Product creation is one of the best ways to make money online, but it’s also one of the hardest. You have to have the time, money, and/or knowledge to invest in a product, and you have to be able to use your contacts very wisely.

The initial idea creation for a new product is the easy part. You can think up ideas all day. What you have to do next is assess these ideas. First, ask yourself if you would buy it. If the answer is “Yes,” then you’re on the right track.

Allen Says’ Private Posts

If you ask me to tell you what product has given me the most profitable ideas and gotten me into the “marketing mindset,” I’d answer Allen Says’ Private Posts Volume I. Allen’s sheer insight into the world of marketing is unbelievable. I have read volume I dozens of times, and I get new ideas every time I read it. As the next volumes come out, I’ll pay whatever I have to pay in order to get my copies.

Allen is also one of the few other “gurus” that I look up to with the utmost respect, because he is more concerned with helping others than he is with making money. That shows some definite character, and it’s hard to come by in this world anymore.

Research It Further

If you have an idea that you think is a good, profitable idea, move forward and research it further. Lay out exactly what you want it to be/do, and put it all on paper (or in MS Word, Notepad, somewhere). Figure out exactly what is necessary for it to work. Outline the process, the content, your ideas, then go back through your outline and expand on those ideas.

When you think you’ve covered all the bases, you’re at the fun part creating it. If you can create it yourself, and you have the time to do it, go for it. Doing it yourself will be the most cost effective way to get it completed, and you know it will be exactly what you want. If you don’t have the time, or you don’t have the abilities necessary (programming, writing, etc.) you can have it outsourced.

Outsourcing

Now, I don’t want you to think that you have to be a software engineer or a writer with a college degree to create your own product. There are many ways to get around your lack of expertise if you have a great idea. The best way is to outsource the product’s creation. And because of the great push to drive down costs, freelance programmers and writers have popped up all over the globe, offering VERY cheap labor for you. Where can you find these freelancers? You can find them on sites like RentACoder.com, Scriptlance.com, Elance.com, and more.

I do want to point out, however, that the lowest bid price is not always the best. There are writers and coders who bid low because they’re not as good as the others, and there are writers and coders who bid low because they can – because many freelancers on these sites live in a country where the US Dollar is worth quite a bit more than their own currency, so they can bid very low and still turn a nice profit.

This is where project feedback comes in handy. Before you accept a bid, make sure you check out their feedback ratings, and check for what types of projects they’ve done in the past. A buyer with a 10/10 for 20 projects is pretty good, but if your project is for ghostwriting an ebook, and those 20.

There is an ebook called Learn How To Speak Geek that you can buy if you want to learn more about how this whole freelancing process works, and how you can make the most of it. I have read this book and think every person who is about to put a project up for bids should read it, and I’m saying that both as a marketer and a programmer.

That book will more than make up for its own price by providing you with the communication skills you need to choose the best freelancer for your project, so you don’t have to re-post it again after your original choice screws things up. The small investment for that ebook is worth much more than the hundreds or thousands of dollars you could lose if you don’t choose the right freelancer.

What To Do With Your Product

When it’s finished, you’ll be able to reap the rewards of your labor. If you haven’t already, set a “launch” date so there is a definite start date for the sale of your product. Now, figure out how you’re going to promote it. You have options to get affiliates, do joint ventures (JVs), sell resale rights/master resale rights/private label rights, and more. Most are already discussed in this book already, so I won’t double-dip and waste your time by making you read it all over again. You can choose to do any/all of the ideas in this book, or create your own ideas for marketing your products! (If you have a truly unique idea, or a great spin on an existing idea, you could even turn that into an ebook and sell it as it’s own product!)

Your Own Affiliate Program

I want to talk very quickly about setting up an affiliate program for your product, as well. It’s very hard to get your product out to the masses by yourself, because the Internet is so huge. So you should always create an affiliate program for your products. You can do this with both PayDotCom and Clickbank, as I mentioned in the affiliate article. PayDotCom has great affiliate management tools, while Clickbank has many, many more registered affiliates, so it’s really a toss-up.

And when you’re considering which site to list your product on, you will also want to decide what commission percentage you want to give to your affiliates. Obviously, the higher, the better, because you’ll get more affiliates with a higher percentage, but your revenue will go down at the same time. Whatever direction you choose to go, if you promote your affiliate campaign and your product is good quality, you’ll have affiliates sign up for your affiliate program.

Letting Others Know About Your Product

Launching your own affiliate program is great, but how will people know about it? Obviously, you can use all of the traffic generation ideas in this book to get people to the site, but there is also another great way to get affiliates (and JV partners), and to let people know about your product. I use the JV Network for free to get notices about when others are launching products, and for a small fee, I can notify thousands of potential partners and affiliates that my product launch is coming up. Other big time marketers like Cody Moya and Mike Filsaime are registered for that site, as well. In my opinion, that kind of publicity is hard to match.

Affiliate programs have been around for basically as long as the Internet has been popular, and they’re still going strong. Why? Because they work for everyone involved. Vendors get the traffic and sales they need, while advertisers can direct their clients to a certain product and make a (sometimes very large) commission per sale.

