• Physical Products
• Ebooks
• Reports
• Membership Sites

-Physical products

Physical products offer you the ability to put something real and tangible in the hands of  your buyers. Physical products are often marketed as “home study courses” which can be set at a higher price point than an eBook or a set of online videos. Although you will have to pay for the production of the book, the videos or the audio CDs, you can more than make up for those costs with your price point. With certain topics, physical products just make more sense.

-eBooks

eBooks can be anywhere from 30 to 200 pages long. They normally offer a more widespread look at a topic than a short report, but they have the potential for covering a lot more topic areas in the niche. The advantage of eBooks is that they can be priced at higher rates than short reports. They are automatically delivered to your customers so they get the instant gratification of having the product immediately. eBooks can be paired with supplemental reports, audios or videos depending on the niche and how many resources you want to offer your customers.

- Reports

Short reports are typically between 5 and 20 pages. They go in depth on a small part of a topic instead of giving a general overview like most large eBooks do. With a short report, you’re normally giving someone an actionable plan that they can use to fix an aspect of their life. “How to Calm a Colicky Baby”, “How to Improve Your Golf Slice” and “How to Lose 5 Lbs this Weekend” are all examples of the narrow focus of short reports. If you have a larger topic, sometimes breaking it down into short reports and offering them separately is a great way to make more money and establish your authority in the niche.

-Membership sites

If you have a lot of information on a niche and feel that you can provide month after month of content, you can create a membership site. The benefit of making a membership site with your content is that you earn money each month from multiple members. Instead of having a one time sale for your content, you can earn from it continuously. Your membership site can take many different forms. You can offer weekly or monthly reports delivered to your members’ inboxes. You can host a forum where members can meet and discuss the niche. You can also offer training through a private blog. The options are endless!

Before you decide on your product delivery system, make sure to research your niche to see what the norm is. Figure out what would be best for your niche and proceed accordingly.

In other words, it can help you make money!

What is it?

Blogs are websites where the freshest content is posted first. Normally, posts are listed in chronological order. There may be some static content in the sidebars or on other pages of the blog, but the homepage is updated when there is a new post. Visitors can post comments on your articles and you have the opportunity to create a real community in your niche.

Blogs are popular because they are very accessible. You don’t have to know much about setting up a website in order to use one. That makes them VERY “beginner friendly”.  Once the initial set  up is complete, they are as easy to use as a word processing program. To top it off, visitors love blogs because they can interact with the content. With a few smart posts and some traffic generation strategy you can quickly have an authority site in your niche.

What are three keys to doing it successfully?

1. Choosing the right blogging platform.

There are several different blogging platforms available to get you started with blogging. Wordpress has a bit of a learning curve but it is by far the best in terms of usability. You can completely customize your Wordpress blog so that it looks totally unique. You can also install several different plugins to make your blog more user friendly. For example, one Wordpress plugin automatically suggests related posts on your blog underneath each post to encourage visitors to explore your website.

2. Creating fresh content Posts.

A successful blog has to be updated at least once a week, at the very minimum. Many successful bloggers add new posts every weekday. You should plan to have new content on your blog at least once every seven days. This can be accomplished easily if you create an editorial calendar. Write down a variety of different topics and plan when you will post them to your blog. With Wordpress you can even write them ahead of time and schedule them to be automatically added to your blog at a certain date and time.

3. Cultivating your blog for profit.

It’s very easy to make money with blogs and you have a few different options to choose from. With your blog, you can make money through contextual advertising with ads that are displayed on your blog. You get paid when someone clicks on the advertising. You can also link to affiliate products or sell your own product from your blog.

Can you give me an example?

You’ve discovered that there is a demand for knowledge on cooking gluten free meals, something you have a lot of experience with. You start a blog about gluten free cooking and post your favorite recipes each week. After several months, you decide to write your own online cookbook and sell it from your blog.

I use a number of different marketing tactics to grow my online business. I certainly don’t rely on just Web 2.0 or any other singular way to market my business. If you’re having wonderful results with Web 2.0, then continue to devote a lot of time to marketing with it, but if you aren’t having success, then don’t be afraid to rely on other marketing methods.

