so you won’t be wrong to pick me too!” Think visually when you create this page. A collage will work better than a static, boring listing.

4. The best way to organize the binder is by content type and media. The actual definition of types is up to you; however, try to consider it from your customer’s point of view. After all, this portfolio is for them — not you!

5. Show examples of each type of content, preferably showing several different media. Only one or two examples per media are needed.

6. Don’t include the whole presentation for all your examples. All that is necessary is one or two full examples and a table of contents for the rest. This is extremely important when dealing with non-disclosure or proprietary courses.