Most basic, and even some of the more complex, practices employed by the major search engines.
When spiders go crawling the web, they start with the most popular pages. From there, they follow the structure and links from those sites to other pages and websites, indexing the most often occurring words as they go along.
What the spiders deem to be the more important keywordsand for any given subject there can be manythey send back to their database. There, those keywords and phrases are cataloged, and information is kept to quickly tell the search engine where to find the words and accompanying information againsuch as when a user enters those terms or similar terms into a search bar.
Based on a variety of factors, the pages that host the information, or words, that the spiders find are ranked in importance and relevance to a subject, or more accurately, a set of terms; if more than one set of terms appears on a website, the site can be ranked for those terms, giving the possibility to rank well for many related, but different sets of keywords or key phrases.
What's indexed and what isn't
Speaking primarily of the major search engines, what are indexed are the more significant words on the site. Prepositions and 'filler' wordssuch as a, an, the, in, et cetera, are ignored. What the spiders look for are the words that appear on the site that actually mean something to the end user.
Those words can appear virtually anywhere on the site. The spiders will search content, headlines, sidebars, ads, and coded tags behind the scenes. Some of these words will add more weight if used properly. For example, titles and subtitles add weight to keywords, so it is a good idea to use your primary keyphrases in titles and subtitles and in the meta tags for the site.
There is something of an art to this, however. It didn't take long for the search engines to figure out that people were simply stuffing pages with keywords and keyphrases to get ranks and hits, and so they developed algorithms (undisclosed) to guide the spiders and tell them what is real content and what is bogus.
In addition, there are some types of content that spiders can't or won't index. They won't index information that you tell them to ignore (through your coding); content that is not accessible because it is restricted behind a password or security system cannot be accessed and so will not be crawled and ranked.
Plug-ins, non-HTML formats, and non-text content cannot be indexed by search engines. This means that if you are including any of the following, it may not be indexed.
Plug-in programs
Videos
Audios
Flash files
Images
Photos
Frames
Java applets
Of course, these elements can be important to the humans who use your site, and certainly do have a purpose that warrants using them, but from an SEO standpoint, they have little to no value. Therefore, the best advice for affiliates is to keep it simple, build it strong, and minimize the use of features that have limited return.
Summing it all up
To sum it all up, it all comes down to this:
Search results rely on content and keywords.
Content = Food for search engines/spiders
Quality Content = Good Search Rankings
Since no human would have a prayer of completing such a monumental task as evaluating and indexing all the sites on the web, we have to rely on the best processes and programs the search engines can create. Those best programs rely on what amounts to an elaborate matching game that matches search words to words on a page. Very basically, if you have no words, or at least no words that matter to spiders and the people searching, you have nothing to match up to, and so you have no way for a search engine to find you. Your existence on the web, and the traffic to your site, depends on you having the words that people want to find.
To rank well in the major search engines, you need to center on a select group of keywords and keyphrases that you want to rank for. You need to use those correctly to prove to the search engines that you are one of the authorities in your subject, for your chosen phrases. As mentioned, we'll give you those details in Chapter 8 when we talk more about SEO. For now, understand the basic inner-workings of the web, and start thinking about how you can make that work for you.
The Secrets to Gaining Fast, Free Traffic
Freeware, Shareware, and Other Tricks that Pay
Viral marketing is one of the easiest and best ways to generate large amounts of inbounds links (which those search engines love) and traffic to your website. And the best thing about it is, you can employ viral marketing methods to gain fast, easy traffic for a very small investmenteven free! If you learn how to harness this simple method for utilizing freeware, shareware, and other viral tricks of the trade, you'll have learned yet another of the Big Dog ways to make big money from the comfort of your beach chair.
What is Viral Marketing?
Viruses are not normally welcomed in either computing or human circles. A virus is an infectiona diseasea thing to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, viruses are to be strictly avoided. But we can learn from the habits of viruses, and make their ways ours to harness motivated web traffic.
At its most basic, viral marketing is nothing more than the spreading of information from one person to another. It is based on the concept that on average, a person will tell three others about a product that they like. So for every client you please, there are three more potentials following behind.