Time management is very, very important and when it comes to an Internet Marketer, it is crucial. People want to talk all about the strategies for making money online and they don’t want to talk about getting your mind right and managing your time.

Look, I don’t care how promising a strategy looks and is, if you don’t have your mind right and can’t manage your time, it will fall by the waste side. Make sure that you have a clear plan of action, can manage your time and cut out the distractions.

Contrary to belief, having success with Web 2.0 can be time consuming and be some work. It can take a lot of testing and tracking, but I really like the results that I get from it.

I think the best bit of advice that I can give is to approach it like you would with any other marketing method. Don’t get blown away from extraordinary claims, hard to do, when you’re an Internet Marketer, but do your research and apply yourself.

Get your online business out there. The World Wide Web is a huge place and Web 2.0 gives you a great opportunity to tap into that. It is a great place to get noticed and have success. Just remember that you should be testing and tracking your results. It isn’t about becoming a celebrity, it is about the success of your online business. Don’t get too caught up in who is giving you praise, while your bottom line isn’t growing. Always remember that you’re running a business.

Actually, I didn’t even get a Twitter account until about January of 2009. I thought that the whole thing was stupid and I didn’t sign up until then. Many months later I had about 100 followers, pretty pathetic, but I wasn’t promoting it.

I then decided that I would start following people and getting followers. Adding followers on Twitter, manually, really sucks. It takes forever and it is just not worth it.

So, I thought that the people that had all of these thousands of followers just got them because they had huge mailing lists. That may help, but these guys were getting most of their followers from some other means.

I started looking at their Twitter accounts and I would see that they were following more people than were following them, not everybody, but a lot of them. That tells you that they are getting their followers by following targeted strangers.

I know how lazy gurus can be, so I wondered, there is no way that they are doing it manually, right? I’m sure that they don’t and I doubt that they outsource it. Then I learned that they’re using software.

Set it up and forget software, that is how they’re doing it. They have software that is doing the work for them, big surprise, I should have known better. The jerks have an edge, haha.

Yeah, I use software to grow my Twitter accounts. There are some really expensive software out there, but I use the lively browser Twitter software. I love it and the customer service is wonderful. Search lively browser and go to the Twitter software. It’s really cheap compared to other software.

You can follow who the gurus are following or their followers if you’re in the make money online niche. If you’re in some other niche, find a guru in that niche and follow their followers. It isn’t rocket science, but it is effective.

You can set up the auto direct messages with tweet later, but I like to network and get to know people. You can always tweet about promoting your blog or website or products later. Take the time to ease your way into the relationship with your followers. I’m not a big believer in selling to someone that you just met. Build the relationship first.

Selling a product is tough. I’ve been in sales for many years and I majored in Sales in college. I did manage to make the dean’s list, a number of times. I know everything that there is to know about making a sale and I’ve made a ton of sales in person and a ton of sales online.

I used to be a top salesman at various jobs. I used to get that reputation because I was good looking, that wasn’t why I was successful. I was successful because I was good at connecting with people and understanding and solving their problems.

When it comes to Web 2.0 or online sales, what you look like, doesn’t matter. Heck, most sales are made without them even seeing you. I don’t have a picture of myself on my two best selling sales pages.
The key is to interact with people and build relationships. People usually won’t buy a product online if they haven’t been pre-sold. I’ve had so much more success when I give away something for free and then tell people that they can get a lot more, if they buy, but I’m not too pushy.

I always offer a money back guarantee and provide my e-mail address to people. If they have any concerns, I will ease them and they usually end up buying. In the end it is usually about trust.

Trust is usually earned when it comes to selling online. People are really skeptical to take out their credit cards and order. When they can talk and interact with a real person, it changes everything. I would say that 90% of the people that send me an e-mail about buying an item, actually buy it.

I don’t contact them with this big, slick, salesman e-mail, I just answer their questions and reassure them. It is coaching them through the whole process.

