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.

I’ve been making my living online since the end of 2002 and have enjoyed every second of it, well…almost every second.

I guess one of the neatest things about making a living online is the people you meet and the willingness to share. So I thought I would share a little as well.

Lately we’ve been doing very well and it is due to the following:

• WordPress Blogs
• Social Media Sites
• Blogger Blogs
• Squidoo Lens

Making money online is about finding hungry buyers and convincing them that your product will make their life better, easier, more productive, happier and more profitable if they owned what it is you’re selling.

It’s a combination of the right website design and the right traffic.

I am going to focus on affiliate sales but the methods will work with anything. Affiliate marketing allows me to focus on marketing and not on:

o Products
o Custom Support
o Merchant Accounts
o Accepting Payments
o Shopping Carts
o Email Systems

This system is amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful.

Our Goal Is To Convert As Many Visitors into Buyers as Possible

We will do this by focusing on a small percent of Google searches that take place each and every day in massive quantities.

So here’s how it works;

I come with a product to sell and build a website around that product. The top part of the website has a call to action, and is set up just like any other website that would be selling that product.

Under the call to action is my WordPress blog.

I add a couple plug-ins like;

akismet
all-in-one-seo-pack
auto-social
easygravatars
global-translator
google-sitemap-generator
no-ping-wait
page-link-manager
pingcrawl
privacy-policy
seo-automatic-links
seo-image
sociable
statpress-reloaded
twitter-feed
twitter-tools
wp-auto-tagger
wp-smilies
yet-another-related-posts-plugin

Okay, now the idea is to create profiles on social media sites that will link back to my main site and I also interlink those profiles back and forth to one another. Along with those I also have a number of social bookmarking sites that I bookmark to.

I try and build enough back links to the site that there is no doubt Google knows about the website, at the same time that is going on I hire someone to add content to the blog.

We come up with a list of keywords and then we add keywords to those that we feel someone that was about to buy the product would add to those keywords.

For example;

Special Offers
Cheap
Discount
Order
Promotions
Free Shipping
Store
How Much
Quality
Best
Acquiring
Best Buy
Good Buys
Deal

We have an extremely long list of these types of words that we use.

The idea is to make about 20 posts per day.

And so far this has worked great for us and the neat thing is that it’s easy to set up and you can duplicate it over and over again.

Making money online is about finding hungry buyers and convincing them that your product will make their life better, easier, more productive, happier and more profitable if they owned what it is you’re selling.

It’s really not that hard to do yet 95% of all websites online struggle to make any amount of real money.

I am going to cut through the BS and show you step by step how to make money with any product online. However, you will have to do your part, nothing comes without effort and in the online world it takes lots and lots of work. Yes, I said work, this isn’t one of those you don’t have to do anything and you’ll make millions websites.

I use the methods I am about to teach to make everyday online with a number of different websites in different niches.

The idea is to learn several different methods and then use them all together when launching your own site. As with anything, the key is to take action.

I am going to focus on affiliate sales but the methods will work with anything. Affiliates allow us to focus on marketing and not to have to worry with having our own

• Products
• Custom Support
• Merchant Accounts
• Accepting Payments
• Shopping Carts
• Email Systems

We will focus on marketing, design and SEO, as well as WordPress and other issues.

This system is amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful.

Our Goal – To Convert As Many Visitors into Buyers as Possible

We will do this by focusing on a small percent of Google searches that take place each and every day in massive quantities.

Understanding Google
Approximately 350,000,000 people search the web daily.

About 60% of those use Google for a total of 210,000,000 individuals;

30% use Yahoo for a total of 105,000,000,

9% use MSN (now Called Bing) for a total of 31,500,000 and the remaining 1% use other, smaller and less known search engines.

At this time Google is the largest and most powerful search engine to-date and sets the tone for online search with more than 210 million daily searches taking place.

It’s important to understand how people are using Google as well as what type of searches are being done. This will allow us to target the most lucrative daily searches.

A) Most people are searching for information and have no intention of making a purchase online. I’d guess the numbers around about 70% are these types of people.

B) The second largest group we’ll put at 30% and these are people that will most likely purchase in the future but are not looking to purchase anything at the moment.

C) The smallest group which is around about 2% is people that understand what they are looking for and are ready to make a purchase. Their searches will be more perfect and will contain model numbers, company names and search terms like free shipping.

Everyday millions and millions of transactions take place online and our goal is to get between the buyer and the merchant.

Many people complain about their websites ability to make money online. With that, many are also showing sheer ignorance at how the internet works, while demanding their site do something while they sit and DO NOTHING!

Sure, you have a great product, a kickass web design and good prices. But did you know in June 2009 there were 238,027,855 websites online, an increase of 2,137,329 from the month before. And just about every one of them wants to rank in Google because Google gets over 3,000 searches every second. That is 180,000 people doing a search on Google every minute.

Building a kick ass website is only the first step when it comes to making money online.
Once the site is finished the work begins

Now that you’ve got your website you need to drive traffic to it. The best way to do this is with social media sites and search engines. But once you get the traffic coming you have to start testing conversion.

Yes, making money online is a never ending game and if you stop for one second, you’ll see your competition pass you by.

I can relate to you if you are looking for a way to make money online. Honestly, there is not much out there…so many guru’s, so many guides and manuals, and so much information that will never pan out.

At the end of the day it’s about hard work and the people willing to put in that hard work will thrive, rather there is a recession or not.

Website Designs for Affiliate Marketing

This is more or less a second part of my rant today. After I finished my rant I decided to put it to the test and made a post about silicone wristbands to show that I’d not make any sales. However, to my surprise I did, as a matter of fact I made a couple sales. But it is still not as good as my silicone wristband site.

When it comes to affiliate marketing you have to have something unique as well as the ability to stand out in that industry. A website talking about how much money you make as an affiliate marketer is not going to make you money in affiliate marketing.

At this moment I have my silicone wristband site that makes me about $1,000.00 per week.

It’s had quite a bit of drop in sales from last year and for this reason we’ve decided to start a website about fundraising events. After all there is only so much that can be said about silicone wristbands however, there is a heck of a lot that can be said about fundraising.

A website about fundraising allows me to stand out in that industry and it allows me to find people looking for silicone wristbands or rather ways to make money with fundraisings ideas.

A post about silicone wristbands on a website about making money online might make me a sale to two today but has very little chance of doing much more than that.