In web circles, this has been applied in a broader sense to include not just word-of mouth campaigning, but actual programs that get passed around and enjoyed; and when those mini-programs link to another, more useful website or product, the viral effect continues on to eventually net the end-goal, which in this case is traffic to your website, and conversion of traffic into sales of featured affiliate products.
Using Freeware and Shareware in Viral Marketing Campaigns
People love getting something for nothing. That is why freeware and shareware are so popular on the web today. There are entire websites dedicated just to just giving away freeware and shareware, and they are making big bucks by doing itand so are the people who own those programs.
By giving away a free version of a complimentary program that fits in with your affiliate product, you can generate a large amount of viral traffic into your site. What's great about this kind of traffic is that it is independent of web searches. In other words, the viral traffic from freeware is in addition to organic traffic generated by search engines.
Notebefore you disregard this method as something beyond your expertise, understand that there are ways to build freeware without any programming knowledge at all. This is a traffic generation method that anyone can use!
The basic method that is employed here is this:
First, you create or have created a simple software application that will appeal to your target consumer. This needs to be something that ties in with your affiliate product in some way, and that can enhance the product or help answer questions which lead the consumer to your product page.
For example, going again with the fitness theme we started earlier, if you are selling bodybuilding supplements you might create a freeware product that helps your customers track their workouts and progress.
Next, you create a website for your freeware product. This page will list the product features and will give download instructions to the visitor so that he or she can really get the freeware product offered. But it also links in some way to your affiliate product. There are a variety of ways you can choose to link out to your merchant's page. Your methodology will depend a lot on your affiliate product, and also on the freeware product that you are offering.
In the case of the workout tracker, you may simply advertise your affiliate product site, or offer links to informational resources. For example, you might prominently display feature articles which detail useful information for bodybuilders. Naturally, the articles that are linked will be those hosted on your main product affiliate site, which is already set up to convert your visitor over to your merchant's page.
If you have created something like a quiz or questionnaire-style diagnostic tool, the "solution" will link directly back to either your affiliate website, or more probably your merchant's sitethe real answer to the problem! So for example here you might create a diagnosis tool for bodybuilders designed to answer "Why can't I make gains?" You ask a few profiling questions about workout habits, show that you understand the trouble facing the userfor instance, no gains despite regular, planned workouts, and then suggest that a dietary need might be to blame, or that supplementation might help. To learn more about what your body needs, click next.
Now that you've created your application, you need to place it in systems where users can find it. Very simply, you will submit it to free download sites, such as freedownloadscenter.com, Tucows.com, or any of about 600+ other free download websites. The websites will offer a brief description and overview of the product (which you will create prior to submission) and then offer a link to the homepage where the free download exists. That homepage is the place where your sales begin!
You can use Shareware applications in much the same way, only instead of promoting an affiliate program you are promoting a program that you own or have created. It starts as a free version, but only works for a limited amount of time before it times out, or has limited functionality. The goal is to get your users to fall in love with your little program so that they do buy the additional features or purchase the program after the trial time (you'll recognize this as the MO of many leading software companiesget them to rely on your product so that they have to buy the full version).
Useful tricks and tips for distributing Freeware and Shareware Easily
To try to submit your applications to all the major free download centers would be entirely unmanageable. You could reasonably manage a few manually and on your own, but that would not be enough to really capitalize on the traffic potential created by creating your own freeware and shareware programs and applications. The only way to really do this is to use a submission program of some kind.
There are different options out there, such as FastSubmit, PromoSoft, SharewareTracker and many more. These types of products help you submit to between 400 and 600 download sites automatically or semi-automatically, depending on the program you choose. You can research these programs, or simply search for mass-submission software to find a program that works well for you. Many of these rely on your having created a PAD file with the needed information the download sites will be using, so you should learn more about PAD files and creating them if you plan to use mass-submission software.
Since you now know the basics of how to utilize the viral capabilities of freeware and shareware, let's talk just a bit about generating the ideas that will make this worth your while, and about how you can get started even if you are completely tech-ignorant.
Generating Winning Ideas
The one thing that you want to keep in mind is that your application needs to in some way appeal to your audience. It has to be something they will be happy to have for free. In other words, while they will not expect premium software for nothing (the possible exception being shareware programs), they will expect a nice little something for nothingthe only reason they'll be looking anyway!