Think of yourself as a parent that is teaching your kid how to walk. If they fall down and ask for a refund, you grant it, but you should have the confidence that most of them will be very successful and gain a lot from the product. Confidence is what you need.

You can obviously monetize the groups before you sell them, but the big money comes from selling them. If you’re making a good steady income from them and you’re happy with the returns, then keep them, but if you just want to build them and not worry too much about monetizing them and are looking for a big pay-day, down the road, then sell them.

I recently talked to a guy on an Internet Marketing forum that sold a Facebook group that he had created and built and sold it for $10,000. That really blew me away, I hadn’t realized how valuable these things could be.

I had heard of websites selling for all kinds of money, but I never really thought about Facebook groups being sold. But, it is like anything else, if people see a long-term profit out of something and the people have done some work for them, they will invest some big dollars.

The first thing that you should throw out, is that any idea for building a huge Facebook group, shouldn’t be considered. There are some of the stupidest Facebook group ideas that have over a million members.
I would like to punch slow walking people in the head has like over a million members. There are these groups that sound so stupid, but they have so many members. I think that the whole key is to make it sensational and to make it viral.

I currently have about the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends, if I’m not at it, I can be because of the back log of friend requests. The point is this. I can invite all 5,000 friends to a group and get a fraction of that to join the group. The viral effect is what is huge. I talked about that Facebook group earlier, it actually got onto tv, that probably helped.

Groups that take advantage of the moment or that cause a stir can get a ton of members. Build a mailing list, put up some CPA offers and see how successful they are. Make sure to encourage participation and to get people to come back, over and over again and to encourage them to invite their friends.

Now, this can be applied to multiple niche markets, if you want.  It can also be applied to about any niche market that you can think of.

The one catch is that it will take some hard work.  The hard work will pay off because you will build a long-term business where you can make an unlimited amount of money and eventually set it up to be nearly hands off. 

The First Step

The first step is to create some assets to promote.  Lots of people aren’t successful online because they don’t create their own assets to promote.

Here are some options

Creating an Information Product – You can make upfront money with information products, build your mailing list with them, be an affiliate through them and open up your own affiliate program.

Creating a Blog or Website – This is an asset that you can monetize in a ton of different ways.  You can also promote your other assets through them.

Creating a Membership Site – You can do all of the things that I mentioned with information products, but you can also set it up to get recurring income.

Some Advice For Creating Assets

The more assets that you create the merrier, as long as you don’t over extend yourself time wise or resource wise.  You don’t want to just spend all of your time creating them and not getting traffic and making money.

Don’t get too perfect when creating assets.  Yes you want them to be great, but nothing is ever perfect.  You want to finish projects, they can always be improve on, later.

Don’t be afraid to outsource certain tasks.  If you aren’t good at something or if something will take you a really long time to do, you should consider outsourcing it.  I like: www.elance.com and www.odesk.com  

The last one is to simply take action.  This is one of the biggest problems that people face.  They over analyze  things and don’t take action or get distracted and keep going from one thing to another without finishing anything.

The Second Step

You will want to set up an auto responder sequence.  You want to send traffic through a squeeze page, where you capture their e-mail address and send them through your auto responder sequence. 

This is where you promote your information products, blog or websites and membership sites.  You can send the traffic through one source and promote multiple assets.  You also have a mailing list, another great asset, for long-term promotion.

Setting Up a Successful Auto Responder Sequence

The first thing that you want to do is to introduce people to yourself and your online business.  Get them to know who you are and get them familiar with getting e-mails from you.

Space out your messages.  You don’t want to bombard them everyday with messages.  People get sick of being bothered that much.  I usually space the messages out by three days.

Don’t be too pushy.  People want to be on your list to be enlightened and get good information.  Some of them are willing to pay for it, but they don’t want to be seen as a dollar sign.

Don’t just send sales pitches.  Make sure that you’re giving them some great free information and free resources.  You have to always ask yourself if you would want to be on your mailing list.

