I have been making my living online for the last eight years. 
I’ve tried just about everything Google Ad Sense, affiliate marketing, SEO and website design as well as a lot of little stuff in between.
At one time we made $10,000 a month off Yahoos publishing program and we were third party for 444.net which cut our profits significantly. Last year we made $2,000 a week as an affiliate for silicone wristbands.
But after eight years of making a living online, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you really want to make money online you should sell your own product. Now, I am not talking about manufacturing a product or reselling someone else’s product, those cost money to produce and the profit margins are slim.
I am talking about making an information product that costs close to nothing and can be sold at prices that allow you to make huge profits.
What Do I Mean by Information Products?
Information products teach people how to do something or solve a problem. They contain information that a professional in that line of business would be looking for and find valuable. There are all sorts of information products that people are willing to pay for.
Information that is well organized and comes from a source that appears trustworthy can be sold for good money. Information products can be produced in many formats like e-books, videos, DVDs, and online sites.
Picking Your Niche Product
Information products can be sold to pros who want more information from a viable and trusted source. The beauty of this information product model is that it can be applied to any niche. You can create information products on anything from lawnmower racing, how to train your dog, building a vintage car, mountain climbing, how to use a Blackberry and the list goes on and on.
What are you passionate about?
What do you know a little bit about that others might find useful?
Everyone has some knowledge that others would find useful, I guarantee it. You do not need to be an expert. You just need to be able to put together good information that people are looking for.
When I started building websites I knew nothing about websites. But I spent a lot of time studying them, looking for common problems, reading forms, finding information on different websites and in less than a month I was considered an expert in the website design business by many people, as well as the SEO business.
I helped people on forms solve problems and made it look easy. Money can be made from this, I guarantee it. Find your niche and take action.
Think About It !
I can create a DVD course with a case cover and DVDs for less than $5.00. I could then turn around and sell that course for $500.00. Pretty good profit margin !
Don’t get me wrong, starting out you would have to bust your ass researching topics, recording videos, editing videos, posting them on the website etc. But once you get going you could turn around and start hiring employees and contractors to do a lot of that stuff.
Videos, e-books, tool sets and other online products have no material cost. You do have to pay for hosting and bandwidth but these are fairly cost-effective. It will cost you next to nothing to get started.
The neat thing about this is that it will work for any niche; you just have to find a niche to exploit.
One of the Problems with Affiliate Marketing
One of the problems I had with affiliate marketing was the fact that you get no repeat business. The owner of the site can send an e-mail to everybody that purchased a product and actually make money on customers that you sent him, where you make nothing. If he comes out with a new product, new service or wants to have a sale he makes money and you make nothing.
Having one product is a great when you are getting started. But once sales start flowing in, it would be nice to have another product to sell to your happy customers. This is where you start making a ridiculous amount of money.
For example, I know nothing about lawnmower racing but I am guessing that there are a lot of different subtopics within lawnmower racing that you can create new courses for.
Think About It !
I create my first, “How to Get Started in Lawnmower Racing” course and sales start to come in on a regular basis. When I create my second more specialized course, “How to Rebuild a Carburetor”, I can sell this to all my happy customers who ordered previously, as well as new customers who have an interest in this topic. The more courses you have, the more products you sell. You growth just continues.
The subscription-based model is even more powerful!
Instead of selling individual lawnmower racing courses you are now selling a lawnmower racing and learning community. You create quality videos on a regular basis, post lawnmower pages of lawnmower racing topics, start a form etc.
Now you are charging people a monthly reoccurring fee. Your mission is to keep your customers happy by creating content and adding value to ensure that you always gain more subscribers than you are losing.
Build Business Value
There are a lot of ways to make money on the Internet like; affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC, advertisers etc. but in most cases no long-term business value is created.
For example, you can make a lot of money as an affiliate but when you decide to quit being an affiliate marketer your cash intake stops and in most cases your business has little or no value to someone else.
Business value is built by creating products, attaining customers, gardening leads and building a recognized quality brand. It goes beyond the money you can make selling the products, it allows you to build a business that can be sold, done correctly you’re in for significant payday on the backend.
How to Get Started
Take Action !
Your first step is to identify your goal. For most people it is related to money. If you want to make $100,000 a year or something similar, a product like lawnmower racing will work.
The amount of money you want to make is important.
I would not be happy making 100,000 a year or having that as my goal, a better goal would be 1 million a year. This helps determine the niche.
For example, a lawnmower product could make me $100,000 a year but I am not sure if it could ever grow to a million a year. You need to evaluate your niche and have realistic expectation.
Next, you need to think about several possible niches and formulate a very basic business plan. I am talking about a basic plan to get started, like jotting down some ideas for product/content, prices you might charge, number of products you would sail or would be a subscribers base model.
Focus on taking small steps forward and build on your momentum.
After you have some basic ideas in your head it is time for you to start learning how to make a good information product.
If you would like I can write another email on my thoughts about that.
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