There is something else to keep in mind, too. It has to fit with your product/niche! You can't just throw out a free loan calculator to sell your bodybuilding supplements; you have to have something that a bodybuilder will be interested in having. Something that solves a problem, enhances your product, or helps make his/her bodybuilding life easier.
To help you generate new ideas if you haven't any of your own, go ahead and search around the net and the download sites. See what other people are offering in your nicheespecially those types of products that are getting downloaded often (you can see how often a program is downloaded when you click on it at most sites) or that have high user reviews (again, available on most download sites). Of course, you cannot simply take what someone else has already built, but you can get some ideas and design one of your own.
Otherwise, a simple brainstorming session could generate some great ideas. Put yourself in your customers' shoes once again, and think about the things that you might like, or that might make your life easier.
Just understand that whatever it is you create, it needs to be something that both stands on its own as an actual interactive product, and one that links in somehow with the rest of what you are doing.
Why it works
Understanding why freeware and shareware give-aways work will help you as you generate ideas and construct your applications. What's most important to understand is thisfreebies work because they are interactive and are of value to the customer. It's different than creating an ad! It has to be something real and useful!
What this means is that you cannot just go about designing an application as yet another wordy advertisement. Applications that are in actuality ads will only hurt your traffic; first because your customer will feel cheated, and secondly because they will be banned by the better download sites, and possibly even result in your website being banned. Therefore, the golden rule in creating freeware applications is to make them something real and useful, capable of standing on their own.
A few basic tips for creating freeware that will net the desired results are:
KISSKeep It Simple, Stupid! Don't go overboard; create a simple application without extending your resources too far. That way if it doesn't get a lot of attention, you haven't lost much, and that way you also don't over-complicate the usefulness for your customers.
Qualitymake it something that is well-built and functional, even for its simplicity. Substandard products will either not be used or will be ignored by websites.
Valueinclude some element of value for your customer, whatever it might be, so that you give them a real incentive to download your application and use it to get to you!
Getting the Freebie Ball Rolling
We did tell you earlier in the notation that it is possible to employ this technique with little or no programming knowledge. To show you how that is possible, we'll talk about just a couple of options for creating programming cheaply (or for freeeven better!) and easily.
The most basic freeware applications we are talking about here are not much more than lists that link to the appropriate target. We're talking about those quiz-style diagnostic questionnaires that go on for a few frames by clicking 'next', and then end at the solution to the problemyou merchant site. Otherwise, we could be talking about a links-finder or listing agent. You can construct these easily enough with just some creative writing in an HTML editor, some CGI script, and linking via a hidden redirect function to the URL of your choice.
Of course, more complex applications might require a little more expertise and programming skill, but if you know where to find that for free, you can still construct a quality product without a degree in programming. Websites like Freebyte.com, NeedScripts.com, and HotScripts.com all offer free programming scripts and codes that can be easily plugged into HTML editors to create applications of a wide variety of sorts. These free source-codes in and of themselves can be a great way to generate freeware application ideas.
In addition to the free and low-cost programming options, there are also programs that can be used in template-fashion to build applications, such as customized toolbars designed to suit the interests of your niche audience. Again, there are many software applications that can be used for this purpose, like Site Pilot Toolbar Creator and Toolbar Studio. There are even free trial versions of ToolBar Studio and other similar programs available online.
As you can see, with the abundance of programs, free codes and scripts, and simple applications that you can build on your own, there are a multitude of possibilities for even the most technologically impaired affiliate. So yes, even you at home can easily get the freebie ball rolling toward Big Dog profits!
What You Need To Know About SEO
The Ins and Outs of SEO
Remember earlier when we said this?
Search results rely on content and keywords.
Content = Food for search engines/spiders
Quality Content = Good Search Rankings
Well the Ins and Outs of SEO are not much more complex than that. To that, the only thing we might add is the importance of links:
Search results rely on content and keywords and links
Links plus Content = Food for search engines/spiders
Links plus Quality Content = Good Search Rankings
So to summarize this chapter before we even get going, if you have good content that your customer is searching for, and you gain some good links back to your content, you will rank well in the search engines, and you will tap into that organic traffic which will result in 90% of the traffic to your website.