There are thousands, if not millions of affiliate programs available on the ‘net, but not all of them are good. The first thing to look for is how well the company is doing. If you can determine that the product(s) is/are selling like hotcakes, this may be something you want to get involved with.

give you a real-world example, I didn’t get the chance to promote Jason Potash’s ArticleAnnouncer program before it launched, but because of the HUGE publicity of the product, I have made about $1000 – $1500 in the past 2 months promoting it, and I haven’t had to do much at all. I researched the product, got reviews from people who had used it, and decided to promote it myself. I’ve driven about 500-1000 people to the ArticleAnnouncer site, and I’ve made 6-10 sales. That’s not too bad, considering I haven’t done anything other than drive traffic there. (I’ll fill you in on how I did that in a bit)

Finding Affiliate Programs

Finding affiliate programs is very easy. You can join PayDotCom and Clickbank for free, and browse through their marketplaces to find products that have programs running. Those two sites are where most of the affiliate products I promote come from.

Other sites have their own affiliate programs. You can find these by going to Google and typing in “your niche” +affiliate. That should find a decent amount of affiliate programs for you. If for some reason there are not any affiliate programs, but you know it’s a good niche, then perhaps this is the perfect niche for you to create your own product and launch your own affiliate campaign! I very highly recommend both sites listed above as affiliate program managers. Clickbank has been around for years and has thousands of registered affiliates, while PayDotCom.com is newer and includes better affiliate management tools. I’ll discuss product creation soon.

Hiding Your Affiliate Links

After you choose a product to promote, there are a few things you can do. You’ll probably want to start by just driving traffic directly to the affiliate site. You can do that anywhere you can put a normal link your webpage, forums, PPC engines, blogs, etc. (All of these will be discussed later in this book) But you won’t always want to show people your affiliate link, because some people will sign up for the affiliate program then replace your ID with their own, effectively stealing the commission from you.

Well, then how do you hide your affiliate link? There are a number of ways to do this.

The first way is to set up a “redirected” URL. I use and recommend Mike Filsaime’s PowerLink Generator. The video on his page is a firsthand look at his product, and what it can do for you. Pay special attention to the tracking features, because that’s HUGE. In order to succeed in IM, you’ll want to track everything! The PowerLink Generator makes it very quick and easy to track your affiliate campaigns through a central spot.

You can also do these redirects by hand, if you want, by adding the following to your page header section: <META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;URL=AffiliateLinkHere”> and replacing “AffiliateLinkHere” with your affiliate URL. When someone visits that page, they will be redirected to your affiliate program. For the sake of compatibility (so old browsers don’t miss out) you should include a standard link in the body of the page as well. Doing it this way makes it harder to track your campaigns, though, so it’s not as effective, in my opinion (plus you have to do all of the redirects by hand)

Another way is to register another domain name (through any of the services listed above) and have it “forwarded” to your affiliate link. This allows you to give people a link like

http://www.GetThisProduct.com and when they type it into their browser, they are sent to your affiliate link. I have used this option to make thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions that I probably wouldn’t have made if people knew they were typing in my affiliate link.

Finally, you can use a “Link shortener” service, like TinyURL.com. This service will allow you to change a url such as:

http://www.xxx.com/affproduct.php?aff_id=1252 into this:

http://www.tinyurl.com/

It’s also quite powerful for hiding your affiliate links, because the user never sees the actual affiliate URL. However, most people won’t be nearly as apt to click on a tinyurl.com link as your own /Recommends link.

Do I Just Send Traffic To My Affiliate Link?

There are many ways to promote affiliate programs, actually. The easiest way is to just direct traffic to your affiliate link, and hope the vendor’s sales page is enough to sell them. But if this is all you do, you’re leaving money on the table.

I highly recommend creating a “name squeeze” page so you can add subscribers to your email list, and I’ll discuss these in more depth later. Just keep in mind that if you’re promoting an affiliate program, you can send them to a name squeeze page first, have them sign up to receive a free ecourse or something similar, then send them to the sales page of the product you’re promoting (by redirecting them to your affiliate link – you can do this with the major autoresponder companies, which are also discussed in the Opt-In Email List article)

Offer A Bonus

Everyone loves free stuff, so if you can offer a bonus of some sort, like an eBook, a report, or an eCourse, do it. Even if you have to write one of the above, it should be worth your time, if you take the time to do it right.

Writing A Report Or An ECourse

If you’re using a name squeeze page to collect emails, offer them a free report and/or a free eCourse as a bonus if they sign up. That way, even if they don’t buy that day, you can have your autoresponder send them emails with valuable information to convince them to buy.

What do you need to do to write these? It varies from niche to niche, but the way I do it is I purchase the product, (usually from someone else’s affiliate link, as most affiliate programs don’t allow you to purchase from your own link) then figure out some answers to common questions and develop some tips that I can give about it. I put that into a 7-day or so ecourse, and pitch it on the name squeeze page. The extra sales I make from doing it this way far outweigh the initial expense of buying the product and creating the report/eCourse.