Go to www.aweber.com and sign up for an account.  It is about $20 a month, but it is well worth it.  I’ve used them for a long time now and they are by far the best auto responder service that I’ve ever used.  Their customer support, their features and tutorials are all awesome.

The Third Step

This step is all about putting together something to give away for free, in order to, capture e-mails.  It is also about having a converting squeeze page.

Advice on Putting Together The Offer

Make the offer have broad appeal.  You don’t want the information to be enticing only to a small percentage of people in the niche.  You want broad appeal and interest.

Giving away short reports is an effective strategy.  People love to sign up to get these free reports.  They give their name and e-mail and quickly get to read the report.  It also allows you to up-sell, be an affiliate and promote your business with it.

Structure your offer around intrigue.  People are curious and people hate to get left behind.  That is why playing on intrigue is so important. 

Advice on Putting Together The Squeeze Page

Short and Sweet – You aren’t asking them to pay you any money, so they shouldn’t need a lot of convincing.  They are giving you their e-mail address, but it shouldn’t be a really tough sell.  You don’t want them to have to scroll down too far to give their information and sign up.

Play on Intrigue – Like I said before, if people are curious, it is like an itch that they need to scratch.  Appeal to their curiosity.

Social Proof – Some  quick social proof can be a good thing.  It always helps people envision their own gain, if they can see that other people have gained from signing up.

Close and Have a Call to Action – You have to tell them to sign up.  If you don’t close hard, some people will leave without signing up.  Encouragement is always a good thing and will help close the deal.

The Fourth Step

This step is all about getting targeted traffic.  You have your offer in place, you have your squeeze page in place and you have your auto responder sequence in place.  Now you need targeted traffic.

Targeted Traffic Sources

Joint Ventures – Working out joint ventures is a great way to get traffic.  If you like what you see from another marketer, then approach them and tell them that you will promote them if they promote you.

Blogging – I talked about having a blog earlier.  You can have a banner ad or a place for them to sign up to your mailing list on your blog and get targeted traffic, that way.

Articles – articles can get you a lot of traffic.  You can write them yourself or you can outsource them.  Either way, you can get a lot of targeted traffic from articles.

Traffic Exchanges and Safe Lists – You can get traffic from these two sources.  Most of them are free, but you can find some gems, if you’re willing to invest some money into them.

Pay-per Click – This is one of the most famous traffic sources.  People don’t want to pay money to get traffic to a free sign up page.  Well, that is why you have front-end offers and treat your members well.  It is a long-term benefit and hopefully you set yourself up with some up-front gains.

There are many other traffic sources that you can pursue, for yourself.  The main thing is to take action and focus and finish projects.

One of the reasons why it is so great is that there are so many people to meet online.  I live in the country and the closest city has a little over 800 people living in it, how many people am I going to meet that are into Internet Marketing?  I don’t even know if there is another Internet Marketer in the city?

Unless you go to these Internet Marketing conferences or events, you will probably not meet another Internet Marketer in person, at least not very many.  I must admit that I don’t go to those things, so I have to meet everyone online.

I meet Internet Marketers through mainly Internet Marketing forums and also through Facebook.  I’m at the friend limit of about 5,000 friends.  Not all of them Internet Marketers, but a fair share of them are.  A lot of gurus are on my friend list, as well.

The main forum that I use now is Warrior forum. At this forum, the members are serious about making money online.  They have committed to their online business by investing in their online business, by belonging to the forum. 

Most of these members are very smart marketers and the percentage of people that belong to that forum that are successful to the percentage that isn’t.  I would estimate that, after I’ve been there a year and a half, that the percentage of successful people on that forum, is way, way higher than the free forums that I belong to.

I’ve offered special offers on there and made money that way and developed some great relationships with customers.  They are great for getting feedback, advice, testimonials, working with in the future etc.  I’ve had a lot of repeat business on forums and have gotten a ton of great advice, feedback and testimonials.

They don’t buy your product or service, they don’t buy your affiliate product or even go to the free resource that you recommend.  So many people focus on just the product and the sales page and not enough on how they are going to get traffic.  I’ve been guilty of that, myself.