As we said when we talked about how search engines work, the entire business is ruled by matching terms to termsterms on your page to terms visitors are looking for. These, and you probably already know this, are what we refer to as keywords and key phrases. Now, as you can imagine, not all the words on your page will really matter because no one is out there searching for meaningless words that are everywhere. What you need to do is figure out which of the words people are searching for in respect to your niche and target a select group of them. These will be the words that you strive to optimize for, the words that hopefully will gain you SERP ranking near enough to the top to get traffic.
These words and phrases will be ranked first and foremost by the content on your page. That is what is given the most weight and relevance by search engines and by people. And since site popularity, traffic, and linking all weighs in, too, content is the most important factor in SEO.
Aside from SEO efforts, there is another, more important reason to write content that is useful and relevant. Your customers! Consider thisno one cares if you rank first but have nothing to offer after the click. All that the humans care about is whether or not you are serving their needs. After they find you, if your content is good they'll stay and have a look around, use your site for a while. If it's nothing more than a pile of keywords stacked one upon another, they'll just leave for the number two-ranked site that actually has real content.
Therefore, if you understand nothing else from this chapter understand thisthe focus of all your SEO efforts must first beabove anything elsethe quality of your content! If you do nothing more than put up good, [humanly] digestible content, you've already done more than half of what it takes to develop a site that will generate traffic.
Nevertheless, there are other factors that weigh in on your ranking that can be optimized to increase your popularity with the search engines. These include both on-site and off-site factors.
On-Site SEO Components
Three basic components will decide the bulk of your search engine rankings. They are
Content
Tags
Link structure
We've pretty much covered the content factor. You need quality content that includes those keywords at a reasonable density to please the spiders (somewhat elusive, but between two and four percent keyword density for each term is generally accepted as the norm and a good target); that content needs to be pleasing to your humans more importantly, so write for them and where it makes sense to add in your targeted keywords, do so, but if it detracts from your content and makes it unreadable, let it go.
Tags are the other important component, as they work as a bit of a guide-system to search engine spiders; not only that, but when you include eye-catching keyphrases, your visitor's interest will be piqued as well. However, much of what exists in tags is never seen by people, so there is a bit more leeway here.
Tags are attached to all sorts of content to explain it to the spiders. There are tags for images, titles, keywords, and more. Title tags are the most crucial of these, as they have a direct bearing on your rankings. Title tags serve as a description of the content on the page. Also, the information in the tag appears in the search results, giving that at-a-glance information that the searcher will use to decide which site they want to click on. Therefore, title tags are something you want to know about and use as part of your overall SEO campaign.
Meta tags are a couple of sentences that describe the content. Meta tags help place your content amongst the other sites, sort of explaining it to the search engine; they also appear in some searches to describe the site to the visitor. They may bear on SEO, although the argument is that their impact is negligible. It is worth the few seconds to use them, and perhaps enter your key terms there, but you should be most concerned with other aspects of SEO.
The third factor in on-site SEO is your internal link structure. From the standpoint of search engines, the better websites have multiple pages of worthwhile content, and they create navigable internal link structures so that their visitors can get around easily and find the information they need.
That is what you need to build for both your visitors and your spiders.
The internal link structure should be logical and usable. Humans will use it to read all that is of interest to them, and spiders will follow them to see where you can take them. Give some consideration to this as you build your website, and think about how you can use your structure to help all involved, and also to direct visitors and search engines where you want them to go.
In addition to just having the basic static components in place, you also need to attend to the dynamics that affect your page ranking. For all intents and purposes, those dynamics are new content creation. Search engines like sites that are up-to-date and well-cared for. And from their point of view, sites that are up-to-date and well maintained are sites that change with the times. Therefore yes, updating content is important.
This does not mean, however, that you should go about changing your basic content every dayjust that on a regular basis (and some say daily is best, but what a lot of work that would be! And Big Dogs aren't into creating more work for themselves!) you need to add some new content. The easiest way to do that is throw up a new article for the spiders to chew on. A blog attached to your website can be very useful for this purpose. Targeted visitors seeking assistance, however, will often prefer the formality of an article.
Off-Site SEO Components
That covers the meaningful on-site SEO components; now we need to take a look at those off-site factors that bear on your search engine popularity.
Search engines like popular websites. They let the use of others show them which sites are most worth going to. That is not to say that you will not be indexed by spiders before you have in-bound links established, it is just to say that you will rank better when search engine crawlers can see that others are pointing towards your site, too.
You can think of it this way. The content on your site provides the food for search enginesthis we've said before. And the links from others outside your site help search engines qualify that, or assign a value to your site.
The moral to the story is that good links mean good rankings. You need outside links coming into your site to gain good ranking and search-generated traffic.
But what makes a good link?
The way the crawlers see it, links should follow a natural order. That order goes something like this:
A website is created
The website is found by a few chance visitors
Those visitors like your site, and recommend it to others (by linking, such as this is the way of spreading good news on the www)
Those interested parties tell other interested parties, and soon there is a navigable path of links from one happy user to another, back to your website
Now the thing of it is that spiders are smart. They know a natural link-structure does not happen instantly, and it is not all centered around one point. So while you can get the ball rolling by scattering some links around the web yourself, or trading a link with someone else (reciprocal links), you can't just flood a few locations with tons of links back to your website.
Hence, there are some disqualifiers for the links coming into your site.
Off-topic links don't make a lot of sense. Limit links from places that do not share your interests.
Reciprocal links just look like a trade-off, so all of your links cannot be gained in trade (some weight will be given to shared links, so they shouldn't be discounted, but don't put all your eggs in this basket).
Having all your links from one or two sources looks just like what it isyou out there linking back to yourself, and not moving around the web to do it. Start some links through social sites like Squidoo and MySpace, but also use these for their intended purposes of informing others about your website.
Paying for links from the top websites (because yes, you can pay popular people to "like" you) looks equally contrived. Your link pattern should be from the jocks' table as well as the nerds'. Paying for a couple of high-hit links is a good fire starter, but don't group your eggs in just this basket, either.
Basically, you just need to utilize link opportunities from each category (link typeone way, reciprocal). A strategy to employ to establish links from the outside in might look like:
Establish one-way links from quality sites
Establish reciprocal links
Submit your site to directories
Use free article submissions (nicely suited since they'll scatter across the web and draw in links from all over)
Engage in social networking on topic-specific niche forums and blogs, etc
Create social networking pages and lenses at Squidoo, Zimbio, and other similar sites
This may seem virtually impossible, but there are such things as paid links and link networks. One that has worked well for many affiliates is Jonathon Leger's 3WayLinksNetwork. There are others, too, and you can research this online. Just know that the fastest way to build links that will count is to utilize all available resources.
And as a last note, know this. Do not be scared that you might break one the rules of pleasing the crawlers with your links. You can't really do it wrong. By that what is meant is that while the right mix of links boosts your performance, the 'wrong' mix doesn't really hurt it. If you end up with a link structure that is too heavily weighted in one area, the worst that will seemingly happen is that the links will be discounted, but they will not subtract 'points' from your ranking. In essence, they just become neutral. Try a few things, build up some links, and then go from there to tweak your external linking.
What Will Work and What You Should Forget About
This is where we've chosen to place this all-important conversation, although by some rights perhaps it should have come much earlier in the book. At any rate, this is where we are going to talk about the keywords and key phrases that you are to choose to target your very willing and able buyersthe people who really want to buy, that are just a step before purchase, that are right on the verge and just need that last little push!
The best free thing you can do is choose the right keywords that will target the right buyers. But those keywords are not what so many others have told you need. The big push on the internet is to get ranked for the most popular keywords. If you accomplish that, you'll have so much traffic nothing else will matter. There are a few things wrong with this methodology and logic.
It is too hard to break into the high rankings for the most popular search terms.
Traffic doesn't matter as much as conversion does.
Most searched does not equal motivated buyer.
It ignores the long tail of keywords that collectively means bigger and better traffic than a single top keyword.
The most important factor that we want to consider is that by basing your keyword searches on what the most popular search terms are for a niche, you are not specifically targeting those people who are willing, motivated, on-the-cusp buyers. You're simply collecting everyone out there with an interest in widgets or bodybuilding powders, who could be everyone from kids researching school papers to people who hate widgets or some actual consumers looking for widgets and supplements to buy.