It doesn’t matter how great your product is or how great your sales page is, if you aren’t getting targeted traffic.  The same goes with the e-mails that you send out to your mailing lists.  If they don’t open your messages, it doesn’t matter how good or compelling you message is, if they don’t open it.

The first thing that you need to do is not let your title get too long.  You have to remember that you’re sending out messages to a huge number of different e-mail services. 

I have e-mail accounts with yahoo, google and my own personal service that is a small local provider.  Most people that are active online have more than one e-mail provider, remember that many people also have work e-mails.

The reason why this is important is not only for spam purposes, but also because different e-mail providers allow more or less of the title in the e-mail titles.  This means that if your title is too long, not all of it will get read.

That can be a bad thing.  You want people to read your whole title or you might leave out a key word or even phrase.  That is why you want it short and sweet.

I don’t know what a great open rate is.  I’ve dealt with many different mailing lists, that have been built in many different ways, but I do know what I’ve been successful with. 

The key is to not only get them to open your e-mail, but also to get them in the right frame of mind to read the e-mail and take action.  You want to play on a human element that we all have.  That is curiosity.  Get them curious and they will click on the link.

The main thing is to develop a relationship.  That is the best way to do things.  Give them great free information and don’t deceive them and be courteous and continue to bond.  They will become really responsive, if you do those things.

Every person is unique and has unique knowledge.  You should think about how powerful that knowledge and experience is.  Think about how you can help others, by sharing that knowledge.

People are willing to pay for convenience and organization.  If buying a report or e-book is going to save them time and effort, it is worth it for the buyers.  Research equals time and effort.  Time equals money.

Also, think about all the interesting things that you have learned in your life.  You may have a college education or be familiar with a certain hobby or form of entertainment. 

I’ll give you some examples.  My mom is a registered nurse and she obviously has some special knowledge about health and treatment.  I’m going to get her to create her own information product.  It can be about helping aspiring registered nurses pass their courses.  It could also be about any number of other health related topics.

Here is another example.  My step-dad loves to hunt, fish and play golf.  He has been doing all of these things for his whole life.  He can create a information product about all of these things and charge for them.  He can also write articles and sell them or use them to get traffic to a website or blog.

These are common things, but there is a constant interest in them.  New people are always coming into these niches.  Even the people that have been interested in them for awhile, will always want more knowledge and want to improve on certain things.

There are countless niches out there and countless ways that you can take advantage of them.  You can sell information products, write articles, blog etc.  These are all methods for making money online.

The best part is that everyone should have some knowledge that people are interested in reading about and will pay money for.  Think about your knowledge and put that knowledge to use.  There is a lot of knowledge sitting out there waiting for you to capitalize on.  Go out there and put your knowledge to use!

My favourite method of making instant cash on the Internet is to flip websites. Either you can buy a cheap website or you can flip an established existing website. For example, if you have an already established website and it is making you steady income on a monthly basis then why not add more content to it and flip it and increase your profits? Or you can buy a cheap website for $20 or so and try flipping it for more money. The possibilities are endless with Flipping websites as there are so many ways and variations of it you can do.

Secondly, another method of making instant cash is to actually use the power of Ebay and sell every day items you have in the house. For example, you might have some old clothes that you might not need. Why not sell them on Ebay for a bargain price? There are always people looking for bargains on Ebay and therefore, this is an excellent way to make a little bit of extra income for yourself. More and more people are already doing this and making lots of money. This can turn into a hobby and you can start buying old clothes from charity shops and sell them for a higher price on Ebay.

Finally, another one of my favourite methods of making money on the Internet is with CPA affiliate marketing. This is getting more and more people. All you need to do is join a bunch of CPA Affiliate networking websites, have a simple website and agree to promote their products with your marketing techniques. More and more people are doing this and some people are making six figures a month alone with CPA marketing.

These were simple methods above of beating the recession. Anyone can do this, so why not make an attempt?