Secondary and long-tail keywords/phrases are actually the traffic that you want most. The reason is simplebecause if you figure out what the motivated buyers are using as their search terms, as opposed to everyone else looking up your niche, you will weed out the fluff, and just net in the traffic you want. It may not be as impressive as bringing in visitors by the thousands, but who cares if those visitors are more likely to be buyers?!
Choosing the rightprofitablekeywords is easier than you think. You just need to know what buyers search for. This will vary depending on what you are selling, but as a general rule buyers will look for information about a product before they will just look for the product. They'll look for the advice of others on the web. They'll look for opinions and information offered in specific types of content like product reviews. For these people you want to choose keywords that include things like
Product x review
Product x opinion
Product x comparison
And so on.
The problem-centric consumer might also be looking for an answer. These types of buyers are easily targeted with tutorials that offer the solution they need. With this you have one of two optionseither provide complex tutorials and point to a better way, or end your tutorial with your product, or otherwise include it as essential to the fix. For these people you would want to include keywords such as
X How to
How to do x
Repair problem
Fix problem
Problem fix
Cure
Clean
Problems
By now you should see where we're going with this. The people who need you are not just going around wasting time in broad searches; they are very specifically addressing their needs and concerns with their search terms. Therefore, what you want to do is give them what they are looking for, and optimize using the terms that the people you really want visiting are using.
This is the keyword and SEO strategy that you will use for each of your small, product-centered websites. By doing this on multiple websites for different products, you will, over time, capture a great deal of the traffic rankings for your niche collectively. That's when you use your parent site to clean up. On your parent site, you start optimizing for the bigger, more general keywords. You can now do this because you have a large enough link structure established outside in the secondary keyword markets to support the larger site, and therefore you've established enough power to rank well with the parent site in short time. Eventually, the roles reverse and it is the parent that feeds the smaller sites, but the roles don't really matter. All that matters to you is that by one turn or another, the traffic is controlled by you.
This is, by far, one of the most effective strategies employed by the Big Dogs. Big Dogs love internet marketing for its simplicity and profitability. They are looking to make big money with limited output. So they concentrate on what will bring in the most buyers, most easily. And this is it. If you do not learn anything else from this book.
learn how to target a buying audience like the Big Dogs do. Learn to choose the keywords upon which everything else will be based, and enjoy higher conversions and interest simply by default.
Powerful Tools You Can Use to Boost Revenue
Creating Your Own Products
It's a simple, very logical conceptif you can make big money as an affiliate, how big could your revenue stream be if you were the producer of the product instead?
You know that as an affiliate you make x percent of each product sold. Let's say you're earning a commission of say 50%. That means that you are not making 50% of the revenue generated from that sale. Someone is making just as much as much as you are! Now yes, we'll give you this one pointthat someone is also paying the expenses of development and production and other overhead, but you can bet they've set their price at well above expenses!
To be clear, we are not recommending that you endeavor to create your own products rather than become an affiliate. What we are recommending is that after you have established your business as an effective internet marketer, that you then leverage your influence to promote products of your own and cash in by netting the biggest part of your sales. Let's talk a bit about how this can be done.
The Back-End Sales Effect
What this private product creation strategy relies on is your having already established a foothold in the market, inside your niche. You've done this by employing the strategies outlined in this book, by creating product-focused websites and then linking them together with the parent site which captures the rest of the general internet traffic looking for your niche content. And now that you have everyone's attention, you can use it to up sell your returning visitors to your own products.
What Might You Sell?
Much like the freeware products that boosted your traffic, you need to sell something that correlates with what you've been selling all along. But you do need to realize that your buyers will not go back in time. You can't just sell them on something simpler that they might have bought before; you have to sell them on something that serves them in their next phase of life, or that enhances that which they've already bought.
Generally speaking, this will be something that is digitally-generated. For instance, if you previously sold bodybuilding supplements, your next product might be an eBook or bodybuilding program that the buyer follows to make those big-muscle gains. If it's the crunch-time workout video, maybe the product that you build is a nutritional plan or for the time-impaired.
It is worth noting, too, while we have this conversation, that you can harness the power of back-end (as in dedicated, trusting, return buyers) sales with other affiliate products as well. For instance, supposing you decide that being a product developer is just not for you, you can group and up sell complimentary products. Likewise, you can also reverse the strategy a bit so that you are first selling your productan eBook or something similarly easy to createand then up-sell an affiliate product. But no matter how you decide to go about this, remember that it is all based on your established sales foundation. Becoming a Big Dog affiliate is still your first order of business, then.
Product Development Options
No doubt, most who are getting into affiliate sales are not those who ever thought they'd be developing a product to sell as their own. This might lead you to believe that creating your own product is beyond you.
However, as we said, we're primarily talking about products that are digitally created in some way. We're not necessarily suggesting you go out and invent anything tangible. Some product options might include:
eBooks
Software programs
Web Templates
Applications and plug-ins
Courses, online training
And this is just the beginning.
You have several options even if you do not actually have the expertise to create one of these products yourself. Hiring a freelance writer or programmer is easy, thanks to online classified ads like Craig's List and freelance websites like GetAFreelancer and VWorker. Since you are already making Big Dog money, and you will be making money with your product, you can now justify the expense. It's just a part of your product development budget and business plan.
Unleashing Affiliate Power
Once you have a quality product, your next natural step will be to do what got you into this whole messoffer your product through ClickBank or another and generate your own affiliate sales. Your own very well-established affiliate sales will turn some great profits for you, but imagine now if you coupled with affiliates and multiply that across the web!? Get others to sell your products for you. Do the foundation work, post some sales and conversions worth bragging about, and then let the power of the internet sales force sell your product for you!
You really have nothing to lose by developing an affiliate program. If you have a product that is selling well, it will sell through other talented affiliates, too. And since it costs you nothing unless a sale is made, there is absolutely nothing to lose. It's the beauty of affiliate marketing, and it's why this business is so vastly popular, and why this is how web-based products sell primarilythrough direct sales and associations.
The Beauty of Duplicity
The more beautiful thing about developing your own product is that you can do it in multiple variations again and again, and thereby benefit from the beauty of duplicity. Seem cryptic? It's not.
The first time is the hardest time. Therefore, if you can manage to create a good-selling product once, you can recreate and capture more market share by doing it again and again.
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The beauty of this is that you do not have to start from scratch every time. All you have to do is make small changes and tweak your original product, give it a new name and domain, create a new brand, and follow the same path to success. The real beauty is that you become a proportion of your competition proportionally based on the size of your niche market and on the number of times you re-create your product.
To capture further power of duplicity, you can also create competitive products and sell the rights to them, either in full or Private Label Rights that others can buy and resell as their own. Since you are still paid on your end each time the product is sold, you still make money. (Be sure that you learn about and understand the different kinds of rights so that you do not illegally resell the product; Private Label Rights, or PLR allows you to resell the same product multiple times, whereas full rights does not. There may be other intermediate rights options that you can explore to get more mileage from your products as well.)
It is true that all of this multiplicity increases the competition against your own products, but in this case that is certainly not a bad thing. For one thing, all that it means to have competition is that there is room within the market to support it. New competitive products would not (and should not) be created in a niche without demand. More importantly, you are creating your own competition. At one point or another, you are making money from the product. You are only multiplying your income by creating your own competition.
And after each completion, you are ready for the final step, which multiplies the beauty of duplicity yet again, opening the floodgates for a near limitless marketing potential. We think you'll recognize this last phase.
Unleashing Affiliate Power
Do we repeat ourselves? A little bit, but this time, with a twist.
The last phase is the same as the final phase in the marketing of your first self-developed product creating an unlimited marketing and sales force. Imagine the power of not only creating that force for your product, and not only creating and controlling your own competition, but then selling those products that you control through more affiliate programs! The result is the multiplied power of multiple affiliate programs, all selling products that you own. There's virtually no end to the possibilities; and all you have to do is do again that which you've done before.
That's it! You've made it! You've just learned everything you need to know to leave the puppy pen and become a Big Dog Super Affiliate. We've just outlined an entire strategy here that will work for you to make big, easy money through internet marketing. We know you're excited to get started, but before you run off to find big-selling affiliate products and start building your web empire.
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